House In Eleanor

I can’t remember the year, but my daughter was 15 and she’s 26 now (so you do the math), but it was not a good year for us here in Yuma (Arizona). My daughter was just getting over a serious illness and I was out of work. We had taken a vacation the year before to visit with my cousins in West Virginia. It was a great time! And they really wanted us to visit again. So we packed up. We had a great time and everyone was so wonderful that we decided to move from Arizona to West Virginia and kind of begin again.

We began looking at houses before coming home to sell our house and pack. After much much searching we found a two-story home in a little town named Eleanor. It sat on about an acre with huge elm trees and a big area for a garden and the roses! The house was white with dark green trim. Two stories with four bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom. A stairwell with a skylight and wonderful banisters. Downstairs was a huge kitchen (19×15), a bathroom, dining room, living room and another bedroom–with wood floors and beams. All for $30,000! No kidding! And besides, we all talked about how lonesome the house seemed and wanted us to move in and fix it up. So we went home and packed all the dogs and cats and books and beds and moved 2300 miles.

We moved into the house in August. It is really sticky in West Virginia in August and we didn’t have AC, but as we started setting up housekeeping we were sleeping in the downstairs bedroom because it was always “cooler” in there even in the hot part of the day. We thought it was because it was over the cellar (walk under) of the house that had been dug out so you could get to the plumbing!

We painted and carpeted and everything was going fine. It was a mess to clean up though, the house had been vacated for about three years and before that, an invalid had lived in the house. We had to rip out all of the carpeting from the upstairs before anything because someone used some of it as a bathroom at one time, and it was really gross (the stains) especially in the small front room over the downstairs cool room that Nanny had picked for her bedroom.

We cleaned up and sparkling the house seemed to welcome us. But then some different frights, sounds, and smells begin to come into our lives.

First let me tell you that all three of us are sensitive to some sights, sounds and smells to a certain degree. Always have been and have seemingly made some adjustments. That is why I don’t know why none of us really knew what was going on.

It started with Nanny hearing a rocking chair in the living room at night, we didn’t have one. Then Ginifer and I kept seeing shadows coming down the stairs as we sat in the living room. The bedroom stayed cold and we had to put heavy curtains on the windows hoping to keep out the drafts. We finally just used this room as storage.

Where my bedroom was, I could see across the upstairs landing to the door of Ginifer’s room. I began seeing a shadow almost every night pause outside and door and look in as though it were a parent that had come to check on a child at night. There was a nice soft and friendly feeling with her. Ginifer was also aware of the shadow.

Then we began experiencing a SMELL from the downstairs bathroom. It smelled like a dead animal left out in the Arizona sun too long). We had some men come in and check the cellar crawl space for a toilet leak or maybe a dead skunk or cat. It was clean and dry. The smell only happened so often and seemed to last only 5 to 15 minutes. But we all smelled it and so did others.

We also experienced bright orbs and flits of lights in and over the garden at night. No, they were not fireflies.

And we started having what we thought were health problems. Even though Ginifer was well when we moved she seemed to relapse into a fugue state. Not wanting to get out of bed. Even Nanny and I started having a lot of colds and the flu, where you just couldn’t seem to get out of bed.

We all love to travel and visit, but all we did was stay in the house! Our animals even seemed to be in a slump (but how can you tell with cats that sleep 16 hours a day anyway).

I was especially worried about my mom because she is a true “A” type of personality, work! work! work! and now all she did was sleep or sit on the porch. We didn’t even look for jobs and we didn’t have much money left.

It was so unlike us! Then one night Mom and I were in the living room and Gin was upstairs in her room reading in bed. We heard Gin scream and we ran up the stairs. She met us in the hall. She said something was trying to form in her room.

She was reading and happened to look up into the corner. At first, she thought it was a fire. A black cloud was forming in the corner. As she watched almost in a daze to seemed to be forming a body shape. When the head began to appear she screamed and ran. She would not go back into the room even to get her clothes! She moved in with me and Nanny (brave soul) that she brought out the clothes!

Because we were running out of money and Ginifer’s health was in another decline we decided to come home to Arizona. We sold, gave away all of our stuff and with just as much personal items that we could get into a small U-Haul plus the four cats and a dog.

Later we began to put all of the feelings and things together and the list grew and grew. Much more than what I’ve given you here.

We finally after four years were able to sell the house and now its a type of office complex. I don’t know if they have any problems or not.