Real Horror Stories

Andy

We moved around quite a bit when I grew up. All within the same town though. When I was about... 10, we moved into this bigger, somewhat older (but not too old) house. We were renting it actually, as my parents had just gone through a divorce, so it was now myself, my mom, my brother and my new step dad.

Anyway, I actually loved the house, even looking back. But still, there was some creepy shit that went on there. The basement was this huge open area, we had turned it into something of a games room. I spent a lot of time down there but looking back, the architecture of it gives me the creeps. It was too... perfect. Too plain, as well. Leading from the basement, there was a corner that had two doors. One door that led to an old bathroom, which the owner decided to keep locked for some reason (I never saw inside it in the three years I lived there) and the second door led down into this really narrow hallway which was also the furnace room. In this hallway was the final door. It too was a really narrow doorway, and it too was locked by the owner's choice. According to my mom, who saw the inside of the room when first meeting the owner, it was bigger than our game's room and full of old, weird stuff.

Within the first few months, we had a lot of problems with the security system, and smoke detector. The owners of the house (who lived way north) were older and quite wealthy and had this lovely house wide alarm thingy. Every time a door leading outside was opened, a two tone alarm would sound, like when you enter a store to alert an employee. Same sound. There were little speakers in each room, which doubled as a microphone intercom system, so you could hear the door alarm (as well as the smoke detector) in any room in the house. Anyway, for the first few months like I said, the the smoke detector alarm system gave us huge problems. It would go off randomly, for long periods of time and then just stop beeping. It was frustrating but we weren't quite familiar with how to work it so whatever. One day though, we got fed up so we called the security company. The support guy looked on his computer and responded hesitantly, clearly baffled. According to his computer, our alarm system was disconnected and should have been inactive. Yet there it was, blaring in our ears.

One evening, I was home alone. This is the middle of winter in the middle of Alberta, at night, so it is dark. I'm upstairs, in this loft right above the front door, on the computer. I can't remember where my family was, but I hear the door alarm beep, meaning that a door has been opened. The intercom is right at the desk so I hear the beep clearly, but the door itself is far off, too far to be the front door; it must have been the side door or the door connecting to the garage, both of which are twenty feet down a hallway from the front door which is right below me. I hear the door close again. It can't be the garage because I didn't hear the big garage door open. Footsteps are coming down the hallway beneath me, relatively quickly. I can tell whoever is walking is wearing big boots, so I figure it is my step dad home early from work. I can't remember if they suddenly stopped or I just stopped paying attention to them, but I do know that I never heard that door alarm go off again, and a few minutes later when I went downstairs, there was no one else in that damned house.

This is possibly totally explainable, but we moved out of that house when I was 13 or so. I remember my first night in the new house, I woke up in the middle of the night, I am almost positive I was awake and not dreaming, and I heard that damned alarm again. I was about to get up and try to turn it off when I heard one of my parents get out of bed, mutter to themselves and start fiddling with it. I went back to sleep. In the morning I mentioned to my mom that she had to get out of bed on our first night here. She looked at me puzzled and said that no alarm went off last night.

I found out only a year or two ago that the house we rented with the alarm issues was actually a house that my mom knew of when she was in high school. Apparently there was a house fire that a boy died in. I'm actually kind of tearing up a bit because it is creeping me out. His name was Andy. She said he died of smoke inhalation, in that very room the owner kept locked up.