FEATURED TALES
16
Tennessee Witch
House
I ran across
your website and the first thing I thought of was the house I lived in six years
ago. I still think about it all the time, and I've never lived in a place more
haunted since.
In 1999, I moved to the lakes region of Tennessee to rent a huge house in the
woods. I had one roommate, and although the rent was surprisingly low for the
opulent dwelling, we didn't hesitate for a minute. We were young, the house was
on the lake, and it looked like the perfect place to have band practice and
parties. We signed a year's lease and moved in.
The house was
very old, had been built sometime in the late 1880's. The only thing about the
house that had been changed was they added a gas heater. The landlord warned us
not to turn it up too high because it was old, and to keep the temperature dial
turned up to six or seven, and no higher. We were very careful when we first
moved in to follow her instructions.
It was about three days after we got settled into the house that I noticed
something odd about it. For one thing, our cats ( we had four of them) didn't
want to be in the house anymore. When we'd force them to stay inside, they would
act strangely. They would seemingly look at things we couldn't see, hissing and
so on. Once I was standing in the kitchen and I heard what clearly to me sounded
like a cat in distress. I could hear it hissing, mewling, and crying. I ran from
the kitchen into this weird little room in between the kitchen and back
bedrooms, and when I looked into the doorway, I saw our cat. It was standing in
the corner of the room, pawing at the air. Every hair on it's body was standing
straight up, and it was hissing and spitting at something directly in front of
it. I couldn't see anything at all, so when I walked over to pick up the cat, it
darted around my feet, running off. Immediately I felt like I had walked into a
waterfall of ice! It was EXTREMELY cold in that corner where I was standing, so
much that I could see my breath. This was in the middle of August, and it was
hot in that house. I knew something weird was going on, so I tensed up, turned
around, and started to leave the room. While I did, I had this horrible feeling
something was standing about three inches away from my face, glaring at me. I
can't describe the feeling any more than to say it felt like someone was staring
at me, very close to me. It was an eerie feeling, and I thought about it for the
rest of the day.
Over the next month, things got much stranger. For one thing, none of the doors
would stay shut/locked/open. You could shut a door, lock it, then come back and
it would be standing open. You could open a door, leave, and come back to find
it shut, etc etc. It drove us CRAZY! Besides that, our things started
disappearing, then reappearing where we clearly didn't leave them. Claw marks
started appearing on the walls near the ceiling...it looked like someone had
taken a knife and gouged it into the wood. You couldn't take pictures in the
house. The film would come out white, black, or with colored balls of lights all
over it. We heard what sounded to me like people running through the front room
and around the house. In the hallway, puddles of water appeared on the floor,
despite the fact that there were no pipes near it. We had a lot of band
equipment, and it would shut on and off for no reason. We rapidly started to
hear a lot of things that just weren't possible. I awoke one night to hear a
woman crying in the root cellar. THAT bothered me. I heard it for a minute, then
it would fade out like a radio signal. All the sounds were like that, you would
hear them clearly, then they would fade away. We woke up another night because
it sounded like there was a party going on in the living room. I could hear
glasses clinking, people talking, laughing, and so on. Of course when we went
out, there would be no one there. We often heard late at night what sounded like
music or people talking coming out of the air. I know that sounds crazy, but we
weren't the only ones who heard it. Our friends could hear it, too.
Things
started to take a much more darker turn, the longer we stayed...
Chris and I have always been best friends, but we started fighting. We had never
fought before, at least not like this. Over the stupidest thing, we would be
screaming at each other. The whole house seemed to reek of disharmony and
discord. Also, around this time, both of us became depressed, which was odd.
We're both normally very upbeat, energetic people. There was a very negative,
evil atmosphere in that house. Around this time we started hearing people
running or walking through the house at night, up the cellar stairs, and what
sounded like three or more people running through the backyard. One night I was
sitting in my bedroom, and I could hear rustling outside the window. As I
started to turn towards it, there was a loud BANG! on my window. I saw the
glass shaking, as if someone had just struck it with their fist. It scared me
badly, but we learned from living in the house that the entity or whatever it
was would always frighten you worse when you were alone. It was almost like it
could feed off of fear. I started to walk out of the room, when I heard a louder
BAM! on my bedroom DOOR. I felt trapped in the room and had a feeling like
something very bad was about to happen. Luckily for me, right then my roommate
pulled into the driveway. I was so relieved, I ran out of the room and outside
onto the deck, shivering.
I must
mention that at this time, someone or something started playing with the gas
heater. It would turn it all the way up when we weren't paying attention, to a
dangerous temperature. It would routinely uplug the valves in the back so that
gas would leak into the house. We came home from the grocery store one night to
find the oven so hot it was almost glowing red. We had it dismantled and started
to use space heaters. It seemed safer.
Around this
time, I started waking up at night, every night. It felt like something was
jolting my bed, as if someone had accidentally ran into it. As this went on,
across my room, I could hear something knocking on the door of my closet, very
softly. I started sleeping in the living room. It was no better. You could hear
things moving around in the cellar below. I could lay there at night and hear
what sounded to me like someone( and not me) breathing. It would fade in and
out, and eventually I'd fall asleep. It was so weird, it was like after being so
scared for so long you started to try to adapt to it. In the meanwhile, we
started having another problem that turned out to be the worst.
We had a
dirt-floor root cellar. It was of course directly under the house, carved right
into the earthen walls. It was creepy as hell down there. It just didn't feel
right, and that feeling of something staring at you would increase until you
were nearly suffocating with anxiety. We had also heard what sounded to us like
a woman crying down there, very late at night. This made sense to me after what
I learned. Around this time, we learned that the man who built that house had
been accused of witchcraft and murder. He supposedly practiced black magic, had
been accused of being possessed, and locked his wife up in the cellar, and she
ended up 'disappearing' down there, or so he claimed. He was charged but never
convicted of her disappearance, and became a recluse in that house. After he
died there, the house became a church, and then a school. We learned all this
from a family member of the people who owned the house, and also learned they
had trouble renting it. Needless to say, after learning that, the cellar REALLY
creeped me out.
Around this time, towards the end, it was the cellar where we had the most
problems..
The cellar
door would NOT stay shut. It had a hook-latch that locked the door, but it
didn't matter. You could lock it all you wanted and come back to find it open.
Also, the cellar started to smell strange. At times it would smell sweet, like
lavender. At other times it smelled overpoweringly of rot and decay. Most
disturbing, something started beating on the floor overhead. If you were
standing in the living room, directly under your feet something would smash into
the floor. This happened one time to my friend Chris, so he went into his
bedroom. While he was walking in, he heard knocking coming from the floor under
his feet, as if it were following him. Worst of all, and last, we were sitting
in the living room, and there was quite a bad storm outside. As we were sitting
there, all the lights went off. We shrugged, lit some candles, and sat back
down. Then we heard the 'Scrreech!' of the old cellar door opening. I looked at
my friend. now was NOT the time for having to deal with the cellar. I decided I
would sit there no matter what happened, because I wasn't going to confront that
thing in the dark.
Meanwhile, we
heard ( and I can't be more precise than this) what sounded like two people
fighting in the cellar. It literally sounded like two people rolling around,
knocking things over, and so on. At this time we were both fear-stricken and
couldn't move if we'd wanted to. About that same time, the commotion stopped.
Then, VERY clearly, we heard a THUD...then another THUD..then another
THUD...Something was coming up the stairs! In my mind's eye, I could picture a
man with heavy boots on, dragging his way up. I started edging off the couch for
the front door. So did my friend. I was clutched onto him so tightly I doubt he
could have moved without dragging me regardless. Then, the footsteps we heard
weren't walking but THUDDING up the stairs, running up the stairs! We bolted off
the couch and out the front door. We stood on the porch, looking through the
front windows of the house. Right then, a light, VERY bright flashed from INSIDE
the house. It almost looked like someone had taken a picture with a camera
flash. We watched all this in silent horror. We LIVED in that house. It had
gotten so bad, but this was too much. We had signed a lease, and didn't want to
break it, but money was quickly becoming the least of my worries. Everyone we
knew called it 'The Witch House', and you would have to be insane to want to
stay there alone.
We ended up
leaving three months before the lease was up. I didn't care about the money.
Things had slowly degenerated since we moved in, and all I wanted to do was
leave. If I knew then what I know now, I might have stayed. I've experienced
hauntings before, but never so many things at once or something that was so
hostile. It clearly didn't want anyone there. By the time it was all over, we
were more than happy to leave...
- Helena-
