Have you ever been blessed to live in a happy house or a used-to-be happy house that you are filling with joy again?
There are some theories that stone and wood absorb emotion and maybe leak that emotion back into their environment. Maybe that explains my experiences. I dont know.
I’ve lived in several houses and each spoke very differently to me and each felt very different…
There was my childhood home, a 70s tudor that consistently made noises like someone was coming up the stairs. I was terified of the downstairs at night and later as a teen would hear the steps creak, think my mon or dad was home, go check, and there would be no one. I was not sad to leave home for college.
Then there was my first real house that my husband and I signed the lease on about a month before we got married. He moved in and worked on fixing it up for us. When I arrived after our honeymoon I fell in love with the house almost as much as I had my dear husband!
This sounds really weird, but I could feel that house! It sort of slowly dawned on me that it was watching me. But it wasn’t menacing at all. First it was like it woke up, then it loved me back the more I made it into our home. Maybe it was because it was the most pitiful bungalow I had ever seen.
I’m not sure if I saved it or the house saved me. -Susan Branch
For the first time ever I felt completely safe in a house. I could walk through it in darkness and not be afraid. It seemed as though it was the house that was keeping bad things out.
We brought home our first baby to that house, and the house rejoiced with us.
We lived there for 7 years, tried to buy her, but she wasn’t for sale. Eventually we had to move. I swear to you dear reader, when we started packing to move, she went cold. I was excited about our new house, but torn up on the inside about having to leave my heart place.
(Years later my husband saw them tearing out the distinctive attic window – they were “remuddling” and he got it for me. That is love, and that spirit is probably what I really felt-my husbands happiness.)
The next house we moved to was not a happy house. I don’t know why. We tried our best, fixing it pretty, making it a cozy home, even bringing another baby home(of course that was for us not the house), but to no avail. I knew on the 3rd day that it was not going to be like out last house at all. I was afraid, irrationally and suddenly I would be terrified in the middle of doing stuff and it would hit me like a bucket of water. There were long, thin, dark shadows that plagued the edges of my vision. I knew we would have to move. And after 5 years we did. I was not sad to leave that house.
Now, I’m not saying that because I lived in a sad or a happy or a slightly paranormal house that my human experiences mirrored the house or that happenings in our lives were siphoned through the house’s past and then affected us thereafter. It was just an underlying current. You knew it was there. The lines didn’t buzz with electricity the whole time, but when they did I knew it. We had all the normal life ups and downs most people have, I just happened to also have a parallel thing going on with some places I’ve lived.
I want to impress upon you that these were my feelings and experiences; I am telling you the truth about my dealings with certain abodes. Take my stories or leave them, its no difference to me. Just please know that for a lot of people it is very difficult to find the bravery to talk about things that are pretty weird that have happened to them.
Heck, maybe its me. I think a lot of people can do this and I’m not the only one, but sometimes it feels like there is a sort of open phone line to these experiences in my brain. I’m old enough and I’ve seen enough now that I try my best to keep the receiver firmly shut on my end. No thank you, not today I say. I just want to lead a quiet life, painting and caring for my family. I do not need or want anything in my life that is hard to explain or makes me open to any bad shadows anymore.
Our house on Kansas Street is a house of peace. I honestly think she is shy. I’m not scared in her. There is a deep and abiding, healing peace about this place, and the more I’m with her the more peaceful I feel. She is the first house I have ever been homesick for, and her quiet love shines through to all that cross her threshold.
With peace from a quiet house on Kansas Street to you,
-Jaime
Life on Kansas Street 