Farmhouse Attic

by charsen

Ok, I have a long story though.

I rented a farmhouse in rural Iowa while I was going to college, and the owner told me to never under any circumstance go into the attic and to not use the basement for anything but storage. At first I had a friend and room mate who loved all the pictures of the house and loved everything about the place but upon entering the house she had a fit and claimed it was haunted and cursed and never visited the house again. I don't believe in that stuff, by the way, but I was ok with it because I wouldn't want her to be uncomfortable.

The basement was very odd and smelled heavily like wet dirt. It had an old coal room that was partially collapsed and made a creaking noise anytime air would come down the shaft, which was regularly.

There were 3 other rooms.

One was a type of bathroom which was about 15' x 15' and looked like a surgical setup for a horror movie. There was even a surgical tray table in there by the toilet. There was a drain in the cement floor and chipped paint on the brick walls, exposed beams and pipes, and a shredded rubber curtain for the "shower". The toilet looked like something out of Fallout 3. There was an old radiator with a chain attached to it. The floor had dark stains over it, and there was an old rotten mattress in the corner.

The other room was some sort of canning room, and it had cabinets upon cabinets of pickled "food" from years and years ago... No idea what kind of food it was, it was so far rotten, despite being canned. It looked like meat, specifically pig parts (the farm was an old pig farm), and maybe fruit.

Btw, the last person to live there was in the 70s. The main room had a stove and sink and was the living room. For years the landline phone in that room rang and rang every couple hours even though it wasn't connected. For no apparent reason it stopped in the 4th year just before I moved. I answered the phone before to troubleshoot the issue, but it was just dead. Similarly, the lights in the house would constantly flicker and turn off or on.

The attic was locked with a few padlocks, and I resisted the urge for 4 years to do so. The attic door was in the bathroom, so every day I'd go in there and do my business, and the door was just there, mostly painted over (even the locks).

I resisted the urge to check out the attic for years because my landlord had asked me not to, but.. well...

After 4 years, I started to hear some scratching. Not like rat scratching, but heavy scratching. I figured it was an animal and shrugged it off. I would have told the landlord but he was in the hospital for some heart surgeries and his mother died, so I figured I wouldn't bother him.

Well, my bedroom was right next to the bathroom and attic door, and I started to hear heavy scratching and what sounded like tapping. It was hard to sleep. As I was driving home one day, I noticed that the window in the attic was no longer covered with brown paper as it was for years, but it was ripped down and there was a chair sitting at the window. It was hard to see more, and this bothered me because it was so suddenly ripped down and it was no longer out of sight/out of mind, I guess.

I tried to get a hold of the landlord, but he was in more surgery and so I figured I'd just go up there with a friend and we'd try to catch whatever animal was in there or try to chase it out of the windows or whatever.

We unscrewed the locks from the door and it opened easily enough. Walked up and around a very weak staircase that was covered in a layer of dust. It smelled rancid, like rotten wood and old food. The entire attic was packed from floor to ceiling in shoe boxes. Couldn't see the window with the chair at first, but we did see scratches on the floor. Looked large, like a raccoon perhaps.

My friend opened a box out of curiosity, and it was full of newspaper ... and at the center was a single plain glass cup. Nothing special about it, not worth a dime at a flea market. Opened another and it was the same. Hundreds.. thousands of boxes like this. We tried to see if there were any animal droppings, but couldn't find any evidence of that... we assume there was a shit corner on the other side of the boxes.

We tried to at least get to the window to see what was going on there, and that's when we saw a whole wall of crutches. Dozens of pairs of crutches. Figured someone had polio back in the day or something, but it was oddly displayed. Then we saw a single chair in front of the window with a shawl or blanket on it. We couldn't quite get to it due to the boxes, but the paper was clearly ripped off the window.

It was then that we saw a bunch of huge chests. We opened it, yes, we were nosy at this point, and it was full of porn and recipe magazines. The porn was very old... WW2 to 1970s or so, and each magazine said something strange on the cover like "THE HAIR" or "EYES" or "ALL LEGS" in all caps. It was my landlord's writing. There were dozens of these chests.

We put everything back and went back down out of the attic, locked it up and I stayed in the house another month before moving (I had planned to move before investigating because I was graduating).

TL;DR: I lived in an old house with a Silent Hill basement and a creepy attic that made old house and raccoon nest noises, but it had a retired serial killer vibe to it. I don't believe in ghosts, I just think it was animals or weird house settling.. it was a 100 year old house. I dunno. It sucked living there but it was cheap.

#Building/aa/Attic #Person/Landlord #Sounds/Scratching #Unexplained #Location/US/Iowa