Your True Tales
October 2008 - Page 12
Aunt's Haunted House
by Trishie
About eight years ago, I was visiting a friend in Lyon and was invited to attend her cousin's wedding near Narbonne. When we arrived in the small village Lea's cousin lived in, I was told that I would have to spend the night at an old aunt's house with Lea's dad and little brother. She was spending the night camping with her boyfriend, and since I really didn't feel like intruding on the happy couple's romantic sleep out, I grudgingly accepted the room at the aunt's grotty house.
It was an old, typically southern building, with darkened windows and squeaky floor boards, which I didn't mind; I was just slightly miffed to be left on my own with someone else's father and little rapper brother. When I first walked into the living room of this rather odd house, I got creeped out by several photos hanging on the wall showing a weird-looking baby. Its skin was ashen, its eyes were watery and unfocussed. I had to ask who the baby was, but the old lady just shrugged and said that it was her nephew's stillborn daughter. He and his wife had prepped their baby for a very macabre photo shoot right before the burial, and had distributed the photos to all of the family. I couldn't help myself wondering who on earth would want to do that to themselves. I did not really believe in ghosts at that time, so I attributed the creepy feeling that settled within me to the odd baby photos and never having had to deal with such a display of morbidity. Lea's father and brother did not flinch at all. They told me later that they'd been handed a picture, too, but refused to hang it on any walls of their place.
We all decided to go for a few drinks and returned back to the house after 11.30 p.m. I was sober, but still felt weird when Flo and I opened the door to the house. I asked him where the toilet and my room was. Flo looked at me quite angrily, asking me why on earth I had not used the loo at the bar we'd just left an hour ago. Noticing that I was not amused, he then showed me the stairway to the second floor. I walked up, Flo following me closely, when suddenly the door in front of me was pulled wide open. I assumed it was the aunt coming out of her bedroom, but when I turned round to Flo and saw the look on his face, I suddenly felt very very afraid. He was terrorized. A 17-year-old wanna-be rapper, tall and strong.
Flo whispered, "This door was locked for years. The key was lost and no one ever dared breaking the lock." It was leading to the attic, according to him, and for some reason, the mere thought of what could be beyond the dark doorstep paralyzed both Flo and myself. Since my bladder was about to burst and I did need the toilet urgently, I managed to brush off my fears, thinking it was a draft or that Flo was playing a bad joke on me.
I was looking around to find the bathroom door when the old standing clock in the far right corner of the hallway started to strike midnight. Startled, I turned around, looking for Flo, but all I could see was him running downstairs into the room he shared with his father, leaving me all on my own. I inspected the old clock because it looked rather intriguing, but realized I shouldn't have: the mechanism had been removed decades ago. And there was no draft, nothing at all that could have produced the sound.
I gulped hard, found the toilet, finished my business, and ran to my room on the ground floor. I was spooked. Really spooked. So I called the two dogs and three cats of the house into my room, locked the door, got undressed in my usual messy way (such as letting the clothes lie wherever they happened to fall) and settled into bed. The animals went back to sleep, I finally dozed off too, feeling safe because of their presence.
When I woke up in the morning from a dreamless sleep, I saw that the chair, which had been at the other end of the room, had somehow been moved next to the bed, with an impression on the seat that looked just like someone had been sitting there, watching me sleep. I freaked out, ran around the room and checked the door, which was still locked, there was no way it could have been opened from outside. The animals acted as if nothing had happened. The thing that made me scream in the end was when I saw that all my clothes had been neatly folded and set out on a buffet next to the window.
I ran out of the room, looking for some human comfort, and bumped into the aunt in the kitchen. I asked whether her place was haunted or if something similar had happened to her or the family. She shrugged again, saying that she'd been sharing the house with ghosts since she'd been living in it, that they were never harming her and that the animals apparently registered a presence, but never felt alarmed. I'm a light sleeper, a skeptic in many ways, and did not ever think anything like this could happen to me. I still can't say that I'm a believer now, but I will never again sleep in that house. Never. It may have been a good intentioned ghost, or the trapped soul of the baby, but if I feel the creepiness I felt on that day, there is nothing in the world that will convince me that everything is alright. There is something out there, that we can't comprehend, and I'd just as much stay away from it.
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