Week 12 Storytelling: The Haunting

I thought I chose a safe place to live. The advertisements in the paper said the neighborhood was safe, safe enough to raise a family. But they were wrong.

            My two children and I moved into a new neighborhood about a month ago. My oldest child is 10 and her name is Beth and Derek is only 6. We decided to move because I was able to afford an actual house and I wanted my children to experience the luxuries of living in a place where they could call home since, in the past, we would constantly move around to different small apartments. Because the house came at a cheep price, I asked the relator for the reasoning behind the low price on the house and all she said was that people never staid long. I wish I had asked more because if I did, I wouldn't have risked my children's life or my own. 

            The first few days, everything went so smoothly. Beth and Derek started their new school and immediately made friends and were happy with their teachers. I started to work at my new job as a college advisor for high school students. The students and coworkers were very nice and friendly. Because everyone was so nice in school and work, it seemed like everyone in town was nice, except the neighbors.  I tried introducing my children and myself but they would rudely shut the door. Sometimes I would see them looking at our house when they passed by and they looked frightened, like something had happened or that they knew something that we didn’t about our property.

            After the course of a few weeks, I began to come across peculiar things missing in the house as well as things being moved. Like chairs would be on top of tables, my sheets were found on the floor when no one was home and it seemed like all of the silverware in the kitchen began to disappear. More weeks go by and my children and I started to hear things like voices. Not just any voices either, they were distorted and sometimes it sounded like someone was yelling. Both Beth and Derek said they would randomly see someone wearing a black hooded cloak standing at the end of the hallway staring at them with dark black eyes but when they blinked it would disappear. All of those occurrences were bearable until one day something so terrifying happened that I took my children and ran.

Once I put the kids to bed and picked up around the house, I finally lay down for bed before midnight. I slept easy until a disturbance woke me up around 3:30 in the morning. What woke me up were my sheets slowly tugging at the foot of my bed. I called out for my children, thinking one of them was pulling the sheets in need for my attention but all I got in a response was a low growl. My heart jumped into my throat, I had no idea who or what was at the end of my bed. As slow as I possibly could to prevent myself from making any noise, I began to crawl to the foot of the bed and looked over the edge and onto the ground. All I saw was darkness until I saw piercing red eyes. The next thing I knew I was forced onto my back with the cloaked woman pinning me down as she screamed in my face. As I struggled to break free, I noticed there was a large horn growing on the side of her head. Frantically, I broke one arm free from the woman and grabbed onto the horn pulling roughly in different directions until I broke it off. Immediately after it broke, the woman screamed and released my other arm, which allowed me to run away and grab my children and get into the car without looking back.

I called the police once I got a safe distance from the house to report the situation and even mentioned that things have been missing in my house. After they searched the house and found no one there but what was weird was when the they told me that for the past few years they have had calls from the same house about things going missing, possible burglary and a woman in a cloak with a horn. That scared me even more.

My children and I moved and we never went back to the house. I moved because I knew it wasn't a burglary. That woman was not human, she was a spirit that haunted the area. 

Haunted House by Shane Gorski (2008).

Author's Note: I used the story called The Horned Woman from the unit Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs (1892). The story was about a woman who lived alone and, one at a time, witches came into her house. 12 witches came into the door and they all had horns but they ranged from the first witch that walked in had one horn and the 12th witch that walked in had 12 horns. The woman let the witches in because she thought someone in the village was calling for them and they just got mixed up with the house. The witches casted a spell on the woman to do their bidding and ordered her to make them cake. The woman went to well to fetch water and the well spirit broke the spell and helped the woman get the witches out of her house and helped keep them out. When I read the story, it made me thing of a home invasion but I wrote it about an invasion of a spirit because witches make me think of supernatural things. I used the idea of the spirit having a horn just to have more relatable to the original story.