Philippa Soo (21:35)
So I grew up in this house that was built in the 1920s in Illinois, in the suburbs of Illinois. And it was this really old brick bungalow and it was built by this guy Michaels and he even like carved his last name in the front of the house and we moved in there when I was about 2 years old. So this is the early 90s. And I remember when I was about 8 or 9 I had a cousin that was moving to the states who was about 10 years older than me, so she was almost in her 20s and she was like going on a huge adventure and moving to the States from London and she was staying with us for a little bit and it was early morning, she had just flown in the day before and my mom asked me to go wake her up because she was sleeping upstairs in the guest room. This is like a one and a half story. So there's my parents bedroom upstairs, a guest room, a bathroom, an attic, and then downstairs is where I slept My brother slept. There was like an office living area and then there's a basement in the house. So this like one and a half story house. So she's staying up in the guest room on the second floor. And I go upstairs to wake her because my mom was like, I don't want her to sleep too much. I don't want her to get jet lagged. She should like wake up now. It's probably like 9am So I go up and I'm like trying to open this door, which the doors are always like creaky. They're old, so they're always a little sticky. Always like a little creaky. But I cannot for the life of me open this door. And so I'm like twisting and pushing and like twisting and pushing and I like can't open it. And then my cousin opens it from the inside and I go, oh, thank you. That was so. And I look and my cousin is still asleep in bed. So it felt like someone had opened the door. And I was sort of startled, but more just like I thought it was kind of funny that I was struggling so hard. And then the door just opened. And so I wake her up and you know, get her out of her like very deep sleep. And I go downstairs and I'm like, mom, this weird thing happened. This funny thing happened. I just tried to open the door and then it felt like somebody opened it for me. And she just looks at me and smiles and she's like, oh, that's funny because a couple of years back, I guess this is when I was like a toddler and we'd first moved in. They had had a housewarming party and my mom's friend was looking for a place to breastfeed her baby. And my mom was like, well, why don't you go upstairs to the guest room? And I guess the same thing happened to her that happened to me where she was trying to open the door and couldn't open it. And then somebody opened it for her and she told my mom this and my mom sort of like laughed it off. But ever since that moment with my mom's friend and then with me coming to my mother, there had been like a series of really strange events in the house. So these, all of these events I end up learning later. What I do know is when I was a teenager, I was standing in my house just sort of like looking out the window. I think I was like waiting for my friend and like looking for her car or something. And I felt like someone had pushed me from behind, like, almost like a shiver, a shiver down my spine. And I just sort of laughed it off because I was like, I think my house is haunted, but maybe that was just me. And then I tell my mom this story, and she's like, oh, that's so funny. Well, our house is definitely haunted. I've, in fact, haven't told you this, but I've brought people over here to come and, like, sage the house. I've talked to these ghosts. I've asked them to, like, go away, and I'm like, oh, that's so funny. So I go off to college, and, you know, I'm living in the dorms, and I do realize that I feel actually alone when I go to sleep. That there is, like, a sense of aloneness that I had never felt growing up. And anyway, so I always knew that I had a haunted house growing up and was ready to tell this story to you here today. And then I went to my mom to confirm some of these details, and she was like, oh, well, that's really interesting, because I have a whole bunch of other things to tell you about the house. One being when we first moved in, we had some friends over, and there was a couple, and the guy in the couple was like, there's many spirits in this house. Like, he was sort of like a medium. He claimed to be a medium, and he said, there's, like, six spirits in this house. And my mother had another experience where she was alone in the house, and the wine bottles just sort of went, like, flying off the shelf. There was another experience where I was in the house, and I was. I was, like, dead asleep, like, in the middle of the night. And I had this leaning bookshelf that just fell in the middle of the night. And, like, when you take these things apart and you look at them separately, you're like, that's not that weird. But then my mom was selling the.
