First Person Exploits Into the Unknown: I live in a haunted house

RURAL BATTLEFORD — "Mommy?"

That's the word my mother used to hear late at night, long after her children were asleep. She'd search the dark, empty house and find my brother and me asleep.

The quiet voice whispering 'Mommy' is just a fragment of the weird, unexplained, and unknowable happenings that have followed us in our 100-year-old Frankenstein house.

In the mid-1960s, a family northwest of Wilkie was looking for a home. They placed bids on two old train station houses, one in Lett and one in Traynor. Both towns are now gone. When they surprisingly won both houses for a combined $200, they moved one to their farm, and used the other for lumber to fix up the house. This mix-match of energies and houses resulted in our 'Frankenstein house.'

Our house is oddly-unique, and this mix-match of energies and houses resulted in our 'Frankenstein house.' No, there aren't any staircases that lead to nowhere, and no doors open into blank walls, but there are two parts of our house, one old, one new. The older section of the house from Traynor is reminiscent of a few architectural features in buildings still standing in Fort Battleford.

In 2012, when my family moved into our home, it came with the itchy, prickly-haired feeling of being watched. Every night, when the sun set, 11-year-old me would stalk out every window in the house and ensure nothing could see inside.

When I tell people, "I grew up in a haunted house," I rarely meet disbelievers.

Everyone has had the oddly unexplained phenomena; seemingly teleporting keys, strange coloured hairs in the basement sink, odd noises at night, and lights turned on when it doesn't seem possible.

My family and I have the typical haunted house experiences: radios turning on while unplugged, the sound of heavy boots walking up the stairs and stopping in front of bedroom doors, knocking on doors in sets of three, malfunctioning electronics, and chairs moving across the floor.

But five wildly dramatic stories still give me chills.

For the majority of the year, nothing happens. But the strange and unexplainable begins to amp up towards Halloween and Easter. Now, with Halloween drawing closer, and when even the disbelievers can't deny the feeling of the unknown in the shifting air, anyone can experience the unexplained.

The Levitating String
When you enter our house and head straight through the dining room into the hallway, you've already entered the old part of the house. In its heyday, thousands of people would walk that same floor every month.

If you look to your left, you'll see a staircase that winds up to the second story with a landing at the top, and a long string hangs from the light at the top of the stairs. Naturally, the light bulb is centred above the landing, and the string hangs against the wall along the stairs.

When we moved into the house, we removed the bright orange shaggy rug but haven't changed the wood panelling that reeks of the 70s. But the bones of the staircase are 100 years old, and they still creak as they might have in 1920 when they were built or the 1950s when it was moved 20 miles to its final resting place south of Battleford.

One night, as I was preparing to go upstairs to bed, the string was floating, perfectly still, almost two feet from the wall, never touching the sides of the landing. I thought nothing of it oddly until I grabbed the string, which went limp in my hand, fluttering back against the wall.

No one could figure it out, and I often wonder how or why it floated. The only reasonable explanation is that someone was holding it in their outstretched fist in the darkness of the upper landing. Those same stairs creak at night like someone is walking them in heavy boots, and it stops outside my bedroom door.

The Halloween Party
We planned a Halloween Party a few years ago, much to the chagrin of those living with us in our house.

They showed their displeasure by locking doors that could only be locked from the inside, exploding light bulbs above our heads, and etching hand prints in the ice in my brother's window that refused to come off. But what really sticks in my head is the tealight mystery.

My mother and I were making Halloween decorations for the party, little chandeliers with black toilet paper tubes and tealight candles. We were home alone and noticed that our meticulously planned and counted 15 tealights were now 14. Irritated, I joked that it was a ghost.

Determined that our resident ghost should stop playing around, I loudly requested for the spirit to return it to us and that'd we'd leave the room and wait five minutes for its hasty return.

I thought it was silly, but when we returned 15 minutes later, having long forgotten our request, we found our 15th tealight sitting in the centre of the coffee table.

The Girl
Every couple of years, our dog likes to play in the hallway. He runs, jumping and barking, wagging his tail and trying to catch something seemingly invisible in the hallway. He runs the length of the hallway twice before he finally stops and acts like he's done nothing.

He's done it six times, and it wasn't until my brother said,

"It looks like he's playing with someone."

In my subsequent research of the train station, I undiscovered a chilling fact: a four-year-old girl died of tuberculosis in our house.

Hello?

But only some things happen inside. My family plays hide-and-go-seek in the dark. We've done it, usually at Easter or Thanksgiving, but sometimes we'd do it during the rest of the year. One April, we were playing as usual.

Games can get quite vicious since we're a competitive family at best, so I'd decided to seek out the old corrals, which seemed a perfect hiding spot. There are ruts deeper than my foot where the slough has dried up, and it's almost impossible to walk.

There was no moon, so it was pitch black, and all I could see is the general outline of the distant wooden planks. Then I heard a voice.

To this day, the voice is almost beyond description. It was metallic, almost scratchy. It echoed, but it also fell flat. The inflection felt wrong, and the word rose like question marks in odd places. It was angry, but also calm. Whatever it was, it spoke contradictorily. The voice said only one word.

"Hello?"

It felt more like a statement, decisive evidence of its existence. I have never questioned its existence. The voice was so wrong. I have never questioned if it could be the work of a living human.

I've spent years wondering why it chose that word. And after I'd run half a kilometre, I stopped and found my family on the other side of the farm yard. The owner of that voice stayed hidden in the dark corrals and, unless it's left, still lives there.

Mom's Red Sweater

Our farm is in the middle of nowhere. We're backed away from the road, our quarters of land are backed onto an extensive co-op pasture, and we're kilometres from the nearest town and neighbour.

Once, my mother and I planned a walk into the wild prairie behind our house. For whatever reason, she set out before me, and I was set to follow her up the road and into the pasture.

I followed her a few minutes later, and I couldn't see her. I walked further out into the field and could only hear myself breathing. Knowing she could have gone left into the field or right up the hill into the trees, I waited.

Nothing.

Then, as I was about to phone her, I saw my mother in her signature red sweater standing in the nearest clump of trees, just obscured enough to block most of her body. I called out to her, and she didn't respond, only walking deeper into the trees.

Determined to catch her, I followed, only to find the trees empty. It wasn't until I'd exited the trees on the opposite side, did I see my mother. She was standing just inside another further set of trees, her red sweater glowing in the evening light. Again, she sunk into the trees, and I set after her.

Once again, the trees were empty, and she was still missing. I saw her sweater again, standing almost out of sight, further into the natural pasture.

I'm a proponent of following my intuition, and my gut was screaming at me. The air felt colder as I watched my mother and her sweater disappear into the third group of trees. Then she came up behind me.

"What are you doing?" She asked, and I had to tell her I watched her walk into the trees ahead of me seconds ago. I found out later that the woman in the red sweater was leading me toward an old homestead that had long turned into dirt and grass again.