haunted house – Obscure Vermont

January 25, 2014March 31, 2020

Weird Moretown

“I swear, there’s something weird about Moretown” said my friend as he sat down on my couch. To be fair, there is something weird about most of Vermont – every community has its obscurities. The difference is while some stories speak slow and heavy, others keep their secrets like a tomb. Moretown is like many Vermont communities – rural and sparsely populated. The town has an estimated 1,658 people spread throughout forested hills and rocky farms along the Mad River banks – the general store which wears the name of the town acts as the focal point for the quiet community. From some parts of town, in the distance, the distinctive outline of Camels’ Hump rises over the foothills. But as for Moretown’s weird side, I knew nothing about it – and was eagerly awaiting my introduction.

My friend lives in one of the oldest houses in town, and he knows this because despite new ownership, the locals still refer to the place after its original occupants. It’s your emblematic Vermont farmhouse in a rural village setting – a two story wooden box with a tin roof, thin walls and tiny rooms with warped wood moldings. A vision that hard work and resilience wrote.

But underneath it’s 19th century antiquated charms and frame of plaster, wood and nails, something else appears to co-exist with my friend and his family like streams of light.

“I always have the radio going in the house when I’m home alone” he begins. He tells me stories of nights he spends alone, and how he hears phantom conversations manifest themselves from the rooms upstairs. These curious voices are barely audible, and indecipherable. Though he can hear them, he also can’t assign a gender to them. “I just know they’re arguing, I can tell by the tone in their voices” he says. Sometimes he recalls hearing the voices coming from the basement instead of upstairs. When I asked him how long the disputes go for, he explains they are random, and often fade away and manifest themselves again later, periodically throughout the night. With the radio running in the background, it drowns out the noises and makes him feel more comfortable, although, he admits by now he’s just used to it.

But this was only the beginning of a long list of peculiar events. One night a few years ago, he had a few friends over to hang out – a way to pass one of the long and bleak Moretown winter nights. They were in the kitchen, when their conversation abruptly stopped at the sound of a clang on the granite counter top, followed by a startled reaction from one of his friends. When the group turned around to investigate, they found a large kitchen knife was laying on the counter – their now distressed friend staring at it with wide eyes. She proceed to explain how the knife flew out of the knife holder on the other end of the counter, landed on the surface and skidded across the counter, powered by some invisible force. That would be an impossible feat without human help. But she says she witnessed the entire thing. As she was explaining this to her incredulous friends, a loud bang was heard, followed by the identifiable sound of a glass bottle rolling across the floor. They turned around and realized what had happened – a bottle of wine had fallen off its shelf and rolled across the floor towards them. But there was something unusual about this scenario; the wine bottle would have had to jump a half foot piece of wooden molding to get off its place on the shelf, before plummeting a 5 foot drop onto the floor, without breaking, and then rolling to a stop at their feet. No one had an explanation for either events.

Later on, as they were sitting and talking on a couch in the living room, one of them suddenly jumped off the couch in a panic. As all attention diverted towards her, she yelled and pointed at her former seat, saying that it felt like two fists had been punching her directly underneath the couch cushion. This isolated event went unnoticed by everyone else sitting on the couch – and of course, there was nothing underneath the couch cushion when it was investigated.

Understandably, two friends decided to leave abruptly after the startling array of events. The remaining friend opted to spend the night on the couch downstairs because he was too tired to make the drive home that late. But that would be a choice he would wind up regretting. Sometime around 4 in the morning, he woke up when he noticed something wasn’t right. As he drifted out of his reverie, he noticed that the lights in the living room were dimming and turning bright again. He knew the lights in the room had a dimmer switch next to the actual light switch, so he rolled over to glance at it – and said he saw the little switch moving up and down by itself! Now officially terrified, he left abruptly at 4 in the morning. “I woke up and he was just gone. He eventually called me later on during the day and told me what had happened. I didn’t know what to say”

I asked my friend about the history of the house, but he didn’t have any answers to give. From his knowledge, nothing tragic has ever happened inside the home that he was aware of, and he’d never spoken to anyone else who had ever claimed to have a strange occurrence inside, so these mysteries were just that.

The Moretown Whatsit

Apart from unaccountable things happening inside his house, my friend also tells me some astonishing occurrences that he witnessed around Moretown.

He recalls one night in his backyard as he was hanging out in his hottub with a few of his friends. Suddenly, he noticed a puzzling noise coming from behind the garage that was right behind them. It was the unmistakable sound of footsteps – and they were coming from behind the garage. He silenced his friends, who also seemed to notice his tense behavior. There was something very bizarre about this situation – something that refused to fade. He reasoned that he surely would have heard footsteps approaching the garage, it was in a wide open area and there were several inches of snow on the ground with a brittle layer of ice crystal on top. And yet, these strange footsteps seemed to literally conjure themselves behind the garage. There were no footprints in the snow that approached the building from either side. It sounded like whatever was back there was pacing back and forth, slowly and steady. Now, the trio of friends sat motionless in the hottub, waiting to see what sort of shapeless terror would eventually step out from behind the garage. But nothing came around the corner, and the pacing continued. Finally, one of the friends made a break for the back door, and the rest followed closely behind. Once inside the closed in porch, they peered out the windows into the stark night – waiting to see what would happen. Nothing. My friend walked around to the back end of the porch where the windows overlooked behind the garage – and the backyard was empty. There were no footprints, no intruder, no nothing. Just the starless winter skies and bare trees of the silent Vermont woods.

This mystifying incident wasn’t isolated however. A few weeks later, once again while hanging with a friend at his house, his dog started barking, which instantly had my friend behaving apprehensively. “My friend kept asking me what was so weird about my dog barking” he explained. “I told her she didn’t understand, that dog was incredibly old and hadn’t barked in years. I knew something was wrong”. As he got closer to his frantic dog, he heard what it was so upset about; They heard the sound of footsteps crunching on hard snow on their side porch. Instantly remembering the irregular events that night at the hottub, he cautiously walked over towards the side windows over looking the porch. There was no one there, and there were no footprints on the fresh snow.

His friend was understandably spooked, and asked if he could walk her home, deciding she had had enough. Next thing he knew, they were outside in the wintery cold, armed with flashlights. A few minutes into walking around and scanning his surroundings, he noticed how strangely quiet the moonless night was. There were no sounds at all. After spending about 10 minutes combing his yard and beginning to walk along the road out front, he suddenly heard a chorus of coyote wails coming from the woods across the road – across the grey of the Mad River. Him and his friend froze in their tracks. Suddenly, and almost impossibly, another crescendo of coyote wails could be heard cracking through the night – but this time, it came from the woods behind his house. He knew there was something out there – something the coyotes didn’t like.

Then he heard another noise, but it wasn’t like any noise he had ever heard before, but he knew it definitely didn’t belong to the coyotes. It was a strange screeching noise, what sounded like a cross between a pig grunt and someone howling with misery. But unlike the coyote wails that echoed off the barren mountains, this odd noise seemed to be swallowed by the hungry night, and it came from the direction towards his neighbors house.

As his eyes swept the skies for that night’s revelation, he said he felt compelled to turn his flashlight beam over across the road towards the neighbors house, and saw something he’ll never forget. On the roof above their garage, were what appeared to be two yellow cat’s eyes, gleaming back at him about 5-6 feet above the roof line. He brought the beam of his flashlight over towards the taciturn creature, and saw the eyes duck out of sight just below the peak of the tin roof. He turned off the light and waited, and minutes later, he saw something scramble back onto the tin roof, and was greeted by the uncomfortable sight of the two yellow cat eyes glaring at him.

As his eyes adjusted in the dark, he said he got a “better” look at the creature on the roof. Through the black of the night, he said that those hazy eyes seemed to belong a gangly shadow, with almost human features. Whatever this thing was, it was subtly observing him in a flouting manner. Suddenly, it clambered down the other side of the roof and fled into the deep dark night. The coyotes went wild. He never saw it again.

“I read your post on Pigman, and I thought about how close Moretown is to the Devil’s Washbowl – so I thought, maybe that thing could have been a Pigman sighting” he suggested. But I wasn’t so sure. The reported Pigman sightings had very different details and scenarios to them – this thing, whatever it was, seemed to be something all its own. Could Vermont have a new, undocumented cryptid? I suppose we’ll never know unless another sighting manifests itself into paranormal concrete.

Giant Cats?

Giant Cats are nothing new to Vermont mythology, and have been spotted all over the state for as long as anyone can remember. They’re referred to as Cougars, Mountain Lions, and the archetypal Catamount. So what could account for my friend’s strange occurrence one Saturday morning near a small horse farm on Route 100B in Moretown?

He tells me he was driving south along 100B on a sunny Saturday morning. As he was passing a quiet horse farm on his left, he noticed something moving along the upper edge of the meadow along the tree line. As the horses were grazing in the open field, he said he saw something long, limber and grey looking that was sleuthing down the hill, attentively towards the horses. He never stopped to get a better look, but he describes it as what appeared to be “a giant cat”. Sadly, we’ll never know the identity of this mysterious stalker, or if it ever got what it was after. Perhaps it was one of Vermont’s legendary Catamounts, or maybe, something far stranger and unimaginable?

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April 11, 2013March 31, 2020

What Dwells on Woodcrest Circle?

Recently, a good friend of mine just confessed to his childhood home being haunted, and if I had known then what I know now, I don’t think I would have ever dared step inside when I was a kid.

I had visited a few times before, and never thought anything strange about the place. I had no reason to feel uncomfortable there. But my friend could argue otherwise, and the things he finally relayed to me were nothing short of terrifying.

He grew up in the same neighborhood as me, a typical 1980s sub division of simple cookie cutter ranch homes built precisely around planned circles and cul-de-sacs all named after local trees that grow wild on the front lawns. Even today, as Milton continues to grow, the honeycomb of pot holed streets and homes that make up my neighborhood is still considered to be the largest development in town. A neighborhood so big, that most of my friends would often call me from their cellphones and complain that they were lost long after they had pulled out of my driveway to leave.

To understand what exactly went on in that house, it’s good to know a little of the history behind it. One of the first occupants of the small ranch house was your typical American nuclear family. A father, a wife and their children. Though almost nothing is known about the family who owned the house before my friend’s family did, the tragic events that exploded like find powder have seemed to forever linger in the atmosphere like oil on skin.

It was known that the happiness of that family had long been eroding, as the father spent most of his hours working his fingers down to dust, trying to provide for his family. But the problem was sadly beyond what a good paycheck could repair. One day, he came home from a grueling day of work, and noticed he was in the unusual position of walking into a quiet and empty house. His suspicious soon became fire as the night passed and his family still hadn’t returned home. Beginning to panic, he soon made frantic phone calls to just about everyone he knew, asking if they had seen his family. But no one had. A few days later, he would have his answer. His wife had waited until he left for work, taken the children, and left him for another man. To make things more devastating, he found that she had been cheating on him for several years. Unable to deal with his betrayal and shame, he went into the bathroom and shot himself.

Years later, my friend’s family moved in. Because they had 4 children, more rooms were needed and the basement was eventually converted into 2 makeshift bedrooms. My friend recalls the basement right after they moved in. He said his first impression of the basement wasn’t a great one, saying it made him feel uncomfortable the moment he set foot down there. Towards the far end was an area that was fenced off from the rest of the basement. It was a giant cage type room, with walls made from 2x4s and chicken wire walls. Their landlord informed them that it used to be a dog cage, but there was just something eerie about it still. Eventually, the space that was the cage was converted into bedrooms.

My friend developed a fear of the basement; more specifically, the part of the basement that was his room. Things seemed normal after they had first settled in. But slowly, strange things began to happen.

He first realized that no matter the circumstances, it was always cold in the basement. He would report feeling phantom breezes at night and frigid temperature drops that would leave his room freezing compared to the rest of the house. Before his room had a door, he used a sheet that had been nailed to the wooden frame around it. Some nights, he reported waking up to the sheet blowing in some sort of invisible draft that seemed to manifest itself from nowhere. More peculiarly, the breezes only seemed to disturb the sheet, and didn’t touch anything else around. With no open windows or doors that could act as the scapegoat, the source of these phantom breezes remained a mystery. But that was nothing.

After some time had passed, he woke up to hearing the sound of something moving around on his carpet. As he lay awake listening, he eventually pin pointed the location of the strange noises; they were coming from the broken plastic remains of a Plasma Globe that broke at the foot of his bed, the broken pieces lay scattered on the floor. Now, it sounded like something was crawling around inside the broken plastic shell. Getting up to turn on his light, he scanned the carpet and the broken globe for the mysterious culprit, and found nothing. Turning off his light, he got back into bed with the intention of getting more sleep, but was soon woken up again to the same noises, only this time, they seemed faster and more frantic. Getting up again, he picked up the shards and put them in the garbage. Thinking that was the end, he got back into bed and fell asleep. But for weeks after, he continued to hear noises at night. This time, he described them as what sounded like chirping noises, like a bird would make. They were soft and delicate, and could never be traced. But he knew they were coming from inside his room.

As time progressed, the strange noises stopped as mysteriously as they had appeared. Things once again were uneventful until months later, he awoke one night to the sound of his computer chair moving. Through the dim light coming from outside his room, he witnessed the chair wheeling itself from the computer desk across his room and stop itself right at the foot of his bed. The basement floor was poured concrete and was level, there was no explanation for why the chair moved on its own. He got out of bed and pushed the chair back underneath the desk. Sometime later, he awoke again to find that the chair was back at the side of his bed! Only this time, the back of the chair was reclined – an impossible position without human help, as if something was sitting in it, and it was facing him as if whatever was sitting in the chair was observing him. After a few minutes, the chair straightened back up to its natural position, as if whatever had been sitting in it had gotten up. He watched the chair roll by itself across the room and rest against the wall.

These events seemed to space themselves out unpredictably, and for the most part, innocuous. But soon, the strange phenomenon became more intense and more interactive. He began waking up in all hours of the night for unexplained reasons. Feeling horribly uncomfortable, he would scan the dark shadows of his room. Meeting his gaze was a “shadow figure” standing near the basement doors that lead to a staircase that went outside, staring at him with red eyes that he described as “like cats eyes”. The shadow was reported as being very tall, and reached from floor to ceiling. But this didn’t happen only once. This happened for years, to a point where he went from being absolutely terrified of this mysterious entity, to becoming accustomed to it. Eventually, he came to the realization that he would wake up every night and see it staring at him from his doorway.

He began to have terrifying and powerful nightmares on a nightly basis, so incredibly intense and aggressive that he didn’t want to talk about them. But, he did recall a few that he remembered vividly. Once, he dreamed that he awoke in the middle of the night laying next to a dead girl in his bed. His eyes would open and he would find himself staring into her dead eyes, which he described as calm and soothing. But the rest of her was anything but. Her mouth gaped open and was infested with crawling worms. Sometimes he would freak out and scream, and like lightning, she would begin to eat him until he woke up in his trembling skin.

Another dream he had involved the same girl, only this time he woke up to a rotting hand coming up from his bedside and clutch his chest. That soon was followed by another hand, and eventually, her dead and rotting face. She opened her mouth and let out an agonizing scream of misery and sorrow for what seemed like hours until he woke up. An interesting side note is that after every single nightmare he would suffer through, he would always wake up and see that familiar shadow figure with the cats eyes staring at him from his doorway. The figure would always be in the same spot, but would never come in the room. Could there be a connection between this strange entity and his dreams?

Another night, he awoke to the chirping noises again. At this point, it had been some time since he had last heard them, so he was a little surprised as his memory was revived. But there was something else now. In the desolate moonlight that lit up his room, he reported seeing something truly terrifying that seemed to crawl and shamble along his floor. Extending from the basement doors to the door of his bedroom, he said he saw what he can best be described as a giant human back, without arms, legs or a head attached to it. It withered and twisted and convulsed across the floor, it’s bones looked like they’d pop out of its skin at any moment. He turned his head away, far too afraid to stare at whatever he was seeing. When he heard the chirping noises quiet down, he forced himself to look at his floor again, and whatever he had seen had vanished into the night.

Now, all of this admittedly seems a bit extreme, if not Hollywood in character. But, my friend isn’t one for lying, and his voice was trembling with such emotion and sincerity that I simply can’t believe that he would be having a laugh at my expense. And as I would soon find out, my theory would be proven correct.

A few nights ago, myself and another good childhood friend were enjoying fine Long Trail Coffee Stouts underneath soft Spring breezes that seemed safe and cool. Sitting on two chairs on his back deck, we often would meet up and let our conversations continue into the night, a great way to unwind from the despairs of the day. And somehow, our conversation turned to nostalgia and strange experiences, and eventually, it lead to my friend’s house.

I had mentioned that I wasn’t sure what to make of the claims that were told to me, I was more than a little skeptical, but he intervened and stopped me.

“I had a really strange experience there when I used to spend the night” he told me. “So, you believe that it’s haunted as well?” I asked, almost incredulously. He wasn’t sure what to think. Like me, he tries to see things logically, and even though he was a firsthand witness to a bizarre encounter there, he still had a hard time admitting to himself that he believed what he saw.

Years ago, when he was spending the night, he rolled over on the couch he was sleeping on, and his foot banged into something. His eyes slowly opened, trying to read the situation. This was strange, considering he knew before he went to bed, there was nothing at all that was near the couch that his foot should have bumped into. Eventually, he sat up and noticed that a computer chair was sitting beside the couch. That was strange, because before he went to bed, he recalled that the chair was in fact tucked underneath the computer desk at the other side of the room, a good 6 feet from where he was sleeping. What was it doing over here? He didn’t think much of it, but he noticed that the room was much colder than it had been. On the back of the computer chair, a blanket had been draped over it. Wanting some extra warmth, he quickly snatched the blanket from the chair and pulled it over him. When he grabbed the blanket, the chair expectantly started spinning. But 15 minutes later, he sat there watching the chair incredulously; it was still spinning at a continuous yet slow speed and showed no signs of slowing down. Then to his horror, the chair began to spin faster. In a scene that would only appear to most people on the silver screen, the chair began to spin faster and faster as if pushed by an unseen force, only to come to a direct stop suddenly, the front of the chair facing him. Needless to say, he preferred not to spend another night in that house again.

But there were other strange factors at play here. My friend recalled that his step dad began to suffer from terrible mood swings shortly after they had moved in the house. He would become violent, irrational and his tongue sharp and serpentine. I only met him a few times when I was much younger, and I saw him as an unfriendly type of person, but according to my friend, he was acting “out of character, even for him”. Eventually, the marriage was dissolved and he left the house. But soon after, his mother would report waking up with a body like imprint in her bed, as if someone had been sleeping beside her the entire time.

In a case such as this, a lot of questions remain, and not surprisingly, far more that can ever be answered.

If we were to believe that these events happened with no logical explanation, was there more than one thing troubling my friend and his family? Was it just a series of bizarre occurrences that seemed all too real? And, what sort of person in life was the man who killed himself? Was he kind and troubled, or were his abusive motives a reason why his family had left him? Admittedly, I was having a hard time debunking these claims.

My friend admitted that one night, he tried speaking to the shadow figure outside his door. “Well, what happened?” I asked curiously, my mind not being able to even predict his response. But he simply shrugged his shoulders and nonchalantly said “nothing”.

One theory is that if haunts are the responsibility of the angry and wounded spirit of the man who killed himself, he seems to have a strong dislike towards men, which is probably why my friend seemed to get the brunt of all that happened. Or perhaps, it was personal…

That was years ago, and they have long since moved and grown up. A peculiar ending to this story is that eventually, the strange phenomenon seemed to die out well before they sold the house, but the strange feeling of being watched remained until the day they left. The house still stands today, and is currently being lived in. It’s been a few years now and it hasn’t been put up for sale, so my best assumption would be that maybe, whatever malevolent entity that plagued the house has perhaps moved on? But maybe the question is, if this is so, where did it go?