The Fairfax House
or the story of being banished to a haunted house
by lsharkkADoNM, SG, LC 1yr
nMom and eDad bought the Fairfax House in the spring of 2004. I turned 10 that summer, and by fall we were in an apartment. The house almost broke my father. I am not a believer in anything remotely paranormal so I will keep this part short (lol that didn't happen).
It was a 4-story monstrosity. We had a map, that's how huge this house was. Very validating for my superficial nMom. I had two incidents in the house that I can recall with complete clarity - every other memory is clouded by both time and the fact that I was 10 when this was happening - one on the top floor and one in the basement.
Top floor
No one went on the top floor because it made you feel weird, says my memory. I don't know if someone told us not to go up there or what, but the house was so huge that avoiding an entire floor was easy.
I went up there and wandered around one day, looking for creepy stuff, and I opened one of those folding door laundry closet things and, while there was nothing inside but dust and dead bugs and it wasn't dark or anything, a ridiculous wave of fear hit me and I sprinted down to my parents. My dad and I went back up to check it out, and the feeling was still there. We sat in front of the empty open closet until he grabbed my arm and sprinted away too. Haven't spoken about it since.
Basement:
There were two entrances to the basement: stairs down in the back of the kitchen pantry and a door built into the hill that the house was built on (the door was on the basement level, the pantry was the floor above if that makes sense). I kept having a recurring nightmare of a voice beckoning me out of bed and into the basement through the pantry, while I screamed and cried for someone to save me or stop me. I always woke in a fit when I got to the bottom of the pantry stairs. One night, I had the nightmare and had enough. I walked down to the bottom of the basement and turned on every light when I went and searched the entire basement for... I don't actually know what I was looking for. But when I opened the door to outside, the pantry door slammed shut and woke everyone up. But I never had the nightmare again.
We lived in the house for less than three months before my dad moved us into an apartment and started looking for a house in a neighbourhood. Whatever was going on in the house convinced my engineer/atheist father that his family was in danger. He really doesn't like talking about it, and nMom alternates between dramatizing what happened ("he saw a figure one day that told him to leave and that was his breaking point") and blaming my dad for being dramatic ("I loved that house, we lost so much money because your dad is a scaredy cat").
I asked him about it recently and he said, "It showed itself to me. That's all I feel like saying right now."
Creepy considering he is very much a skeptic like me.
Putting on my paranormal hat here, but maybe the spirit/power/ghost thing singled dad out because he was such a disbeliever and made an effort to scare him by proving itself to be real. Just a theory since nothing ever happened when he wasn't in the house. Not even a creak or a nightmare.
I told you those stories because, after we found a new house and the Fairfax monstrosity sat unsold for 11 years (edit: they sold in 2011, oops. That's only 7 years) in the housing slump, I was frequently exiled to the Fairfax house during bad fights with nMom.
My eDad, who was terrified of the house, would drive me over and drop me off to stay the night alone. In the house that scared him shitless. Alone.
Just sort of hit me today how weird that is. He was so committed to appeasing nMom that he would dump his teenage daughter at a house he personally believed was haunted. Alone.
The Fairfax House sold three years ago, and I started thinking about all this again because my mother told me today she saw another for sale sign in the yard. She said, "I wonder if anything similar happened to them. Did you notice anything when you stayed there?"
No, mom, because even demon ghost things take pity on lonely children. But not you.
#Unexplained/Paranormal #Dreams/Nightmare