The guy’s name was Pete and he was waiting for his friends. They were getting ready to go out to dinner to celebrate their first semester of graduate school. The porter found me a room five doors down from him.
Several weeks went by and we quickly developed a friendship. We shared a kitchen and I found that I was hanging out in it more and more, hoping to see him. Of course, whenever I went in there I was always in full makeup, cute clothes, and had great-looking hair. It wasn’t suspicious at all at 2am!
I kept up this charade for almost a month. And then I got a job picking carrots at an organic farm. Since I hadn’t finished my contract at the resort, I’d arrived in Wales with very little money and it became essential that I pick up some work. I’d applied for several positions but, so far, only the farm had replied with an offer.
It was dirty, uncomfortable work. The muck and grime would cling to my skin and hair and the thick gloves and Wellingtons I wore did little to protect my hands and feet from the mud and cold. I came home every day and quickly jumped into the shower before anyone could see me. The farm was beautiful but carrot picking is no joke; it’s a lot of work!
One day, though, the weather was particularly miserable. It was raining, cold, and the mud was so thick it came up to my knees. I could barely see for the torrential rain and my hands were freezing before I‘d even stuck them in the ground.
When we got to the field, I hopped off the tractor and started to take a step forward and…SPLAT! I moved but my feet did not. I wound up face down in the mud. I was mortified. The owners carted me home where I HOPED I could sneak in and clean up before anyone saw me.
It was then I realized I’d locked myself out of my dorm room.
A call to housekeeping told me they could be there in half an hour. Nobody else was around so I tried to hide in the corner of the kitchen, keeping quiet.
Pete wandered in ten minutes later.
To his credit, he didn’t laugh in my dirt-streaked face but he DID offer to let me use his shower and put on one of his T-shirts until housekeeping arrived.
It was when he saw me, mud and all, that he says he realized he was in love with me. I’d known a little sooner.
Two years later, we gave birth to our first child. We married, moved back to the United States together upon graduation, and (for the most part) lived happily ever after.
The Maple House
The True Story of a Haunting
Rebecca Patrick-Howard
Written as Jeanie Dyer
Disclaimer:
The following story is true. However, names and identifying locations have been changed.
Foreword
The following story really happened. Names and identifying locations and certain information have been changed for different reasons, some of which might become more understandable as you read on.
My story is not a long one, although it took place over the course of two years. Many of the events, when taken on their own, are not extraordinary in and of themselves.
A lot of people have asked me why we stayed in the house as long as we did. The truth of the matter is, we were never completely sure that there was something paranormal or even unusual going on around us–at least not until the end when we started piecing our experiences together. Although many bad things happened in the Maple House, a lot of good things did as well. It wasn’t always a time filled with terror or sadness. There was quite a bit of joy within the walls and, for the most part, that canceled out whatever else was going on.
Things began to change, however, and then it became an unhappy place. When I look back on the house now, I feel a certain amount of dread, tension, and my memories are tinged with darkness. This makes me unbearably sad because we started out so happy there, excited, ready to take on a new adventure. That everything could end so horribly in a place where we’d counted on many of our dreams coming true feels like a cruel joke.
I couldn’t tell you when our haunting started. I suppose it really started with the music, although I can think of smaller things that pre-date even that.
I can’t even tell you, for sure, that it was a haunting. Times have changed attitudes when it comes to hauntings and ghosts and we expect more out of them these days. I know I did. I learned that in reality, unlike in the movies, you don’t always get the loud noises, disappearing specters, and levitating objects. It’s much more subtle. The downside of this is it makes you more apt to question your sanity and what you’re experiencing. By the time you finish reading this you might not even be convinced that there was anything supernatural at play at all; that everything was just a string of unhappy coincidences, random life events strung together one after another. My husband’s mother once said life was just a series of events, some good and some bad.
And perhaps that is true. Maybe what happened to us at the Maple House didn’t have anything to do with ghosts or negative energy. Everyone goes through tough times. This may have simply been ours.
But I know what I felt. And I know what I saw.
Except for the one incident witnessed only by my then three-year-old son, there were no “ghosts”: no apparitions, no floating heads, no Hollywood-type “Lady in White” figures roaming up and down our hallways. We didn’t catch orbs in our photographs. We didn’t invite ghost hunters into our house to catch disembodied voices on EVPs.
But we felt targeted.
At the end, I will let you decide what was going on–if the house and land did, indeed, have something going on inside it or if everything could be chalked up to coincidence and the randomness that the Universe often presents.
There will be no clear resolution to this story. No happy ending. No smoking gun. For awhile I searched for answers. I tried to research the history of the area (the house itself was not old), tried to glean insightful information that might explain what was going on. I became obsessed with the understanding of the events. If you walk away from this feeling frustrated, unsettled, or without resolution you must know that I feel the same way. There were never any answers, only speculation.
For almost two years I felt as though something might be after my family, especially my children. I honestly wondered if we would all make it out alive. And, unfortunately, one of us didn’t. By the end, I was holding onto my family so tightly that the sheer panic was overwhelming and strangling. The terror that something more would happen to us was a blanket that enveloped me and kept me suffocated, unable to breathe. And then we left. There are times, though, especially late at night when I’m sitting up all alone and I feel as though whatever “it” was that haunted us is still there, waiting.
The Maple House
For years I’ve had this recurring dream: I am living in a haunted house but nobody will believe it’s haunted. The ghosts are after me, night after night. They’re attacking me, trying to kill me. They chase me and suffocate me and try to get inside of me. I beg everyone in the house to leave, to move, but they laugh at me. The dream always ends with me screaming, pleading, and crying. I wake up covered in sweat, my heart pounding.
Our time at the Maple House didn’t start out frightening. Indeed, it began as a dream home. It’s a funny thing about hauntings, though: They’re not always scary. Sometimes you even find yourself hoping that something else will happen.
In the beginning, at least, a lot of good things happened to us in the house. We loved it there. The strange things that occurred, the “bad luck” we seemed to encounter, was intermixed with a lot of joy. It was easy to ignore the rest at first. Life isn’t like a Hollywood horror movie, where every moment is filled with terror and dread. The dread, I learned, builds slowly. It eats away at you a little bit over time, like a sickness, until it consumes you and fills you. You start questioning everything you do and feel.
On more than one occasion I thought I might be going crazy. Sometimes, I still feel like I am.
We weren’t necessarily looking to move. My husband Pete and our two-year-old son Sam and I were moderately happy in our bric
k ranch-style house in the country. Pete and I were a little concerned that it was so close to the road but Sam was a good child and listened most of the time. We were renting the house and had made it ours as best we could. I had a decent job, although it was stressful, and Pete had a great job, although it didn’t pay much. We were probably what most people would consider “to be middle class”, if a little on the lower end. We lived paycheck to paycheck like everyone else in the area and dreamed of a day when we wouldn’t.
We were happy, but we were also restless. After several years of struggling financially we felt like we should have been doing better at that point in our marriage. Most nights, after Sam fell asleep, we’d stay awake and sit on the couch, Pete rubbing my feet, while we’d talk about what we wanted to do next, where we wanted to go, what we saw ourselves really doing.
“I’m stressed,” I’d moan as Pete flipped through the TV channels, looking for something to watch. Cable, thee basic package, was one of our few indulgences. That and name brand ice cream. “Work stinks. I don’t want to go in tomorrow.”
“You say that every day,” he’d remind me and we’d go back to watching “Criminal Minds” or “The Golden Girls.” The conversation would be over because it didn’t have anywhere else to go.
I wasn’t in the career I wanted to be in. I did what I did because it was a job, but as a public servant in the child welfare sector there were many rough days. I couldn’t leave my duties at the office and often worked late and on weekends. I was on call 24/7. I was around so much neglect, sadness, and suffering that the lining in my stomach was being eaten away from stress. I cried a lot. More and more I found myself struggling to get out of bed in the morning, on the verge of tears at the thought of another day in my office or getting a new client.
I loved the children I worked with and enjoyed many of their parents but I still wasn’t happy; I knew it wasn’t my “calling.” The stress of work was causing stress in our marriage and I was sorry for that, too. I wanted more free time to garden, to play with Sam, to hang out with Pete and relax and not have to keep my phone on me at all times with constant text messages from my supervisor interrupting us.
That previous winter we’d had a terrible ice storm, one of the worst ones on record. When our power went out in the middle of the storm while Pete was at work teaching a night class I’d bundled Sam up and stuck him in the car. We’d driven to my mother’s, thinking the storm was over. It wasn’t. What would eventually become eleven inches of ice pounded the car as I tried to get to my mother’s house in another county. Her road was a deathtrap; as I moved inch by inch down the narrow lane the trees crashed around me and I spun off the road into a ditch, nearly tumbling into the river. A neighbor had to come and get us because the falling trees crushed my car and blocked us in. When we finally made it to her house we were wet, cold, crying, and scared. My supervisor had immediately texted me and asked me to drive three counties over to check on a client. At our own home we were without power for three weeks and had to spend that time with my mother at her house. We lost all the food in our refrigerator and freezer and were out nearly $1,000. Our pipes froze and burst. We received no relief, yet I still had to work more than twelve hours a day, using our agency’s budget to restock the refrigerators of the families we worked with. It had been a sobering experience.
“I need to find another job,” I said to Pete that spring.
He agreed. “Rebecca, you’re crying because you don’t want to go to work. I never see you and your agency has no consideration for your health. How many times have you been asked to drive in a snowstorm? Work during tornados? Go into homes with highly infectious diseases?”
It was true. I’d brought home scabies, MRSA, head lice more than once, swine flu, and more infections than I could count.
“I’ll think of something,” I promised. “I swear I’ll make it better for us.”
And I tried.
In high school and college I’d spent a lot of my time writing books, screenplays, and poetry. I loved writing and tried to do it in what little spare time I had, but lately all I wanted to do was sleep. I was tired, cranky, and almost certainly depressed. I toyed around with the idea of making writing a fulltime career, but had no idea how to proceed with that. I was no Stephen King or Nora Roberts. I’d never even finished writing the novel I’d been working on for several years.
It seemed impossible to try and make a career out of such a thing, but writing made me happy. A lot of my job depended on case notes and extensive report writing, however, and after spending so much time doing it for work I didn’t feel like devoting any time to creative writing anymore. Each day, it felt like more pieces of me were floating away and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want another ten years to go by and suddenly look back on my life and regret not doing the things I loved.
It was time to make a change while I still could.
One afternoon, out of boredom, I began playing around on Craigslist. I liked to look at houses for rent and for sale, just for the fun of it. Like most people, I guess, I dreamed of the day my ship would come in and we could afford to buy a big house with a big yard and live the “dream.” I liked to see what all was out there, even if it was just fantasizing about things we could never have. Real estate was my escape in those days and long after Sam went to sleep I’d scour the ads, looking at virtual tours and videos and showing Pete the ones I found. Of course, we couldn’t afford anything more than what we were paying but it was fun to imagine. One day, we’d tell ourselves, one day…
There was only one house listed for rent in my area that day and I did a double take, thinking it must be a mistake. The rent was more than twice what we were currently paying, and we were on the high end of the spectrum for our community. I was intrigued. The ad didn’t have a picture, but it boasted more than 4,000 square feet and five bedrooms.
“Hey Pete!” I hollered from the office. “You gotta come listen to this!”
I read him the description aloud while he swung little Sam around by the waist and tried to entertain him.
“Huh,” he said when I was finished. “Sounds nice I guess.”
“’Nice’?” I shook my head. “It sounds great!”
Considering the cost of the rent, he was less than enthused.
To be honest, I didn’t know of many houses in my county that could even fit that description. It was a small place, the county seat having fewer than 3,000 residents. While not everyone knew everyone, big houses did not go unnoticed. And, for our neck of the woods, 4,000 square feet was a big house. In fact, it was almost a mansion.
My mother was coming over that afternoon for a visit and I showed the ad to her. She was much more enthusiastic.
“Wanna go see it?” she asked with excitement.
“Heck yeah!” I cried, grabbing my shoes. Sam stretched his chubby little arms upwards, asking to go along. We were a team, the two of us, so I scooped him up and took him along with us.
Always up for an adventure, we decided to go for a drive and check it out. “We’re not moving,” my husband hollered as we sailed out the door. He hated moving more than anything in the world.
“I know!” I yelled back. “We just want to see what it looks like! We’re just bored!”
He rolled his eyes and shooed us on, shaking his head in disbelief. He couldn’t understand why we might want to get our hopes up about something that was so far out of our reach.
The address was in a part of the county we weren’t familiar with and the house was isolated, even more remote than my own country home.
From its position high on a mountaintop we could see it nearly a mile before we reached it and then a gravel road took us nearly straight up to the top. “No wonder we didn’t know anything about it,” my mom said as we bounced up the rocky road. “You can’t see it from the road and it’s pretty set back. Hate to drive up this in the winter.” (That was, by the way, my mom’s standby remark any time we looked at a house with a hill or narrow road.)
Oh, but it was beautiful, though. The high price tag was immediately obvious.
“Damn,” I couldn’t help but say as I stared in awe. “This is nice! I’ve always wanted to live in a mini-mansion.”
It looked like something out of a fairy tale. With its dark brown wooded-sides, tall rose bushes flanking the wraparound porch, apple trees nearly reaching both the second-floor balconies, and mountains rising up on all three sides it appeared to be growing from the very ground it was built upon. There was an organic look to the house, as though it had emerged from the land rather than having been built on it.
It didn’t look very old; maybe thirty years at most. From the driveway we had a panorama view of the valley below as the mountains stretched out before us.
It was late afternoon so the sun had dropped down in the sky and cast a golden shadow over everything. The valley below us appeared to be on fire, the mountains a purple haze in the background. Maple trees shaded the front and from that point onwards we would refer to it as “The Maple House.” A back deck led to a wooden jungle gym with a slide, swings, and little club house and there was even a small barn and pasture. The rest of the backyard was surrounded by thick, dark woods.
Sam couldn’t contain his excitement. “Can we live here?” he shouted from the backseat. “Can I play on the slide?”
“You want to look at it?” Mom asked. She tried to act casual but I could see the eagerness in her eyes. She was just itching to get out and look around.
“Well, we’re here,” I shrugged, also trying to act like I wasn’t nearly as impressed as I was. “Why not?”
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