CREEPY CATALOG

There's Something Sinister In My Grandma's Old House

Your first year of college is supposed to be a coming of age story. Meet new people. Make new friends. Learn things that change your perspective on the world. Drink. Study. Fuck. Not me.

I spent the majority of my first year of college lying in bed in my dead grandmother's house sleeping, eating horrible food, beating off to Internet porn, and skipping class while a black cloud of fear, anxiety and growing social anxiety seeped into my being like fog off a dark bay.

The first mistake I made was following my father's advice of moving into my freshly-deceased grandmother's house instead of the freshman dorms to save money. My parents agreed to pay the astronomical out of state tuition, the least I could do was accommodate by living in my grandma's dusty old house which still smelled like her nine months after her passing.

I had a lot of reasons not to complain. My grandma's house was fairly large, within walking distance of the school and the beach. Had I not been petrified of the place my entire life, it could have been a dream come true.

I spent most Christmas breaks of my formative years at my grandma's house in Santa Cruz, but no matter how times I stayed there, I never shook an unnerving fear of the place. One of those typical grandparent houses that hadn't changed a lick since the 50s, the place was just a completely alien environment for a little kid raised in a brand new house. It was one of those old homes that seemed to have a personality itself. Every step made a sound. It had its own scent. The lighting was dim. The artwork dated and eerie – filled with portraits of long-dead relatives. I never seemed to be able to sleep all the way through the night there.

Plus, my grandpa was a simply frightening dude who I never had a single real conversation with in the 15 years we shared on this planet. All I knew about him was he was well-decorated in the Pacific theater in World War II, he worked the night shift at some kind of factory, he slept (a lot), he liked McCormick whiskey (a lot) and I found out down the road he wasn't my biological grandpa.

The most-terrifying moment of my life occurred when I was nine. I was watching late-night TV in the living room because I couldn't sleep and he snuck up behind me. I can still picture him walking into the doorway of the living room stark naked – hairy with a pale blue skin tone. He didn't say a word, just walked up next to me and shut the TV off.

But back to what I was talking about...

Come September, I packed up my Chevy Malibu and drove down to Santa Cruz from my parents' home in suburban Portland to move into my grandma's house and start my first semester of college. I should have been stoked as an 18-year-old with his own three-bedroom house right off of campus about to start his first year at a killer school, but I was far from. I was leaving behind my brand new girlfriend back at home, my dog, and I was still terrified of my grandma's house. I tried to pull out of the whole out-of-state college thing just a few weeks before the semester started, but my parents convinced me to stick it out and set me up with a therapist to meet with weekly when I arrived to help me through it.

Things got off to a rocky start when I showed up. I couldn't get a good night's sleep in the house for the life of me and not just because the place freaked me out. Apparently crickets invaded the house while it was empty all summer and were almost impossible to get rid of. Their horrible chirping was perpetual once it got dark and the local exterminators were 0-3 thus far with trying to get rid of them.

Also, college was nothing like I thought it would be. One, it was a mountain of work. Two, everyone at my school was a crunchy hippy who I felt judged me on everything from the beef jerky I ate between classes, to my Nikes, to my Oregon Ducks football shirt.

I instantly became a loner. Just walked to and from classes and the store to occasionally pick up food and then locked myself back into the gloomy dim light of my grandma's house.