Alright gang, sit down, buckle up, grab a fucking drink. If you saw me recently in my last appearance from the cave(Merrimack Valley Horror Book Fest!), you may have heard a bit of this, but IT IS TIME. ON THIS EVE OF ALL HALLOW’S EVE. To tell the story of my currently haunted house.
Yeah. This isn’t a “remember when I grew up in the house that became the basis for Poltergeist?” THIS IS HAPPENING. TO ME. RIGHT NOW.
It all starts with the first week moving in, way back in July. From day one, I could feel…something. I’m a sensitive, have been all my life, so this is just The Norm for me. But I didn’t pick up anything in the house. So I went for a walk around the yard.
First off–the yard is fucking weird. It’s overgrown to shit because the house has been empty for so long and the landlord has decided that the tenant handles the yard. So its just..everything everywhere. Blackberries are taking over what I’m sure was once a tame hedge thing around the front porch. Spearmint taller than me grows along the west side of the house. Possibly still living fruit trees, maybe peaches? Maybe already dead? And surrounding the whole house is fucking deadly night shade. Cause why not.
Good to know I can both have free food (we also have asiatic pear trees) and murder people without having to go to the store. Thank’s Grafton house!
But the land is definitely charged. The wind sounds like it’s talking and I keep feeling something tugging on the belt loops of my jeans. And yet, nothing feels dark or pissy. It feels playful. My initial assessment- mischievous land spirits. Alright. Keep an eye on the house keys. Put up warding spells to keep them out of my room so none of my shit goes missing. Alright. We can work with that.
Then it gets…worse. As all such stories do. Its week two in the new place and already things are not going well. The pool needs more work than we realized. A toilet gasket decides now is the time to die and flood our basement, resulting in the mold war I’m still currently battling. And the more furniture my roommates start to build, the more pissed off the spirits in the yard get. Finally, my old housemates come over to drop off a few boxes that got left behind and see the new place.
The first words they say- “You realize this is Native American land, right?”
Fuck. My. Life.
So we walk the yard. The wind? Yeah its definitely talking. “Oh. Oh good. That’s…that’s good.”
So! I do my digging. Turns out all of Grafton is built on Nipmuc land. Or what was Nipmuc land. See, the early settlers had a really good relationship with the Nipmuc. Right up until they fled during the Native American wars, and we the white assholes we are sold their land out from under them, because the white people and the Nipmuc got friendly enough to have children together. So the Nipmuc come back to find the half-Nipmuc half white-guy asshole left to safeguard their land has sold everything but TWO ACRES.
And of course, I don’t just live anywhere in Grafton, oh no no no. I’m not that fucking lucky. I live just a few yards away from Hassanamesit, a hiking trail and land preserve set aside by a former resident of the road I live on who did some literal digging and found evidence of native occupation dating back thousands of years. That land can now no longer be fucked with by anyone, as its part of the Grafton Land Trust, but it still can’t be given back to the Nipmuc. It is, at least, preserved for all time as a teeny tiny park.
A teeny tiny park which my teeny tiny dog will now no longer walk in because of the shit that’s gone down at my house.
BUT I DIGRESS. Let’s back track to my initial discovery of all this shit.
Because the Nipmuc only have two goddamn acres, they’re not even considered a real tribe (that’s how much we fucked them over). So finding information about how to appease Nipmuc spirits is limited, to say the least. I had been using whiskey, thinking they were fae or some other nature spirit, but that’s gotten me nowhere. A friend says to try tobacco. Okay, I say, I will go to the local witchcraft store that Friday and buy some tobacco and do A Thing for them in the yard.
We never get to Friday.
On Tuesday of that week, my roommate and I come home from our shift at Target to find one of the doors to the outdoors wide open. Sunny the small dog is asleep on the couch. But my cat is nowhere to be found.
If you would like to take a guess on how long it took me to go into a full blown panic attack, the answer is fifteen minutes. We go through every corner of the house. We comb through the yard. I yell for my neighbor whose outside with the horses and give him my cats description and tell him to please fucking check on his barn cats and see if she’s with them.
One hour of hell later, I find Tuscany in the closed garage. No idea how she got in there.
And no one opened that door. Because its the door leading out to the pool, which is fully fenced in, so its not used to actually leave the house. We check with the other flat mates–they assure us it and all doors were closed tight when they left.
Because everything is still in boxes, I can’t find my sage. But I do find my witch’s holy water and go over every fucking goddamn door and window because Fuck No am I going through this shit again. You fuck with me, that’s fine. As a sensitive I am used to it from spirits, but you try and fuck with my cat? You are as dead to me as the president of our country.
My angry magic works for about a month. Twice when I’m home on the lower level by myself, I hear what sounds like a little girl saying hello. Once when I’m on the couch reading a book downstairs, once when I’m in the bathroom from the other side of the door. Each time I call my cat; she’s on the upper level and nowhere near me. I ask the spirit to come talk to me, and say I’ll help in any way I can. But that’s all I get.
The roommates get a lot more. While my bedroom and its many hexes and wardings keep me undisturbed, my roommates get the full plethora of spooky shit. Roommate 1 who sleeps with Sunny the small dog in between jobs, keeps getting woken up by Sunny growling. But he’s not looking outside–he’s sitting up and staring at her bedroom doorway. She loses many hours of sleep. While trying to fall asleep, she also hears a little girl say hello. When I’m the only one home, and I’m a floor away reading a book.
Roommate 2 gets knocking and tapping when no one is even remotely moving (I’m on the lower level, Roommate 3 is playing videogames, Roommate 1 is at work) and hears a little girl say hello. She starts having trouble sleeping, which only gets worse when something physically grabs her ankle, making her fly up out of her sleep to an immediate upright position. Roommate 2 has a very bad back and can’t afford either these injuries, or the lack of sleep.
None of us communicated at all (we all work different hours and don’t see eachother much save for in passing and on weekends) until Roommate 2 got her ankle grabbed and told me everything. Then Roommate 1 told me about the dog and the voice.
And so, now with the important things unpacked (clothes and witchcraft supplies) I broke out the sage, had Roommate 1 take Sunny and sit in the lower living room with him, and went through the whole damn house top to bottom. No one has heard anything since.
Do I know if the little girl and the Native American spirits are one in the same? Honestly, I have no fucking clue. The house only dates back to 1960, but hey, anything is possible (the haunted house I grew up in was built in 1978). Am I ever going to figure out? Probably not anytime soon–free time is a foreign concept right now.
Here’s the kicker:
Sunny, since having his growling encounters with invisible people, will not step foot in the Hassanamesit woods. We can get him as far as the entrance, and he stops cold. Sunny is a three year old chihuahua terrier mix–he goes anywhere Roommate 1 or Roommate 3 go; he LOVES hiking in the woods. And he went into those woods our first week in the house no problem, before any of the incidents happened. But till this very day, he will not go in those woods.
And when I’m home alone, working in the sun room office at my desktop computer with the windows open so Tuscany can chat with Neighbor Cat, I still hear the wind talking. Sometimes it says my name.
An Andro Named Sue 