April 12, 2006

The Haunted Mansion

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Marisa, Reading, Pennsylvania, 1996

As soon as my mother saw the house, she fell in love with it. It was built in the early 1900s and was huge. She begged her boyfriend at the time to buy the house, and he did. The house was really nice but creepy at the same time. It had butler calls and a second kitchen in the basement. From the time I moved in, I knew there was something weird about the house.

I had my own "wing" of the house -- basically I was all the way on the other side from where my mom's room was. You would have to walk through a cedar den and up some steps to be in my entry way. All the time I would hear someone walking up the steps -- I thought it was someone coming to my room, but no one ever came to the door. On other occasions my bedroom door would open by itself. Now keep in mind I had to hit it with my hip or kick it to open (it would stick that bad), but all the time the door would open by itself. Even my balcony door would open by itself. Whenever I took a shower I would feel like someone was watching me and sometimes would hear my name whispered. The first thing that really scared me was about a week after I moved in, me and my friend were sitting on my bed. I had those bars underneath the bed to hold the mattress/boxspring up when out of no where the boards fell into a perfect cross under my bed. Neither me or my friend were heavy and there is no way they can go from being straight across to a cross. During the day the chandelier would swing back and forth for no reason. If I brought friends to the house when I would go to turn on the lights they would blink on and off and not turn off when I pressed the button in (we had dimmer lights). My friends were so freaked out that they wouldn't sleep over my house anymore.

My scariest occurrence in the house was when I was about to go in the basement for something. I was about to take a step when something pushed me down the steps. It was a lot of steps and I slammed into the wall at the bottom. I had a huge bruise on my leg from it. There was no one behind me because no one was home at the time. After that, I was terrified. I tried to tell my mom but she said that it was my imagination. I think we only lived there a little over a year and my mom and her boyfriend split up. We then moved out. Recently my mom rented an apartment from the realtor that sold us the house and my mom was asking him about the house when he told her that it was haunted. The realtor said one day he had just got done showing the house and he started closing it up when he heard a noise from the master bedroom closet. The closets were the kind that fold and look like window shutters. He went in the closet to look around and the doors closed behind him. He tried to get them open but it felt like they were locked or someone was holding them closed. He called his wife and said, "You need to come here and let me out." Just as he hung up his cell phone, the doors flung open and there was no one standing there. I now know it was not my imagination and that the spirits in that house didn't want people there -- they felt threatened. I never looked up the history of the house but I heard that around the time it was built they had maids and butlers, so I figured maybe it was a past servant trying to get revenge. There was also a coldroom in the basement that I would never go in because I got a bad feeling from it. The house is up the hill from the "famous viaduct bridge" that everyone commits suicide off of when their man leaves them. This bridge is also said to be haunted.