Haunted House on Buller street

It was 2014, 15th July. The day we moved in.

The old yellow house on Buller street was our first home in New Zealand, and it was haunted.

My 2 daughters of 10 and 12, and I had recently immigrated to New Zealand, and were looking forward to finally settling down into our own home, after having stayed with relatives for weeks on end, whilst getting settled in a job, and finding my feet. Finally we could move into our own house. The day before, the agent had given me the key to start bringing any furniture in, and I had found a free washing machine, so had decided to take advantage of this.

At dusk, we got the washing machine offloaded from the trailer, and I had a friend help me carry it inside, whilst my one daughter shone the flashlight from my cellphone into the house for us. The electricity had not yet been turned on. My daughter yelled and jumped back, but I thought she may have seen a spider, and didn't question anything, we were in a hurry to get the trailer back to the garage.

Moving in day was exciting, and the house seemed so big. Too big for us actually. We had all these rooms to ourselves. Perhaps it was just because for the last 10 weeks, we had been sharing a house with our relatives. The garden had lovely rose bushes, and an old vegetable patch. I love gardening, so I decided that would be one of my first projects. The passage was very wide for a house, and there were 2 art deco lampshade, one on the ceiling as you entered, and one further down the hallway, as you entered the third bedroom. We only had one double bed to all share. My uncle had helped set it up in the main bedroom, it was an old brass bed.

That evening we were all sitting on the floor in the main bedroom, unpacking our only worldly possessions from the suitcases, when I became aware of a smell. It was like a dead animal smell. I asked Hannah and Alex whether they smelt anything, and they smelt it too. It was quite awful, I tried to find out what area of the room it was strongest, and whether we could smell it in the passage. There was no smell in the passage, the smell was only where we were, in the bedroom, so perhaps an animal had died under the house. We carried on unpacking, and we were getting cold, the smell was horrid, and the room seemed to have a dark shadow in the corner, the lighting couldn't be too good in the old house, and I suggested we should go to bed. Both the girls noticed the dark shadow, and became scared. Hannah started telling me what she had seen the day before, when she had shone my cellphone flashlight into the house. She had seen the form of a lady, she described it as, "a figure of light, that looked like a woman, walking down the passage."

My youngest daughter started crying when she heard this. I had to try and calm them both down, and rationalize the situation. We got ready for bed, and lay close together watching " Hillstreet Blues" on my laptop. It was the only dvd I had, in an attempt to distract ourselves. The smells were more sulphuric now, and it was as if someone was passing putrid wind in our room. I decided we should pray. No matter what I said, I too was becoming convinced there was something sinister at play. Finally we got to sleep, and in the morning the smells were just gone. For the next 2 months, we all stayed in the same room, accompanying each other to the toilet at night and in the late afternoon. My daughters were too scared to stay in their own bedrooms. During those first 2 months a few other strange incidents occurred. A tap turned on by itself, in the kitchen. A light switched on by itself, in the kitchen as well. I decided to adopt a cat as a family pet, and this was a welcome distraction for my girls. The girls became brave enough to move into one of the other bedrooms. Hannah was listening to her ipod on her bed one afternoon, and the music just stopped, and she started hearing whispering noises, she got such a fright.

Alex was relaxing in the bedroom on another occasion, and the door, which was ajar, started opening, as if it was being pushed open, she heard what she described as the pressure of a hand moving across the door, but nobody was around. I finally decided to tackle the garden on one of my days off, and uncovered a "Welcome" plaque under the sand. It was very unusual. we wondered why it was buried in the soil, it was totally intact, so I cleaned it up, and put it by the front door. It was embossed with little bunny rabbits, and looked very friendly. Almost like a gift. I told my daughters that perhaps an old lady used to live in the house, and wanted to share the house with us. Now and then when we came home, I would shout out, " Hello granny, were home!" This made me feel a bit better, saner, somehow.

My eldest daughter and her partner came to stay for a few months, and one day, they were alone in the house. They heard the front door open, and slam shut, and assumed we had returned home. When they realized there was nobody else at home still, they were spooked, and when we finally did get home, we found them under the blankets in their room, terrified.

I decided to have Airbnb guests to stay in one of the rooms, when my eldest moved out, after her few months of staying with us. This was to supplement my income a little. On this day, My daughters had gone to school. I had just had my first guest stay, an indian man. He was due to leave that morning, but was trying to get the rest of his belongings together in the kitchen. He had asked me, when I was also in the kitchen, where he could find a plastic bag, and I had told him, "On the shelf next to the stove". A few minutes later,I was down the end of the house, near the garage entrance, when he called out to me, "Sorry, where are the plastic bags again?"Before I could utter a word, I heard a voice, my voice, say, " On the shelf next to the stove". And he said, "Ok, thank you." It was bizarre. I questioned it, and questioned my sanity. Nobody else would have been there to hear it. Except him, but I didn't want to make a scene, he was my first guest, might he judge me?

Another incident like this happened a few months later. My youngest daughter, Alex, was on a date with her boyfriend, and only Hannah and I were in the house. We were relaxing in the lounge. I was on my laptop going through emails, and Hannah was on her cellphone, whilst playing with the pendant on her necklace. Then, in the background I became aware of someone talking to herself, as if she was having a monologue with herself. It sounded like Alex. Alex does have a very organized way about her, an anxious sort of personality, and she does sometimes do that, make mental lists out aloud. So when I heard this, immediately I thought, oh, shes back from her date. But it was too soon. She couldnt be. So I said, " Can you hear that Hannah?", " Is Alex back?" Hannah, looked up from her phone, and listened, "Alex? " she was surprised as I was. We both got up, the talking was coming from the passage area, inside the house. We both called "Alex?"as we got to the passage, and it just stopped. There was nobody there. No more talking. That was also very unusual, and we questioned whether we had actually heard it. But we definitely had.

On another occasion, an Airbnb guest and her boyfriend, both youngsters from Germany, had been locked out of their room. The room had a lock that could only be locked from the inside, and so it was a puzzle. They had definitely not locked the door, or touched the lock.

I moved to the middle room at one stage during our 4 years in the Buller street house. Every morning at 0520, which was around the time I needed the toilet, I would here creaking of the floorboards outside my door, like pressure on the floorboards...footsteps. Every morning. To this day I sleep with ear plugs in, it was too disturbing.

I knew our family weren't insane, and so when something happened to a friend of mine who was house sitting for us, it proved to me that we hadn't been just seeing things. I was on leave, and had sked a friend, Matthew, to please watch the house for us, and feed the cat. He was only too happy to, as he loves to surf, and the house was a hop, skip and a jump to the beach. He is a pretty skeptical guy, and hadn't believed any of the things we had told him about what had occurred. One fine day, I received a text from him, " I think I've met your ghost". Upon returning he let me know the entire story. He was at the front door, which had a pane of glass in it, and saw a figure running past, down the corridor, he rushed in, expecting to chase an intruder, but found nobody there. He searched everywhere. This is when he had sent that text to me. Then, on the last day, the day I would be returning, he came in to feed the cats, and had found every single door open in the house, including all the cupboard doors, doors that he had closed the night before. And linen had been strewn across the floor, thrown out of the cupboard in the passage. It was unexplainable. Perhaps it was her? Was she unhappy with someone new in the house again? We would never know.

I never really believed in actual ghosts other than what people had told me, and from movies. But what we experienced has convinced me beyond the shadow of a doubt. The truth is stranger than fiction.