“A Place for Dead Roads” by Other Passengers which clocks in at 8:41.

Tomorrow is Halloween. The time for spooks and ghouls and ghastly tales of the macabre and tricks and treats. In the spirit of the holiday I’d like to share a story with you. It’s my story, it is an entirely true story. In fact, the events that occurred are more accurately retold in this particular story than in many of the other true life tales I’ve told in the 8+ series. This is a true, honest, ghost story. As for the song, well, nothing goes better with a ghost story on Halloween than a bit of the old Other Passengers. The title of the song, as you will see, is a somewhat of an intentional coincidence.

I don’t actually believe in ghosts. That is, I tend towards the skeptical/scientific school of thought when it comes to unexplained phenomenon, even though I made my parents buy me the Mysteries of the Unknown series as a kid. I read all of those books and love the mysterious, but I’m reasonable… UFOs? Could be aliens, I guess. I mean, I wish little grey aliens were visiting our planet. But realistically UFOs are nothing more than unexplained things in the sky. Likely advanced military technology I’d guess, but what do I know? I don’t, and that’s all I can say for sure. Bigfoot? As much as I’d love for there to be a massive, undiscovered, species of great apes hiding out in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, I can’t really just up and believe they actually exist. Ghosts? Now this one hits a bit closer to home, knowing that we all might one day end up as ghosts, and surely everyone has had a creepy feeling or two before… But I haven’t technically seen a ghost, so I’m still reticent to say I believe in them. Notice I said “seen” - I haven’t seen any ghosts, but I do have a ghost story to tell you. My very own -true, as in it happened to me- ghost story.

I’ll begin the way I always do… I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but if such a thing as ghosts were proven to exist, I know one house that is definitely haunted. It’s pictured above.

When I was 19 years old I moved out of the dorm I lived in during my freshman year of college and into my first house. It was an older house, likely built in the ’40s or early ’50s, that hadn’t been updated one bit since it was first constructed. The floors and walls and cabinets and heating and electrical were all original. It was the kind of house you expect college kids to live in. It was hot as hell in the summer, freezing in the winter, and fairly to very inexpensive in terms of rent. Especially since we had four people living there - plus one of the guys had his girlfriend kind of living with him in his room; so, basically there were five of us there. We loved it, it was great. Lots of fun times, parties… we did all of the things college kids do when you move out of a dorm and into your own house. BUT. But, it was creepy. It was a creepy house. You know, largely because it was an older house and, well, thinking about it now, I was only 19 and thus still a kid. So there was still an aspect of that childhood notion that everything is a little bit scary. Especially at night, in the dark, or alone.

I remember every time I would go down into the basement - the basement was a massive unfinished but completely usable concrete space where we’d hang out, break beer bottles, do our laundry, and access the mechanics of the house - going down the stairs was slightly terrifying, every time. Like I said, the house was just creepy in general. So heading into the basement to change a fuse or relight the pilot light on the oil heater was a scary prospect. Not to mention the fact that my mind raced heading down those basement stairs… unfinished stairs that were slightly rickety and were open in the back, the way that basement stairs often are. Meaning, if some psycho wanted to hide in the basement and grab my feet as I went down those stairs then he could very easily do just that. Or worse… maybe the psycho would have a knife. Psychos tend to like knives. My mind consistently fed my fear each time I went into that basement, the omnipresent spooky atmosphere of the house didn’t help. Whenever we blew a fuse and had to flip the breaker, or had to relight our oil heater’s pilot light, all of the roommates would draw straws. Nobody wanted to go into that basement alone. Often we’d go in teams of two with a flashlight each and relight the pilot light together. It was scary.

But that’s just to give you a sense of the general mood or atmosphere of the house. It was… something. Most noticeably, whenever you were alone in the house, it was just… eerie. Even in the day. That being the case; whatever, we were fine. We weren’t overly scared of the house and truly enjoyed living there. Until one night I awoke in the middle of the night to get some water from the refrigerator…

I don’t really remember the specifics of that particular night, or what I’d been doing earlier, but I woke up thirsty at about 4 or 5am - it was definitely still dark and I was half asleep. I went into the kitchen and….. I get goosebumps when I tell this story. Every time. I get full-on goosebumps at a couple of different moments when I’m telling, or apparently even when typing, this story. I’m getting them right now on my arms and legs - the effect is more impactful when I tell the story in person, but you get the idea. Anyway….. I went into the kitchen and all of the cabinets (there was a nice big wall of cabinets in the kitchen in the shape of an L), ALL of the cabinets both top and bottom were open. Just a little bit. I would say, maybe open about 4 or 5 inches each. Every single cabinet door in the kitchen, open to the same degree.

Just the site of this was pretty creepy, it was late at night and dark, and it snapped me from half-sleepy to awake in the blink of an eye. I got a rollercoaster “I’m scared” feeling in my stomach and then I realized it was likely one of my roommates who had played a trick on me. Because, clearly, these cabinets were put this way by a person with purpose. It wasn’t as if they were all jarred open by an earthquake or something. I shut them, got my water, and went back to bed. Didn’t bring it up the next morning so as to not give the cabineteer the joy of hearing how scared I was at first sight of the phenomenon, so I just let it go. And then it happened again.

It was about a week later. At this point, with nobody in the house mentioning the cabinet caper, I was a bit extra timid when I went into the kitchen at night. But this second occurrence was during the day. Nobody else was home and I got that same rollercoaster “I’m scared” feeling in my stomach when I walked into the kitchen and saw that sight. All of the cabinets both top and bottom were open, again. Just a little bit, in the same exact manner as before: maybe open about 4 or 5 inches each. This wasn’t like someone had just run through the kitchen opening cabinets, but was rather as though someone took their time in a very deliberate manner and opened each door exactly the same amount. All open just a little bit, just so. Creepy - extremely - but I didn’t let it get the best of me for whatever reason. Skepticism won out, and I was certain that whoever had been home last was setting me up. Until it happened again.

Another week or so later, middle of the night, I went into the kitchen and there they were again. All of the cabinets open, everyone else was fast asleep. I decided to address the issue (finally) and went and woke up my roommate and brought him into the kitchen and he was immediately like “holy shit! Wait, have you been doing this? Did you do this? That’s not funny. I’ve been in here a few times and I’ve seen these cabinets like this and I close them all and I think ‘oh, Matt’s just fucking with me’”

I interrupted him, “that’s what I’ve done! I’ve seen this before and closed them all and figured you were doing it.”

“No way, so you didn’t do it?”

“No,” I said, “you didn’t?”

“NO.”

So then we woke up everyone in the house. We brought them into the kitchen and showed them the cabinets and each person very plainly said the same thing. That it wasn’t them and they’d seen it before. It seemed that nobody was lying, everyone was palpably creeped out. We’d all seen the same thing on our own, separately. Always alone, always every cabinet open just a little bit in the same careful manner. Needless to say, we were all a bit spooked by this but at the same time, there is strength in numbers. And I think we all thought “hey, this is kinda cool”. Not sure any of us really considered how “haunted” the house actually was, we just had something unexplainable on our hands. We were the stupid white people in horror movies who never leave the haunted house even when all signs point to poltergeist.

The cabinet mystery persisted. I never saw the cabinets open themselves, never saw a roommate open them, and never were they asymmetrical or different from time to time. Whoever was doing this was good at it. I would say I saw it about 5 or 6 times total while I lived there and everyone who lived in that house confirms that they saw the same thing. And, the whole thing with going down into the basement remained hair-raising, as did any trip into the attic or any of the extremities of the house. Day or night, it was just a bit creepy. But not overly scary, like I said.

Time went on and we lived in the house and enjoyed it. I soon adopted a kitten, I still have him now. His name is Joe, he’s a black cat, and he’s my buddy. Ever since I first got him he’s been my little pal and he often follows me around the house. Does now, did then.

One afternoon, Joe was about seven months old at this point, no longer a kitten, definitely a “young man” doing his own thing, I came home from class a little early. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon? 3:00 maybe? I came home from class and had some lunch with me. I set down the lunch as I was greeted by Joe. He was a bit agitated or something it seemed. Uneasy, I could tell. But I was a new parent and didn’t know what that meant. Maybe a litter change? I walked back towards my room, towards where his litter box was just to check on that, and as I’m walking down the hall I get to the bedroom door….. and here come the chills again on my arms as I type….. I get to my bedroom door and the cat stops dead in his tracks. Stops and backs up a little while groaning ever so slightly. His reaction was a bit like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when she sees the Arnold Terminator for the first time but doesn’t know he’s ‘good’. Where she stopped so quickly that she fell down and tried to slide herself backwards away from danger… Joe stopped like that and did NOT want to go into that room. I didn’t know any better.

I crossed the threshold into my room, which was the master bedroom of the house, from the hallway through the door and I felt the icy hand of death rush over my entire body. It was as you always hear: the most bone chillingly cold sensation overwhelmed me. It felt as though I had both entered a walk-in refrigerator and gotten the worst case of the heebie jeebies in my life. My entire body shuddered and every hair raised to attention - I was scared. This wasn’t merely ‘creepy’ like the other sensations in the house; I was full-on scared. Before I could turn to look back at my cat, from inside of the room I had just entered, came a woman’s voice. Shrieking, yelling, screaming “Ahhghhghhh!” as if someone had just stabbed her with a knife or she’d just witnessed the most horrifying thing imaginable. It was the kind of scream reserved for horror movies, not real life. But this wasn’t a movie. It was a blood curdling cry of pain and it had originated, without a doubt, from within the room I was standing in. Yet, it sounded strangely detached, almost as if it was coming from just outside the window, or even from a television (there wasn’t one in the room, or even in the next room over - and remember, I reminded myself - NOBODY else was home). A rush of fright came over me as I looked around the room; nobody was in there other than myself. I summoned the courage to open the closet, which wasn’t far from where the voice sounded like it had come from… I imagined what might wait for me on the other side of the closet door but allowed myself no time to second guess the decision to open the closet.

Nothing. Even in the face of such ghostly evidence, I quickly assumed that the scream had come from my neighbor’s house, just on the other side of the wall and window closest to where it had sounded like this scream originated. I ran out of the house and around the side to see if someone needed help - two older women lived in the house next door. When I turned the corner I could plainly see no cars in the driveway. I peeked into their house and looked around the yard. Nobody was around, not one person in site. I went to the next door neighbor on the other side, nobody home. An unpleasant feeling overwhelmed me as I walked back across the front yard. Finally it had occurred to me that I did not want to be in that house alone, at least not at the moment. I couldn’t think, I didn’t know what to do. However, I knew enough to know that I had to get my cat out of there.

I walked back into the house and grabbed the cat carrier and found my cat sitting on the floor in the kitchen, staring up at the corner cabinets. I paused for a second, almost expecting the cabinets to all open before my eyes, and then reached down and grabbed Joe and put him in the carrier and dashed out the door. On the way I grabbed my lunch (Wendy’s, I remember now clearly) and walked out to the driveway and stood by my car. I knew someone was due home very shortly, so I stood there with the cat carrier resting on the hood of my car next to my lunch. I’d lost my appetite, didn’t eat. I just waited. I kept my eyes on the windows of my room, half expecting to see a ghostly apparition standing there. I was shaking slightly and asking the cat if he’d heard what I heard. And I waited.

By the time my roommates returned home I’d calmed down a bit. I felt stupid standing there outside with my cat and a takeout bag of fast food and I explained, in a brief version, that I’d heard and experienced something very strange. And scary. We went back into the house, had a look around together (strength in numbers) and decided it was safe to be in there. So we stayed, hung out that night, and lived in the house for another couple of months until our lease was up. You’d think that might be enough to scare us, or at least me, off for good. You watch movies like Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror and you think “why won’t they just get out?!” but that wasn’t really an option. I felt slightly foolish about the whole thing. I considered, even assumed, that it might be a ghost - an actual phantasm, in my house - but I was young enough, dumb enough, and macho enough to want to go right back in there and try to forget about it. How did I sleep in that room that night? I didn’t actually, I slept on the couch. But eventually I started sleeping in my room and nothing that extreme ever happened again; in fact, I’m not sure if the thing with the cabinets ever even happened again after that. The unpleasant ambiance of the house remained but somehow I was able to block the experience and keep it from dominating my thoughts. I just, kind of, moved on. Strangely. But I always knew that it was real, it had happened, I simply couldn’t explain what it was.
–
I didn’t tell the story to anyone else right away, but about a year later we had moved to another house and I was at my job and the discussion of ghosts came up. I was an intern at some video production company and people were talking about whether or not they believed in ghosts, sharing their own haunting tales of “strange feelings” and what not, and I decided to tell my story. I began, “well, I don’t really believe in ghosts… but if there is such a thing as ghosts, I know a house that is haunted.”

I’ve since told the story numerous times, always the exact same way, and it’s lost a bit of the luster over time. But that first time I retold it there at work that day, it being the first time I’d told anyone other than my roommates in that very house, I could feel fear washing over my body. I got goosebumps and likely turned white, I could see that I was making my coworkers slightly uneasy as I told the story.

While I recounted my experience, I could tell that one of the guys in the room was especially affected by what I was saying. The look on his face was puzzled, curious, but also slightly frightened. It was as if the story had really hit home with him, or something. I didn’t know what, exactly, but I could tell there was something. And as soon as I finished telling my story he said “where… where was this house? Where did you live?” So I told him.

With honest astonishment he said “NO. WAY.” He said, “you’re not going to believe this, but that is right around the corner from where I grew up and when I was very young, about five years old, I remember a girl, a little girl, got hit - that lived in that house - got hit by a car and was killed directly in front of that house.”

Now, it’s not that great of a stretch of imagination to connect the dots… if you want to think about and explain a potential ghost and that scream as they might relate to the real life events described by my coworker… I was standing in my bedroom, the master bedroom, where you can see directly out the window (the windows on the left side in the picture above) and onto the road in front of the house. Might the little girl’s mother have been in her room that day that her daughter died? Might she have seen the whole thing happen before her eyes, unable to act or do anything other than scream at the site of her daughter getting hit by a car? If she had, there’s no question that her reaction would’ve been something like what I heard. But again, I don’t know, I’m not sure I believe in ghosts.

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