Ellen and John were the perfect couple, and after they got married, they found the perfect house. Tucked away on a quiet street in a quiet corner of Vermont, the old Victorian was definitely a fixer-upper. Ellen and John weren’t afraid of a little work, but after the events they witnessed in the house, they found other things to fear.
Ellen and John were married on a bright summer day in 1986. They immediately began searching for their dream home, and by autumn, they had found it. It was an old house – drafty and in need of some repair – but Ellen and John saw nothing but potential. “We were young and we thought we could handle whatever came along,” Ellen tells me.
The young couple started right away ripping up carpets and painting walls. Soon the house was more of a mess than it had been when they first laid eyes on it, but it was all part of the plan. As Ellen worked upstairs on the two bathrooms, John was downstairs uncovering the beautiful, old hardwood floor that had languished for years under an orange shag carpet. “That carpet was the first thing that had to go,” Ellen recalls.
As the carpet came up, John began to notice some pesky stains on the floorboards. He tried cleaning them, spending time at the local hardware store in consultation with the owner, Bill, and when that didn’t work, he sanded them down. The stains went deep, however, and John and Ellen were resigned to hiding the problem with strategically-placed furniture.
One day, as Ellen attacked a particularly stubborn water stain in the upstairs bathroom, she called down to John. “I needed the little brush we were using for hard-to-reach places,” Ellen remembers, “and I swore I left it in the bedroom, but it wasn’t there.”
Receiving no reply, Ellen called to John again. This time she heard him walk across the floor downstairs to the bottom of the staircase. “I thought, Why is he not answering me?,” Ellen recalls, “and then I remembered that he had gone to the hardware store.”
Ellen froze in fear; someone was in the house. They had neighbors, but none close by. Their house sat in its own cul-de-sac and the nearest houses were through the trees and bushes in the back yard. Would anyone hear if Ellen cried out?
Suddenly the staircase began to creak; the intruder was coming up. “I tried to be as quiet as possible,” Ellen tells me. Ellen crouched on the floor of the bathroom and gripped her mop as her only means of defence. “I was ready to mop the floor with whoever it was,” she recalls.
The footfalls slowly continued up the steps and into the hallway. Ellen listened as they came down the hall and stopped just before the bathroom door. “I hadn’t thought to close the door,” Ellen tells me, “so I was just going to rush them with my mop. Stupid plan, I know.”
Ellen readied herself and jumped into the hallway brandishing her mop. “It was just me in that hallway,” Ellen recalls. After searching the house, Ellen told her story to John when he came home. “Old houses make a lot of noise,” John told her.
Ellen chalked up the incident to an old house and an overactive imagination. The couple continued renovating the house as the temperature dropped. For Ellen, the cold Vermont winter was mitigated by the knowledge that soon her sister, Anne, would visit.
Ellen and John were married on a bright summer day in 1986. They immediately began searching for their dream home, and by autumn, they had found it. It was an old house – drafty and in need of some repair – but Ellen and John saw nothing but potential. “We were young and we thought we could handle whatever came along,” Ellen tells me.
The young couple started right away ripping up carpets and painting walls. Soon the house was more of a mess than it had been when they first laid eyes on it, but it was all part of the plan. As Ellen worked upstairs on the two bathrooms, John was downstairs uncovering the beautiful, old hardwood floor that had languished for years under an orange shag carpet. “That carpet was the first thing that had to go,” Ellen recalls.
As the carpet came up, John began to notice some pesky stains on the floorboards. He tried cleaning them, spending time at the local hardware store in consultation with the owner, Bill, and when that didn’t work, he sanded them down. The stains went deep, however, and John and Ellen were resigned to hiding the problem with strategically-placed furniture.
One day, as Ellen attacked a particularly stubborn water stain in the upstairs bathroom, she called down to John. “I needed the little brush we were using for hard-to-reach places,” Ellen remembers, “and I swore I left it in the bedroom, but it wasn’t there.”
Receiving no reply, Ellen called to John again. This time she heard him walk across the floor downstairs to the bottom of the staircase. “I thought, Why is he not answering me?,” Ellen recalls, “and then I remembered that he had gone to the hardware store.”
Ellen froze in fear; someone was in the house. They had neighbors, but none close by. Their house sat in its own cul-de-sac and the nearest houses were through the trees and bushes in the back yard. Would anyone hear if Ellen cried out?
Suddenly the staircase began to creak; the intruder was coming up. “I tried to be as quiet as possible,” Ellen tells me. Ellen crouched on the floor of the bathroom and gripped her mop as her only means of defence. “I was ready to mop the floor with whoever it was,” she recalls.
The footfalls slowly continued up the steps and into the hallway. Ellen listened as they came down the hall and stopped just before the bathroom door. “I hadn’t thought to close the door,” Ellen tells me, “so I was just going to rush them with my mop. Stupid plan, I know.”
Ellen readied herself and jumped into the hallway brandishing her mop. “It was just me in that hallway,” Ellen recalls. After searching the house, Ellen told her story to John when he came home. “Old houses make a lot of noise,” John told her.
Ellen chalked up the incident to an old house and an overactive imagination. The couple continued renovating the house as the temperature dropped. For Ellen, the cold Vermont winter was mitigated by the knowledge that soon her sister, Anne, would visit.
As John and Ellen worked on the house, they made time to get to know their neighbors in the small town. Ellen became especially fond of a women about her age named Kathy who lived nearby. Kathy would drop in occasionally and chat with Ellen about the house and the town and whatever else came up.
A few days before her sister came to visit, Ellen was busy painting the dining room when Kathy knocked on the front door. “She usually just came right in,” Ellen remembers. “I thought it was odd that she knocked.”
Ellen answered the door and invited her neighbor inside, but Kathy declined. She told Ellen that she was going on vacation and wanted to say goodbye. In the course of their conversation, Ellen could tell something wasn’t right. “She wasn’t acting like herself,” Ellen says. “It was like she was afraid of something.”
Ellen offered to walk with Kathy home, and as they passed through the trees and away from Ellen’s house, Kathy opened up. “She said she was afraid of my sister,” Ellen recalls, “but my sister wasn’t there yet.” Kathy explained that she had dropped by the day before when Ellen and John were both out, and the door was answered by a women Kathy assumed was Ellen’s sister.
“She said this women was really rude to her,” Ellen tells me. “I thought somebody broke into my house.” Kathy described the strange encounter with the mysterious woman to Ellen. The woman was pale and young but wore her thick, black hair in an old fashioned style. She had deep set, dark eyes that Kathy found both bewitching and intimidating. The woman told Kathy no one was home and quickly closed the door, leaving Kathy inexplicably shaken.
After hearing Kathy’s strange story, Ellen talked it over with John. John revealed that he, too, had experienced some odd things in the house like objects disappearing and sounds of movement when no one was there. Ellen decided to dig into the house’s history and confirm her suspicion that her dream home was haunted by some forlorn soul.
Ellen didn’t need to look for long. On her way to the town municipal building, she stopped in the hardware store and asked the owner, Bill, about her house. Bill told her the story of Martha Jones, the owner of the house 20 years before. “Bill said that when Martha’s husband died, it was ruled a natural death,” Ellen says, “but there was plenty of talk in town.” Martha remarried and when that husband died, too, folks got suspicious.
Martha lived alone in the house, keeping to herself, and when she died, the house was rented out until Ellen and John bought it. The renters had all been single men, with women and couples always leaving the house after a few weeks. Bill confirmed that some townsfolk figured the place was cursed, but no one had ever reported seeing anything before. “I thought I had my ghost,” Ellen tells me.
The next week brought Ellen’s sister, Anne, to the house, and the mysterious goings-on were almost forgotten. Taking a break from the renovation, Ellen spent most of this time away from the house with Anne. After the holidays were over, Anne said her goodbyes and left for home.
The next day Ellen found a thank you note from her sister in the guest room. In the note, Anne expressed her gratitude for the visit and the all the fun things they had done together. Anne apologized to her sister that she had taken her away from the house work, but wrote that at least Ellen had been able to finish the upstairs sitting room. “We don’t have a sitting room upstairs,” Ellen recalls.
Ellen called her sister in order to unravel the cryptic reference, but her sister insisted that during her stay there was a sitting room on the second floor. She described a fully furnished room with old fashioned chairs, tables decorated with knickknacks, and pictures covering the walls – a room that didn’t exist as far as Ellen knew. “All the pictures in the room – photographs and paintings – were all of different women,” Ellen recalls, “some going back a hundred years.”
Things changed quickly after that. Ellen told John she couldn’t stay in the house anymore. The resulting stress drove a wedge between the couple and Ellen and John were separated soon after. But before she left town for good, Ellen checked the town records to get the real history on her former house.
“When I think back to that time now, I realize my experiences in the house could have been a lot worse,” Ellen recalls. Although the townspeople’s memory was accurate as far as Martha and her husbands, it failed to make all the connections. Going back over a hundred years, the house had been occupied by women whose husbands had met early deaths. Martha was only the latest in a long line. Was it Martha with the dark eyes and deathly pallor who answered the door when Kathy came to call? Or was it some other long lost resident? And what power or entity could drive so many women to possibly murder their husbands? Ellen believes now that something more sinister, something ancient and bloodthirsty lived alongside the house’s human and formerly human residents. “In a different way, but just like all the rest,” Ellen tells me, “I lost my husband, too.”
Got a scary story? Email wannahearascarystory@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment