House on Montgomery Street

From: 
Story type: Ghost
Location: New York
Source: Form Submission

This story details my experiences with a house I grew up in from 1970 - 1976. The house was one that I had visited with my parents in the 60's when I was around 8. Nearly 10 years passed after we moved away that I remembered a story I heard when I was young. One of the older women in the house told about a night when she was sitting in her chair and she glanced out the window and saw a man staring back in at her.

She described him in perfect detail, hat, rain gear, pipe. The only thing that has to be out of the norm is that she was looking out of a second story window at the time. It was winter, and the ground below the window was undisturbed snow, so a ladder wasn't used.

It was about 4 or 5 years later that my parents bought that house and we moved in. It was an old 24 room farmhouse, parts of which dated back to the mid 1800th century and had been built on to over the years. It was four stories including the cellars (there were actually two of them) and the attic (big enough to make rooms into, but no one ever had). It wasn't long before I began to awaken during the night, by feeling someone tickle my left foot (only). I would look up and see a hooded figure at the foot of my bed. This scared me quite a bit and I would turn on the light (of course, nothing would be there) and finally go back to sleep with the light on.

The noises in the house could be attributed to an old house settling further, but they weren't. You could almost hear a breeze inside the house and you could definitely feel it. And it wasn't like a breeze from a window. It had a chill to it that sunk right down into your bones. In the breeze, you could almost hear voices, faintly, but there nonetheless.

At times, you would hear what sounded like someone banging on the radiators. My parents always told me that it was just the water running through them, but there were many times that it happened when the heat was not on! And there would be sounds of things falling, but never any evidence of it.

I believe that there were actually three ghosts in that house. The first one was the hooded figure who only ever woke me up with tickling my left foot, the second was an old retired sea captain who had passed in the house in the early 1900's, and the third an older woman, possibly in her 80's. One event happened one summer afternoon. We had a rain storm kick up from nowhere and I was sitting on the front porch reading. Since it became windy and the rain was blowing in on me, I went inside. Just as I opened the front door, there was a clap of thunder.

I glanced up the front stairway and then back to where I was walking. But I had seen the woman standing at the top of the stairs and I looked back up. She was gone but then a very loud crash occurred in the closet at the top of the stairs. I went up and opened the door. We had a four-legged clothes rack in the closet and it was turned upside down. There wasn't enough room in the closet to have done that, the rack would have had to have been taken out, turned over, then put back in.

Another time, a friend was sleeping over and we stayed in one of the upstairs rooms. There were twin beds, about ten feet apart, and we each had one of them. It was summer, a beautiful night, about 65 degrees and we had the windows open because it was so nice. At exactly 3 a.m., we both awoke from being shaken. Our covers were neatly folded at the foot of the bed and the room felt like it was below freezing. Since we were the only ones there, we knew that the other hadn't shaken anyone awake! We both ran down the stairs and spent the rest of the night on the front porch, where it was around 65 degrees!

On Sunday mornings, my mom would fix me breakfast and I would eat it in front of the TV. I'd leave my cigarettes and lighter on the floor by the couch and when I'd come back in with breakfast, they'd always be missing. Just on Sundays. One day, I was in the cellar and moved some lumber and there I found 10 packs of cigarettes and 10 lighters, all the ones that had gone missing.

One of my friends had been killed in a car wreck and I went to one of our mutual friend's to tell him about it. I was gone from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. My mom hadn't realized I had been gone all that time and she started to yell at me about leaving the toilet seat up. She had put it down a half dozen times that day and had blamed me for it, but I hadn't even been there all day! Also, she had done the dishes and put a heavy Pyrex baking dish on the drying rack, followed by dishes and glasses. She heard a loud crash and when she came out to the kitchen, that heavy Pyrex baking dish was in a million pieces on the floor, yet all the dishes that had been piled on top of it were untouched still on the drying rack.

I always thought I could see something out of the corner of my eye, but, as it normally is, when I looked, it was gone. The feeling of being watched was very prominent though. One night, I felt as if everywhere I went in the house, I was being followed. Another time, my buddies and I decided to see what was in the attic. We went up the stairs and turned on the lights. In one corner, we noticed that there was a brick wall there, a very strange place for one! We decided to break it down and see what was behind it, but at that instant, the 4 lights in the attic all blew apart at the same instant. Only the attic lights were affected, the rest of the house was fine. Well, we decided then and there not to explore where we weren't wanted!!

The inside cellar steps seemed to be one place where it was always cold, no matter what time of the year. It was also a place that I dreaded to go. If I had to go to the cellar, I went out and used the outside entrance. It was there that we found an old sea chest buried under other things from over the years. A woman who rented a few rooms from us said she had seen the old captain upstairs and in the cellar many times. But eventually, it got to be too much for her and she moved away. But her move didn't stop the ghosts from making themselves known. When my brother and sister-in-law moved in for a few months, they, along with another couple, began to play with a Ouija board. One night they brought a spirit into the room. She had been a prostitute in England and was deathly afraid of needles. One of them put a needle on the board and all at once, each of them felt hands pushing them backwards and the pointer and the board flew straight up into the air. They too moved away after that.

We sold the house eventually and on the last day I was there, picking up the last of my things, I felt the house shake and those voices I had heard all those years seemed to laugh now, as if they had won. Well, they did as far as I'm concerned! Since, my brother and my parents have died and I now live in Florida. Far away from that house on Montgomery Street.