The Overlook

This is the story of a house we lived in where very strange things happened. This was between December 1998 and May 1999. When we had moved in, we made a sign that we put up outside of the gate, calling the house "The Overlook". Which we thought really fit the house, because if you looked in from an outside window, you would look down the long passage, and all you see is glass doors, much like the little boy on the tricycle in The Shining.

It is an 8-bedroom house with three passageways, the longest passage is 118ft long. The house has 22 doors leading outside, 2 leading to the front yard and 20 leading to the back yard. The long passage contains a lounge, a huge built-in bar with a storeroom, the pantry, the kitchen and it ended at my parents' bedroom door. The dining room also led off this passage. The dining room is big enough to contain two full dining room tables, each with 6 chairs, and a pool table. The rooms are enormous, and, as the house is relatively old, one could suppose that many of the strange things we encountered there could possibly have been imagined. We were two families living together in this house, four adults and five kids.

Thinking back to everything that happened in that house, the least scary thing that happened was that I had a paranoid fear of my parents' bath. Not the entire room, just the bath itself. If I had to use that bath, I caught myself repeatedly picturing a dead woman lying in it. Moreover, it really scared me.

My youngest cousin and I both had experiences in the passageway where the other bedrooms were situated. My bedroom was the second one in the passageway, and it overlooked a bathroom. My cousin and I frequently heard the sound of a woman being strangled in the passage, always in the spot between my bedroom door and the bathroom door. You could clearly hear her fighting to breathe, but most of the time the noise ended. One night I was up alone, and my bedroom door was standing open. I had gotten into bed and as I lay down, I again heard the woman gasping for breath. I lay and watched the bedroom door, heard the sound of a hand hitting the wall, followed by someone falling to his or her knees. She started crawling into my room, heading straight for the head of my bed. She was completely white, and her face was not visible at all, as she kept her head down, but she had pitch-black hair. She stopped next to my bed and I was so frightened I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, she was gone. It led me to wonder if the gasping in the passageway may have been the start of her murder, and that she may have died in my room.

The bathroom across from my room had a huge shower, we were four girls, aged 10, 12, 14 (myself) and 17. Sometimes we would all cram into the shower together, claiming it was to save water, when in fact we were too afraid to be alone. One Saturday night we all were getting ready to shower, the water had been running and the two younger girls were already in the shower. Suddenly the water stopped and steam started coming out of the showerhead. With that, the bathroom light started flickering on and off, the light seemed to change to a dull purple colour and eventually went out altogether. Of course, we all started screaming and bolted out of the bathroom. When the adults came to check, the water was back and the light was on, nothing out of the ordinary.

My youngest cousin frequently heard someone scratching on her carpet when she was alone in her room, always early in the morning, around 6:30AM. Her sister, who was the eldest of the four girls, would wander around the house late at night, going to the kitchen for water or whatever the case may be. On a number of occasions she saw what appeared to be a figure, all in black, sitting behind the bar counter and he appeared to be holding a cigarette, though all she ever saw was the floating ember.

We had a New Year's Eve party and after the party had died down and the guests turned in for the night, the kids were sleeping in the bottom lounge, adjacent to the dining room. One of the kids woke up in the early morning hours and heard people still chatting and laughing and glasses clinking at the bar. Therefore, he got up and went to the bar, only to find it deserted, not a single person there. He decided he must have imagined the noise, but as he lay back down, he heard the voices again, this time coming from the kitchen. Again, he went to investigate and found nothing. When he lay back down for the third time, the voices were back in the bar, and as he looked toward where all the girls were sleeping, he saw the figure of a child, dressed completely in white with pitch-black hair, crawling around between the sleeping girls. At this point, he said he squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself to sleep.

As every event occurred, we told the adults about what we saw, and they all claimed that none of them ever had any such experiences in the house. Of course, they did not believe us. However, it just so happened that my father ended up working for a company where two sisters worked as receptionists. They had grown up in that house, and they proceeded to tell my father all of the stories of creepy experiences in that house that we all had, adding that their grandmother had died in the bathtub. This explained my fear of the bath.

We still drive by the house occasionally, and the house has not been sold in the past 13 years. People tend to move out within 6 months of moving in.