The House That Liz Bought
(Inspired By True Events)
The first time Liz noticed that something was not right about her house was a few days after she moved in. She woke up in the middle of the night to a sound that she couldn’t quite place. Was that hissing? She felt her way out of bed in the dark and followed the sound down the hall, trying to figure out what it was.
When she reached the bathroom door, she saw something quite baffling. Water was streaming out of the tap at full pressure. It wasn’t dripping or leaking. It was fully open, water flowing freely. She stared at it in disbelief. Foggy from sleep, she tried to remember if she accidentally left it on while brushing her teeth. No, not possible, she thought. She turned the tap off and studied it a bit longer as if it would offer some explanation and then went back to bed.
Liz bought the house a few months earlier after she and her boyfriend split up. It was amicable as break-ups go. Still, she was heartbroken. She thought they would build a life together. Instead, she found herself buying a house on her own. Well, it wasn’t exactly on her own. A $20,000 inheritance from her grandmother afforded her the down payment for the semi-detached abode in the east end of town. She wouldn’t have been able to buy it otherwise. Liz wasn’t a saver.
Several days after the faucet incident, her friend James and his brother Rob came over to help her paint. “Wow, who’s room was this?” Rob asked as they walked into the middle bedroom.
“I think it was the nursery,” Liz answered.
“Do you know who lived here before?” Rob was uneasy. “There’s a weird energy in this room.”
“My brother can sense things, like ghosts,” James offered. “Our mom says he has The Gift.”
Liz was curious but not buying this. “Really. What do you think you're sensing?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not good, something negative, angry….” Rob hesitated,” I don’t know. “He asked if anything strange had been happening since she bought the place. Liz shared the water incident from a few days earlier. “Anything missing?” he asked.
“Not really,” Liz remembered that she couldn’t find one of her rings and a scarf she swore she had put away. Her friends always teased her about her knack for losing things.
“Well, I would seriously think about bringing in a medium or someone who can help get rid of this energy. You definitely have something in here.” Liz wasn’t sure what to make of what he was saying. It all sounded a little far-fetched, and she had never believed in such things.
A week later, she came in from a walk to find her bathtub faucet running. As she turned the tap off, she recalled Rob’s comments. This is crazy, she thought; there must be some rational explanation.
“Worn out packing nuts,” the helpful guy at the hardware store told her. “They get loose over time, and with the water pressure, it’s enough to turn them on automatically. It sounds like you might need to replace them. I can recommend a plumber.”
While new packing nuts may have resolved the water problem, it did not explain the other strange incidents Liz experienced over the next couple of months. Various items went missing around the house, only to pop up somewhere else. Some things just disappeared altogether. A hairbrush she kept in the bathroom ended up on the fireplace mantle. Earrings went missing from her jewelry box and later turned up in a coat pocket she had put in storage for the winter. Several times the TV or stereo spontaneously turned on when she was in another room.
One Saturday evening, as she was rushing out the door to meet friends for dinner. She remembered she left her phone upstairs. She tossed her sweater over a dining room chair and ran to retrieve the phone. When she came back down, the sweater was gone. She frantically went through every room in the house, trying to think of what could have happened. She was sure she had put that sweater on the chair - so where was it? She turned her bedroom upside down and checked all the other rooms upstairs. Heading back downstairs, she searched throughout the main floor. Nothing. She sat on the couch and cried in frustration. “I’m losing my mind,” she thought.
Checking her watch, she realized she was now running late to meet her friends. She gathered her wits and hurried upstairs again to grab another sweater from her closet. Back downstairs, she made her way towards the door. Halfway out, she stopped dead in her tracks. Turning slowly to look around, she saw her sweater perfectly laid out on the dining table. Her heart stopped. Liz walked over to the sweater, stared at it in disbelief for a moment, and then left.
At dinner, she filled her friends in on what happened earlier, as well as the other strange experiences she had, including Rob’s peculiar remarks about the guest room.
“Maybe he’s right; maybe your house is haunted. You should bring in a medium and see what they say.”
“Maybe it’s some spirit playing tricks on you for fun. I’ve heard that some ghosts do that.’”
“Liz, don’t listen to them. It’s all crap. There’s a reasonable explanation for all of it. You’re just stressed out. You need some chill time.”
Liz didn’t know what to believe anymore. She couldn’t accept the idea of a ghost in her house. At the same time, she couldn’t ignore all the strange happenings, especially her sweater. That was just weird. And then there was Rob and his creepy comments about bad energy. After a few drinks and a few laughs about cheesy horror movies, she convinced herself it was all nothing - silly, actually. She chalked up the missing stuff to her absent-mindedness, the TV and radio to energy surges, and the water issues to an old house and bad plumbing.
Several weeks later, Liz was at her dining room table working on a project for a client. The place was unusually quiet. Her neighbour was away on vacation, so there wasn’t the usual muffled sound of voices through the shared wall.
As she sat in silence, she wondered if she should turn on some music. And then she heard it. The dripping sound was unmistakable. This time, it wasn’t coming from the bathroom. As she looked up from her computer, she saw beads of water landing on her papers on the table. Moving her gaze to the ceiling, she realized the water was coming from her chandelier. It took seconds for the drops to become a steady flow of water falling on her dining room table. Alarmed, she quickly moved her laptop and documents and covered the table with dish towels. She ran upstairs to check the taps. They were all dry. Downstairs again, she watched in horror as water began to also seep out of the light fixtures over the bar. She turned off all the lights and found more towels.
The next day she called the plumber who had fixed her bathroom taps. After opening several sections in the wall, he showed her a pinprick hole in the pipes behind the bathroom sink. Water was slowly escaping in a mist. “Over time, it builds up inside the wall and looks for anywhere it can get out – like your light fixtures,” he explained, referring to her chandelier and bar lights. As he was packing up, he handed her a worn and beaten black moleskin book. “I found this in the vent where I went into the wall,” he said as he walked out.
Liz looked at the weathered notebook. There were pages of writing, some of which were water damaged but, she could make out most of it. The first several pages looked like notes and lists of bottle feeding times, height and weight measurements and comments about first words, first tooth - the kind of things a mother would keep track of as her baby was growing.
As she went further into the book, it started to look more like a journal. The words on the pages became more heartbreaking and disturbing.
I’m a horrible mother. I can’t do anything right. He cries all the time, and I don’t know what to do. I’m so tired. I can’t remember when I last slept. I feel like I’m losing myself down a deep dark hole that I can’t get out of.
And then it stopped. Liz flipped through the book and could find nothing else - nothing but blank pages. She grabbed her laptop and her file from the house purchase and searched for the previous owner.
The few stories she was able to find gave slightly different accounts of the accident, but the story was sadly clear. Mrs. Elaine Grossman and her 2-year-old son were killed in a car accident near their home. The collision happened in the middle of an intersection early on a Tuesday morning. It was unclear how it happened or who was at fault. There was nothing else about it.
Liz was shocked. How did she not hear about this when she bought the house? “There’s no legal obligation to disclose if a former owner has died,” her real estate agent informed her, “and besides, the house was in the husband’s name.”
Liz thought about Elaine’s last entries in the black book and wondered if her state of mind had anything to do with the accident. Was she distracted? Depressed? Suicidal? And then it hit her. Is Elaine in her house? Are they both here? Even considering it made her sound crazy, she thought.
Several weeks went by without incident. Liz convinced herself that she needed to put it all behind her for her own peace of mind - the previous owner's tragic story, the ideas of ghosts and bad energy. She just wanted to enjoy her home.
Working again at her make-shift office in the dining room, she noted that it might be a good idea to turn her guest room into a home office. Hunched over her laptop, Liz suddenly felt a cold draft as if someone had opened the window behind her. The hairs on the back of her neck began to tingle. Her senses suddenly became razor-sharp, and she felt a sense of dread she had never experienced before. And a presence. It was unmistakable. There was someone was standing behind her; she could feel it. All of her instincts knew what she was experiencing, and yet her mind kept telling her that it was impossible. Fear and confusion took over. Her mind was racing. She was frozen in her seat, unable or afraid to move.
And then she did something that completely surprised her. “I’m not afraid of you…” she said out loud, her voice shaking. “…and I’m not going anywhere”. Liz steadied herself and continued. “I know what happened to you. I’m sorry. But I live here now, and I won’t be scared off.” The feeling lingered for a moment, and then suddenly, it was gone. It was like someone flipped a switch.
It was the first and last time Liz would experience that cold presence in her home. Despite what had happened, she didn’t heed her friends’ advice to smudge the house or call a medium. She never fully accepted the idea that the ghosts of Elaine and her child might be in her home. And yet, for the rest of her days in that house, every once in a while, things unexplainably moved or went missing, the TV and stereo would act up, and occasionally, she would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of running water in her bathroom.
About the Creator
Catherine Meyer
Catherine is a writer, speaker, coach, and founder of Catalyst Leadership Solutions. Her work is focused on helping people develop tools and skills for success in their business, career and life.
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