The Closed Room: an Eyewitness Account of a Real Haunting

We didn't really know how old the house was. We had moved into it when I was still very young, and my family was temporarily renting the home. The home was massive, rolling, it had also been neglected for many years.

It had a two story covered porch that wrapped around the entire outside, we weren't allowed to walk on the second story because the porch boards had fallen through. The house was hidden from the road by large trees that were ancient.

The owners lived up the road & periodically rented the house out for extra income. They were elderly and the home had been their parents' home. The only stipulation about renting it was that there was a room upstairs that had their parents belongings in it, and the door was to remain shut and locked. The owners really didn't have any place to store the belongings and probably didn't have the ability to remove it from the home if they did, so the items had been there for years.

My brother and I took the upstairs rooms while my parents and my sisters took the bedrooms down below. The way that the upstairs was built was that at the top of the stairs you could walk out to the porch, or you could turn left and walk down a long hallway with the open stairwell on the left and the closed off room to the right. When my brother and I had to go to our bedrooms we had to walk by that closed door each and every night. The porch wrapped around the closed off room on the outside. We had snuck out on the old porch to try and peek through the windows, but even the window had been shuttered to where you could not see in from the outside as you walked around the upper story of the home.

Being boys, and curious, and at the age when told we couldn't do something made it all the more attractive to us, we decided to pop the door open one day while our parents were away. Inside the room were boxes and boxes that were stacked away from the wall and towards the center of the room with cloth poking out here and there and cobwebs everywhere. We walked around to the backside of the large pile and started to look around.

There was box of war medals here, and old gaudy jewelry there, and in the corner there was a uniform hanging up that was a soldiers, in the piles of stuff we found a hand grenade that we didn't know if it was real or not. There was so much stuff there that it made going through it all impossible. So we left it before our parents got home and since our curiosity was answered, we locked up the room again.

Whether it be coincidence or not, life around the house changed after that excursion into the room upstairs. I began to hear things at night, not just the usual old creaks and groans of the ancient house, we were use to that, but there were other things that were foreign to me, a shuffle here, a pop, it became so unnerving that it wasn't long before I was moving downstairs and away from that room and the upstairs all together.

Every night between about 2 and 4 a.m., a loud crash was heard, and it would only awake one person at a time. Once, I was up late and watching television and I saw a light outside the window sweeping around. I got up and looked out to see my brother looking around the house with his flashlight. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "Didn't you hear that? It sounded like a bookshelf fell over". This continued for months and always just woke one person, even if you were sleeping right next to them, it would only awake one of you.

I couldn't sleep, I began to sleep on the floor in my parent's room. Soon, my sisters were there too, they couldn't sleep in their rooms because of the feeling, the noises, and the constant prickling sensation that you was not alone in your own bedroom. My brother began to spend more time at other people's houses, spending the nights with friends, and then he began to fall asleep watching television in the family room on the couch. The upstairs was all but abandoned at this point.

Our father was a work-a-holic and seldom home long enough to discuss these things with and when he was, it was usually just before bed and he was a very sound sleeper. So, he didn't really buy into the whole affair, but if he did, he never told us at the time. My mother began to look for other places to rent because she didn't like the fact the kids couldn't sleep in the home. She never said if she was hearing or seeing things either, years later we would find out that both of them had, but they weren't discussing with the kids so that they didn't scare us even more than we already was.

Nights became an adventure, and we all dreaded going to bed to try and sleep, I was especially frightened by the whole thing. At night, I would wait for the sounds and would find myself fighting off sleep just so that I wasn't taken by the noise unawares, and when it did happen to me, it was always after I had just dosed off and thought I was going to get some rest.

I would sit and listen, and my sisters also, the noises upstairs became more active over time, we would lay in the floor and stair up at the ceiling. This noise was different than the crashing sound, there were sounds of furniture, heavy furniture like a large bed or dresser, being pushed, scooted actually, as if it were one person trying to move it across the hardwood floors upstairs. On the nights when we knew our brother wasn't up there we would become even more scared, and often when we woke up our parents it wasn't there anymore.

I saw it once, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the feeling that something was standing over me, someone was standing beside my bed. And, I looked up and in the dark I could make out the form of a very tall and large man. As I continued to come awake the figure began to fade into the black, it was there, I am sure of it. And there was this feeling I don't even know how to describe it, it was the first and only time in my life that I had felt it, if there was a feeling associated with pure animosity then that is what it was. This figure didn't like me, resented me being there and wanted me gone.

We found another home. It didn't take long for us to move out, and we had left the house as fast as we had moved in. Several years later I would find out that the persons who used to live there had intense marital problems and at the time we had lived in the home, the old man was dead, and the woman was in the asylum. The old man had let the marital problems drive him to an attempted suicide, but he survived and eventually died of natural causes in the house.

I was driving by the house last summer, and it was still there, someone new had actually bought it from the old couple down the road. The trees were all cut down to give a passerby a clear view from the main road. I instantly looked up to the upstairs and sought the windows of the closed off room. The room didn't have it's shutters anymore, in fact the windows were new, and the shades were open and the upstairs looked open and inviting. Perhaps when the new owners had gutted the home and remodeled it, they had also tore the energy out of the house - I don't know. I thought about stopping and asking if they had ever had any issues with hearing or seeing things, then I thought, no, I didn't want anything to follow me home.