Haunted house in McKenzie, TN

There is a house in McKenzie, TN that I know for a fact is haunted. My best friend and her family rented the house about twelve years ago and lived in the home for a short while until they had their own home built and moved into it. The house is located on Cherry Street just down from Bethel College in McKenzie. The house was built over a hundred years ago by a man who was affiliated with Bethel College. He had moved to the area because of the college and built the house for his family.

The man and his wife had a daughter (don't know how many other children they had) who grew up in the house and went on to marry and raise her own family in the same home. The woman lived there until she was elderly and her health was failing. She eventually died in a hospital or nursing home and the house was turned over to Bethel College and then sat empty for a short while. When my friend and her family moved into the house, they were the first ones other than the family who had built it, to ever live in the home. My friend immediately did not like the house; it was a two story brick five bedroom home that had very old dark rooms.

When she would find herself alone in a room she always felt like someone was watching her or that someone else was in the room. The family dog acted strange in the house too; it would act as if someone was in the room and as if it was watching something or someone walking around the room even though no one was there. The dog would also growl during these times it would "see" something. After living in the house for a little while more unsettling things started to occur. My friend's elderly grandfather came to live with them and stayed in a bedroom on the first floor since he was unable to use the stairs.

Soon after he moved in he began telling the family that while they were away at work/school that an old woman was in the house. Her father would search the home and find no one. Her grandfather would tell them that he had saw the old woman come in the front door, she would not say anything to him and would go up the stairs and go into the bedroom on the left at the top of the stairs, which coincidentally was the elderly woman's bedroom when she was alive and living in the home. My friend and her family didn't think much of the grandfather's story until more sightings and unexplained things happened.

They would her loud bangs and such in the house, thinking there might be an intruder her father would always check all the rooms and not find anything or anyone. One evening though when they were all down stairs and heard one of these loud bangs, and her father went to investigate he found a baseball bat laying in the floor in the same bedroom upstairs as the old woman was seen entering. The bat had been pulled out of a basket that had several other bats crammed into it and the bat appeared to have been thrown across to the opposite side of the room and was lying in the floor.

No one was upstairs when this happened and it could not be explained! Another incident happened in the middle of the night. My friend's older brother (the old woman's bedroom was his bedroom!) had left to go stay the night at his girlfriend's so he wasn't going to be back until the next day. My friend was asleep in her room with the door open as it always was when she all of a sudden woke up. She turned and looked and there in her bedroom doorway she could see a man standing there looking at her. She thought it was her brother so she started calling his name in a whisper as not to wake her parents. She called his name a couple of times but he would not answer her. The man turned from her doorway and started down the hall.

Just then my friend remembered that her brother was not there and immediately began to scream for her mom and dad. After telling them what happened her father searched the house. All doors and windows were locked, nothing had been disturbed and there was no one in their home!! The last major incident that took place before they moved out happed to my friend's mother. She was home alone in the living room one day watching TV when she heard the back door to the house come open and shut. She then heard foot steps walking through the kitchen, into the dining room, then turning and walking down the hall toward the front of the house.

The foot steps stopped at the basement door in the hall and she heard the door open, the light switch click on and she then heard the foot steps bound down the stairs as if the person was skipping every other step on he way down. She thought it was her oldest son but didn't remember hearing his loud car pull in to the drive. Wondering why he was in the basement she got up and went to go see what he was looking for. When she got to the basement door it was open and the light was on but there wasn't any one down there (there was no other way in or out of the basement other than the door in the hall). She turned the light off and shut the door and went back to the living room and sat back down. Not long after she sat down the whole thing happened all over again. She heard the same foot steps, following the same path through the house, again the door to the basement opened and the light clicked on and she heard the same footsteps bounding down the stair.

She got back up and went to the basement doorway to find yet again the door was standing open and the light was on but no one was down there. This time she went outside and sat on the porch until someone finally come home. She did not tell the rest of their family what had happened to her until they moved out because she knew that they would have refused to stay in the house.

After they moved out and into their newly built home, I spent the night and had my own experience in the new house the next morning. My friend, one of her brother's and I were watching TV in their new living room and I heard a swoosh noise and at the same time saw out of the corner of my eye a black figure of a person moving very fast out of my friends bedroom around a corner into the bathroom. Her brother didn't see the figure but he heard the swoosh sound. My friend had her back to her room so she didn't see the dark figure nor did she hear the sound we heard. It freaked me out and for a while my friend was worried that the ghosts had followed them to their new home but fortunately there were no other incidents (that I know of).

By: Christy@deltafaucet.com