A relative, who is a realtor in rural Pennsylvania, came across a house that had been sitting vacant for a year. She first went to the house alone but had to leave when water begin to pour in through the kitchen ceiling without explanation.
She then went back to the house again an hour later with her husband and young daughter. When the child got to the door of the house, she became hysterical and refused to go inside, screaming “this house is mean”. The mother took the child to the car. The husband, a construction site manager, went in alone.
Again, the kitchen was dry. While upstairs, her husband heard a cracking sound and then a waterfall-like sound from downstairs. Water was pouring down into the kitchen again and there was suddenly water damage to the kitchen ceiling that had not been present when he first walked in.
I wanted to see it for myself, so I drove down and my relative and I went to see the house on a bright, late-February afternoon. Set in a heavily wooded community on a large lot, it was a beautiful house with an in-ground pool, gazebo and deck in the backyard.
Inside, there were no signs of water or leaking. The house was huge, but the most amazing thing was a massive ballroom with cathedral ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. The only items in the house were a large, antique grand piano in the family room and a small, wooden doll’s cradle on a kitchen counter.
We went upstairs. Again, a thunderous crack and waterfall sound. Water was pouring through the kitchen ceiling again. My relative wanted to leave but I wanted to stay and see what happened next. We went back upstairs to determine where a leak may be coming from when the house suddenly grew frigid, although it was a Spring-like day outside. The roaring water sound got louder.
Back downstairs, the kitchen ceiling had split open, was sagging and tons of water was pouring through the crack. Not only that, the wooden doll cradle on the kitchen counter was rocking and we could hear the piano playing by itself. It was time to go.
We ran outside into the backyard to see if we could see anything in the windows. While I was looking up, I heard a shuffling sound and my relative had become entangled in the heavy, plastic pool cover, which had somehow moved to where we standing mysteriously and the pool was filled with stagnant, leaf-filled water.
Out front we saw a man at the house next door. I asked him if he knew who’d lived in the house before. He told us it was really weird but the house was built recently, a family had moved in – two small children, a mother and a father – and one night they disappeared in the middle of the night. He said they just moved out and the house had been empty since then.
