The House in the Field

I moved to West Virginia for a second year at being a climbing guide. I loved the work and the area and couldn’t be kept away. Instead of living in a campground my friend Aaron and I decided to rent a house a few miles away from work. This would allow us to stay later into the fall season. Our house was newer compared to the 1800s farm houses found in the town. It was probably built in the 1950s. It was a solid brick house the set in a 1 acre indent in a farmer’s field. The house was surrounded on three sides by pastures and a beautiful mountain towered over the backyard. It seemed like a cozy house.

About a week into living there I was standing in the kitchen making lunch when the knife I was using spun around and then flew of the counter around the room. I laughed it off and went on with the rest of my day. Shortly after that my eyes kept getting drawn to the doorway between my kitchen and living room. There was always a sense that someone was just standing in the doorway. Next to that doorway were my basement steps and I could always here a creaking on them as if someone was just hiding there. Sometimes it would sound like someone walking up and down the steps. It was unsettling so I would normally keep the basement door shut and locked.

Just like most houses on farms, there was a problem with mice. They would sometimes just run through the room you were sitting in and they could also be heard crawling through the walls. The noises they made became normally and we seemed to just ignore any small bumps or scratches we hear. One night however there were different noises coming from the attic which sounded like footsteps.  These were human footsteps and not the bitter patter of little mouse feet. I woke Aaron who heard the noises as well. We decided to take the shotgun and see who was up in our attic. Carefully we opened the drop down ladder and crawled up. There wasn’t anyone there. The floor was dusty and we left footprints in the dust as we walked. There was also no way to get in the attic from outside.

From that point on the activity in the house picked up. Laying in bed at night I would hear conversations going on through my wall. It sounded like a man and a women talking. One morning I walked into my kitchen and noticed Aaron asleep on the couch with his gun laying across his chest. He awoke and told me that there was something crawling around on the floor all night. It was small like a child and was just running around the living room.

The house seemed to have a few ghosts, there was a playful child, and elderly couple and a man. The child’s spirit was playful and more like a prankster, the elderly couple seemed as if they were watching on us, but the man just seemed to be bad.

I told my friend what had been happening in the house since she had lived there before us. She asked if I had seen the pictures in the basement. She didn’t say much else about it. I had not and decided to go looking for them. In my basement there was one side full of the landlords thing and stacks of antiques. Digging through them I found a stack of old pictures. There were pictures of an elderly couple, as well as a man that just unpleasant. I couldn’t help but think that these were the spirits in the house. Amongst the antiques were ledger books with locals names in them. The book were from years before showing the neighbors paying thousand of dollars to someone. Moonshine if very popular in this area and the house was full of cupboards with shelves just big enough to hold mason jars and some were still full of jars. The house also had a security system, which is odd for an area with such low crime.

Aaron would leave me there alone a lot to go work in the next over. The nights I was there alone I was sure to sleep with a gun next to me, just in case. Laying in bed at night I would hear the front door open and close. It couldn’t because I had locked it. The sound just became something I ignored. There was a night I was tired and didn’t get the gun out of his room to leave next to my bed. That night I woke up to hearing my kitchen chair sliding across the kitchen and slamming into the cupboards. Following that I heard footsteps into my living room. I flipped on the lights, ran down the hall into Aaron’s room and loaded the gun. I slowly opened the door and hear the floor creaking in the living room. As I walked through the house I flipped on the lights in each room and check them out. There wasn’t anyone there. All the doors and window were shut and locked.

One of the best feelings in the world was when I moved out of that house. It was if something had been lifted off of me. Going off of the feelings and occurrences in the house I wonder if there was another house on the property before and the spirits are connected to the land. There is also part of me that thinks something happened there while someone was storing moonshine. The following year some friends of mine moved into the house. They claimed to have had many of the same experiences. Most of the experiences targeted the one girl living there. One thing is for sure, I have no intentions of ever going back in that house.