Love Gone Awry

My boyfriend Rob and I have always been open-minded and believed in the paranormal. We have lived together in a small two bedroom house in Louisiana for just over a year. Rob lived in the house for a year before I moved in, so for him, this makes just over two years.

Upon moving in, Rob had an Australian Shepherd named Stetson who was deaf. From the beginning, Rob would wake to find Stetson barking, growling, and baring his teeth in the same corner of the living room at nearly the same time every night. Remember, Stetson is deaf, so he wasn't barking at anything he heard. Rob found it alarming because Stetson was a very docile dog. Each night he would carefully console Stetson and return to bed.

As Rob began to get to know the neighbors, the woman next door asked if he was aware of what had taken place in his house. Obviously he was not. The woman informed him that just months before, a young man lived in the house with his girlfriend. One day he returned home to find her in bed with another man. After he found them, the woman and her lover took off in his car. The man was so distraught over losing his girlfriend, that he put a gun to his head and committed suicide, or so it is believed.

The woman who told Rob the story said that she awoke the night of the suicide to a knock at her door from the police around two am. She also claims that she witnessed the scene of the crime, even assisted in cleaning up and repainting. She believed that the man was shot in the bathroom, but somehow ended up in the second bedroom, where he died. She also claims that the cheating girlfriend was once questioned as a suspect for the murder of her boyfriend, but the case was never solved and no one was convicted.

I moved in during January of 2007. In March of 2007, our friend Jeremy moved into the second room before deploying to Iraq. Jeremy's room is the site of the man's death. There is a constant smell within the room that is difficult to describe. We've steam vacuumed, air freshened, opened windows, done everything we could think of, and it continues to smell. It smells damp and earthy. Before Jeremy knew the story of the man who died in the house, he started telling us that at night, he would feel his bed shake from underneath, as if someone was punching the floor up into his bed. He had the type of bed that sat very low to the floor. Needless to say, we told him the story.

Other happenings include the closet door in the hallway between the bathroom and second bedroom. The man would have walked right in front of it. Things in the closet crash to the floor, heavy things like televisions. The door is always opening and closing. At the moment, it's broken off of the hinges. Lights go on and off. Once, an entire six foot bookshelf came crashing to the floor, shattering glass items on the shelf. Rob and I were both on the couch nowhere near the shelf. While passing the living room to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, Rob and I have seen the figure of a man sitting on the couch staring at the wall. When we look again, he's gone. Rob has seen a shadow pass in front of our alarm clock so that the numbers went completely black for a moment. Small statues on our shelves have been turned completely backward. We've seen someone cross in front of the bathroom door while we shower. We've heard inexplicable music, bangings, knockings, thumps. We always feel people watching. No one is ever there.

There is another thing I should mention. There is a full body apparition of a tall elderly man with silver hair in a black suit and a red tie. At times, he carries a matching black hat, but I've never seen him wear it. The strange thing is that he can't be the man who died in the house. The man who died was around nineteen. This man is nearly seventy it seems. I was the first to see him. One night I wasn't feeling well and was sitting on the bathroom floor in front of the toilet. The bathroom is small and there are no windows, so no shadows are cast into it. Suddenly, I felt a chill and looked up to see the old man standing in the doorway, blocking the entry with his arms folded across his chest. His build filled nearly the entire door frame. He's very tall. I didn't feel threatened, but taken aback. I felt as if he just wanted me to be aware of his presence. He was only there for a few seconds. One night I heard whispering which elevated into what sounded like a party in the 20s or 30s. I heard faint swing music. I got up and went to each room, listened near the windows, opened the front and back doors to listen and see where it was coming from. Each time, it died down. There wasn't any music. The moment I put my head back on the pillow, I head it faintly again. I finally fell asleep feeling psychotic. The man Rob and I have both witnessed on the couch is this elderly man. Before I told Rob of the man standing in the doorway, he had a dream that he was walking through an old house and he saw the same man walk past a doorway and point to the outlines of various crosses that had been burned into the wall. Rob is a crazy sleeper. He talks, tosses, turns, all kinds of things. That night, I remember him pointing to the wall and speaking gibberish. I laughed and went to sleep. The next morning, he told me about the dream and of the man. I nearly died. We had both seen him. After that, he's been everywhere.

We finally mustered up the courage to tell the woman next door of the "ghost" in our house. She was surprised and said that a friend of hers was taking pictures in an abandoned house across the street and caught a silhouette of an old man in dark clothing and a hat. We've come to believe that the man may have owned the land long before these houses were built. We've come to the conclusion that we have a residual haunting because he has never seemed aware of our presence. He also looks as if he lived a few decades in the past. His suit is very traditional and simple looking. He isn't active too often and never feels threatening or scary, but Rob and I believe that he was an important man and he wants to continue to feel that way. He may not even realize that he has died. We've attempted to do research on both the old man and have attempted to find out the name of the young man who died in the house, but haven't had any success. We'll be moving soon, and it will be kind of sad leaving our ghost (or ghosts) behind. It's been quite an experience.