Chapter 1 – Chap 1

The house we’re selling is haunted. It actually sold the other day. It feels a bit odd, the house I lived in for all 18 years of my life is going to be someone else’s house next March. Mom and dad won’t let me tell them about the ghosts, even if it is a bit obvious that it’s haunted. I mean, are any houses in the historic district not haunted? Since I’m disallowed from telling them directly I’m gonna tell the stories of all the incidents in the house here and hope and pray to god that the new owners see this. They need to be warned.

So about the ghosts. There’s a ghost for every floor and an extra for the elevator to boot. I’m gonna go top to bottom in the house. Since there’s 5 ghosts (that are consistent in behavior) Now since I’ve lived here my whole life I must have some pretty good names for them all right? No. All of these suck. The top floor ghost is Stairs Guy, the second floor ghost I call The Lady, the ghost on the elevator I call The Gentleman and on the first floor there’s a ghost in the parlor that I call Kind Sir. If you have any suggestions for new names, feel free to give em, you can’t really do worse than these. As a kid I always worried they’d be offended so I never gave them names but I honestly don’t think they’d care. I’m doing this out of familiarity.

I’ll just run down what each of the ghosts generally do on a day to day. They’re honestly harmless but whenever I think about that family not knowing they’re there my head feels all cotteny and I get this dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach. It can’t do any harm to talk about them though.

Stairs Guy is almost perfectly harmless. He just fucks with people. His spot of frequency, if you couldn’t guess from my brilliant naming is the stairs going up to the attic. I think he’s just a run of the mill poltergeist or something because he takes small things that you’ll notice like fancy pens, nicely written notes, or lucky trinkets and he’ll hide them on this ledge right next to the attic staircase. Other than that he’ll disappear either the bottom stair on the flight at the top or the top stair of the bottom flight. Luckily the top flight is like 6 total steps, but if you’re curious yes I have fallen down that flight of stairs before. Multiple times. Haven’t broken a bone doing this yet surprisingly.

The Lady keeps things tidy I think. Anytime I got a new nicknack I had to try a few placements to see what pleased her or else it’d be on the floor the next day. Even if something was glass it’d be on the floor but never broken. She sometimes leaves little notes. They look so antique, written on old yellow paper and with swoopy beautiful cursive. After I read them they always disappeared. I’ve seen her before. Her ghost is very thin and wispy and I think she died at night because she wears a nightgown that’s all twisted up near her knees. She’s very old and her hands are very wrinkly but her face is all smoothed out like a blurry picture. I only ever saw her at night, and when I did she’d tut at me and get me a glass of water and shoo me to bed.

Well she did that every night but one. Back then I called her The Nice Lady. But that night is when she dropped the nice. I was 6. It was the night of my parents annual Christmas party, so very early December. The party was coming to a close, it must have been nearly 2 or 3AM, I only say that because that’s the time my parents current parties usually end although the annual Christmas party was orders of magnitude larger than the ones they host now so I could be wrong. I had been bundled off to bed and should’ve been sleeping. The door we always use is right underneath my room. I was not sleeping. I was curled up near the air vent so I could hear mom and dad chatting with their friends and wishing them goodbye.

After a while I started hearing whispers that didn’t sound like mom or dad or any of their friends. Something whispered in my ear the basement, it’s such fun, darts and the pool table, and your friend! Don’t you want to visit your friend! At that point I couldn’t hear mom and dad anymore. I could only hear the whispers.

Being 6 years old, I asked it “what about mom and dad? They said the basement isn’t for me.”

And the whispers replied *mom and dad aren’t downstairs anymore, the basement is fun! They’re in the basement, they want you with them.”

I remember nodding and smiling and thinking. Of course! Mom and dad open the basement up when guests come. And they play darts and pool and laugh. I want to laugh with them. I got up from the little vent on the floor and turned to go downstairs and into the basement. I was so excited I didn’t even notice The Lady standing there. I didn’t even notice that her gown was unwound from her legs, nor did I notice that her face was unblurry.

I was soon made aware of her presence. As I walked to the door of my room she gracelessly slammed into my side. I shrieked in terror and tried to wriggle free, if only I thought if only I could get to mom and dad in the basement! She grabbed my face and turned my head to look into her eyes. Her unblurry eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes quite as deep as hers. As she held my stare and my eyes began to sting a kind of static nose grew in my head. Louder and louder it hurt and eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore and I closed my eyes.

I don’t remember what happened after that. All I remember is waking up the next morning with my legs all tangled in the bedsheets. After shuffling around for a moment I noticed that around my knees the ends were tied in a crude bow. She didn’t appear at night for months after that, and when she next did her nightgown was wrapped up, and her face was blurry once more.

Guys I apologize I was going to post this all in one go but I’m afraid I’m just too tired after that. My head feels all cotteny and there’s a ringing in my ears. I guess that’s what bad memories do to you. I’m going to get a glass of water and I’ll tell more stories about the ghosts tomorrow. I hope you guys understand!