Renovations

The sound started at went into the couch and worked down in the couch and you know if you're dragging your hand down the top of the couch, and stopped right behind her, and then she said she heard the sound of two little children giggling. It was supposed to be a quiet renovation project, but then it turned into an experience where mirrors defied gravity and visitors from the past still make themselves known. My name is Edwin and here is Eric's true scary story. Back in the early nineties, I had just gotten out of college. My girlfriend at the time of my life now, we're from the same little town in Illinois. Her dad, my future father in law. Well, I was kind of his handy man. He used to hire me to do various work for him. I put a fence in this house or rooped his house one time. This particular time, he had hired me to go down and do some work in a house that he was taken care of. There was a lady in town, missus Jones. He had taken care of her for years. She was a widow who lived just down the street from him. I think she had fallen at the time and had gone into a nursing home in town, and the house was empty when she went into the nursing home. He knew she probably wasn't going to come back out and needed to take care of the house. He didn't want it sitting empty. My wife had a childhood friend I had lived next door to her. She and her husband had just been married and were moving back to town, so my father in law was going to rent this house to them needed some work done in it. I'd been in this place a couple times before, actually visiting the lady that lived there, back when she was still in the house with my future in law. I had gone over that day. I think I was patching some drywall in the bathroom. And it was a really small house a front of a living room and then a really short haul away with a bedroom money side and a bathroom in the middle. I went in this house by myself, took my ladder, my tools, you know, went in through the garage and started working in the bathroom. So I had a ladder set up in the bathtub so I could reach the ceiling. And it wasn't a big deal. It was a relatively small job. I'm working away and I hadn't been there ten minutes or so, I got this really strong sensation that somebody was there. I thought maybe somebody had come in through the garage or something while I was working, or maybe my father in law was there checking on things. Got down off the ladder and went back out and walked around the house. Nobody was there, you know, went out to check in the garage. Nobody was there, no vehicles outside. So I went back to work, got back on my ladder and working on the ceiling. Within like two or three minutes, I had that same really strong sensation that somebody was there watching me. This time, it felt like somebody was right there. The way that that bathroom in the tub was set up, you would walk in the door, the houb was kind of around the corner, so where I was standing on that ladder, I couldn't see out the door. You know. Again, I got down, kind of poked my head around the door, looked around, didn't see anybody, didn't hear anybody. And this time I didn't walk all through the house, got back up on the ladder and went to work. This happened one more time, and every time that sensation got stronger and stronger that I was being watched. So after that last time, I was creeping me out a little bit, and I got back up on that ladder and I'm working away. All of a sudden, from right outside the bathroom door, I hear this really loud crash. Startled me to the planet, almost saw off my ladder. I got down. I couldn't figure out what could possibly have happened. I walked outside the bathroom door. Right outside that door, on the wall, there had been hanging this really worn heavy mirror. I think probably weighed ten or fifteen pounds. It was laying on the ground, leaning up against the wall and not broke, all of which was really on. I'm almost impossible physically to have happened, as heavy as that mirror was, for it to fall like that and not break, I don't know how to possibly have happened. And then the fact that the fellon was leaning against the wall, I thought it was really weird. But I thought, all right, maybe the hook pull out of the wall or something like that. So I bent down to pick this mirror up to make sure it wasn't broken, flipped it around to the back, thinking maybe the wire broke. It was one of those like a painting you know the wire on the back, and the wire was fully intact on both sides. It wasn't broken, there was nothing wrong with it. In fact, I was holding it by the wire, you know, the full weight of this mirror by the wire, just to test it, and it was fine. Then I thought, okay, so the hook must pull out of the wall. So I looked up on the wall and the hook was still in the wall. I wiggled it, tested it. It was solid. It didn't move at all. So then I was really creeped out because there's no way physically that mirror jumped up off of that hook, fell to the floor, didn't break, and wound up leaning against that wall. I at that point put the mirror back on the wall, went back in very quickly, finished what I was doing, and got out of that house. I never said anything to my father in law, In fact, I never said anything to anybody. I didn't want him to think his future son in law was losing it, you know, just went on about my day and didn't think too much more about it. After that, our friends moved in, lived there for a couple of years, and eventually bought a house on the same talent. Just across town was this kind of like a late eighteen hundreds, turning the century kind of house, just really beautiful old house. They were going to renovate it, you know, kind of take it back to that period when it had been built. My wife and I were married at this point, lived just on the other side of town and our friends. When I found out they were doing that work, I liked doing that kind of stuff, so I offered to help them and would go over on weekends. You know, this happened for several weeks in Ao like go over. We've worked together, the husband and I. We were doing things like, you know, stripping wallpaper off the wall. You know, there were several layers of a little wallpaper, you know, doing that in all the rooms, patching the plaster, stripping woodwork, and anything that needed to be done to renovate this house from top to bottom. Florida ceiling. So I remember we worked on the stairwell in the hallway one day stripping wallpaper, and you know, we got to the base layer of the plaster and you know, saw some writing on the wall from presumably back when the house was built. And I'm just finding really cool stuff that point had never really noticed anything, never had any really weird feelings. But I was usually there with other people. We were all there working together and talking, and you know, it was no big deal. So one weekend I went over to help work and I got there and my friend said, hey, we had to go over to this other town and pick up this tough There was a big cloth with tub they had had refinished, and he said, do you do you want to go with us or do you want to just stay here? And I said, no, I'll just stay here and keep working. They took off and I was the only one in the house at that point. I was up at the top of the stair well the second floor, in the bedroom. At the top of the stairs. I think I was working in a closet. Actually I don't know if I was what I was doing, stripping wallpaper. Maybe there was in this closet going about my business. And for probably the second time in my life, I got that same really cleepy dealing like somebody was there, somebody was in the house, kind of like in a repeat from what had happened at the other house. I you know, stopped pro I was doing, came out of this big closet into the bedroom, looked around, didn't see anybody, so I thought, Okay, it's just my imagination. Go back in this closet and go back to work once again. I'm not in there for you know, two or three minutes, and I get that really same strong sensation that somebody is there watching it. Again. I leave this closet. This time, I kind of walk all through the upstairs. I go downstairs. I look around, thinking somebody came in, you know, through the lock door while I was working. Nobody's there. Now I'm kind of starting in the back of my mind to remember this other incident. I go back upstairs once again, go back in this closet, and start working. I have that same feeling this time. I come out in the room. My eyes are kind of immediately drawing to one particular corner of the room. I don't know why. I don't know anything about the history of this house. I just get kind of drawn to that spot, and I couldn't shake the feeling like somebody was there. My friends were probably gone at least two or three hours, so I'm just there working by myself all this time, with this feeling of the sensation. It never left that and the feeling never never left the whole time. I was there working that day by myself. So they finally came back and you know, brought the top in. I said to him right away, I said, don't ever leave me here by myself in this house again. And my friend kind of laughed. He said why. So I told him and he said, oh, that's missus so and So I said, what do you mean. He said, well, the house had belonged to I think was a grandmother of another guy in town that we knew, a man in town, and my friend had apparently done some research in the house and found out that this was this guy's grandmother's home, you know, back at that time, probably her childhood home. He said, yeah, I researched this was their house. He'd even talk to this man and you know, kind of got his memories of living there or going there rather as a child. And he said, I believe that you know this so and so, this lady who had apparently lived in this house her entire life. He says, yeah, we've had that same sensation, you know, We've had things happen in this house too. He even told me at one point that he had talked to the man whose whose grandmother lived there, and then that at one point was her room, and she used to sit in her rocky chair in this room, and it was in that particular corner that I had been looking at that I had kind of been drawn to. He kind of laughed, and I never did work there by myself again, although I continue to work there a lot with them. They renovated that house over a period of years. I'd go over there, even after the house was finished. I'd go over there, you know, for we'd hang out with them or whatever, and we bring it up. I talked to them about it, you know, some of the stuff that we'd seen when we were working on the house, and him and his wife said to me, has definitely hasn't stopped it. You know, stuff has continued since then. His wife told me anything. She and I had never really talked about this, but she said, oh yeah. Not long after we finished the house, we were asleeping in bed one night. It was a bedroom right across the hallway from that room I'd been working in all those years ago. She said, I was sleeping and kind of had my butt sticking out the side of the bed uncovered, and she said, in the middle of the night, she felt a slap on her butt hard startled her obviously, startled her awake, and she immediately rolled over and looked around, and nobody was there. Her husband was fast asleep beside her, and they didn't even have kids yet at that point in time. Freaked out a little bit, obviously, she said. Another time, she had been in the downstairs in this house, sleeping on the college late at night. I think her husband was gone. She was home by herself, so just I had been watching TV, fell asleep on the couch, and she woke up to a noise, and she said, as she was laying there, she heard what sounded like somebody running their hand across the top of the couch. You know, this was right behind her head. Basically, the sound started went into the couch and worked down on the couch, you know if you were dragging your hand down on the top of the couch, and stopped right behind her. And then she said she heard the sound of two little children giggling. She finally kind of worked up the nerve to sit up and look around, and of course there was nobody there, nobody behind her. The house was empty. She was all by herself. They had various experiences like that in the house over the years, and I, you know, I was coming to hear about a lot of these, you know, years later after the fact. They had a son and two daughters, and they kind of learned over time, this lady that they believed was haunting this house didn't like guys, because when the sun was in that room, or when when my friend was in that room, you know, things would happen. If it was just the wife of the daughters, things didn't tend to happen so much. So that ended up being the daughter's room, and things, you know, kind of calmed down over time. They're no longer together, but the life and the children still live in that house. I'd been there periodically over the years. I haven't asked her recently if anything new has happened, but I think it just got to be so commonplace for them. It was just part of living there that they got used to it. To fast forward and kind of tied back into the story about the original house, the one that started all this story. Years later, and we're talking, you know, probably twenty years later or more, we were having a party at my house, So I think it was a graduation party for one of my kids. Our friends came up to it. We were sitting outside. It was late at night, there was just a few people left to the party, and somehow we got on this topic and we're talking about, you know, these sort of experiences I had never all that time, even after what happened at the new house my friends were renovating, you know, my experience there. I had never said anything to them about what had happened in that first house that they had rented right after they married. We were sitting there talking and got on the top because some of the stuff that had happened in their house, and we were talking with all our friends about that, and I said, hey, you know, you guys remember when you lived in Missus Jones's house And he said yeah, And I said, you know, I had something happened there. I don't know if you guys ever had anything happen, but I had this situation happen there. So I told him all about it, and he was just kind of smiling the whole time and wasn't saying anything. So I got done telling him that story and he said, you know, he said, that's really funny that he told me that Not long after I had been working there in the house, he and his wife had moved in and had taken up residence in one of the two bedrooms on either side of the bathroom. So they had pretty much the run of the house and they had that one bedroom, but the second bedroom. At this point, the lady was old life. She was still in the nursing home, so some of her stuff was still stored in there. There's all kinds of things of hers. So they just didn't use it, but it was it was not locked. The room was open. It was accessible for anybody that wanted to go in it. My friend said, yeah, not long after we moved into that house, I woke up the middle of the night one night I had to go to the bathroom. So he said, you got up and came to the door of the room, and when you would walk to the door of that room, you would be looking straight down the hallway into the other bedroom with the bathroom just right outside the door on the right. He said, as he got up and walked to the door, you can't help but look straight into the room ahead of you. He said. In that room, straight inside the door, there was a chair against the wall. There was a little old man and bib overall sitting in the chair just looking at him, and he kind of shook his head and thought he was dreaming or imagining or something. So he just went on into the bathroom, you know, did his business, and came out and nobody was there. Whatever it was was gone. He kind of brushed it aside for the moment and went back to bed. The next day, he was thinking about it and went into that room and was kind of looking around in the closet or maybe on a night stand or something. He said there were some old photos, so he picked him up and was kind of looking through them, and he came across one that was a picture of the lady whose house it was, and a man he presumed it was her husband. It was the same exact band he had seen sitting in the chair the night before, dressed the same everything, and this lady's husband had been a farmer for years and he had died many years before. But you know, that kind of explains the outfit. And his friend had no knowledge to these people. He didn't know that, he didn't know anything about them at all. He wasn't from the area. He had married his wife who was from the town. He saw the picture of this man and realized that was the man he had seen the night before, and that he wasn't just imagining things. You know. That was the first time I heard that story from him ever, the first time we'd exchanged stories about that house. So what we kind of like to think is that this lady's husband was kind of there watching out for her, protecting her, you know, during her lifetime, and you know, and she was no longer in the house, and maybe that stirred things up, and that's why he saw that. And I you know, to this day, I know the house is so occupied. I see it all the time. I don't know who lives there. I've never you know, found out, never stopped to ask. I'm always curious whether they'd had any experiences, you know, since she has long since passed away, if he went on and that all things like that stopped or what happened. But it was just I thought kind of a really cool end that story and kind of wraps back around to that scenario. I think it's naive to think that there's not something else out there that you know, maybe it's not visible to us, you know, whether that's a different plane or dimension or you know, whether that's a spirit world or whatever. I think it's just really naive to not believe that there's something else out there, you know, just because we can't necessarily see it or directly experience that. There are just too many things that have happened to too many people. And you know when I listen to podcasts like this or I read about this kind of stuff, and there's just too many things that can't be explained away by science and by any other methods. So yeah, I think I have a healthy belief in supernatural. I suppose with the other hose us the house they've renovated to move into. You read about the stuff, you hear about it on on go shows on TV and stuff that we kind of think that renovating that house is maybe, you know, kind of what stirred things up, because when we first started working on it, nothing had really been happening. It was only after we've been working on it for a while and it really got into some heavy dater renovations that things like that had started to happen. In hindsight, and having talked to him and kind of put that together, so we think that's maybe what happened, but you know the happy ending. I guess there's the sill live in the house with the kids and they come to live with the other occupants. I guess you could say. Thank you, Eric for sharing your story with our community, and you can tell me about your story over on True scarystory dot com for the rest of us to hear right here on the podcast. To support our show and the rest of the shows here on scary Fm, try out Scary Plus. You'll get to listen at free right here. You'll find out more over on scaryplus dot com. This episode of True Scary Story was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel, the VW sound scheduling by Bianca Chavis, an additional production by me Edwin Kobarrubias and the Scary FM team. I'll be back next week with another story, so be sure to tap the follow button. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.