Bellingham, WA is one of the most Haunted cities I’ve ever been to. My family has resided in the area since the 1800’s, I personally have been living in town for the last 10 years. My great grandparents used to own Horseshoe Cafe (oldest restaurant in the state), and I’m also a descendent of the Clayton family. I’ve lived in most parts of town (I moved every year during college and most years after for various reasons). And though I’ve seen things in many parts of town my most haunted house was when I lived on South Hill. My Ex and I rented the apartment together. It’s an old old house just at the bottom of Oak St. on North Forest. It’s three stories (not including the basement), each floor was converted into an apartment at some point. My Ex and I lived in the bottom apartment.When we first moved in it was like the honeymoon phase, we marveled at the character of the old structure. It had beautiful crown molding and picturesque views of the bay, we were smitten. Overall we lived there about two years and by the time I escaped that apartment I had nothing left.
You know when you leave something colorful out in the sun for too long, and it starts to fade. A slow bleed from the center, not quite noticeable yet on the edges. That’s how my life began to feel. When the arguing started I figured it was just a phase, most couples fight right? We had always been such a close pair, I imagined it was a temporary hiccup. Yet I could feel myself growing more and more emotionally aggressive from within. When my parents came to stay with us at Christmas time I told my mom that the backroom that leads to the bathroom had a ghost living in it, and I totally freaked her out. Thinking back I thought nothing of it when I said it to her, like it was a totally common thing to be aware of like a leaky faucet or bad light bulb. Upon leaving both of my parents told me that they had, “noticed our attitudes,” and that we needed to go easier on each other. I brushed it off.
It’s not clear to me when I became, “okay,” with the multiple presences living in the walls of my home. I knew they were there, I felt them, I heard things, I saw them, I allowed them. I felt the dark and the light beings move through my space. I talked to them sometimes, asked them how long they had been there, but these answers were not given to me.In the summer we decided to clear the empty lot next to our house of blackberry bushes. We were friends with our landlord and he let us do these sort of fixer upper projects. Upon removing the brush we unearthed the past. An old dog house frozen in time, old toys, and other various objects. But most disturbingly we found a rock pile. As we began to pull away at the rocks, to our surprise some began to collapse inward, revealing a hole. We immediately stopped digging. We shined a light down it, and threw a few pebbles in to see if we could hear them hit water or anything of the sort. They never made a sound. No bottom to this hole was present enough for us to hear anything hit the bottom. We covered the opening with a rock and never went near it again. But it terrified me knowing that 50 feet from my bedroom window was an open shaft to who knows where.
My ex and I grew more and more distant, things that used to bring us joy became mundane. Our loving conversation shifted, and eventually the screaming started. I’ve never been someone that yells at others, but in that time, in that place, growls emitted from me that did not belong to me. We said horrible things to each other that we didn’t mean. One day, near the end, I experienced the worst sleep paralysis of my life thus far. I awoke pinned to my bed, eyes open, unable to move. A black figure emerged from my closet and walked towards my bed before turning and exiting out the bedroom door beside me. I tried to scream. I tried to pinch myself, my hands wouldn’t move. Another presence overcame me then, invisible but even darker still. I felt it crawl up over the end of my bed onto my legs and claw its weight up to my chest. It stayed there, sinking into me, consuming me. I must have mustered some kind of noise because I was finally broken from my trance by my husky who wandered into my room to check on me. I called him onto the bed and he laid there with me, but the feeling didn’t leave. I felt dark.
Soon after, as the fighting grew more intense I started making drastic decisions. I surrendered my dog to a friend as I felt I could no longer care for him. A few weeks later in an eerily serene way I told my ex to leave. I told him I needed to be alone in the house and I wanted our relationship to end. He was beside himself, but after I convinced him it was, “the right thing to do,” he left. Alone in the house I felt powerful. Except I didn’t feel alone, I felt wrapped up in the arms of whatever it was that wouldn’t part with me. I wrote a lot of music, all of which was very dark as I look back on it now. One of the lines even read, “Everyone thinks I’m crazy, I talk to the walls, they say I’m fine.”
I lived in the house alone for a few months in this state. Until one night I was sitting in my dining room playing my guitar and something changed. I sat in a chair in the middle of the room facing the single plate wavy glass window. The eyes of the house; definitely original glass. As the evening turned to night and the view faded to a reflection of myself I continued to play. I clearly remember strumming on my guitar, as I felt a hand come down upon my right shoulder. I looked up at my reflection and saw an old man with white hair standing behind me. He nodded to me and I felt supported and protected, I was comforted by him and I continued to play. All of a sudden like getting hit by a rogue wave the gravity of the situation hit me all at once. I physically jumped out of my chair and spun around. I was alone, no one should be in the room with me. Why was I okay with the ghost in the room? What else was I allowing? A million questions filled my head and I began to feel a sense of concern and panic wash over me as I hadn’t felt these emotions since before telling my partner to leave me.
The next day I called him and begged him to come home but it was too late. He wanted nothing to do with me. I wanted nothing to do with me. I felt deeply sick with grief and in the following three months the walls of the house and my life closed in around me. I stopped eating, I lost all sense of self. I was slowly disappearing. I felt my already slight frame become feathery. I didn’t touch the ground.Thankfully my family was able to encourage me, after a lot of convincing to leave the house. They didn’t know the ways in which it held me there, but they obviously could tell I was pretty f’d up and needed some kind of change. Saying goodbye to the house was excruciating. It didn’t want me to leave. The fact that I had run myself totally broke and couldn’t afford the rent anymore was my saving grace.
It took years for me to find myself again. I dreamed of the house, it beckoned me to return, in my sleep I still lived there. Today, four years later, the house seldom visits me in my dreams. But when it does it’s just as clear as it was before, and I’m always sitting in the living room waiting for my partner to come home but he never does. When I awake I remind myself that the house does not hold me anymore, and that I am free. I am stronger and wiser now, I’ve grown a lot. But it never ceases to unsettle me in my thoughts.
A few years after leaving I ran into the upstairs neighbor. She and I never talked much when we lived in the house, but we saw her from time to time and always had polite interactions. We shared some small talk as we stood there on the sidewalk, and I learned that she had moved out of the house as well. She remarked on how she had enjoyed seeing my boyfriend and I while living there, she was bummed and unaware we had split. And as the conversation came to a close she left me with this, “You two were such a nice couple, I was relieved when you moved in, the couple that lived there before you was nice enough… except for all that screaming.”