When House Hunting Turned Into a Ghost Sighting

I still don’t know what to make of what happened to me

I’ve come to appreciate how parts of life and nature are deeply shrouded in mystery. I am comfortable being undecided about many things. For example, I have long neither believed nor disbelieved in ghosts, but an experience I had not too long ago made me more open to their existence.

Years ago I had a friend who lived in Oregon with a small community of forest-dwellers. She and her neighbors made things to sell, such as jewellery, walking sticks, dog leashes, and so on, which they sold on the streets or at open markets and used the money they made to buy food and other supplies. When it was cold, they would find abandoned cabins or houses to stay in.

From what I deciphered, they smoked quite a bit of weed and experimented with psychedelic drugs. So, when she told me about the ghosts she had encountered during her time in the forest, I suspected that she might just have been hallucinating. But the stories still gave me goosebumps.

Still, I remained neutral about the existence of ghosts no matter how many stories I heard from her or others.

Three years ago, my husband, son, and I needed to find a larger place to move into. Finding a decent and affordable place to rent in the San Francisco Bay Area isn’t easy. Not at all. Because we had moved so many times over the years, we understood what it would take to locate and secure a good place.

Still, we grossly underestimated the challenge of this task.

We hoped this would take only four or five weeks, but after three months we still hadn’t found the kind of place we envisioned. We scanned Craigslist and other online sites for listings every day and went to open houses on weekends. We lost count of all the dreary or downright depressing flats we viewed during those months. I was becoming utterly frustrated.

On Saturday, I acquired keys to view three places from a local real estate agency. This particular company doesn’t arrange open houses, they instead hand out keys to people to look at the places by themselves.

I got lost while trying to reach one of the places. When I finally found it, however, I immediately knew it wasn’t what I had hoped for. I could’ve just turned around and left without bothering to look inside of it, but I decided to look anyway.

From what I could tell, everything about this place had poor Chi or bad vibes. The stairs leading up to its dark blue front door creaked beneath my feet. The front door opened into a strange dark kitchen. Whoever built this house, I thought, had no sense of design nor the slightest idea of Feng Shui. I became scared of the narrow corridor on the left of the kitchen leading to the bedrooms. I didn’t want to go there at all. Instead, I went to the back terrace that overlooked the small backyard.

After seeing a dead tree and dead grass in the yard, I felt uneasy. “Yikes, no thank you,” I whispered to myself. Everything about the place screamed for me to just get the hell out of there. Yet, I lingered for longer than I needed without knowing why. On my way back to the kitchen, I noticed rotten wooden floorboards on the terrace.

I looked around one more time and saw a small carpeted stairway leading up to the attic from the living room adjacent to the kitchen. Right then, I had the peculiar sensation that someone was watching me from there. Out of nowhere came a mental image of someone wrapped in a green blanket lying down on the floor of the attic. I sensed a tremendous amount of sadness from this being.

I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. It could have been my own fear of playing tricks. Still, instead of running out, I lingered, standing, frozen with fear. I couldn’t seem to control my legs. It could have been just a minute or two, but it felt like at least ten minutes before I opened the front door and ran down the stairs onto the street. I drove back to the rental agency to return the keys.

After this experience, I was ready to altogether give up my search for a new home. As tiny as our apartment was, it was cosy and warm. We could probably manage to live there for another year or so.

On that same night, I lay awake for a while wondering about the incident. I didn’t know what to make of it. There was no reason for me to feel scared of an empty house on a bright sunny day. Yet, the sensation of being watched overwhelmed me. I wondered if my fear of rundown old Victorian houses played mental tricks on me that day.

The next day I had lunch with a friend. She has a big proud Mexican family and likes to tell me about all the drama going on in it. At one point she pulled out her iPhone to show me pictures.

I was nibbling my ramen soup when I saw her eyes widen with fright and her right-hand fling to cover her mouth. She stared into her phone in that pose for a bit too long.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She kept staring. “What is it?” I asked again. Now I was becoming alarmed.

“There’s … there’s a ghost!” she said.

“What? A ghost, where?”

“In the picture right behind my cousin,” she said. “Do you want to see it?”

The same cold shiver as before ran down my spine even though I didn’t fully understand what she was referring to. I said “Okay,” but then hesitated. A part of me didn’t want to look at the photo. It is a weird thing to explain, but I didn’t want any ghost to catch sight of me or lock its eyes onto mine in case my friend wasn’t joking. Especially after what happened in that house the day before.

I declined to look at her photo. She looked genuinely shocked and scared out of her mind for a few more minutes before texting the photo to her many relatives and family members. I asked her what she saw and she described a chalk-colored woman’s face peering out from the shadows behind her smiling family members inside a Catholic church.

To this day, I don’t know what to make of these incidents. And if you ask me whether or not I believe in ghosts, my answer is still: I neither believe it nor disbelieve it.

But, I still wonder if what I experienced in that house wasn’t purely a figment of my imagination.