This happened to me when I was 4 years old. It’s been 30 years but I remember it like it was yesterday. There were many strange occurrences in this house, but this is the one that started everything.
Some backstory
My entire family has lived in the same, small, SE Kansas town for 4 generations. My mother grew up there and moved away with her mother when she was around 15. A year later, she was involved in a very tragic car accident where she was the only survivor. After waking up from a month-long coma, there was a lawsuit against the company who owned the other vehicle, and my mom won a large settlement.
Shortly after the lawsuit, my mother was whisked back to the small Kansas town by her father. It wasn’t long before my mother was back in High School, met my father, and was pregnant with me. By the time she was 17, she had married my father and graduated from High School.
They bounced around from small house, to apartment, to small house. In a town of 1000 people, there isn’t much to choose from. Eventually, they got sick of the roach filled slums and decided to use the money my mom had to buy a house. As with the rental side of things, houses were somewhat tough to come by as well. Most homes are family owned and have been for decades. But they did find one house available for sale.
The house
The house they settled on was a large, 2 story home, across the street from the high school. It was built in the 1800s, when the streets in town were either dirt or brick. As with any big, creepy, old house next to a high school, people talked about it, but none of my parents’ friends had ever actually even been inside.
When my mom viewed it, she found it to be absolutely beautiful. She instantly spent most of her settlement on the house and purchased it in her name alone. My mom, dad, and my 3-year-old self moved in shortly after. Less than a year later, my parents divorced, and my dad moved out. My mom and I ended up living here (mostly) alone for the next 9 years.
The Layout
I know this is getting a bit long, it’s important to understand the layout of the home for this (and almost all) stories that happened here.
You opened the front door to a large staircase in the middle of the home. On the left was a small living-room area, and on the right was a larger living-room esque space bisected by what was once a double doorway, but the door was missing. The bathroom was under the stairs which led to the one downstairs bedroom. Spanning the back of the home was the kitchen and laundry room which was clearly once a back porch.
Upstairs was a bit strange. The staircase was in the center of the house, which led almost all the way to the back of the home. At the top of the stairs, to the right was a bedroom(mine), to the left a long hallway. In the middle of the hallway was a door to another bedroom (moms) and at the end was a room we called “the balcony room”.
The first time
It was a cool fall night in 1994. My mom and I had been at her friend’s house, Jay Bird (that’s what we called him anyway), for most of the evening listening to the smashing pumpkins, Nirvana, or whatever edgy music was most popular back then. She was 21, into partying, dumber than a box of rocks, and had no problem dragging me along through all of her bullshit. But that’s another story. I remember having a good time with all her friends and they usually treated me pretty well, so I had a good time hanging out late into the night. But around 2 or 3am, it was time for us to go home.
We pulled into the driveway in front of the garage after a short 10 minutes’ drive. The garage was about 100ft from the back of the house, and we could see our bedroom lights shining through the lace curtains in the upstairs windows. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary or strange at all. We walked up the small path to the back door that led to the laundry room, both yawning and ready to go to sleep.
Once we got inside, the light from the large living room shined through the open doorway into the kitchen, lighting our way. we walked through the kitchen and into the living room and that’s when we heard it. Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud…. Footsteps, somewhere inside the house! We peered into the living room but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Mom called out “Hello?”. No response, just footsteps.
Mom and I made the trek to the front of the house, stopping near the foot of the stairs. The light from the living room bled over the bottom few stairs into the smaller living room on the other side. Unfortunately, the upstairs hallway light had been out since we moved in. That’s why we typically left the bedroom lights on, so the light could bleed into the hallway. But, looking up the staircase was looking up into complete darkness. Someone had turned off the bedroom lights and was running around upstairs.
Mom called out again “Hello? Who’s up there!?”. Of course, no response again. The footsteps were getting more intense. Like most old houses, when something is dropped or someone is stomping on the floor, you feel it everywhere. We were starting to feel these footsteps and they were turning into stomps.
One last time, my mom called out “Who’s running around up there?” and, for a split second, the footsteps stopped. Then, the stomping started, I could feel the stomps walking down the hallway, towards the top of the stairs, then they started almost running down the staircase. My mom and I stood, petrified, knowing whoever was running around in our home was about to reveal themselves by stepping into the light. I remember feeling them in the floor, getting closer with every stomp.
stomp, STOMP, STOMP!
The stomping stopped right at the foot of the stairs. Nothing was there. It seemed like an eternity that mom and I both stood there staring at the last step, but I’m sure it was only a second. Then, as quickly as it stopped, the stomping started again, back up the stairs, around the banister, and down the hallway.
Once we snapped out of it, Mom picked me up and ran back to the car. She backed out of the driveway and we went back to Jays house. Once we got there, mom told Jay what we had seen. “There’s no way, someone’s fucking with you Jen” he said. She begged him to come back to the house and see it for himself, he agreed.
We pulled up to the front of the house this time, not even bothering with the back door that we usually came through. I’m sure mom expected us to open the door and everything to be completely normal, Jay would laugh at the situation, and we’d take him home, I know I did. But that’s not what happened at all.
Jay opened the door first, and we all walked in. Standing at the foot of the stairs, just where mom and I had been 20 minutes ago, we heard the same stomps as before. Instantly Jay said “watch, we’re going to go outside and find the ladder that they climbed up to get into your house. We’ll pull it down then they’ll have to reveal themselves”. We went outside and found, of course, no ladder or any other way that someone could have broken in. We went back inside, and it happened again.
stomp, STOMP, STOMP!
All the way to the bottom of the stairs again, right in front of mom, Jay and myself. Jay ushered us outside and said, “how about you guys stay at my place tonight”. We spent the night at Jays house.
The next morning, we went back. The sunlight was shining in, illuminating the upstairs hallway. When we made it to the top of the stairs, everything was normal. Nothing was misplaced, no windows were broken or left open, everything was exactly how we left it.
Jay Bird didn’t come around moms much after that. I guess it’s hard to blame him. Mom and I spoke about this happening in the days following the event, but shortly after, up until we moved out of that house, she tried to play it off as if it was a joke. She seemed scarred by the event and, in an effort to “protect me from the truth”, always denied or downplayed any experiences I shared with her in the future. It wasn’t until several years after we’d left that house that she finally opened up about her experiences there and admitted that it was haunted. I don’t think she ever fully mended her relationship with Jay Bird and the relationship between her and I would never be the same.
This is one of my earliest childhood memories. I was just a little guy back then and I didn’t really understand what had happened to me, I just knew that it wasn’t normal. Little did I know, this was the first of many paranormal experiences in this home, and its history had much more to tell us.