Gloaming Crackle

I’ve written this up a few times before, though I can’t find it offhand.

I grew up in an at-least-hundred-year-old-at-the-time house in rural Maine, at the end of a short dead end street by a lake. Originally it was a sort of an “in patient” cottage for the doctor who lived in the big house nearby; for over a century, until Dr. Van Wart died a few years back, there was always a doctor there; originally our property belonged to Dr. Van Wart; he split it off a while before my parents bought it, resulting in a pretty big, strangely shaped piece of property and an old house that had seen many modifications since its original construction. If you wander around and look closely, you can piece together how the house must have evolved — walls getting taken out here, rooms being extended or added there, each alteration being very much of its era and not matching anything else.

For nearly the entire time I lived there — from my birth in late 1978 to when I left for San Francisco in early 2004, a little over twenty-five years — I had a history, kept wholly to myself until toward the end — of seeing, and feeling… things. Black, shadowy human forms. Usually hunched over, staring at me. Sometimes, rarely, with (yes) red glowing eyes. It’s not like they were always around; I might go years between seeing them, or I might go weeks.

There were a few particular trouble spots where I saw them more frequently, in particular the room that used to be my parents’ room when I was very small, then became “the book room” when they moved to a new bedroom they added. My father just stacked boxes and boxes of paperback novels in there, mostly sci-fi and horror, to gather dust and silverfish; the walls, typically, were lined with bookshelves filled with two layers of books per shelf. One side of the room was assorted with old dolls (which probably didn’t help in the creep factor), and in the center was an old four-poster. When I graduated from high school, and was attending the local University branch, I cleaned out that room and wholly decorated it with my own nonsense, moving out from my shoebox-sized room I’d had since I was born. The door was also repaired of its enormous hole, formed sometime before I was aware from my father punching a panel out of it.

So. There was that room, and there was the “old basement” — the section that lay under the original part of the house, as compared to the newish, kind of bland and soggy section under the kitchen. Then there was the living room, in particular the corner by a bay window; it’s become obvious that this was a different room from the back half of the living room — probably a bedroom. Finally, there’s the hallway from the kitchen, past the bathroom, to what eventually became my mother’s study and which probably started off as a separate shed.

The first time I saw one of them, that I can remember, was when I was about three; I was lying in my parents’ bed, and the door was open such that I could see though the missing panel. I lay there a long time, adjusting to the dark, when out of the corner of my eye I caught a shape; I turned to look through the frame of the panel and there was the head and torso of an adult man — or the silhouette of one, anyway — leaning forward slightly, staring at me, with somehow darker pits (despite the entire thing being shadow) for eyes. For a long time I just lay there, confused and nervous, and it just kept staring, shifting slightly. I think I asked my mother about it; she was asleep, and unreponsive aside from a mumble. Eventually I chose to ignore it and went to sleep myself.

I rarely went into that room after my parents moved out of it, as it had sort of a forbidding air. During the “book room” era it became a makeshift guest room, and in the rare occasions someone actually visited and stayed over, I would invariably hear comment about how unnerved they were by the room; how hard it was to get to sleep, as the guests felt so creeped out. Later when I moved into the room, and stayed up late at the computer in a darkened room, or entered the room in the dark (or dim; the light wasn’t very good anyway), or lay in bed thinking, I would feel something — and when I turned, there was the shape again. Sometimes its face was inches from my own. Once or twice there were the red eyes. And I was THE HELL out of my room, whenever that happened — and so went the search for someplace in the house that felt safe.

As it turned out, that usually meant the newer sections. It’s weird, as I didn’t actually work out which were the new and which were the old parts until long after I figured where the “safe” and “unsafe” parts were. Maybe it’s obvious in retrospect, though hey; I grew up there. I didn’t have the perspective to see how the place was assembled. At any rate, all the “unsafe” areas were parts of the house that were definitely there from the beginning.

Occasionally I’d get a bit of weirdness from the hallway and living room, as mentioned, though nothing quite so intimidating as the bedroom. And to be perfectly honest, I never in my life went all the way into the old cellar; it was too forbidding. It was almost like there was a physical barrier. Like the air got thicker and every step closer got smaller until I had to come to a stop. I’ve talked to my older sister; she also says she never once went in there in the years she lived in the house. On a few occasions she was asked to go in to fetch something and she outright refused.

Now. Before I get into the real story, here’s a little anecdote that might have nothing to do with anything. It was… maybe about ten or fifteen years ago; my parents and I were all sitting in the living room, on a hot summer evening. At the time I stored all of my console stuff in an old glass-doored stereo cabinet that was jammed over by the bay window I mentioned. We were watching television; I might have been fiddling with something. At any rate, none of us were anywhere near that corner of the room — and then suddenly there was a tremendous crash. The glass door to the record cabinet EXPLODED outward, apparently of its own accord. The glass pellets reached in perhaps a four-foot arc around the front, and they… fizzled. After landing, they kept popping and jumping around and settling, as if they were carbonated. We were all basically just perplexed; I was asked to clean up the glass. I have always considered this event a little peculiar.

So. Sometime not too long before I came out here — maybe 2002, 2003 — I was sitting in my room, doing something or other, when my mother came running up and banged on the door. She said she had just been in the new part of the cellar, and as she turned around to face the doorway to the old part she saw a form way at the other end — a hunched-over black shape, staring at her. She wigged out and threw something at it, then ran upstairs and locked the cellar.

She only had to explain about half of it. When she got to describing the shape, I contributed: “looks like a man? Hunched over? Feels like he’s angry at you?” And… yeah. That was exactly it. Later I realized that that part of the cellar — which, again, is the most dangerous-feeling part of the house — is immediately below the part of the living room where the record cabinet had stood back then, and that in turn is immediately below what was then my bedroom. So. Huh.

Now the thing is, this was the first time I mentioned the things to anyone; I always chalked it up to my own imagination. This, however — this was sort of interesting. She got sufficiently unnerved that she asked a priest to bless the house, in particular the “problem areas”. I admit I didn’t feel any of the weird tension that had always been in the house, or see any more of these things, before I left — though that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.