In the early 1970s, when I was around 7 years old, my family moved from Southern California to the Seattle area.
The neighborhood we moved to was beautiful. There were fields with fruit trees, a creek down a hill from our house and tall trees everywhere. Our house was a ranch style, two story house. As you can see in the photo, it doesn’t have the classic haunted house appearance.
I don’t remember what feelings I may have had about leaving California. Maybe I was nervous about starting at a new school and making new friends, but I do know that I was excited about leaving the Knocking Thing behind in our California house. Imagine the depth of my disappointment when I went to bed that first night in our new house in Washington and heard the Knocking Thing. It had followed me. I was really upset. I remember being shocked that the Thing could travel. Worst of all, at this new house, the Knocking Thing seemed to have friends.
Before I share more details, I want to talk a bit about the house. I actually liked the house, especially upstairs. A wall of windows in the living room looked out onto our yard and a small forested area (later that disappeared as the area developed). I liked the kitchen and other upstairs rooms. They all had a nice, homey feel. Whatever was in the house stuck to the downstairs, a basement really, where my sister’s and my bedrooms were located. As you went downstairs, there was an oppressive, creepy feeling. Not everyone noticed this, but I did right off the bat. There was a storage/crawl space in the TV room that I avoided being near or having to get anything out of. My dad’s workshop/storage room located across the hall and between my sister’s and my bedrooms felt evil to me. And the door to the workshop was often open, even after it was tightly closed. My sister’s room seemed pretty safe, but my room had some of the same feel as the workshop. I often felt like something was watching me when I was downstairs.
Being downstairs was tolerable during the day, but as bedtime approached, so did my nightly dread. Even during our first nights at the house, I could clearly hear something shuffling up and down the hallway at night. The hallway was carpeted, so I didn’t hear loud steps. It was like someone had slippers on and didn’t bother to pick up their feet as they traveled the hallway each night. My bed was situated against the wall by the bedroom door, so that I could easily see down the hall if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. I never looked to see if there was anything there. If I turned away from the hall, I could see my wall-length shuttered closets, which actually scared me. So, I slept with covers over my head (for years) to muffle the sounds of the Knocking Thing and the shuffling, and to avoid seeing anything.
Even without much else happening other than the shuffling and door opening, I was very scared downstairs. It may have had to do with the overall feel of the downstairs. Something just didn’t feel safe about it, and I wasn’t sure at all what to make of something that traveled with the family.
After some nights of being afraid and trying to sleep in my parents’ room (the answer was no), my mom said that she’d sleep in the room with me to show me that it was OK. I’m sure I fell asleep easily that night, having an adult there to protect me from whatever it was. But in the morning, my mom said something to the effect that she was frightened the whole night. She, too, could hear sounds and feel a presence. But I was not permitted to move to the extra bedroom upstairs, which is what I really wanted. I talked about this incident with my mom as an adult, and she doesn’t remember spending a night in my room with me, but she does recall that after I went to college, she became more aware of the feeling of being watched downstairs and didn’t always feel comfortable down there.
Over time, the Knocking Thing seemed to go away, but the other presence stayed. I could still hear shuffling feet every night. Overall, not a lot happened except the nightly noises and a sense of intense fear and dread downstairs. As I write about the house, it’s a bit hard to see what I found so frightening, but whatever it was, as I kid I was hypervigilant and anxious, I think in part to being so aware of the energy around me.
In other posts, I will share some of the other things that happened in the house, but it is important to first share the overall context of the story. It wasn’t the Amityville Horror, but it wasn’t a peaceful, calming place either.
I want to comment on my family. My parents and sister are great people. I had a pretty normal childhood and lacked nothing. I did have a lot of anger that I wasn’t aware of until later in my life about my parents not doing much more than looking around a few times downstairs and declaring it possibly scary but fine. In my adult years, I have had conversations with them about the house and their experience of it and have finally made peace with things. Nobody denies that there was something odd about the downstairs of the house. But my parents really didn’t know what to do about it. They didn’t want to sell the house, and in the 1970s, you couldn’t do a Google search of local ghost busters or psychics. I think the major paranormal cultural references at the time were movies like the Amityville Horror and The Exorcist. Those were highly fictionalized stories, though both are supposedly based on true events, and were pretty extreme. Our house was nothing like it, so it probably just seemed like the best thing to do was ignore it. My family could, but I couldn’t.