I think I was ten or eleven when our family moved into a three bedroom home. We loved it at first. But as is common with creepy houses, that changed in a hurry. I think our dog noticed something weird way before we did. He would bark at empty room, growl at dark corners and even did the classic head tilt to sounds only he could hear.
My parents rationalized for as long as they could. They’d tell my brother and I that he was probably reacting to sounds other dogs made, that couldn’t be heard by human ears. Today, I can tell that they were clutching at straws, but to 10 year old me, it made perfect sense.
Soon, the strangeness in the house made itself known to us too. It started off with little things. For instance, my brother and I came home from school one day and saw a middle aged woman sitting on the couch. We assumed she was mom’s friend or something and said a polite “hello”, before going off into our rooms to change. Later that day when we asked mom about her, she didn’t know what we were talking about. We’d hear the cries of a baby at night coming from the guest room, sounds of conversations involving multiple people could be heard from the empty living room. One afternoon, my mom heard a male voice in the garage and assumed , at first, that it was my dad. Then she remembered that my dad was out of town. She was terrified that it was an intruder. However a subsequent search for the said intruder, armed with a hammer to defend herself, yielded no results.
The sighting that was most common was that of the lady we had seen sitting on our couch. We would often see her in the kitchen, or hear her singing to herself as she “tended” to the garden.
We were convinced that the house was haunted. It explained why it had been so ridiculously cheap. My parents did some research to find out if someone had ever died in the house. But as it turned out, the house had been built less than 50 years ago and a woman in her 70s was the only person to have breathed her last there. Of all the sightings we had had, that of an old woman had not been among them. So haunting was ruled out.
My mom was able to track down the previous owners of the house. They now lived in a different part of town and the matriarch of that family agreed to speak with her. Mom came straight to the point and asked why they had left. The lady gave the answer my mom had expected – creepy shit. Mom probed further and asked if she they had a baby, if the baby’s room was the one we were using as our guest room, if she liked to sing as she worked in the kitchen and garden etc. The lady replied in affirmatives to all of these. I think she answered all of my mom’s questions so patiently because she knew exactly what we were going through.
Mom and dad deduced that the house somehow recoded memories of the previous residents and played them back. How this was possible was, of course, beyond the comprehension of mortal minds. They decided , though none of us had been hurt, the house was just too weird and decided to move.
A few months after moving to our new house, each of her began to have dreams about our experiences in the previous house. However, it wasn’t just ourselves that we saw. The dreams also involved other people who were now living in the house. What’s more, we could see those people looking at us and reacting to our presence, all in our dreams. We figured out that this is probably how we were now “haunting” our old house, even though we were alive. For my brother and I it became a fun little game, we couldn’t wait to go to bed at night and haunt those poor unsuspecting people. Our parents told us not to relish in such mischief, but couldn’t really scold us as we weren’t really doing anything.
Those dreams lasted for about 18 months, the exact same duration of our stay in that house.
Today, I can’t help but wonder just how many so called haunted houses are truly haunted by the troubled spirits of the dead, instead of houses simply recording memories and playing them for whoever now resides in them.
