Writing Prompt: You are a ghost, who’ve been haunting a house for years. Most people left after a few days, some can last few weeks. You’ve been a mighty ghost, until a scientist moved in. He had stayed for 2 years and keeps coming up with scientific explanations for all your tricks. (source)
The Haunting. Demon. Poltergeist. Beelzebub. These were names given to me decades by the guests who so dare trespass on the resting place of an old soul like myself. This had been my home long before the country side had been consumed by what folks these days called “the suburbs.” As the world changed, I stayed within the confines of my house, working tirelessly to shoo out the unwanted guests like chasing rats out of the pantry with a broom. Why didn’t anyone let me just rest in peace?
I had spent many such decades perfecting the craft of a good scare. It helped that in part that the story of my untimely demise had become a local legend. A good beheading is bound to make people terrified of what still remains within the walls. For the first few years that story was all I needed, only to disturbed by a flying rock through the window or two teenagers sneaking into my house to make out or get high. But that all changed once an eager young woman and her husband decided to “flip” my house. I wanted nothing to do with that, so I did a little work of my own.
Tape measures would extend on their own. Saws would turn on by themselves. Hammers banged on the walls when nobody was in the room. But despite this the construction still persisted. I thought I had lost until the night the young couple moved in. The woman was different this time, a baby bump sat upon her belly a few months from delivery I suspected.
They dressed up a room with a cradle with mobile dangling delicately above it, stuffed bunnies and bears, a paint bucket and nails sat upon a blue tarp in the corner for the final touch ups of the house. I decided to give the room a make over.
The next morning the young trespassers minded their own business for most of the day. I patiently waited within the nursery, eager to see the look on their faces at my art. It was the early afternoon when the soon to be mother ventured into the nursery. Her face morphed from the cool and calmness to a mouth gaping eyes wide open scream. Loud footsteps banged across the floor as the husband dashed down the hallway. He stopped at the doorway and let out a loud “what the fuck?”
Inside the room was my first masterpiece. The bodies of the stuffed animals were nailed to the walls without order. Hanging by the pull string of the light fixture was the body of one stuffed rabbit, the light strobed, a little flair I added at last minute. On the wall across from the door I had written in blue paint “get out.”
The couple left that night to never return. But people kept trespassing.
I got pretty good at my hauntings over the years. From the obvious tricks such as floating knives and rooms being completely rearranged after a family had returned for their Sunday church, to the more subtle nightmares I would project into people’s dreams. Most people wouldn’t last a whole month in my house before they hightailed it out of there, leaving me with a few weeks of peace and quiet until another family moved in. But then she came.
At first I thought she would be easy. You see, she moved into my house all alone, and I’ve had my share of single people throughout the years and single people were easy. Their loneliness only amplified the effects of my hauntings. Whereas couples and families would lean on each other for a while before things got too weird, single people had nobody to share their experience with and often times worried about going mad. But she was different.
No matter what I did, from shadows moving on their own, to flipping tables she always had an explanation for everything happening. When I banged on the walls at night she’d say it was the pipes. If she watched TV alone late at night and I started interfering with the signals she called it interference. Whenever I gave her a few nightmares she’s call it anxiety and take pills that made my tricks futile. If the furniture seemed out of place after she had returned from work it was because the wooden floors were too slippery. Everything had an explanation, and you know what? For the first two months it was kinda cute, but two years later it’s tiring.
No longer was I the demon, I was a pipe banging against the wall. Long were the days of being called a poltergeist, now I was just slippery floors. Beelzebub was no more, instead I was just another broken light bulb. It was no longer a haunting, just “perfectly reasonable” things happening around the house.
