Scary Stories

the scary room

My dad was dating a woman (let's call her Anne) in Rochester, NY. She lived in an old farm house. I don't even know where to begin with this place. Let's bulletpoint it out:

1) The basement looked like the basement in Stir of Echoes. Most of it was cement, except for "the scary room" which was a mound of dirt and sand. Weird and scary things would result if anything happened in that room, like having to run wires through it. Anne placed a chest-high piece of wood in the door frame to keep her animals from getting in there. It's worth noting that while her cat would go into the basement, her extremely loyal dog could not be made to go down the steps. That's when you know something's wrong. Anyway, Anne kept her cat's food dish on the top step to the basement. One day, she noticed a few pieces of the cat's food laying a couple steps down from the dish. Thinking nothing of it, she let it be. The next day, the food had moved down a step in the exact same pattern. Next day, same thing. Again and again until the food disappeared. Anne tried not to go into the basement as a matter of course, but had to soon thereafter to do laundry. She saw the cat food in the same pattern in the scary room. Blaaaagh.

2) Before my dad lived with her, she had a nightly routine. She would get in bed and read and then would turn on the t.v. (which was directly across from the bed) and fall asleep. Her dog would lie on the floor by her side. One night, she was reading and her dog jumped up and started barking at the t.v. Since her dog was generally hyper, she thought nothing of it—didn't even look up. But when the barking persisted, she looked at the t.v. The t.v. was off, but there were black and white images on the screen. They kept changing every minute or so—a church, a skull, etc. While she had experienced many scary things in her house, this freaked her out badly. She called my dad, panicking, and asked what to do. He said, "Take pictures!" She did. I've seen them. That t.v. was most definitely off and there were most definitely images on it. You can bet that when I stayed in their guest room for a Thanksgiving visit, I made sure the t.v. across from my bed was unplugged (not that it would've made a difference, but it made me feel better!), the lights stayed on, and the blanket was over my head all night.

3) Anne had a ghost travel with her to visit my dad one time. While it wasn't a mean-spirited ghost or anything, I still find that unbelievably creepy....so Paranormal Activity-ish.

4) I asked my dad what the scariest thing was that happened to him while living in that house and he said that one day, he was making a sandwich in the kitchen (which adjoined to the basement stairs, btw) and felt something hit his back and then heard it drop to the floor. It was a penny. "Weird," he thought. He started walking to the living room and something hit has back again. Same. Penny. Not cool, ghost. Not cool.