www.HeritageHillGhosts.com

Location: 520 Union Ave SE, Apartment One
Submitted By: [name withheld]

This is a long one . . . but there's a lot to tell.

I should probably start by saying that I believe in the supernatural, the paranormal, or whatever else you want to call it. I have a skeptical mind and I'm not very credulous . . . but I also have had a number of personal experiences which aren't easily explained or debunked.

I have lived in Heritage Hill for about four years now, in three different houses -- each of which turned out to have some level of paranormal or supernatural activity . . . but the house on Union Street has been by far the most active and disturbing.

The general layout and style of the house is typical for the Hill -- high ceilings, hardwood floors, vintage/period details mixed with a handful of modern updates and fixtures here and there. Like many of the homes in Heritage Hill, the property was divided into two separate units, one upstairs and one downstairs.

My family lived in the lower unit, a very spacious apartment with three bedrooms, dining room, family room, and exclusive access to the basement (where we did our laundry).

Probably the most distinctive thing about the house (at least for my story) was a small room that had been added on to the back of the house at some point in the recent future. It was fairly small, maybe 20x20, and a little grubby around the edges -- but my daughter decided that it would be perfect as her bedroom. The other two bedrooms were at the front of the house, which meant (although we didn't realize it at the time) that she would be sleeping very far away from the rest of us.

When we first moved in during the early spring, everything was perfectly fine. We went through the spring and early summer without any problems at all . . . apart from the fact that my daughter would wake up every night and ask to sleep on the lower bunk in her brother's room.

This was uncharacteristic of her. The first week or two that we'd been there, she'd slept without any problems at all. But one night she came in to my room complaining about bad dreams and, after that, the pattern continued. We tried a number of different tactics for helping her get comfortable with her own space -- all of which worked perfectly well during the daytime but not at night.

It didn't help that my daughter's room was always cold. The original landlord who had signed us up (and the sold the house to someone new almost immediately afterwards) neglected to mention that the back bedroom had never been insulated and the little grate in the wall wasn't connected to heating system. So throughout the Michigan autumn, winter, and spring, the room maintained a temperature almost equal to what it was outside.

In other words, even with a floor heater running full blast, it was sometimes cold enough to see your breath.

I'd love to blame all of this on the ghost (there, I said it) but, in all honesty, it was just a dishonest landlord. Fortunately the new owner turned out to be a much better person who never hesitated to fix things and who was always there when we needed him . . . although he couldn't help us with the main problem in the house.

I stay up very late, always have since I was very young. I don't have insomnia per se, I just don't sleep very much. I like being awake when the rest of the house is quiet and everyone else is asleep. It gives me some alone time to read or sit at the dining room table and work on whatever I'm writing at the time.

I sat at the table often, usually for a few hours each night. This gave me a perfect view of the main hallway that ran the length of the house as well as the family room which bordered the dining room where the table was. Over a period of months, I began to notice movement in the corners of my eye. Sometime it looked like someone was passing in the hallway. At first, I thought it was one of the kids . . . but when I'd get up to check, no one would be there and everyone was still in bed.

And then there was the shadows that drifted along the ceiling in the family room. Again, this wasn't something that I saw dead on, just out of the corner of my eye. If I was sitting down, writing at the table, the would sometimes be a long, thick shadow that hung down from the ceiling in the other room. If I didn't look up (which would make ti disappear, of course) the shadow would drift back and forth across the room.

I don't have a better word than "shadow" for what it was. It was something long, perhaps five feet or more, and I got the impression that it was irregularly shaped, thick around the middle and somewhat tapered at the top and bottom.

This happened a number of times over a period of weeks. Eventually it became distracting enough (it was my quite time, after all), that I would get up and quietly admonish the empty room to leave me alone. I wasn't ever really frightened. I'm a fairly liberal minded person and a Christian as well, which means that I can accept a lot of different layers of spirituality and the idea of spiritual warfare isn't unfamiliar to me . . . so when I find myself in these sorts of situations, I don't get scared. But I will pray.

Being upstairs wasn't the scariest thing about the house. The scariest thing about the house was the basement, so I should tell you about that and what happened there. The basement was a massive place, stretching under the whole house. It was unfinished, of course, with a poured concrete floor and walls, crumbling stonework and exposed beams, with a single bare bulb hanging over the coin operated washer and dryer . . . a haven for spiders and shadows, a place that you wouldn't like to linger in.

The basement was divided into two areas: The smaller front area near the steps coming down where the laundry was, and then the larger back area that stretched through underneath the rest of the house. There was a small open doorway connecting the two areas so that, when doing laundry, you could see through into the rest of the basement.

The larger area was more or less open, with a small back room that had been partitioned off and fitted with a cheap wooden door. This little room was full of outdated plumbing equipment -- old toilets and sinks and pipes all stained with age and neglect. Next to the door was an old, disused refrigerator that I could never quite bring myself to open and see what was inside.

The hot water heater was down there in the dark area of the basement, of course, as well as the furnace and fuse boxes. Lots of exposed wires and ducts everywhere. And, out in the middle of the floor, there was a huge piece of concrete missing with bare dirt showing through.

It was dark, it was spooky, it looked like something out of a nightmare. Even if there was nothing supernatural going on down there, you wouldn't be able to help feeling scared because it had all of the classic details that equal "haunted" to most people.

This charming little spot was where we did our laundry. One of us would usually be down there a couple of times a week at least. Any time I was down there, I would feel very uncomfortable (not a surprise, given the overall ambience) and over time I became aware that I had a very strong sense that someone watching me from back in the larger, darker half of the basement.

But when I would look (of course) no one was there.

There was always a feeling that something or someone was in that little back room, waiting.

Having read a fair amount about hauntings and how people handle them, I tried to notice the moments when I felt uncomfortable or scared or like someone was watching me. And, when it happened, I'd talk to whoever was there and say that I was sorry but it was our house now, that they were welcome to stay so long as there weren't any problems and nobody tried to scare me or my family, but that it might be for the best if they just moved on to where they needed to be, at last.

I wasn't certain if it ever worked. But it made me feel a bit better and it seemed like the polite and courteous way to handle the little moments that popped up from time to time.

But then, after a while, things got worse. The flashpoint for all of this activity in the basement was probably when my girlfriend was down there doing laundry one afternoon and something charged out at her from the shadows. She screamed, dropped the basket, and ran upstairs. Later, when I got home from work she told me what had happened.

As she told it, she didn't quite see anything but there was this immense rush of anger and rage towards her from the darkened doorway. In her mind, she saw a man in his forties, wearing overalls and a workshirt coming at her -- not that she literally "saw" him. It was just the impression she had when the something rapidly came towards her out of the shadows.

After hearing this, I felt like I had no choice but to tell her what I had experienced a few weeks earlier and what i thought it meant.

One afternoon a few months earlier, I had been cleaning house -- working my way from the front to the back. Once I had finished up the kitchen, I went back to my daughter's bedroom to straighten up and vacuum. It was a warm summer's day, but the little room was cool and even a little clammy. I'd been working hard for a number of hours, so being sweaty and tired probably contributed to the clamminess.

And I'd been up late working the night before, so I was pretty drowsy and, for some reason I can't quite explain, I decided to lie down on my daughter's bed and take a quick nap.

And as I slept, I dreamt that there was a man in the room with me. He was older, maybe fifty years old or so, and heavyset. He was wearing a pair of dark blue stained pants and a white workshirt.

Anger was pouring off of him. I was lying on the bed and he was standing over me. His thick hands were fumbling with his belt and for a moment I was frozen with fear until I broke out of it and literally threw myself up and out of the dream before anything else happened.

I woke in the room, everything as before, with the strongest feeling that I had narrowly escaped something very nasty happening to me.

The cat was gone.

After that, I didn't give my daughter too much grief about not wanting to sleep in her room. And I stepped up my nightly rounds and prayers for protection.

I was, in all honesty, extremely angry and I wasn't about to let anything fuck with me and my family.

As a test, I deliberately went back a few weeks later and took another nap. And I had, more or less, the same dream as before -- which is rare for me as I don't typically have recurring dreams.

My description of the man I had seen in my dream seemed to fit very well with what my girlfriend had experienced/seen in the basement. There was obviously something or someone very strong in the house and they weren't exactly passive towards us.

Once we had discussed it and come to our own understanding of what was there -- we never discussed it with the children, of course -- the events started getting more frequent and worse.

I'd get up in the morning to get ready for work only to find that, after waiting for a few minutes, the water in the shower was still ice cold. Checking in the basement, I'd find that the pilot light had gone out. A minor irritation, really. And it didn't happen every day or even once a week. But I had a very strong feeling that someone was trying lure me down into the basement. Re-lighting the pilot light is a frustrating, time consuming task and doing it with your back to a huge open area of darkness isn't pleasant. The feelings of being observed and vulnerable were hard to keep in check.

And then there was the sudden misbehavior of the clothes dryer. We'd put a load in and come back an hour later to find that the dryer was off and the clothes were still damp. At first, I chalked it up to forgetfulness -- it was easy to load the dryer and put the quarters in but forget to hit the START button. But after a number of times, I was very conscious of making sure that I had . . . only to find that, somehow, the dryer had shut off. I thought that it could have been that the dryer door was loose and coming open during the cycle, but the latch seemed tight enough there was nothing heavy enough to knock it open

A few times, I heard it happen. I'd be upstairs in the kitchen, the sound of the dryer was audible through the basement door . . . and then it would suddenly shut off.

I'd go down to check, only to find nothing out of order. Just a dryer that wasn't running as it should be.

I think it was the dryer that drove my girlfriend over the edge a little bit. At one point she went down to check the laundry and found that it was off again. She got so mad that, as she restarted it, I heard her yell "God damn it, knock this shit off asshole!" It seemed to work and we didn't have any more problems with the dryer for a week or two.

At that point, I'd already been fighting back in my own way. I laid down a fat stripe of pure, kosher salt across the doorway leading into the larger area of the basement. Many cultures view salt as a purifier and a barrier to negative or evil spirits. Whether or not it worked was beside the point -- it helped focus things and increase our sense of protection.

Also, I picked up on my girlfriend's tactic of yelling at the spirit. If I had to go down there to take care of the dryer or the pilot light, I'd keep up a loud and aggressive dialogue directed to the ghost. I didn't know his name or who he was, but I knew he was there and that if I didn't go after him he was probably going to come after me. And, when I'm angry, I can be pretty fierce.

The very aggressive tone and profanity (our neighbors probably thought we were crazy) not only made us feel better, but it seemed to have a tendency to push the presence back into the deeper part of the basement and leave us alone.

During one of the quieter periods, I had an experience late one evening which opened my eyes to the true nature of the situation and who we were dealing with.

It was, as I said, late at night and I was doing what I usually did after everyone went to bed -- I was up sitting at the table, writing. And, as is often the case these days, I was very tired. It had been a long week and I had stayed up fairly late for a number of evenings. As is so often the case, I was starting to doze off after an hour or so. But I had a lot to finish and a deadline for the story I was working on, so I would shake myself awake and keep moving as best I could.

Eventually, I dozed off. As with my dream in my daughter's room, I dreamt that I was sitting right where I was before I fell asleep. That is, in my dream I was sitting at the table with my notebook open in front of me.

Standing next to me (in my dream, remember, just a dream) was the man. He was facing me, with his face thrust forward just inches from mine. His mouth was gaping open, jaw extended, chin thrust forward almost to my shoulder. His body was hunched over, as though he were hanging there, suspended next to me.

For a brief moment, I had a flash of insight -- a belt hanging from a clothes rod in a closet, that silent cavern of a mouth yawning open at my should, a strangled scream.

And then I woke up, still sitting at the table, all alone in the room.

The next day I told my girlfriend what had happened, what I had dreamt and what I thought it meant. A few months after that, our lease was up and we opted to move to a nicer place in Heritage Hill.

In the last few months leading up to the move, things quieted down somewhat. There weren't as many pilot light and dryer episodes as there had been. And there was a sense that whatever/whoever was there was just waiting patiently for us to leave.

Only one last thing sticks out in my memory: Evening and I'm down in the basement getting the laundry when I catch a glimpse of something in the corner of my eye and there's a rush from the darker part of the basement towards me. Immediately, I turn and move forward into the dark, shouting down whatever was there. I don't remember everything that I said, but I know that at one point I said "I'll fucking choke you, pal, you're so fucking tough. I'm not scared of you at all!"

I feel a little ashamed of that now. Whatever was there, whoever it was, they obviously came to a bad end and there must have been a lot of hatred and despair weighing them down to that place. Like a hurt animal, they were just lashing out -- something more damaged than evil, I think. I don't know why my earlier efforts to reach out and help them didn't work. Would that it had.

Last thing I did before handing back the keys was to give it one last shot. We prayed together -- the kids and my girlfriend's father and me -- standing in the empty dining room, holding hands. We thanked God for blessing our time there and we asked Him to watch over and bless the people who would come in after us.

When the others went out to the car, I took a last look through to make sure we didn't forget anything. Then I went down to the basement, stood in the dark for a moment, and said to whatever was there that it was time for all of us to move on to a better place.

I don't know if it worked or not.

Before I went back upstairs, I swept away the salt that I'd poured across the doorway.

Not sure why, really. I suppose I was a little embarrassed by my own superstition and I was worried that my landlord would ask about it. I didn't think I'd have a very good answer.

And that's where it ends. I know there are a lot of questions left to be answered, I have a lot of my own.

The only thing I have to offer is this postscript: A few weeks after we moved out, I got a call from the landlord ( a terrific guy and one of the best landlords I've ever had) asking me if I had ever noticed any trouble in the basement. Apparently the new tenants have reported that the pilot light on the hot water heater has a tendency to go out for no apparent reason. I don't know much about the people who moved in after us but can't help but wonder if they too have other stories to tell.