Spooktober Part 3: Rose
As a fun way to get everyone into the Halloween spirit, and in a nod to comedian Dan Cummins and his wife Lynze, hosts of my new favorite podcast, Scared to Death, I thought I would present a special multi-part blog series to share some of my own “personal tales of terror.”
The following collection of spooky stories are based on actual events that happened to me, my friends and family at different points over an approximately thirty-year period. I will try my best not to embellish details, and stick to the facts as I remember them, which shouldn’t be a problem, since like most scary stories, I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the chilling circumstances surrounding these events, no matter how hard I try.
For more spooky stories, check out the Scared to Death podcast on Pandora, YouTube, or at scaredtodeathpodcast.com. And, if you like what you hear, be sure to give them a positive rating or review.
An image of of a Rose Bush – it’s symbolic. You’ll get it later. Trust me.
Rose
When it comes to the question of whether I believe in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, I guess the short answer is, sure. Because why not? For me, it’s less about needing demonstrable proof or black-and-white evidence that these things either exist or they don’t. Instead, it’s about keeping my mind open to the possibility of there being these forces out there that we just can’t explain and may never understand.
Now you’ll never find me participating in a séance or using a Ouija board to try and communicate with the spirit world, I’m not that guy, there’s enough shit in the real world that scares me, I don’t need to go looking for more things to keep me up late at night. But at the same time, it’s not like I go around each day living in fear of this stuff. I consider myself a pretty grounded individual, open minded to all possibilities, including the subjects of scares and spooks, but not to the point that I’m neurotic about it, and fear that just by thinking about this stuff, I’m somehow going to invite evil into my life and make me more susceptible to these things.
I enjoy a good spooky story or scary movie, because like most people, I can recognize and appreciate these for what they are, an intense adrenaline rush that comes along with considering some pretty abstract, dare I say scary, alternate realities. But I draw the line there, my default is to still keep one foot squarely planted in the skeptic camp.
Now, real-life paranormal encounters are a whole different story. Once the spooky shit starts jumping off the page or out of the screen and into your living room, I would just as soon remain on the side lines, a very distant, non-participatory and oblivious party to these sorts of events. However, sometimes you have no choice in the matter.
Such was the case with the first house that Teresa and I owned. I am fairly certain that the place was haunted, based on a number of strange occurrences that we witnessed during the approximately eight years that we lived in the house.
Fixer-upper
2001 was a pretty big year for Teresa and I. We had just graduated from Michigan State University, I had started my first real job after college, and we had plans to get married in September of that year. Missing, of course, was the house. So in the spring of 2001, our hunt for our future home together started in earnest.
Teresa worked with this guy Brian who moonlighted as a realtor, and after retaining his services, he started pulling MLS listings and setting up appointments for us to do walk-throughs of various places that he had found in our price range.
We probably looked at a dozen or so places in and around the Lansing area. Most of the houses were either complete dives or had some weird design feature or structural issue that we just couldn’t look past. The few nice places that we were able to find were of course in sketchy neighborhoods or on some busy street with a ton of traffic.
One day, while Teresa and her mom were out driving around, they passed by a house for sale that looked like it had potential. The house was located on Riley Street in Lansing and was listed as a “for sale by owner,” which is why when Teresa had called Brian to ask him about it, it wasn’t even on his radar since it wouldn’t have come up in any of the MLS listings. Teresa gave Brian the information and he quickly sprang into action, reaching out to the owner to arrange a time for us to walk through the house.
The house was owned by this guy who had bought it some ten years earlier, but had moved to a new place in DeWitt and had been renting it out to one tenant after another for the past two or three years. The seller explained that he didn’t like being a landlord and having a rental property, while hinting around at the fact that he could really use the proceeds from the sale of the home to help with his current financial situation, since it sounded like he was paying two mortgages and had a variety of other expenses. It was for the above reasons that he said he had decided to list the house, and why he had priced it like he had, explaining that he was only interested in recouping the money he owed on the property.
The $74,500 listing price was well within our $100,000 price range, which we liked, but we were of course wondering what the catch was, since it appeared that it was being undervalued for that size house in that neighborhood. But then we got a chance to take a closer look, and it became more apparent why he had priced it like he had, since the place obviously needed a lot of work.
At the time we did our walk through, there was a family of renters still living in the house. According to the seller, he had offered to let them buy the house from him prior to putting it on the market, but they hadn’t been able to secure the necessary financing, leaving him no other option than to list the property.
I can still remember the day of the walk through like it was yesterday, standing in the drizzly rain on the front porch waiting for the current tenant to answer the door, and how even before we had stepped inside, our first impressions of the place were already being formed by the gaudy John Deer Tractor mailbox and satellite dish mounted on the rail to our left (can you say curb appeal)? The house was your typical Cape Cod, with the footprint of the main level consisting of a living room/dining area, two small bedrooms, and the home’s one and only bathroom. A modest galley-style kitchen jutted out into the backyard from what would be the northwest corner of the house. At some point, a small patio off the side entrance of the kitchen behind the bathroom and guest bedroom had been turned into a covered porch and later converted into crude living space which the current tenants were now using as a third bedroom for their teenage son. There was a steep, almost ladder like set of stairs between the dining area and kitchen that led up to an unfinished attic which was being used for storage, and there was a Silence of the Lambs worthy basement which had been subdivided into a series of small, creepy rooms that created a bunch of weird sight-lines and shadows that just made you feel uncomfortable being down there. Adding to the basement’s creep factor, was an old coal den in the southwest corner which hadn’t been used in several decades, and was now just chalked full of old storm windows and other junk. And every one of the basement windows had at least one pane of glass that was broken or missing, and there was evidence that they had a current mouse problem.
Despite some of the quirky features, numerous repairs that were needed, and the fact that the roof had to be replaced, the house had good bones, and Teresa and I were able to look past some of these issues to imagine its full potential. After taking a day or two to talk it over, we had Brian submit a full price offer contingent on the seller having the roof replaced. We closed on the house in early July and moved in over the weekend of the fourth, ready to begin this next chapter of our life together in our new home.
Meeting the Neighbors
Shortly after taking possession of the house we got to work on making an assortment of much needed repairs. Teresa’s step-dad Dave helped us install new steel entry doors, while her uncle Rick and cousin Scott helped with scraping and repainting the exterior of all of the windows to prep them for some new white aluminum self-storing storms that we had purchased from Home Depot. We completely gutted the basement, demoing every square inch of the creepy wall system that had been erected (including the house’s original coal den) and installed new plexiglass in all of the basement windows to seal everything up. Teresa threw a new coat of paint on everything and Dave helped us go through and upgrade all of our electrical fixtures, and before long, it started feeling like a completely different place.
Our efforts hadn’t gone unnoticed. As we would be outside working on the house or yard, or running some debris out to the trash, inevitably one of our next-door neighbors would compliment us on how nice the house was looking, and we’d stop for a few minutes to converse with them. Our neighbor to our immediate west was this sweet little old lady named Josephine, who was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s. Josephine’s son John had arranged for 24/7 care givers to stay at the house with his mom, and would routinely stop by to check on things and visit with his ailing mother. John’s parents had built their house back in the 40’s and were some of the original residents of the neighborhood, along with our other neighbor Bill who lived on the other side. It was while John was telling us some of the old stories from growing up in the neighborhood that he had shared with us that our house had been owned at one time by this woman named Rose. John described how she used to split her time between her sewing room down in the basement (one of the small rooms that we had destroyed during our demolition) and her beautiful, lush backyard garden full of ornate trellises and perfectly manicured, you guessed it, rose bushes.
It was also during one of these impromptu confabs out in the shared driveway between our house and his mom’s place that John first told us that Rose had actually died in the house. According to John, Rose had passed away while sitting at her kitchen table. She was advanced in age and had apparently died peacefully of natural causes. Now it’s never a good thing to learn someone has died in the place that you just moved into, but John’s news wasn’t that unusual, old people tend to die and chance’s are that some of them are going to pass away at home. I remember it creeping me out a little, mostly because he couldn’t tell me if she was seated at her table in the small galley-style kitchen, or out in the dining area adjacent to the living room, and somehow not definitively knowing what room she had died in just nagged at me. But life went on, and we didn’t think much more about Rose or of how she had passed away in this house that we now called home.
Happy Anniversary, Knapp Style
As our one-year wedding anniversary was approaching, Teresa and I decided that we would take the week off of work, but not to travel someplace warm to sit on a beach and sip on cocktails, no, we decided that we would use the week to completely remodel our kitchen that was desperately in need of a make-over. That Friday night after work we started the demo, and in a few hours we had removed all of the upper and lower cabinets and had pulled up the last of the old linoleum flooring. We had pulled out the old appliances along the way, trashing the stove, and giving the small, economy size dishwasher to a friend. Teresa’s cousin Scott, who at the time, lived several blocks away on Teal Street, in the neighborhood over on the other side of Cedar Street, said that he would take our old fridge for his basement. And since neither of us had a vehicle big enough to haul a large appliance, him and I loaded the fridge onto a hand truck and wheeled it the approximate mile or so over to their place (we actually have some pictures of Scott and I wheeling the fridge across Cedar Street and stopping on the other side to enjoy a couple of Stroh’s that we had placed into the fridge prior to leaving our house – my only regret is that we didn’t go a half a block down and manhandle the fridge up and over the pedestrian crosswalk, that would’ve been awesome to see people’s reactions to a couple of idiots wheeling a fridge through the elevated crosswalk high above Cedar Street!)
Well, anyway, Teresa and I spent the rest of the week slowly piecing our kitchen back together, assembling the new Mill’s Pride cabinets and installing Formica countertops that we had purchased from Home Depot. Our new stainless-steel appliances were delivered that following weekend, and the last of the finishing touches involved installing a new white-washed maple laminate floating floor, a retro style phone from Pottery Barn (that we had paid way too much money for,) and this really cool, contemporary 3-blade stainless steel ceiling fan. The fan was from a manufacturer called Minka Aire, and we liked it so much, we ended up buying a total of four fans from them over the years as we remodeled other parts of the house, and eventually even our cabin up north.
Now, this particular Minka Aire model did not come equipped with pull chains, you hardwired it to the switch and would use the small remote control that it came with to change the speed/direction of the fan and turn the light on or off, a small detail that you will need to know for the next part of this story.
Well, after we had got done with our kitchen remodel, Teresa would stand in our brand-new kitchen admiring our handy work, and would say out loud, to no one in particular, “do you like your new kitchen Rose?” On more than one occasion, when she would do this, the lights would flicker, the ceiling fan would start up on its own, and our yellow lab Murphy would start barking. It freaked us out a little, but we just blamed it on the home’s old wiring or on the remote or the fan’s built-in sensor. But neither of us could ignore the coincidence, or some far fetched possibility that it could be Rose’s spirit making its presence known, so I would sternly scold Teresa, telling her to “quit talking to it,” suggesting that she was encouraging it. At the same time, I never felt threatened by any of the weird activity, joking that we were being haunted by the ghost of an eighty-five-year-old grandma, asking myself, what’s the worst that could happen, that she would show up and bake some cookies for us?
The Spider Lamp Incident
We eventually got around to finishing the upstairs, adding a master suite complete with another full bath and large walk-in closet as well as a small home office above our kitchen. At the time I was working for Capital Area Michigan Works! and my office was only five or six blocks from our house, so I would often go through my whole morning routine without bothering to wake up Teresa. On this particular morning I walked downstairs with Murphy close on my heels. As we got to the bottom of the steps, Murphy went to turn right into the living room/dining area before stopping dead in his tracks. He started growling and the hair on his back stood up on end. Not sure what it was that he was growling at, I flipped on the light above our dining table, and just then, he lunged forward barking aggressively as if he was going after something, but there was nothing there, just our wine cabinet that sat between the two windows on that wall. I gave Murphy a gentle slap on the butt and told him to knock it off, that there wasn’t anything there, and that his barking was going to wake up mom. I let Murphy out to go to the bathroom, finished getting ready and a few minutes later I left for work.
That night, as we were sitting at the table having dinner, I told Teresa about the weird incident with Murphy that morning. I laughed, saying how ridiculous he was being, not thinking there was anything more to it.
But then Teresa dropped her fork, looked up from her plate, and in a freaked-out voice said, “oh my god, I have to tell you about what happened last night while you were out.”
The night before I had been out with a friend while Teresa was home alone with Murphy. At some point she had gone downstairs to change the laundry. When she got to the bottom of the steps, reaching the main level, she was surprised to see the lights in the living room were turned on full blast. I had a bunch of furniture that I had bought prior to meeting Teresa, so she ended up inheriting all of this stuff when we got married and moved in together. There was this one spider lamp thing that Teresa absolutely hated. It had these five halogen lamps that stretched out like tentacles over the sectional couch. She thought it was the ugliest thing, not to mention that she felt it gave off way too much light, so she would never, ever turn it on. When she came downstairs and noticed that the lamp was turned on full blast, she assumed that I had come home and somehow hadn’t heard me come in, so she nervously called out to me, but I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t there. She built up enough courage to run over and turn off the light, but didn’t bother with going down to the basement to change laundry, and instead ran straight upstairs and jumped back into bed with Murphy. She had fallen asleep before I had gotten home, and I left that morning without waking her up, so she hadn’t had a chance to tell me about the thing with the light. Her weird experience, coupled with the odd way that Murphy had been acting that morning was sufficient enough to creep us out. Plus, not knowing exactly where Rose had died in the house has often made me wonder if she had passed away near the spot where Murphy was barking, just some ten feet or so away from where the spider lamp sat behind the corner of the sectional. Well, I don’t have Murphy’s sixth sense and he wasn’t talking, so I guess I will never know for certain.
Murphy the Scaredy Cat
On another occasion, Teresa and I were hanging out on the sectional watching TV in the living room. We were interrupted by Murphy making a low growl as he sat at the bottom of the stairs, staring up into the dark stairwell at something. I yelled at Murphy to knock it off, but like before, he just ignored me and kept growling. I finally got up off of the couch and walked over to where he was sitting. I flicked on the switch to illuminate the sconce mounted on the wall above the landing at the top of the steps. I looked up the stairwell to where Murphy was still staring. But with my limited vision I couldn’t see anything, and besides that, I was convinced that there wasn’t anything to see anyway, so I said, “There’s nothing there idiot, now knock it off.” But Murphy didn’t budge, he kept staring and growling, prompting me to start walking up the stairs and coaxing him to follow along, saying, “come on you chicken, there’s nothing up here.” Murphy slowly crept up the stairs after me, step by step, cautiously peering around the corner as he approached the landing where I was now standing. Honestly, I was a bit annoyed with Murphy at this point, watching him army crawl along the carpeted steps. I was about to chew him out again, when he reached the top step going into our office, and then all of a sudden started barking and took off around the corner into our bedroom after something. Startled, I immediately got the chills, and then a sickening feeling in my stomach, because I knew I had to follow after him to try and figure out what it was that he had seen. But after completing a room by room sweep of the upstairs, turning on every light in the process, I found nothing, just another weird, unexplained case of the heebie-jeebies.
Ghost on a Late-Night Spending Spree
Besides Murphy’s sometimes erratic behavior toward what we would later attribute to a possible paranormal entity in our house, the spirit didn’t appear to be malevolent or seem to wish us any harm. Like I said before, she was an eighty-five-year-old elderly woman ghost, so if anything, the idea of being haunted by her was somewhat assuring compared to the alternative.
That being said, I didn’t like all of the unusual stuff that kept happening, probably because I was worried that things would start to get progressively worse, but mostly they just stayed the same level of weird.
For example, one-night Teresa and I were sound asleep in our bed upstairs when our television across the room on the TV stand turned on by itself. Weirder still, the TV was on the QVC home shopping network, a channel that Teresa or me would have never had on at any point. When the TV switched on the two of us just laid there, motionless, until I asked, “did you do that?” and Teresa responded, “no, the TV remote is still sitting on the nightstand, I didn’t touch it.”
We switched the TV off, and tried to fall back to sleep, making a mental note to check our credit card statement in the off-chance ghosts are somehow able to make purchases from the after world.
Halloween Surprise
On Halloween night in 2004, we were still putting the finishing touches on our upstairs master suite addition. We had already been living in and using most of the master suite, but we still had some random pieces of baseboard to tack on and a few other odds and ends that needed to be done. That night, I was hanging out up in our bedroom assembling a Mills Pride vanity for our master bath as Teresa manned the front door and handed out candy to trick-or-treaters. She was hanging out enjoying the evening when another group of costumed kids approached the porch. The adult who was accompanying the little kids introduced himself, explaining that he had actually owned the house at one point. In fact, he said that he was the person who had sold the place to the guy who we had bought it from. Well this guy had apparently moved into a new place down around the corner on Roberts Avenue, and said that he had been noticing all of the different renovations to the house that we had been doing, complimenting Teresa on how great the house looked, and what a nice job that we had done with fixing the place up.
Teresa thanked him for the compliment, made some comment about it being a lot of work but that it had been worth it, you know, standard neighborly banter.
What he said next would forever change our perception about supposed paranormal activity and all of the weird events that we had experienced during our time in the house.
Without prompting, without any further explanation, he just cut Teresa off mid-sentence and said the following six words before turning and walking off into the night with his kids.
“So…have you met Rose yet?”