CREPPYPASTA

My Great Uncle's House

My Great Uncle's House

My great uncle died recently. I was never really close to him—he was my great uncle, after all, but my dad asked me to come with him and some other family to clean out the house, since Uncle Frank never had any kids of his own.

I guess a little background information would be good. Uncle Frank, along with most of us, lived in southeastern Virginia, on an old plantation house. It’s across the street from a little family cemetery, and most of it is surrounded by state wildlife reserves. He didn’t have any neighbors, so my dad took me to visit him a lot.

Uncle Frank raised baby trees and sold them to nurseries, and the rest of his enormous yard was overgrown grass and a bunch of produce-bearing trees and bushes, so most of my visits were picking blueberries to take home or watching from the rope swing while he and my dad cut down trees. There was a forest behind his house, which I had only ever been in to investigate deer.  Up until his death, I don’t remember going inside the house since I was ten. I don’t remember much about it; just two things.

It was cluttered and dirty and miserable, with insulation and roofing fallen all over the place; and a whole room in the back was boarded up. My dad told me it was haunted, with a whole back story about how the plantation owner’s daughter was shot sometime during the Civil War and he hanged himself out of grief. I’m pretty sure I believed it; I want to ask him about it again, to see if he actually believed it or if he just made it up to scare me. I probably won’t.

Anyways,

A week or so after Uncle Frank died, we went to clean out his house—it was my dad, his sister, a cousin of mine, and me. The yard was overgrown as ever, and being June in Virginia, it was unbearably hot and humid. Mosquitoes and dragonflies swarmed around the house. My aunt only half-joked that we should just burn the place to the ground. I brought my digital camera with me that day on my dad’s request, and I went around photographing the lines of trees, the old cars in the backyard that had been overgrown, and the house, so we could sell everything. Then I joined everybody else inside. We worked until two o’clock in the afternoon, when we took a break because it was getting too hot and my dad—a surveyor—wanted to check the floors because they were damp and soft.  By that time we had

cleared out a bunch of junk—lots of old kitchenware and clothing.

When we got back at around four, I pulled my cousin aside and asked if he wanted to check out the haunted room. He said yeah—by that time neither of us believed it was haunted; we just assumed the floor was rotted or something. So, while my dad and aunt worked on clearing my great uncle’s bedroom, my cousin—Tom—and I found some screwdrivers and worked on prying the boards from the door. They came off with a little bit of ease—Tom did most of the work—and we just had to bang on the door with our shoulders before it flung open. I nearly stumbled into the room, but I caught myself on the doorframe, luckily—the floor opened directly into the crawlspace beneath the house in the middle of the room.

Tom and I surveyed the area and decided that I should try to walk around the rim of the room, since I was lightest, and see if it was sturdy. I walked beside the wall like I was on a balance beam, and when I reached the very back, I told him it was safe for him to follow.

We both turned on our cell phones, as the windows were all boarded up, and looked around.

“No nooses,” I noted.

“Or ghosts.  Maybe you should take a picture and make sure they don’t only appear on film,” He raised his eyebrows and wiggled his hands around.

“It’s digital,” I said, but I took a picture of him, mid-spooking, and made sure there were no phantoms from the 1860s behind his shoulder. Of course, there weren’t. We continued goofing off in the room, ignoring our cleaning duties, for fifteen minutes. I took dozens of pictures. We pretended to be ghost hunters.