The Room on the Landing

During the summer before my fourth grade school year my parents bought a home in an old community of central Pennsylvania. My father was so proud of the fact that the house was originally a very large estate that had been broken into three separate sectors to make room for three family town-homes. You could still see the archways that connected the severed rooms through the plaster fills. To prove the home’s age, we were shown the basement. It was a creepy, dark, damp, and secluded room. The only way to reach the basement was to go through a closet, a hidden hallway, and down a flight of rickety stairs. The floor was packed dirt, the walls were thick stone, and the ceiling was supported using old railroad ties.

The rest of the home was rich in architectural detail, showing the craftsmanship and pride of the original builder, and supporting similar antique structures as the basement ceiling supports.

The staircase of the dining room went thirteen steps upward to a landing that held a single door. The door was half the height of an average sized human. It held a window that was short and long on the upper side of it’s heavily weighted construction. Turning 180 degrees on the landing brought you face to face with four additional stairs, which led to the main bedroom quarters. For now, let’s focus our attention to the room on the landing.
My younger sister (“Emily”) and I initially shared this room. It held an open closet and a fireplace. The fireplace had long since been out of use and held only a path into blackness when looking upward, and two deep holes of abandon when looking through the pierced plaster of the sides. It was, overall, too creepy for the two of us so we kept a shoe box in the empty burn area to ward off anything that might venture through the broken walls inside. However, our foolish little trick did nothing to stop the spirits that wanted through..

My first experience with the “spirit world” occurred in the dark of the night while occupying the room on the landing.
I have never been able to sleep through movement. When I turn I become completely awake in order to do so. So, one night, as I moved from my left (which faced the open closet) to my right (which faced the fireplace), I noticed a strong blue glow. My sisters bed was placed next to the fireplace in a little alcove between one of the three windows and the wall of the structure. At the midsection of Emily’s bed, a foot from the opening of the unused fireplace sat a little girl. She was in a kneeling position, as if praying. She was clothed in a frilly little dress, solid white or flowered cotton, with ruffles at the shoulders and knees. Her fingertips were pressed against her chin. Her black hair fell to her shoulders and curled under, she had a bow on the top of her little head. Her whole entity was displayed and I could see her as though she was an actual child. The only difference between her and my surroundings was her blue aura. Everything about her seemed to reflect an odd, cold blueness. As I watched her kneel, she turned her head to face me, and her eye sockets were empty. She didn’t smile, she didn’t stand, she just stared at me through the holes where her eyes should have been.

When I told my mom about the experience I had, she explained to me that before we had moved in, she had been vacuuming that room when she felt someone tugging on her shirt. She turned, and there wasn’t anyone there… She went on to tell me that the previous owners had revealed that the boy that had occupied our room at one time (a basketball playing teen) had committed suicide either in that room or the second story of our garage, the room that our bedroom faced.

Now that I’ve told you the story of the room on the landing, let’s go up the four additional stairs…
When past the landing, there is a bedroom on the left, the door to the attic directly across from said bedroom, another bedroom (formerly the master) on the right, and a bathroom straight ahead… Let’s focus on the two bedrooms.

When my parents finally remodeled the attic (a story in and of itself) they relinquished the old master suite to me. The bedrooms on this floor, a floor that we often referred to as the second and a half, the bedrooms connected through a closet. Allow me to describe… When opening the sliding paneled doors, one could go three feet to the left in closet space, or three feet to the right and intrude onto the first bedroom’s closet space, only to escape through that bedroom’s closet doors. Why the two rooms were connected, we have yet to figure out.
While my parents were still using the master room, my mother awoke one night to a sound. As she laid in her bed, next to my father, she watched frightfully as a man and two women walked into her room, only to disappear through the connecting closets.

There have been many experiences in this house. Too many to describe in one letter, so I’ll end here…... Besides, I’m afraid if I write too much, something in this house will get ideas.

By: mo2428@charter.net