The New-Old House

There are places in the world that disregard the rules of existence as we know them, either by being occupied by entities alien to humanity, or by possessing such traits that go against everything we know of the laws of physics. One such place, where all manner of supernatural beings, dimensional gates, otherworldly phenomena, cursed objects, cryptids, and other creatures seem to gather, changed my life – for better or for worse, remains to be seen. I have taken accounts of the events that have been going on there; I have seen it with my own eyes. What I went through there defies conventional explanation — the kind of experiences that leave a mark on your soul. I am a person trained in the sciences, yet these are things I couldn’t explain, and I no longer try. I have learned to let them drift away and accept them as mysteries beyond my reach. As the saying goes, I have lived with a fragile faith, built on vague memories from an experience that I could neither prove nor explain.

I encountered this peculiar place – which I named the new-old house – on one of my cases. I’m a paranormal private investigator; people hire me whenever they have issues that can’t be dealt with by conventional means, and police or even friends and family members don’t believe them. Objects moving around the house, ghostly night-time visitors showing up uninvited, that sort of thing. They reach out to me, and I do my best to help them with whatever they desire regarding these occurrences.

I love my job; I find it fulfilling in a way nothing has satiated my exuberant energy before. My business card says ’Winter Hollander M.D., paranormal private investigator’. I have an office near the city centre, but the majority of my job is done on-site, I just keep this rented room furnished with a desk, two chairs and a sofa to meet clients and receive bills. It’s cosy in a run-down way; since I don’t spend that much time there, I don’t take care of it as much. The plain beige walls sport a few scratches and dirt marks, courtesy of the previous tenants, and the only window across the door, behind my desk, has never been cleaned in the past two years since I moved in.

I was raised in the countryside by my moms, Summer and Autumn, and they were delighted to find out they were expecting a daughter, so they could name me Winter. It became kind of a family inside joke, but I cherish my name. I’m an only child, getting the best and worst out of that status. I turned thirty last November, happily progressing through life. I’m a fairly ordinary-looking person, with an average build, mostly straight, shoulder-length dark brown hair and light green eyes. I only have a couple of tattoos here and there, and I prefer clothing that’s more comfortable than stylish.

The M. D. stands for my psychiatry doctorate that I have never professionally used since I got it. Sure, I use the knowledge, but I have never practiced medicine. My moms were not happy to say the least when they found out I wanted to attend medical school, but they were supportive. They were even less amused when after graduating, I declared that I wouldn’t want to work in that field. I moved to the capital city when I went to university, and thanks to some strange turn of events, I stayed and have mostly lived here since.

The case with the new-old house started as any other: a potential client contacting me, conducting the preliminary interview, planning an on-site investigation. A relative of the house’s owner found me a few weeks ago, and sent me an e-mail. His name was Destry Kerr, and according to his initial mail, his aunt, who had been living there, died, and his cousin wanted to sell the property; he went there and memories of time spent there came rushing back. He said the house was his father’s childhood home and he himself had spent a lot of time there as a kid. Destry also claimed that the house was haunted, always has been, and wanted me to investigate. After exchanging a few more messages, I agreed to meet him at my office. The first step was always getting the background from the client, and then doing my own research to see if I could find out more.

When Destry Kerr walked into my office on a sunny day in early spring, he seemed nervous. He was a generally good-looking man, somewhat tall, barely older than me, maybe by a few years. He was wearing a pair of distressed jeans and a black t-shirt, his short strawberry blond hair faded at the back and sides, his chestnut eyes darting around the small space as if he wanted to make sure no one would surprise him by jumping out from a corner. After shaking hands, I offered him a seat across my desk and he sat down, clenching his fists on his lap. Our conversation started slowly; I was used to most clients wanting to tell me everything before I got the chance to speak at all, but I had to ask Destry a lot of questions for him to open up before he got into his stories.

The background information I gathered from him about the new-old house, as I came to call it, was the following: it was a building plot with two houses built side by side, and there were other smaller buildings on it as well for farming and raising animals; altogether that made eight buildings, including the garage. Destry couldn’t say from the top of his head when the first house was built, but my preliminary research showed that in 1966 they built a second house right in front of the first one. The two were then separated by a wall, only sharing the attic. Behind these houses stood the piggery, then a farming storage house, and then a chicken coop. On the other side of the yard, facing the back of the original house where the stairs led up to the attic, there was a cellar; behind that an animal house for the rabbits, geese, and ducks, and at the end, the garage. Over the years, some of these buildings were destroyed and rebuilt, modified, or completely repurposed, but the majority stayed the same.

In conclusion, the land was quite built-up, and considering that there were practically two complete houses on it, it could give home to at least two or three generations at the same time.

I would have imagined two houses having lots of rooms, but I would have been wrong. The old house had three rooms and a small kitchen; two of the rooms had been used in the past decades as storage rooms, and one as an old relative’s home, who died some years ago. The new house had six rooms in all: a bedroom, a living room, one was a kitchen, another was the bathroom, and there was a hall and a narrow hallway. The new house’s kitchen and one of the storage rooms of the old house shared a wall, making it thicker as they reinforced it when they were building the new house.

Adding a bit more to the history, supposedly nothing has ever been on the land before these houses. Not any other building, not a cemetery, nothing. It was just pastures used to shepherd animals there. Destry’s ancestors built the first version of the old house, they lived in it, and even now his cousin owned it.

Destry said that every time he spent time there, he felt that the old house was kinder and more welcoming than the new house. He said, whenever he was in the old house it was nice, like any other forgotten home, with flaking plaster, dusty old smell and half-broken furniture and objects. But when he entered the new house, he didn’t feel welcome; even if he was the only person inside, he never felt like he was alone, not in any room. And it wasn’t a positive, home-y feeling, it felt quite hostile, like he was an intruder somewhere he shouldn’t be.

These feelings alone wouldn’t have had such meaning, but considering what Destry told me about his experiences visiting that place as a child, I felt that there was more to it. He detailed his experiences during the initial interview about that place, including events that happened to him, his family members or relatives.

In chronological order, the first story Destry told me – sitting in my office while chewing on his fingernails – was his father’s, who was born the same year the new house was built. It happened to him as a toddler. His parents were sleeping in the main bedroom that later became the living room – the smaller bedroom, later nicknamed the green room being given to his older brother –, and he had his crib next to their bed. He claimed that from as long as he could remember, until he was moved from that room when he was around seven years old, every night he felt a presence next to his crib that would shake it, disturbing his sleep, but never seeing it. In his childish fantasy, he imagined it as a hippopotamus, indicating the presence’s size, which he felt was huge.

This was the first minor event that we were able to dig up involving Destry’s immediate family. It wasn’t much, but it couldn’t have been a coincidence that the same year the new house was built, something other than the family moved in.

As we talked, Destry started to relax a little, telling me about his experiences, trying to think hard about decades old details. His fingers often wandered to scratch his chin or run through his hair, but he still avoided making eye contact with me for longer than a few seconds, looking around in the room, probably noticing all the cobwebs I missed while cleaning.

The second story Destry’s father told him was something that according to Destry, left him baffled because a very similar thing happened to him later. When his father turned seven, he was given the smaller bedroom, which they started calling the green room, simply because the sofa set had green fabric.

To understand his tale, Destry described the green room’s arrangement to me. It opened from the hall, across the entrance, and from the door, on the left bookshelves and wardrobes lined the wall. Across the door was a desk, above that a huge window which had roll-up shutters that could block out every streak of light even in the middle of summer, at midday. On the door’s right was a bed along the wall, and more wardrobes and cupboards on the fourth wall. The room had a chandelier and the lights could be turned on and off with a switch to the right of the door. So, his father was given this room; Destry conveyed his experience to me.

“When I first had my own room, I was happy to get away from my parents a little. My brother just moved out of that room and the whole house to go to study in another city, so I felt like the king of the place, being the only child there with parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents to satisfy my childish needs. However, after a few nights in the newly acquired room, something happened I’ve never told anyone and I eventually forgot about until you brought up the whole topic. I woke up in the middle of the night; I have no idea what time it was, because the room was in complete darkness. But I was okay; I was just thirsty and wanted to get some water. I sat up in my bed and put my feet on the floor. Or not. There was no floor. I hung my legs as down as I could without falling off the bed, but I couldn’t reach anything. Mind you, I was about seven or eight years old at the time, not a small child with short legs. I got scared, but I was a tough kid, thinking that I got disoriented, I decided that I’d switch on the lights. I stood up on my bed, went to the door, tapping along the wall, but nothing. The wall was there, but even though I knew where the switch should have been, above the head of the bed, it wasn’t there. Well, not knowing what else I could do and starting to shit my pants from fear, I sat on the bed, yelling for my parents. My father opened the door and came in, and everything was where it should have been: the floor, the switch – father turned the light on –, everything. I told him I had a bad dream and moved on. I thought everyone would think I went crazy if I told them what really happened, and with time, even I began to think it may have only been a nightmare, until your story.”

Destry added that his father had never been religious, not a believer. Not in any gods, not in monsters or ghosts, he was kind of a simple-minded person, not even trying to explain things he didn’t understand. He wasn’t bothered by anything the new-old house has done or any events that happened there, he just didn’t care.

I’m generally more curious about mysterious things than I should be. Just like Destry’s father, I also am not religious. As a child, I was fascinated by ancient mythology, and even now I love those stories – as fairy tales. I have read the Bible, I’m familiar with the Koran, I enjoyed reading Aradia, I personally keep the Buddha’s words close to my heart, I researched a lot of religions for work. With this, I can’t say I’m not aware of my options. I have also read almost every existing urban legend, and having the experiences I do, I just can’t ignore the facts beside science.

As far back as I could remember, I have been seeing things. Until I became a teenager, when it gradually started to fade, until I could only see some shadows or lights, but I could still sense supernatural beings nearby. According to my moms, during my childhood I would tell them about the people I was seeing and meeting everywhere. Some were nice, some even resembled humans, but some were scary, monster-like.

Now my only possible answer to the alarming question in connection to these childhood visions is hallucinations. That’s reasonable, logical, but knowing the world, it’s just not the real answer. Now I can’t see most non-human beings as clearly, but I can still sense them and I can obviously experience their doings. I had to learn to keep an open mind the hard way; first struggling to be different, then having to embrace and even learn more of the world we live in.