Second Post

There were, actually, a few other things that led me to further suspect a supernatural presence inhabiting the house, which occurred subsequently to me discovering the doll. First, I noticed I could hear the sound of a heartbeat when I went far enough into the large basement underneath the house, faint but always just audible if I listened hard enough.

I tried to find the source of the heartbeat. It was loudest if I was standing at the furthest end of the basement, which left me with nowhere else to look, because from there, it sounded as if it was coming through the walls themselves.

Also, more than once, I could have sworn I saw the doll in a different location or position from where I left it. Further, one time I was completely positive I saw it stumbling awkwardly between rooms, although when I ran to look more closely I found it lying on my bed, completely still, with no indication of having moved at all.

I was also sure that the expression on its face changed once or twice, from a sweet smile to something closer to a leering look. They were, for the most part, subtle changes, ones that drove me a bit mad trying to be certain if they were real or in my head.

There were a couple times where the music the doll played started going on by itself. The tune it played would sound a little different every time, like the melody had changed or gone out of tune slightly. Again, the change in tune was a subtle thing, and it could have easily been my imagination, but all together, these events had me intrigued, and excited.

So I started investigating further. First, I decided to try a séance with one of my friends to attempt to communicate with the spirit I suspected might be inhabiting the doll.

Nothing much came of that. The doll was stubbornly inactive in the presence of my friend and showed absolutely no indications of paranormal activity. At the end of the experience, I looked, and felt, very stupid.

It only seemed to act remotely paranormal when I was alone and there was no one else to witness it. It was almost like the spirit that I believed inhabited this doll - or perhaps the house in general - was deliberately trying to mess with me.

After that, I started looking into the history of the house itself. This is where I actually began making some real progress. I learned there had been a couple of murders that happened in the house before I moved in. When I looked into them more, I came across a story of some guy named David who started a fire in the house while his wife and son were stuck inside. He survived, but his wife and kid didn't. Apparently he had ongoing alcohol problems. It had escalated to one night where his wife confronted him about it, they got into a fight, and the guy just snapped.

You can guess what I was thinking. The wife, maybe her kid, they were the ones haunting the house. It seemed plausible. I felt pretty bad thinking that they could be stuck here, possibly cursed to live out an eternity in the house where they were murdered. They deserved better than that. I could only hope maybe they could find the peace they needed to move on sometime - whatever that meant for them.

I found myself attempting to talk to them a few times, not through a séance again - just normally -, trying to say that I was sorry for what happened to them and if they wanted to communicate with me at all, they could. I never got a response, but I felt better for trying.

At the same time, I continued to investigate further.

It difficult finding more about David's murders on the internet. There were only a few brief articles about it. It never really got too much press. And there wasn't a whole lot in the way of other sources talking about the events, either. It was almost a bit odd how it slipped under the radar.

Although I couldn't find too much more about the most recent murders, I did discover something that partially stomped my theory about the house being haunted by the David's wife and child. See, those weren't the only murders that happened in the house I lived in. I learned they were just the most recent ones. Actually, when I looked back another century or so, there were at least three more families / couples which had moved into the house who'd all come to unpleasant ends.

The earliest was one guy in around 1950 - he was perfectly happy and totally in love before he lived in the house. Within three months of him and his lover moving in, he shot and murdered her after he found out she was cheating on him, and then hanged himself.

A couple years after that, another family moved in. The mother had a psychotic breakdown a year after. She tied up and poisoned her whole family and watched them die, then tried and failed to kill herself too. She ended up in a high security prison. A short while later, the house was, once again, advertised as for sale.

Yet another family moved in. They started having fights with their neighbours. After that, they began exhibiting cult-like behaviour. Over time, it got more and more extreme. They stopped talking to other people, rarely left the house, acting fearful and paranoid around everyone else. Apparently they all claimed everyone else in the world had been taken over by demons; or something along those lines.

At some point they all committed mass suicide in the living room of my house. They had become so reclusive no one cared when nothing was heard from them, and their bodies weren't discovered for weeks.

There were a few other murders I found out about, too, all with similarly disturbing stories. In fact, I struggled to find a single family living at the house whose fate hadn't at some point turned ugly.

What was most unsettling was that in all cases, these events seemed to happen to perfectly normal people. Some of them had troubled histories, but they were all leading happy, unexceptional lives. They definitely weren't the kind of people who you would imagine committing any of these terrible crimes or self destructive behaviours.

Following this discovery however, I got stuck. Again. I couldn't get further insight into any of the murders, either the most recent ones or the murders further back in history. At the end of my research, all I had to go on were some very unsettling patterns of behaviour staying at the house seemed to be linked to.

My next major breakthrough occurred when I happened to talk about the murders during a conversation with my neighbour who came over to visit one time. We were discussing how I liked the new house, and I brought up the man who murdered his wife and child while staying there. He told me he had been at home the time these murders took place.

'I remember the night it all happened very clearly,' he told me. 'I overheard David and his wife having an argument. At that point, I was pretty used to their arguments and even though it was particularly loud, I just tried to tune it out. Then I heard some glasses smashing. That made me concerned enough to really pay attention to what was going on. I worried their fight might have gotten physical.'

He pointed toward a window up on the second story of my house, and I glanced up to look through it, the interior of the house half obscured in shadow by curtains.

'I remember hearing them from up there,' he told me, looking at me sideways. 'There was a whole lot of yelling. I couldn't see much of what was going on because the curtains were closed. I heard David starting to laugh, like a maniac.' He shuddered visibly. 'I remember hearing the sounds of the fire starting and the first screams coming from the house a minute or two later. That was when I called the police.'

He continued, 'Tracy (David's wife) talked about David with my family all the time. He wasn't always so violent and bad tempered, she claimed. He had a bad history with alcohol, sure, but he'd stayed clean for nearly two full decades before he and his wife came to stay at the house.'

I was listening eagerly. 'So what made him change?,' I asked.

'Tracy said some pretty traumatizing things happened to him a few years before the murders,' he explained. 'I guess that's what started his downward spiral.'

He frowned. 'It was kind of weird though. I met David a whole bunch of times. I could see what Tracy was saying, he didn't seem like such a bad guy. From what I could see, he really didn't act like the kind of person who would be capable of murder. Sure, he was far from perfect, but he looked like he really loved his wife and he was super kind to the rest of us. Even during the months leading up to the tragedy, I never would have guessed what was really going on with him.'

He shrugged. 'I guess it shows that people can be capable of anything, right?'

'I'm sure it must have been a shock,' I said, nodding and trying to reassure him. 'You couldn't have expected it.'

We continued talking for a while. It was a few minutes later when my neighbour brought up something else which caught my attention.

'You want to hear something even weirder?' he asked. 'Tracy told my parents there was this room David kept going into. He would spend hours in it. She didn't know why, or what he was doing in there, but every time he came out, he was in a dark mood.'

That piqued my interest. 'Really?' I asked, leaned forward.

'He would be fine, then go into that room, and come out almost a different person', he explained. 'It was like that room did something to him. She actually claimed she could often hear him talking or arguing with someone in there.'

He laughed a little. 'She said some crazy things, you know. She said he described the room full of furniture, with a bottle of whiskey on a desk beside a large sofa, the room full of old bookshelves. But when she went into the room, it was totally bare and empty. Not a single piece of furniture, nothing. What was even weirder was that he would often come out smelling of alcohol, even though she knew she didn't have alcohol in the house, and she hadn't seen him walk into the room with any.'

He spoke more energetically, now. 'Nothing she would do could stop him from going into that room, either. She even tried locking it and throwing away the key. He always found a way to get back in there. He started spending more and more time in the room in the months leading up to the murders.'

I found myself hanging on to every word as he continued.

'David also said other strange things, according to her. Claimed there were people in the room with him sometimes, that he could hear a heartbeat through the walls. He also claimed that the room made him do things. Bad things, like drinking lots of alcohol, or starting arguments with people. He talked about it all with the police apparently after he was caught. Of course, they didn't buy into any of it.'

'It all sounds crazy, but when you heard it from her, it was almost believable. There's something unnatural about that house, I swear.' He gave a little uneasy laugh, and then joked, 'hey, don't let it screw with your head, too.'

He talked more about what Tracy and David were like before the murders. Not a lot of it interested me, since it wasn't very relevant to the possible haunting I was investigating, but I listened anyway, hoping he might mention something useful.

Then, near the end of our conversation he brought up one other thing that I remember quite clearly, something perhaps even more unsettling than everything else he told me up to that point.

'You know when I said I heard David laughing like a maniac? Well, it didn't sound like David was the one laughing. I only figured it was David because it had to be - the police said they didn't find any evidence of anyone else in the house. But yeah, I was sure, at the time it was a completely different person. I could have sworn it, I could have sworn someone else was in there with them.' He chuckled, uncomfortably. 'You must think I'm crazy, right?'

I had my neighbour describe the room David obsessed over for me and I tried to find it myself later that day. I couldn't be sure which room he was talking about, but I did recall his reference to the sound of a heartbeat and decided it must be a room near the basement, since I remembered hearing something similar while I was in the basement myself.

Despite my best efforts, I never did find which room the neighbour identified. I didn't even know if the room was still there; or if it had been burned down in the fire which partially destroyed the house that night David went all crazy.

My neighbour told me David's been holed up in some nearby mental asylum ever since he confessed to the murders. He doesn't get many visits.

His explanation convinced me I needed to investigate further. What my neighbour said corroborated with my new theory: there was something influencing people who moved into my house. Maybe not a spirit, maybe something more sinister than that.

I wasn't sure what the next step in my investigation was, but I was determined to get to the bottom of whatever was causing all the paranormal events. Perhaps there was some initial murder that triggered the haunting, and the subsequent killings.

The more I heard about this mystery, the more personally invested I became into it, and the more convinced I was that I had stumbled across something malevolent, something evil, concealed within the depths of my home.