For as long as I can remember, my family has worked in real estate. And for much longer than that, we have worked alongside the people behind the veil.
Back in the day we were called charlatans because we are mediums. Knowing how to communicate with the dead is a fine art, but certainly not a quantifiable science. After my great grandfather was arrested and died in prison, leaving my great grandmother a widow at 30 and without an anchor at her séances, she decided to clean houses to feed her three small children.
The problem of course is that if you’re a medium, you’re a beacon. You attract beings from other realms, paranormal objects and the dead whether you like it or not. And often your intuition takes you places and shows you things you never intended to see.
So the story goes that my great grandmother somehow found herself at house after house with deep, painful histories. A whole family murdered here, a dead child there. She would walk into home after home and as soon as the door opened, the ghosts of each home would rush to her presence, knowing well that she could sense them.
At some point a lonely, rich old woman who my great grandmother had been cleaning for died and left her the house. The details on this are always a little fuzzy. No one ever says “murder” but no one ever tells the full tale either - they just say the old woman had no relatives and my great grandmother was the closest thing she had to a friend. Either way, my great grandmother inherited a 5 bedroom Victorian.
She could have moved her children in from their cramped apartment but instead, she decided to fix it up and sell it. The house had three distinctive entities. The old woman herself, the man with no face and the girl made of shadow. My great grandmother struck a deal with the three of them. That they would not scare or kill the next owners for at least 13 years and in return, she would bring them each what they most desired.
What can the living possibly offer the dead you may wonder?
We will get to that.
The three beings agreed, and everyone kept their word. The first reported sighting of the man with no face was no less than 14 years after the house had been in the hands of the newest owners.
I guess you could say this was where it started. One thing led to another and my great grandmother “inherited” more houses with more sordid histories. Some of the stories my grandmother told me about these houses sent an actual shiver down my spine. But by the time my great grandmother died, she had passed the reigns of the “business” to her daughters who then gave it to their daughters and finally, the business is now run by my sister, my cousin and I.
Our business is now totally legitimate as a real estate agency, by the way. No more dodgy ‘inheritances’ from elderly rich people. My grandmother was the one who put a stop to that. She studied and got her real estate license and set up an above board business. Mom and her sister got their MBAs at universities and expanded the agency.
I think my mother and her sister just wanted to sell regular houses. New builds. Apartment buildings. They never got those contracts though.
Somehow the houses still found us. They always find us. Wounded houses, houses full of memories and grief that have turned into grudges and then there are the evil houses. The ones that are born bad, crafted with ill intent or built on unhallowed grounds. We were used to strange potential clients walking through our doors at Cornerstone Homes.
We sit between Rosie’s Café and Jackson Antiques and this has been our office since Grandma bought it in 1967. Now it’s just me and my sister Lora and my cousin Ari who run it after my mother and aunt retired a month ago.
It’s been oddly quiet. I think the houses are…recalibrating. This isn’t a good thing.
It’s usually the quiet before the storm.
It was like this when I sold my first house alone two months ago. It was a 6 bedroom colonial out in Pennsylvania and I had to go and “get it ready” as my family called it.
I remember my heart pounding even as I packed my bag carefully. Salt, sage, sugar, a tiny chest of herbs and oils, a holy book from 5 different religions, holy water from the Vatican and the sacred Ganges in India, crystals for protection, black candles for curses and white for purity, a pistol with silver billets and a gold bullet just in case. Finally a ceremonial knife that had once been dipped in the blood of a Saint. Finally there was the vial of blood only to be used in case of emergencies.
Even with this little armoury of protection, I did not feel safe.
I had only ever watched my mother and sister prep homes. Yes I had helped but it wasn’t me talking to the entities. I wasn’t the one who had to deal with the crueller ones. Or the clean up.
Now it was my turn to do this alone.
I remember checking into my motel quietly, my hands so sweaty, my bags nearly slipping out of my hands. Just as I opened the room door and sat down on the bed, my phone rang. I lifted it to my ear when I saw who it was.
“Have you gone to the house yet?”
It was my mother.
“Not yet. I just checked in.”
“The faster you get this done the better.” My mother told me, I could hear my sister and aunt’s voices in the background, asking if I had packed everything properly.
“I know.” I said, annoyed. I didn’t like being rushed even though my mother was right. The less time spent in the house, the less chance of my being injured, hurt, trapped or worse, disappeared.
No one really knows what happens to the people haunted houses take. They sometimes show up as decayed corpses years later.
Mostly though, they are never seen or heard from again. I had encountered one of those kind of houses in the past. But that’s a story for another day.
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. Despite the long drive, I knew I had to go to the house now. When these houses are unoccupied, that is when the entities get stronger.
Clutching my car keys in my hand, I picked up the bag and walked out of the room.
*
The house was old. 1650s build. It loomed large behind a rusted old gate which led down a road to the very front of the large white colonial with its grey side-gabled roof. It had two floors and windows which were framed by shutters that opened outwards. The waning sun showed a large garden that was unkempt and overgrown, knee length weeds everywhere and the fountain held two marble statues which I assumed were supposed to be likenesses of Greek Gods but were covered in ivy.
I could hear the voices of the ghosts all the way from here.
A feeling of deep unease was growing inside me as I swung open the rusted gate and it creaked open slowly. Come on, Jo. I muttered to myself. Best foot forward.
As soon as I stepped onto the road, I heard the voices grow more excited, the whispers grew in their symphony of chaos.
But below it all, I could hear a few distinctive voices. I couldn’t quite make out what it was saying but I could hear children’s distinctive voices singing a song.
I swallowed hard.
Child ghosts were always the most difficult ones. Their spirits were trapped in these houses because of an unspeakable act. Sometimes the houses keep the children out of misplaced love, other times, it is something far more sinister.
As I reached the front door, the voices grew deafening. I pulled out the key and put it in the lock as I winced, I could barely hear myself think. The minute I twisted the key, the voices crescendoed-
And then stopped.
The front door creaks opens into a darkened room. Silence and the feeling I am not alone in this lonely old house fall over me.
I wish I didn’t have to come here in the evening. But the best time for the entities to come out is at night time. And night time is also when they are able to prey best on the living.
In a way, doing this was setting myself up like bait. The only way to draw a wolf out is to place meat before it and wait.
Slowly, I walked into the house.
Every footstep made its own quiet little thud. The house was dusty and hadn’t seen the light of day in a while, I could taste it in the stale air. The first thing I did was put my bag down and then walk to open up one of the windows. As I leaned to push the shutters out-
…a large, cold hand grabbed me at the back of my neck.
My spine felt like it had turned to ice and my heart raced. But I remembered what my mother had taught me. “They feed on fear. Do not scream or cry out or even acknowledge them when they try to scare you. It will only make them more powerful.”
Still feeling the hand gripping the back of my neck, my hands on the shutters, I took a deep, slow breath, willing my heart rate down.
After a minute, of hearing only my own heavy breathing, I felt the hand release.
Slowly I pushed open the shutters as I had intended and the last spills of sunlight from a setting sun came into the room. Then I turned slowly, still feeling the impression of the icy cold touch at the back of my neck.
Then I began making my way up to the attic.
This house was old enough to have experienced a litany of brutalities and scandal to its name. It’s the way of all old houses. The man who had the house built was murdered in his bed on the first night he lived here. It was bought by a wealthy family where the wife developed an fever which affected her mind after her third child was born and drown all three children in a bathtub. At least four more murders had taken place here. And during one of the many parties this house had hosted, a girl had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck.
But the most haunted place in this house was the attic. Six small children’s dismembered bodies had been found up there two years ago. At the time, no one had been living in the house as it had been bought by a developer. Rumour was that the killer had been experimenting medical procedures on the children
No one had ever been caught for the murder of these children.
I could hear the noises start again as I climbed up the second flight of stairs. The sense of unease in me grew along with the voice. Quietly I began to chant a Buddhist prayer in my mind to bring myself back to equilibrium.
“Remember they can’t hurt you unless you think they can. Control your fear.” My mother’s teachings came flooding to me.
I wish I could say they instilled more confidence in me.
When i got to the attic door, I distinctly smelled it. That old iron whiff of blood. A part of me recoiled realising whose blood it was. The voices were louder now, children singing a soft, unsettling song.
“He told us to run But cut off our feet. He will sneak up behind you, Catch you in his teeth. He will leave your flesh For the vultures to eat.”
I really wanted to turn back but I knew that the deal needed to be made. I opened the door and shone the torch inside. There was nothing in there other than an old arm chair and some suspicious looking dark red staining parts of the floor.
“H-hello?” I said, then waited for a response.
Nothing at first. The seconds ticked by and I was about to leave and go hunting for some other spirit in the house when a creepy little voice whispered “Hello.”
My whole body was shivering now, against my best intentions. I shone a torch slowly around the room till I got to the pair of small grey feet. Raising my torch slowly, I almost dropped it when I saw the boy properly.
He had two faces. One was his own but the other, botched, mottled and eyeless was clearly from someone else: it would have looked like a mask had it not been for the dripping blood. It has been stitched to the side of his face and covered his cheek and ear.
But the worst part was his eyes. They were completely opaque white.
His mouth smiled ghoulishly.
“He said you are pretty.” His voice may be soft but there was something deeply wrong with it.
I ignored his words and did what my mother had taught me. Hold the entity’s gaze and say “Let me aid you spirit. I can give you what you need if you give me what I need in return.”
This is what we offered them. A chance at closure. To complete their unfinished business. Even the most terrifying of them usually wanted closure and to leave their purgatory.
But the boy simply kept smiling ghoulishly, his other face looking even more terrifying when he smiled.
“You are so pretty and he would like to add you to his collection.”
What was wrong with its voice?
The terrible realisation hit me so suddenly, I stumbled backwards.
It was the voice of a man pretending to be a little boy.
I stuttered this time as I repeated my words. “L-let me aid you spirit-“
The door behind me slammed shut.
I gasped and turned to it only to find the floor was starting to turn to quicksand. It swallowed my feet up and then turned back to wood, trapping me there. The surprise caused me to make my fatal error: I shrieked.
The skin crawling chuckle that filled the room made me nearly wet myself. I knew I was in trouble now. I reached quickly into my bag and pulled out the holy water and a vial of blood from my bag. This was a last resort. We were supposed to use this only in case of dire emergency. But as I felt the hands crawling up my back to my throat, I knew I was on limited time.
I stiffened as one of the hands found my throat and started to wrap itself around opening up the holy water and tossing it onto myself. The hands fell away. I tossed the holy water onto my feet but that was no good. The whole time I was there, I could feel something circling me. I tossed the holy water all around me until the bottle was empty.
As soon as the water was gone, I felt something yank me back by my hair to the point I thought it would tear from my scalp. Terrified I looked up to see it. The boy was crawling on the roof. He was no longer smiling. His jaw distended and black, foul smelling liquid fell from his throat onto my face.
I screamed again, sputtering, my hand clutching the vial of blood. Quickly I wiped my eyes with one arm so I could see the boy and shouted the words,
“In uterum gehennae evanescet et nunquam domum tuam inveniat!”
Then I opened and threw the vial of blood into the boys faces and for a moment, all went still in the room.
With a loud, demonic roar, the entity lunged for me and I covered my face bracing for impact but-
Nothing happened.
When I opened my eyes, the entity was gone.
I breathed a huge sign of relief and looked down. My feet had been released from the wood. The attic no longer felt filled with unease and I reached down to pick up my torch which I had dropped in the fray.
Quietly I shone it around once, found nothing and left.
*
The rest of my time in the house had gone quietly. I smudged each room. I changed prayers and spread salt where I needed to. By the time I was done, the whole house was silent and still and felt empty. Properly, fully empty of anything that could possibly live here. Since no other spirits had met me, I assumed that the attic was the only place I needed to deal with.
After staying at the motel overnight, I got up early the next morning to leave. The weather forecast was rain all the way home but I didn’t mind that. I has successfully cleansed and appeased my first haunted house.
Humming to myself as I often did, I left the parking lot in my car, the rain pelting down on the roof. It was only when I was an hour into my drive that I noticed it. The feeling of unease. The sense of dread. The familiar song that I was humming.
But what solidified it into solid fear was the voice which rose from the empty passenger seat next to me.
The voice that had terrified me last night and had made my blood curdle.
“He thinks you’re so pretty and he would like to add you to his collection.”