Basement Gravestone and Haunted Noises

Witness: Tom Marhefki
Location: Collinsville, Connecticut
Date of Encounter: until 2002

I grew up in a house that was almost 150 years old in a small factory town in Connecticut. My brothers and I used to hear voices in our basement and other sounds that would often scare us. My parents would threaten to punish us by putting us there when we misbehaved which would always keep us in line.

Living in the house we experienced many odd occurrences which had us convinced that we were cursed. The basement always had a strong, foreboding atmosphere which kept our family from going into the basement very often and seldom did any of us venture there alone. The home was a company-built duplex and had dirt floors in the basement.

My dad decided he was going to finish off our basement to try and make some use of the area. As we were moving dirt out of the basement we hit something solid. It turned out to be a grave stone! We stopped digging!

We checked with the town hall but they had no records of anyone dying in the house and we found out that when the home was constructed they did not have the equipment to bury people in the winter so families would bury deceased loved ones in the basements and then move them as the ground thawed.

My brothers would hear voices and banging sounds all over the house but especially in our basement. I personally saw areas of darkness which were pronounced — even at night when the room was dark.

One night in high school I was in my kitchen doing homework. Outside there was a heavy rain and thunderstorm with a great deal of wind. My kitchen though was still, with no wind or air movement at all. I looked at a phone that was hanging from my wall — a phone which had a very long, coiled cord that dangled straight to the floor. The cord shot to the left of the phone as though someone pushed it from the middle of the cord and it swung like a pendulum.

I was such a wreck that I ran out of the house. I had met a Baptist minister three days earlier whose church my brothers had been going to for a few weeks and he left me his number if I ever needed any help.

I called him from a neighbor's house and he came over with another man who was entering seminary school. They witnessed the sounds and odd pressures in the house which caused us all to feel like we were in a box being watched from all sides at the same time. They started praying and reading from the Bible which made the voices and sounds of running up and down the steps in the basement just go crazy.

The sounds stopped about an hour later and I moved out shortly after. However, bad things continued to happen in the house while I lived there.

There were many things that had happened while I lived there growing up which ended, at least for me, when I left. However, the house still has a terrible evil feel to it. You see, I went back to the house over the past two years since my Aunt, who owned the house, passed unexpectedly in the house. Her boyfriend killed himself with a shotgun in the same room about six months ago…

I guarantee I will never go back there, and I still shutter when I have to drive by the property.