The Stone House
I always repost this in response to threads like this:
I always tell the story of how I got into ghost hunting. Years ago, I was dating a girl at the beginning of the Ghost Hunters craze, about 2005ish. She got really into and I thought it was bonkers dumb, but I loved her so who cares. She tells me her family owns a large plot of land with a haunted house and if I'd like to record it over night to see if we pick up anything.
The Location
Schulemberg, Texas is located halfway between Houston and San Antonio. The girlfriends family owned a huge tract of land there, acres upon acres. We arrived that morning to get an early start and explore the land so I could get familiar with it.
The entirety of the land was fenced, as rural Texas owners are want to do, across the entirety of its boundaries. Entry was far off the main road, down a long stretch of dirt and gravel path through trees and bushes. Once through the gate, you emerged at...
The Wood House
The Wood House was the newest of the homes built on the property and served as the main house for family and a sometimes guest house. It had a tv but no cable, plus two stories. With an open layout and large, welcome windows, it had all the accoutrements of a modern home minus cell phone signal or cable. This would be my home and home base for the next two nights. Outside, I was introduced to the golf cart, which was necessary to navigate the huge swaths of land that would otherwise take an hour or more to traverse on foot. After lunch, her mother stayed behind while we loaded up and departed for...
The Brick House
The Brick House was another modern structure built on the opposite point of land, with an outside wooden deck that looked out onto descending hills and provided an amazing view of the countryside. With a Jacuzzi built on the deck and a tv inside, we enjoyed some time making sure the Jacuzzi was operating and clean, just in case we wanted to use it. Then we loaded up into the golf cart for our final destination...
The Stone House
During the Years after the Civil War, my girlfriend told me, local legend was that a bugle player had shot himself through the mouth after coming down with some sort of cancer or tumor. There were records of this, she claimed, although I never saw them. Still, I took it on good faith.
The structure itself was half modern, half Civil War period. The modern side was Wood and electrically powered but connected to the original Civil War structure. You could tell the difference immediately stepping into the Civil War side, the floor was built of large hewn stone that looked ripped from a rock quarry, the wooden door was made of ancient wood and felt like it took incredible effort to push open. The Civil War side was essentially one continuous room with a doorway connecting the 'living room' to the 'bedroom.'
The bedroom was like a prison cell. Stepping inside, there was a tiny bed to your left and a dresser to your right. You could turn left and right but not move, only lie down on the bed. Visitors who had slept overnight at the house told stories about it, stories about knocks on the door in the middle of the night and scratching on the floors.
The Evening
That day, in late afternoon, I set up on a tripod a mini-dv video camera with tapes that needed to be replaced after four hours of continuous video. We set it up in the 'living room' facing the 'bedroom.' The camera stared directly out the back window of the 'bedroom,' a small, pathetic thing that provided only a meager view of the outside. Come, heavy curtain had been set on a recently installed rod to separate the two rooms, so I made sure to pull the curtain open. It was heavy, with the thickness of a rug or extremely sturdy blanket, then left with my girlfriend and her sister.
Before we left, we looked into the camera and made mocking gestures as I proclaimed "We're the ghost busters!" An easy joke, a silly one to end a silly project as we turned the camera on and left for the evening. As we were driving away, I suddenly got an anxious feeling that we hadn't turned the camera on. We quickly zipped back to make sure, made one last silly pose and proclamation of being ghost busters, then returned to the Wood House before the sun could go down. Daylight was coming to an end.
I remember, as we sat around the living room of the Wood House, my girlfriends mother telling us that we had left the light on in the Stone House. Of course we hadn't. We'd never needed to turn it on in the first place. It had been daylight hours. But, as we gathered around the window overlooking the land below, I realized that, indeed, the light was on.
And so, we clambered into the golf cart and zipped back to the Stone House. Sure enough, the light was on. Strange, I thought, but there had been three of us. Any one of us could have turned the light on. But, with it turned off, the house fell into pitch blackness. If you've never left the big city behind or travelled into the country without any nearby town, there's a deep darkness that settles on the land. It was made worse as we stood in that house, that small, claustrophobic house. For the first time since we had arrived, I realized why people might see or hear things while sleeping there. The house was small, like a tomb, and standing in the living room in absolute darkness was terrifying. I quickly ushered everyone out and we zoomed back to the Wooden House. Joy returned as we sat around, telling stories and playing games while we enjoyed dinner. I remembered why I didn't believe in ghosts, and enjoyed the rest of the night with people I cared for.
The Video Review
We returned to the house periodically throughout the night to switch out tapes but gave up sometime after two in the morning. I didn't really think we would catch anything, after all, and the girlfriend was sleepy. We collected the tapes and spent the next day relaxing on the land before returning to my home at the end of the weekend.
The evening of our return, the girlfriend opted to make margaritas while I watched the tapes. It was one of those apartments you get in college, small but not too small, with a living room connected directly to the kitchen. She could see me as I sat on the couch and reviewed the tapes.
Well, fast forwarded through the tapes. I knew I wouldn't find anything.
I've done a lot of ghost hunting over the years since then and when you do see stuff or catch things, it's never what people want. It's never a full body of a dead man or some ghastly apparition appearing. And, even on that first day I ever spent reviewing, I didn't catch anything like that either.
But I do remember fast forwarding, while the tape was still playing, just to get through nothing happening as fast as possible. And I do remember the moment I paused the video, wondering what was going in with the camera, some of you may have never used a video tape camera before, if you're over a certain age. When you fast forward while it's playing, you see static lines. The image jumps a little.
But the image was jumping not just a little, but a lot. So I paused it and rewound the tape. On video, you could see us all on tape, me shouting about how we're ghostbusters, and then the sound of the door closing as we left. Then, outside, the sound of our golf cart as it roared to life and then the fading noise of us leaving.
But what I'll never forget is the music. The single, solemn, mid-tone that started to play. Not quite whistling, not quite a wind instrument. Then the low tone, deeper and bass filled. Then the high pitch tone that started to ring out as the camera started to wobble and jump.
I didn't know what I was watching. I called for the girlfriend, who put the margarita mix away and came into the room to see why I was sounding scared. I rewound the tape and we both watched and heard the same music and shaking of the camera.
Do you remember me saying that we returned because I thought I had forgotten to turn the camera on? In the far background, I hear the noise of our golf cart returning and, as we pulled up, the sounds and motion of the camera all coming to a stop. I watched as we came back inside, I checked the film, we did another silly pose, and then roared away again.
And, again, a few minutes after you could no longer hear the golf cart? The music, again, starting with that low tone and progressing through highs and lows as the camera started to wobble up and down, the screen jumping until the imaged vanished for a second in a wash of static lines. When the image returned, the music had stopped.
We reviewed photos we took that day. There are strange auras of light around us, but that could be merely light tricks. The music though. I will never forget the music.