THE HAUNTING OF MUIRFIELD HOUSE
PART ONE
PART ONE
“The best aspect of storytelling is it is the prevention of forgetting”.- Barry Lopez.
This a very long story, so I will tell it in parts. There are many details, but I have tried to condense them to only what is important to the story.
I grew up in a very haunted house, near Hollywood. My family spent 12 years there. I never had direct contact, only feeling their strong, icy presences. However, my mother, brother, a friend and a real estate agent did.
The house was L-shaped, with rooms extending on two stories off a large, two story drawing room. There was (and this gets important later) a balustrade on the second floor, off the staircase. The house was built in 1925, by a wealthy oil man for his wife, who left him before they ever moved in. A radio announcer and his wife lived in the house in the 1940s and 50s. After they moved out they made a suicide pact, shooting each other to death, but in a house many miles away.
We moved into this very large house in 1962. It was cavernous, with over 22 rooms. It was way too big for 6 people (My parents and four sons), but I suspect my father bought it to impress those he did business with. We bought the house from a couple whose children were gone. My parents said they acted “strangely” on the day the sale closed. My mother was very beautiful. When my parents met to close the deal, the wife of the owner, jumped in fright behind her deadpan, bespectacled husband, not believing her eyes, seeing my mother.
Nothing happened for a couple of years. Then one afternoon my brother B- was looking in a mirror, in a room off the balustrade. He was combing his hair. He saw a man in an alpaca golf sweater walk by the door facing the balustrade. He turned and looked at my brother, but had no face. My father travelled often, and was often not in the house.
On the ground floor, there were French doors to a library, where we watched television. I always felt spooked there, feeling I was being watched from other adjoining rooms. I closed other doors while I watched tv. If I was the last to go to bed, I always had a creepy compulsion to check the nearby doors to the outside, making sure they were locked. We could lock off the upstairs and I would always check those. Time after time, as I walked up the grand staircase, I would feel cold at my back, often ascending looking over my shoulder. I attributed it to being a scared, sheltered, nerdy little boy. Then one night, as I was locking the last upstairs door, I heard one door after another slam in different parts of the ground floor. NO, I didn’t investigate!
My bedroom was on the east side of the L- my parents on the west side. My room always gave me the midnight creeps. I pushed my bed to the corner, and always slept facing out. My parents encouraged me to set up a hobby room in my basement. I tried to work down there but was never comfortable. I felt I was watched. I thought I heard a voice now and then, always during daylight,usually just a word or two. I did not think of that for years, until it happened last week!
We were kids, and we livened up this cold spooky place with our rambunctious, destructive behavior. At night our parents would drink and argue loudly. We would escape them into our rooms. Other than my creepy feelings and my brother’s odd little sighting, nothing happened.
We had Chow dogs, but there were places you could not get them to accompany you. There was a shady corner with an old wall-fountain under my parents’ bedroom. If you tried to drag a dog back there, it would bite you.
When I was in high school, my parents started to talk about moving out of this too-big, expensive to maintain house. Then the dark doings really got under way.
It started when a friend moved to town to work. He knew no one in California city, except us and he came by frequently. He came over so much, we would tell him to watch tv in the library until we finished homework etc. He was treated like family. We came back down to see him after we finished our studies, and he had left. He did not come back-ever again. I finally called this friend. He said he opened the French doors, and my “mother” was standing there, in a long, 1920s gown, surprising him, almost in his face. She hissed, “You have to leave NOW!!!” He did! I asked, “Dammit, was my mother drunk?” “Well, she looked weird”, He replied. “Her face was white, and her eyes were real red! She just looked different - just not right!”
I angrily confronted my mother the next afternoon. “You were drunk again, and chased away one of my few friends!” “No, J- I didn’t”, she vehemently replied. “You DID! Quit LYING!”, I screamed.
“No J- I DIDN’T!” she pleaded. Confused, I stopped to think. She knew something more than she was letting on, but she was no liar.It was the first time I thought my mother was aware of the haunting.
Later my brother B- and I talked to this friend one afternoon at his apartment. He said he also saw a demon’s face angrily staring at him from a bottom pane in a long dining room window, again off the drawing-room. That was strange, as the dogs were always out next to these windows! As for his confrontation with my mother? “No, guys”, my friend said, looking both of us in the eyes. “That was NOT your mother! I don’t know WHO ‘IT’ was!”
Not long after, I went to school in another state. My parents put the house up for sale. After I left, the haunting became even more intense. Well, I feel that old cold feeling on my back. How about you?
Time to go to bed, and read the New Yorker…The conclusion will come on another lonely night.
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By JHC, copyright 2010 @ World Mysteries And True Ghost Tales
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