Winchester: The Haunted Pencil

Continued from part one of my story, we were not alone in the house. We were physically alone yes, just my children, dog, and myself, but spiritually… no. This I did not know just yet. Little things would happen. The lights would flicker or shut off, or even, occasionally, just turn on at random. This could be explained through faulty or old wiring. It was a 70 year old home after all. Several of the things in it were the original construction. I will add that even after being looked at, repaired, or even replaced, the electrical activity did not seize. That beautiful 1940 O’Keef and Merrit gas stove would suddenly have the knob turned just enough to emit gas into the room. This was obvious through the bitter smell. Things would get moved, lost and show up in a different place, fall and break. Of course I had children but neither of them were tall enough to see onto kitchen counters. One couldn’t even crawl yet.

On the day I moved into my beautiful home on Winchester, it was empty, all except for one thing. A single green pencil. This pencil was dark forest green, and quite used. It had no eraser, just the last bit of what was left of the robins egg blue eraser under the silver metal ferrule that attaches the eraser to the body of the pencil. It was sharpened rather blunt. It was just an old pencil in the middle of the white tiled kitchen counter; nothing special about it. On that day of the move in, I thought it odd to be there but thought nothing of it and put in the drawer in the kitchen. A drawer that would become the miscellaneous drawer everyone has in their kitchen…..

This ordinary pencil is the one thing that moved the most throughout the house.

At first it would appear on the same kitchen counter in the exact same spot that I originally found it. It then ended up in other places such as the shower, beds, couch, in the middle of the floor and even in the oven. I started to think that it was my two year son messing around with me. I asked him about it and he said he had never even seen it. I would start putting it in very high places out of a child’s reach. On top of the refrigerator, top of my closet, or entertainment system. Time & time again, I would pick this pencil up & put it in a different place and eventually always back inside the same drawer that I did on the day I moved in. What point did this pencil have by moving around into different places. I even locked it in a cabinet with a high lock that took a key. Even after being put back in the drawer, why move. It wasn’t my son so there was some entity moving the pencil, but why? Why the pencil of all things? What connection could anything have to a simple pencil?

Little did we know, the pencil was not the only mysterious thing that could occur in this house. First noticed, the house always had cold spots. They were now becoming even more frigid as we got deeper into the fall and entered into the winter. The days became shorter, cooler and more cloudy with rain that seemed to last all day and night. The spots in the house that were normally cooler like standing under a fan were now bone chilling and almost hurt your joints to stand in them. I tried to avoid them, and could not figure out just why they were so cold. I always felt like we were not alone when I stood in these cold places; like I was standing right next to someone else… but who?

To be continued...