The Hauntings That Follow Us

Case 2: Private Home and Farm in Volendam

For privacy reasons, we obviously will not be disclosing who owns this property, as they are acquainted with Marie's parents and Jared's parents. We would not want random people showing up to hunt ghosts at their private property, after all. As such, I will be referring to them as Family A, consisting of Father A, Mother A, Son A1, Son A2, Daughter A, Uncle A, Grandfather A. and Grandmother A.

As for the backstory behind this particular case, this home and its attached farm were built in 1817, and the property was owned by a family for over 150 years before it was sold to the family that currently owns it. The property is located in the most remote area of the town of Volendam, referred to as Amesbury. Aside from some farms, three churches, an abandoned schoolhouse, and one of the smallest fire departments in the area, there's not much in the way of things within this area of town, although it has been settled for almost two and a half centuries. As with any property that has been around as long as this one has, multiple people of this first family have died on the grounds, seven to be exact. Five of them were normal and relatively peaceful deaths from natural causes. However, there were two that were of particular note that were not.

In 1838, it is recorded that one of the older sons of the family at the time was killed when he was kicked and stomped on by a horse. Then, in 1910, the father of the family at the time was killed when he fell from the top of the barn while working on it. While these deaths are certainly fairly violent compared to the other five, perhaps the cause of most activity does not involve the first family to own the property after all, but rather the road the house sits on.

The house sits on a bend in the road that was infamous for being the site of several fatal car accidents. The worst took place in 1987, which both of the grandparents and the father of the family remembered. A drunk driver took the turn too fast and hit a family in their own car, killing two young children and their mother while an older child and their father survived. The drunk driver also survived and spent 10 years in prison for the accident, only being released in 1998. His whereabouts were unknown after that until it was reported he died in 2010. In total, there have been at least six fatal accidents on that bend in the road in 1947, 1957, 1980, 1987, 2003, and 2014, killing eleven people. The most recent was a motorcyclist who was killed when he crashed his bike on the bend while the family was out on a vacation in Florida.

In regards to Family A, activity picked up around the time their youngest child, Son A2, was born in 2012. While there had been the occasional bump in the night or the rare voice no one recognized in the house, for some reason, after Son A2 was born, the spirits became restless. Grandfather A and Father A both recalled to Marie when she visited the farm that several times when they were outside working early in the morning, they could hear what sounded like screaming from the bend in the road, in particular after the fatal motorcycle accident in 2014. Sometimes, the screams were male, and other times, they were female. Male screams became more common after the motorcycle accident, which makes sense as the victim was a man in his late 20s. Regardless, every time they stopped what they were doing to see what was going on, they found nothing.

Within the house itself, Grandmother A recounted that a few weeks after Son A2 was born, he began to point out something invisible in whatever room he was in in the house. Curious, she had taken a photograph of Son A2, and found that it had a white mist shape in the direction of where Son A2 was staring. When I talked to her, she also gave me a photograph she and Grandfather A had taken long ago, around 1985, of one of the windows of the house. Standing in the window between the curtains was a semi-transparent apparition staring back at the camera. She also showed us another photo, this time of the driveway near the bend in the road, taken late at night. This photo, taken by Grandfather A after he began to feel uneasy while walking a dog, showed an indiscernible white shape in the distance standing on the side of the road.