Story 23 of 52

By M. Snarky

Before living through it (twice in two different houses) I really didn’t believe in ghosts. Actual street addresses in the following story are withheld to respect the privacy of the current owners.

The first haunted house that I lived in was in, Pasadena, CA. It was a 1-story 3+1 California craftsman home built in 1922. My mom, my older sister Lisa, my younger brother Scott, and I moved in with the Dubuque family after my parents divorced in 1972. This is one of those cool old homes with a big front porch and a subterranean cellar with double doors, similar to the one in Dorothy Gale’s Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s farmhouse in rural Kansas in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

Nancy Dubuque warned us early on about their ghostly resident that lived in the attic. The ghost was described as “A friendly old man” that died in the house. She also said that we might hear the following sounds emanating from the attic, and not to be alarmed:

Okay, so being an 11-year-old boy, this ghost, and noises in the attic business kind of freaked me out. The Dubuque’s, however, had apparently accepted the otherworldly spirit as part of the history of the house and its earthly residents went about living there like it was no big deal.

My first encounter with the presence of the spirit happened while I was sitting in the large living room in the evening by myself and reading, believe it or not, a worn-out copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. I know; this is heady stuff for such a young boy, but I loved reading whatever I could get my hands on, and the book cover with the image of the black bird intrigued me.

I don’t recall where everyone else was at the time, but I do remember that it was quiet; so quiet that In the midst of reading one of the passages in the poem, I heard the distinct sound of creaky footsteps walking across the attic. This made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up, and I slammed the book shut and ran off to find my siblings. I never told anyone about it.

The second time I encountered the presence of the spirit was when I wasn’t feeling well and was lying on my mom’s bed in the front bedroom staring at the ceiling in an almost meditative state. It was late at night and everyone else was asleep. That’s when I noticed the creaking rocking chair sound directly above me. It was faint at first, and slowly increased in intensity. This too, freaked me out at first, but I decided to interpret it as a sign that the nice grandfatherly old man in the attic was concerned about me and was watching over me from his rocking chair. I felt his presence and took comfort in it. I chose not to be scared about it. I never told anyone about this either but I never actually saw an apparition while living there.

I suppose that it could have been a much worse haunting, like poltergeist level worse, but over time, I too accepted the spirit as part of the house. We only lived there for about one school year before moving to North Hollywood.

Fast-forward 8-years, and I found myself living in a Spanish-Mediterranean hillside house in Glendale, CA that was built around 1925. I shared the house with two friends named Danny Lord and Mike Anderson. There was a tiled mural in glazed hand painted Spanish tile just inside the front door with the name Machu Picchu and a depiction of the legendary terraced citadel. It was built on a 2-level terraced floor plan taking advantage of the steep hillside lot.

At street level was the top level of the house that included a one-car, partially attached garage, a large living room with a vaulted, exposed beam ceiling and a fireplace, a large patio deck with three double hung French doors, a galley style kitchen, and a large dining room. At the end of the kitchen was a walk-through pantry that had a side door that led to a small sidewalk between the house and the garage. From the sidewalk you could enter the garage from a side door or walk out to the street. There was a wrought iron staircase from the living room that went down to the lower level.

The lower level had a short hallway with three large bedrooms branching off, one laundry room, and one large full bathroom. There was also a glass door at one end of the hallway that led to a flight of stairs that went down to a small outside patio area.

It was actually a pretty cool bachelor house. We had many parties and good times while living there.

Danny was the one who found the house in the Los Angeles Times classified section and contacted the owners about renting it. This is when the owners disclosed that the house was haunted and why the rent was lower than similar houses in the area. So, the three of us moved into a low-rent haunted house – what could go wrong with that? Plenty, as we were to find out.

The story behind this haunted house was that around 1930, a 5-year-old girl died from an exploding boiler tank that was formerly located in the laundry room. My bedroom happened to be directly adjacent to the laundry room.

Per the owners disclosure, the spirit of the little girl was known to do the following:

I was working in the electrical trade at the time and always had early hours during the week, generally, up by 5:00 AM and out of the door by 6:00 AM. I was always up before Danny and Mike every weekday.

One early weekday morning shortly after we had moved in, I went upstairs for coffee and a bagel. I noticed a cold draft as I was ascending the stairs and it was when I turned toward the kitchen that I noticed that one set of the double hung French doors were wide open. I was certain that Mike or Danny left them open from the night before when they went out on the patio to smoke a cigarette.

When I got home, I told the guys about it and reminded them to close the doors. They both looked at me as if I had two heads and said that neither of them were on the patio the night before. It was at this point that we all looked at each other and realized that this nocturnal activity was from our resident of the spiritual world. We laughed it off.

Every now and then as I was walking to my bedroom, there was a distinct cold spot in the hallway near the laundry room. This was obviously another sign that there was a spirit in the house. I’ve often wondered if the cold spot was a portal for our ghostly resident.

One night we had a few friends over and were hanging out in the living room listening to records and drinking beer and smoking some weed and talking. Suddenly, the living room lights went off. I said, “Very funny Danny.” Danny said, “I’m over here, Kent,” from the dining room, and he (nor anyone else) was anywhere near the switch for the living room lights. We all looked at each other and had a collective freak-out moment after realizing that our ghostly resident had made her presence felt again. Admittedly, it was a very creepy feeling.

Over the following months we encountered many more of the open patio door events, sometimes it was the side door, and various lights turning on or off, and occasionally a running bathroom faucet.

But one event stood out as the most chilling of them all…

One Saturday night, we had a few friends over to pre-game before heading to the Starwood nightclub in West Hollywood to see a concert of a local band and someone in our group knew the lead guitar player. There were six of us in total – three men and three women. We drank a little. We smoked a little. We listened to a little music. Collectively, we were feeling pretty damn good.

As the string of us were leaving the house through the kitchen to the side door, the lights went off. The girls were sure that we were trying to spook them, but as we were groping our way in the dark to find the light switch, we all sensed that someone had rushed past us…and then the side door flew open without anyone near it. The girls screamed. The guys screamed. And now we were all spooked out of our minds. An otherworldly presence was felt by everyone, though there was no appearance of an apparition.

We all piled into Danny’s 1974 Pontiac Firebird and headed to the Starwood. For the first 15-minutes of the drive, nobody talked about what happened at Machu Picchu. Then one of the girls asked, “Do you really think it was the ghost?” This opened up an entire conversation about it.

When we got back to the house after the concert and asked the girls to come in, there was an awkward hesitation, and then came the excuses. “I have to get back home to let my dog out.” “I have to get up early for work.” “I have to be back to my apartment by 1:00 or my roommate will lock me out.” I think the truth was that they did not want to step foot into our creepy haunted house on the hill. I can’t say that I blame them.

We did not move out of the house because of the ghost. We eventually moved out due to the circumstances of life, money, jobs, and personal relationships. We all remained friends but went our separate ways before the first year was out.

Ghosts are a complicated topic because they validate the world of spirits. And if there is a world of spirits, this validates that there is an afterlife of some sort. If there is an afterlife, does this also mean that there is a heaven and hell? If so, this also means that God and Jesus Christ are not fictional characters. If God and Jesus are not fictional characters, it means that the bible is true. If the bible is true, I may be on the road to hell. I should probably work on this. Also, if the bible is true and God exists, I have questions. Questions like, “God, why did you create the mosquito? What purpose does it serve other than to spread diseases (that you also presumably created) that kill people in some of the most agonizing, horrific ways possible?” Questions like this flood my mind. This is my Pandora’s box.

Anyway, to add other credibility to this matter of spirituality, I had a near-death experience in 1994 from an electrical accident which I recently wrote about in a post titled, Anniversary of a Near-Death Experience. At some point I lost consciousness and I saw the white light. I was floating. The last thing I remembered thinking to myself immediately before hitting the floor and regaining consciousness was, “I can’t go; my wife and kids need me. I can’t go.

Even with this evidence of a spiritual world, I’m still very conflicted about this biblical heaven and hell stuff because I really don’t believe that a righteous God wants children to suffer.

But I’m not taking any chances.

Instagram: @m.snarky

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