Guest Storyteller (4:58)
When I was 17, I started working at a Christian camp. I met this girl named Claire. She was my age. She actually lived with this friend Ro. She had moved in with her when she was about 14 because her family situation was just not very good. We were bunk mates. It was kind of your typical movie story. We stayed up all night getting to know each other, telling each other our life stories. We had a lot in common. She actually opened up to me about something that she didn't tell too many people. She told me that she didn't have a Social Security number or a birth certificate or anything. She didn't exist legally. And all she said then was, my parents are just crazy. She couldn't really live a normal lifestyle because of that. It made making money really hard for her because we were 18 at this time, and she wanted to earn money, save up for a car, but she couldn't have a real job. So she would always pick up these random little gigs, gardening or cleaning or babysitting. And so those who were close to her knew about her situation. So they would kind of give her these little jobs to do. Around the time that we were 19, I started college. She decided she wanted to move out and kind of start her own life in a little teeny town about an hour outside of the city where I lived. She met a family there who needed a nanny. She started working for them. A few months after getting this new nanny job, she texted me one day saying, you'll Never believe what happened. I just got a house. I was confused. You just got an apartment that you can't pay for. Anyway, how did this happen? She said that the family that she nannied for actually lived about 40 minutes outside of this teeny, tiny town that she already lived in. It was a long way there and back every day. And that the family offered to give her a house that was just a few minutes down the road from them. She went and toured it. She loved it. She called me saying, it's just perfect. It is huge. It is in complete solitude. There's nothing near it. I mean, it's perfect for me. She called me one day to go start painting. So I drove there, and it was about two hours from my town. She was giving me a tour. I remember Ro was there. Claire ended up telling us that there were two rules for if she stayed in the house. One was to not get rid of anything. And the second was to not add locks. This was the husband's grandma's house. She died, like, in the 90s. It was just pretty much a time capsule. She finished giving us this huge tour, and I made a joke about how the only lock in the entire house was a chain lock on the basement door. That was the only lock in the entire house. Not a bathroom door or anything. She wanted to show us the basement. I remember Claire and Ro walked down the steps. It was this huge open room covered in windows. And there was a door downstairs leading to the backyard underneath the deck. As I stepped lower down into the basement, there was a dark room beyond the stairs. It was so long and dark, I couldn't see the end. And I didn't want to go down there. I said, I promise I'm not being chicken. I don't want to go down there. And they were giving me a hard time. Oh, no, come down. Come down. There's all kinds of old jars down here. It's so weird. And I just. I couldn't. I did not want to go down there. I should not go down there. The next time I went over there, I brought my dog to play with her dog. I ended up letting the dogs out one at a time. So I let her dog out first, came back inside her dog. She got her as a puppy. She kind of was growing up as a farm dog. She didn't need a leash, but my dog did. He would run if he wasn't on a leash. So I took him out there, and I just kind of walked around the backyard with him. And all of a sudden, all of these Dogs ran up on us. I don't really know where they came from. They had collars, they were well trained. I mean, I said stop and they stopped and they played with my dog. It was just very confusing. I didn't know where they came from. About 20ft out there was this very strange looking dog. It just sort of looked like if a person was to wear a dog suit, it didn't move. It wasn't with the rest of this pack. It wasn't playing. The dogs weren't going over there. It was perfectly underneath this light. It was just weird that it wasn't interacting with anything and it would just sort of just crouch down and it didn't look like a normal dog. Its eyes were just looking right at me and they almost looked like human eyes. The eyes were not filled in with an iris like an animal's would be. It looked like someone pretending to be a dog. Really freaked me out. I ended up going inside and I told Claire, like, there's this weird dog out there. I don't know why this is freaking me out so much but like, where, where are these dogs from? Where is this dog from? It was just this really weird situation. And she was just saying, oh no, I don't know of any dogs in the area. That's so weird. I don't know of any dogs. That situation really rubbed me the wrong way enough to the point where when I was sleeping, I was sleeping up in her room and she was sleeping downstairs with her do to kind of keep our dog separate. And I could hear the coyotes in the distance. I just could not stop thinking about those dogs and what that situation was. I was very scared to be there. The next day I came downstairs in the kitchen and Claire was cooking breakfast. She was in a really bad mood. She wasn't wanting to talk, really. I was sitting at the kitchen table and she was at the sink and she was washing some fruit and she wasn't responding. She suddenly turned around and accused me of pranking her. It's just not funny when you try to do things to freak me out when you know that I live here by myself. I don't know what she's talking about, so I'm very confused. What are you talking about? So if I locked you in the bathroom, would you think that's funny? And I didn't know what she was talking about. I just don't know why you go out of your way to do things to freak me out when this is my house, I can't go anywhere else. I'm Getting agitated because she's accusing me of doing something. I don't know what. So I'm very heated. I know that I was asleep in bed all night. Things kind of escalate, and I just kind of raise my voice. What do you mean? And she told me that when she woke up, she got up, went to the bathroom and was taking a shower. And when she tried to leave, the door was locked. Like it was jammed. She said that she spent about 30 minutes trying to get out while I was apparently upstairs laughing, thinking, it's so funny to pull this prank on her. She said that when she finally kind of busted the door open, there was a chair lodged underneath the doorknob. And she was accusing me of doing that. I'm looking at her, eyes wide. Claire, I did not do that. I immediately am freaked out. It took a long time of me sitting there convincing her, saying, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what is going on. I could kind of tell the moment that things shifted and she realizes I was not in charge of whatever this thing was. She was just standing in the kitchen, not moving. And then she suddenly broke that silence by saying, were you not trying to scare me last night either? No, I was upstairs. I was with my dog, trying to sleep. What are you talking about? And she said, oh, well, I thought I saw someone standing in the doorway of the living room just watching me sleep. Where did you see? What was this thing doing? Show me. So she took me down this little hallway that led from the kitchen to the living room. In that hallway is the door to the basement. And I noticed that chain lock was broken. I said, why is this broken? Because it didn't rust off. It was completely solid. Last time I was there, I wasn't looking for it, but it caught my eye. Walking past it, I feel like I would have noticed it. And she just looked at it. Oh, I don't know. I didn't know that that broke. I mean, are you sure? It was always solid. And I said, yeah, I remember because I messed with it the first time I was over here. The only lock in the entire house that was allowed to be there had been broken. It didn't really matter what you told Claire. She would always put a band aid on things. She just never wanted to break. Address it. A few days later, she told me that she had one of those old phones that was on the wall. And she said that the cord had been cut. And so in my head, I'm thinking, either someone is coming in the house or this is a poltergeist that is doing these things. She called me one morning and she said, hey, does your dad know how to fix furnaces? And she pretty much told me that she woke up and her furnace was broken, and she went down to try to see if she could fix it, but it was super old, she didn't know how to do it. And I said, okay, I'll ask him when he gets home from work. She called me later that night. She asked me if my dad stopped by, and I said, no, I haven't even gotten a chance to ask him about that, if he could fix that. He's not even home from work yet. And she said, oh, okay. It was probably my boss then, because I told him about how it was broken, so he probably just fixed it while I was at work and just didn't tell me. And I said, oh, okay, so it's fixed? And she said, yeah, but I don't really know how because he didn't even read my message. It's okay. It's fine. It's fixed though. It's fixed. A few hours later, she texts me, so it wasn't my boss. Okay, then who do you think it was? I don't know. He probably hired someone, though. It's probably no big deal. It's okay. It's fine. A few hours later, again, I get another message. Hey, are you awake? Usually when it's things that urgent, I don't let it go unnoticed. So I immediately said, yes. What's up? I think I hear someone in the basement and I don't know what to do. I instantly start freaking out because I know if she's acknowledging this, it has to be really bad. She said that she heard banging around, shuffling. She said, I can hear someone walking underneath me right now. What do you mean? Are you there alone? Asking if her boyfriend was there. And she just kept saying, I hear them walking around. They're right under me. So I try calling her. She immediately declines the call, and she says, I can't call right now. I'm too scared to talk. I'm saying the obvious. Call the police, go out to your car, wait for them. She said, I can't call the police because if they come here, I don't have an id, I won't have anything, and I'll be arrested. She was totally stuck. I convinced her to get her dog. Get in the car. She drove to her boss's house about 10 minutes down the road, and her bosses answered the door. She was saying, there's Someone in the house or someone in the house, please go look.
