A Crowded House



A little background; I was raised in my grandfather’s house in Huntington, NY. In that house lived my Uncle, my mother who was about 20 at the time, and their four younger sisters ranging in age from 11-18. The events in the house started around the time I was born, and took place between 1987-1995. As I came to find out many years later, when my grandfather bought the house, there was an old man living on a cot in the basement near the boiler. Most of the basement was unfinished, and he thought it was odd this man was down there when there was 2 bedrooms in the basement and 4 upstairs in the rest of the house. that man had died in the basement before my grandfather could purchase the house, and a woman had died in the upstairs on the second floor.

As an infant; As I’m told, a few weeks after being brought home from the hospital, I started getting attention from “the house”. My mom placed my crib in the living room which was adjacent to her bedroom so she could hear me at night. One night she had heard a sounds coming from the living room and came out to find my 3-men-in-a-tub crib ornament swinging back and forth. As she watched, it started swinging faster and faster until eventually she screamed “STOP!” and it came to a halt mid swing.

Another time she came out to feed me at night, and when she walked into the living room saw what she thought was one of her sisters run and dive behind the couch. When she went to look, nobody was there.

On a separate occasion, within a few weeks/months of the first two, my mother once again exited the room to come check on me at night and saw an old man standing above my crib. Who looked up, smiled at my mother, then promptly disappeared.

I was also told that randomly, myself and the family dog, who was deaf and nearly blind, would both be doing our own thing and at the exact same time, stop dead in our tracks and stare up into the corner of the wall where the two walls met the ceiling near the front door. We would stand there and stare for about a minute, then both go on with what we were doing. Staring at something that wasn’t there.

My childhood; As I got a little older, I remember more events as clear as day. Most people can’t remember things from being as young as 3-4 years old. But even at 30 years old, these memories are all I have from that age.

Odd memories– I have a clear memory of myself wearing a blue zip up onesie at a young age, however the memory isn’t from my own point of view. Its oddly enough from the angle of where the wall meets the ceiling that I mentioned earlier. I also have a very vivid and clear memory of standing in the driveway, watching a fire burn in the window over the garage, and watching it for a long time. I came to find out years later that there actually was a fire above the garage, however it happened 5 years before I was born.

The closet -I was 4 years old at the time, and sharing a room with my mother. I remember sitting on her bed and playing, while she was on the phone with her friend lorraine. We had a closet in the room with two sliding doors, one of which had been broken and hanging off the track for some time. Out of nowhere, the door begins to shake, and starts sliding left and right and shaking violently, for a good 30 seconds to a minute. So long that we were able to look at the closet, look at each other, and look back at the closet as this was going on. Her friend on the phone even heard the banging it on her end. All said and done, it actually fixed the closet and ended up on the track, ha.

My room – eventually around 5-6 years old, I got my own room. My first bedroom was at the bottom of the stairs in the basement. It was one of two furnished rooms in an otherwise dark and concrete basement. After moving into my room, I began to feel very uneasy. I developed a fear of the dark, would wake up with intense fear for no reason and scream like I was being murdered, I started to sleep walk and roam around the house, knock on my moms door and then go back down to my room, etc. I don’t know if there was an outside influence, but I never felt quite right down there.

One day my closet, another sliding door, closed on its own while I was laying in bed.

I had a small diorama i made for a community art project which was Icobad Crane racing across a bridge from the headless horseman. As part of the diorama, there were two clay trees on either side of the bridge I made. I had this sitting on a shelf about 5 ft off the ground on one side of my room. One night I was awoken by a loud crash sound. I found one of the trees, smashed to pieces on the floor against the wall on the opposite side of the room, a good 12 foot distance away.

Outside my room was the stairs and the rest of the basement. I was about 6 years old, walked out of my room past the stairs, and on the far end of the basement was the boiler. I saw an old man in a grey trench coat and old dick tracy style hat,standing against the wall facing my direction, but I couldn’t really see his face as it was covered by a shadow. The man stared (as i would say because his face was dark) at me for several moments, then he turned, and walked behind the boiler and disappeared.

Several years later I drew what I had seen and my mom and her siblings said they saw the same thing.

The man in the trench coat;

This was the most prominent sighting in the house. My uncle used to have my bedroom in the basement before me, and he saw him over a series of evenings not realizing what was going on. He first saw a man in a trench coat standing on the side of the road several blocks away from the house one night on his way home. For several days he saw him and each day he was closer to the house. One day he wasn’t to be found and my uncle thought nothing of it. He went to sleep that night. He awoke in the middle of the night to the sight of the old man in his bedroom hovering above him.

Each one of my aunts has a story about hearing footsteps in their bedroom, then seeing a man in a trench coat with a shadow covering his face, standing at the foot of the bed. When they close their eyes and open them again, he is standing next to the head of their bed and places his hand over there mouth. This happened to most of my aunts and my mother, in different bed rooms.

The pink woman:

At one point, we had a family friend named Bruce living with us in our house renting out a room in the basement. I forget the reason, but he was keeping an eye on me for a couple hours one night when everyone else was out. We were sitting in the living room, and a pink silhouette of a woman appears near the front door where the upstairs staircase was, travels around the entire living room along the wall, then moves to the hallway and descends into the basement. Bruce grabs a hammer, and my 7 year old self a butterfly net (whatever either of those would do?), and we walked down into the basement to look for it and never saw anything again.

The stairs:
My aunt Jill who was the youngest of the siblings, was sitting in the living room watching TV. The only other person who was home was her sister Susie, who was down in her bedroom (the other furnished room in the basement).

As Jill is watching the tv, someone quickly stomps down the stairs from the second floor and starts banging loudly on the door at the bottom of the stairs. Jill jumps up, opens the door to the stairs, there’s nobody there and she slams the door shut and leaves the house and runs to her friends down the street.

Soon after, Susie, who is none the wiser, comes upstairs into the living room. Home alone, she sits and the same thing happens, violent banging on the door and running up and down the stairs repeatedly. She sprints and runs out of the house and drives to my grandmothers and is so scared she leaves her shoes and drives away barefoot.

After the house:

There were other strange things that happened over the years, but it all eventually stopped one day. My grandfather got remarried, and his new wife threw out all the old 70s-80s furniture and re-did the place and remodeled everything and after she was done, nothing ever happened again in that house.

My family has had some other experiences throughout the years however. My mom and my aunts have heard knocking on their bedroom walls in different houses, usually knocks coming in 3s. My mom’s boyfriend saw my grandmother after her passing in the basement of her house.

I had a few more experiences myself after moving out of the house. My mom and I lived in a basement apartment several years later. My TV would turn on randomly when I did my homework. I also was laying in bed and there was a plastic bag at the foot of my bed filled with my old stuffed animals. I heard what sounded like something heavy press into the bag, got up and looked and there was a massive foot sized indentation in the middle of the bag.

The last thing that happened to me was at age 13 in Vermont on a ski trip with my aunt and her husband. We were staying at one of their friends apartments, and I had the living room to myself. I was laying on the air-mattress trying to fall asleep, wearing a snow hat slightly over my eyes. The air mattress was pressed up against the coffee table on the left side. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark black mass zoom quickly passed the bed where the table was. Seconds later I felt hands on my chest and I was being pushed down into my mattress. So much so that my back had touched the floor, and the sides of the airbed clam-shelled up and closed up on either side of me. It released and and the mattress fell back to normal shaped and popped me up off of it. I spent the rest of the night under the covers too scared to move.

So those are my stories. I stand by everything that happened to me. Been watching the Weird Darkness show and many others like it for validation for years and felt its finally time I shared mine. People tell me they don’t believe in ghosts and I don’t care. I know they are real, and I’m sticking to my guns.

Submitted by Erik Sassone


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