The Room
We had been in the house for a little over a year when they decided I needed to change rooms. The house had not been acting up all that much yet. My parents had been stripping wall paper and bringing the home up to liveable standards that first year. The summer had been very hot, but the first winter was rough. There was only one heater in the entire house and it was in a downstairs room. We all had to sleep in that one room to keep warm, it was the original kitchen to the home, but was now a living room. Record low temperatures we recorded that first winter and it made for interesting living conditions. There was a stick near the toilet so that the ice could be broken in order to flush it and baths were taken very quickly. You could see your breath in most areas of the home, going to school each day was a treat. As soon as winter passed, my parents decided it was time to get started on my new room.
The home had a pitched roof upstairs that made the rooms resemble tents. I wanted a space mural on my wall and the rest of the walls painted white. My father installed outlets and lights in the room and put shutters on the window for privacy. I really liked the look of the room, I was very nervous about sleeping in the room, but I figured that nothing could really hurt me. My parents had purchased new furniture for the room, including one of those 70's style egg shaped wicker chairs that hangs from a stand. I really liked that chair, I could swing around in it and pretend I was exploring space. I soon found that I could sleep in the room and that the lights had not appeared since moving in.
I guess it all started at night as I would lie down waiting to fall asleep. My floor had been covered with carpet, so I never heard footsteps, what I did hear were floorboards. The floorboards would creak when walked on. You could hear them squeak and creak under the carpet whenever anyone would walk across the room. There was an especially loud floorboard near the door to the room, I knew to step over that spot as to not make the loud squeak. At night, I would hear the floor start creaking. I told my parents about it and they said that it was just the boards going back into position from walking on it that day. It sounded like a good answer and it worked to explain the nightly noises for a while. As time went on, the floorboards started to get more active. Nightly, I would hear the sound of the loud floorboard by the door, then hear the boards creak closer and closer to my bed. They would get near the bed, travel around the room and then the loud board by the door would creak and all would be quiet. I never saw anything, just heard and smelled something. I would smell the sweet smell of lilacs whenever the boards would creak. As in my other room, I would put my head under the covers and wait for all to pass.
This continued for months, the nightly visits. In the meantime, my parents decided to take out two interior walls in the house to create a better traffic flow. Shortly after the walls were removed, things started to pick up. I was always home alone in the mornings until the school bus would pick me up. Often in the mornings, the smell of lilac perfume seemed to follow me around the house. The smell would sometimes get so intense, I would almost become sick to my stomach. Something was following me around the house in mornings, never letting itself be seen, but keeping it’s presence known. It always felt as though it were protecting me, keeping an eye out for me in the mornings to make sure all went well.
Grandmother comes to stay.
When I was around twelve, my grandmother retired and came to live with us. She was very religious and a very level headed woman. My parents had told her that I was having experiences with the home and she told them there was nothing to worry about, she didn’t believe in ghosts and figured I had an overactive imagination. She moved into the room under mine. It used to be a parlor, but had been divided at some point in history to put in a restroom. It was nice having her around, she was fun to be with and helped to keep me calm when I would get nervous with the house acting up. She had a large garden in the field that could be seen from my bedroom window and always loved to garden and read.
Knowing she was just downstairs was a comfort, but it didn’t stop things from happening. Ever since the walls were removed, the house seemed to become more agitated with us. It went from a feeling of being watched all the time, to more of a feeling that it really didn’t want us around, this was mid 1982. The floorboards in my room were a nightly occurrence and I guess it decided to step things up a notch. The hanging chair in my room was a favorite of mine. I loved swinging in that chair and all my friends wanted one as well. You could swing in the chair or bounce, it hung from it’s stand by a spring. At night the floorboards would creak as usual, but suddenly my visitor decided it needed to stay a while. The floorboards would creak to the bed, then creak over to the chair. The chair was wicker and would make cracking noises anytime anyone sat in it. I would be lying there and the floorboards would stop, then suddenly the chair would start to crackle as if being sat in. It would crackle and then the crackling would stop. By this time, I was under the covers, waiting for things to stop. I didn’t much like this and really just hoped if I didn’t pay it any attention, it would just go away. Well it didn’t go away, in fact it enjoyed swinging as well. The chair would start a slow swinging motion, side to side. The chair swinging under it’s own power was frightening enough, but soon it learned a new trick.
Since the chair hung from a spring, it could rotate in a complete circle. On many nights, the crackling of the chair would be followed with the chair slowly turning to face my bed. It would then slowly swing side to side, the wicker crackling as it swung. Needless to say, that was just more than I was really able to stand. I usually would end up sleeping on the floor in my parents room on the nights that would happen. Before long, I found myself doing strange things. I would lock myself in the room at night, thinking that it would not be able to enter. Well, all that ended up happening was that I would end up locking myself in the room with it. I learned to not be afraid, but never at really at ease. This all transpired quite some time before I ever saw the spirit.
Background Info
During this time, my parents were still remodeling the home. After removing layers of wallpaper we found, “Completed April 1882.” The James family had written on the lath and plaster walls when the upstairs had been completed. We knew little of the James family, only that they had built the house. The house was like no other farmhouse in the area, it was built entirely of oak and square nails. It has an ornate walnut hand turned staircase, something you don’t see in Kansas farm homes. The basement walls were made of two foot thick limestone blocks, the house was very sturdy. Even though the house was sturdy, very large limestone slabs had been used in the basement as a floor, these would easily rock as though something were underneath. The home had been purchased around 1900 by the Blankenship family, a very large and influential farm family in the area for many years. They continued to live there until 1977, then the home was purchased by the fellow that my parents purchased it from. It had originally been a very large farm, but over the years, the land was broken up and the farm eventually died.
As the first couple of years passed, Blankenship family members would stop in and ask if they could see the progress on the home. The farm home had always been white as long as anyone could remember. The first thing my parents did was to paint the home yellow, the trim creme and brown and all the doors bright red. Painting doors bright red convinced the locals that the people that bought the old Blankenship farm must indeed worship the devil, it didn’t help that we had a mean black dog and 3 black cats. No one knew us in the tight knit community and they weren’t used to such bright displays of color, especially bright red doors. It wasn’t until the second or third Christmas that my father, an avid Christmas light fan, decorated the house from top to bottom and they all new we indeed did not worship the devil. Over time we heard of many family stories of the Blankenships, but no one knew of the James family. It was fun to hear family stories, but some stories weren’t so fun to hear about.
The home had been labeled the spook house by the locals. For years, townsfolk would drive out and watch as lights flew around the home, going in and out of the windows. We had often wondered why cars would often park out in our driveway at night when we first moved in. They would often take off in a panic if we turned on lights when they weren’t expecting it. Many people came from out of town and didn’t realize a family was living in there, they must have thought the ghosts were about to get them.
Grandmother moves out.
By 1984, the home was coming along fine. Many of the rooms had been remodeled, the exterior repainted and heat and air conditioning had been installed upstairs and down. My parents worked hard to make the home look as though it would have at the time of it’s build. Many times, my mother would already have wallpaper picked out for a particular room before starting to scrape the old paper off. On more than one occasion, the first paper found under all the layers would nearly match the paper she had picked out to cover the room. In the hallway alone, there were 11 layers of wallpaper, the paper she had picked matched nearly perfectly. The strange habit of picking very similar styles of decoration, compared to the original decor, happened many times as the years went by. It was years after my parents had completed the outside that a neighbor brought a picture of the home dated 1884. The home looked very much like the home looked in that photo. My parents had planted bushes in the same location, put yard decor up in the same locations and even added things to the home itself that we never knew were missing from the original design, until we saw the sketching. It was clear that my parents were being guided in many of their decisions, looking back, we all were.
During this time, my grandmother started to experience things in the home. She never told anyone about them until she moved out, she didn’t want to alarm anyone. On more than one occasion, she would hear people walking up and down the stairs to the basement, doors slamming and things in her room had been moved. She decided that she was no longer comfortable living in the home and had a talk with my mother about it. She told her that she never believed in ghosts and never was one to scare easily, but there was something in the home and it she believed it to be evil. She moved into town.
Back on my own, not really.
Basically, I am just starting with background info and then building off of that. It is hard to sit and type of things that happened over 20 years ago and covered the span of a decade without leaving important things out. 