The Entity:- The Haunting

The first time that he caught sight of the place he knew that there was something there, a story to be told perhaps, or a mystery to unravel. He was intrigued to say the least. It was an old house, located on a decent piece of land, he didn’t know who the owner was, and it looked like it had been just left there for years. It looked slightly rundown and was in need of repair, whoever owned the place didn’t appear to have any intentions of renting it out. He asked around, and discovered that the house had a caretaker who lived nowhere close to it, and when they caught up with him, and asked him about it, he simply replied, “trust me no one would go near the place”, with a touch of confidence that implied that the man was telling the truth. “Why?”, he asked, despite having his suspicions, and the man simply replied, “because it is haunted”. Tim took a deep breath, he’d been in the business for a long time and he knew that haunted places did exist, and researching them and writing about them had provided them with a lucrative income in a country that loved spine-chillers, especially one that they could relate to. He asked the man if he would lend him the keys to the place for a small price, and the man agreed almost instantly. What they didn’t know was just how much history was still present. From the moment they entered the house, a peculiar stillness settled over them, a feeling that they weren’t entirely alone. There was an inexplicable chillness in the air that was distinctly out of place, a coolness that could not be explained. Doors creaked open on their own, whispers seemed to echo from empty rooms, and shadows danced in the periphery of their vision. It wasn’t just the wind; it was something more. The house appeared to have a life of its own.

They decided to spend a week there, and the first night went by uneventfully, with the exception of the fact that it grew cooler, so much so that they had to have their jackets on. That however did not last, and as the days went by, strange things started to happen. For starters Tim and Sarah would, on different occasions, hear someone call out their name rather faintly, and when they went to check, it would turn out that the other person hadn’t called out. Then there would be times, when their stuff would not be where they left it, and would turn up a couple of feet away from where they’d originally left it. Tim, and Sarah had done enough research on haunted places to know that there was something there, and it wasn’t really all that friendly. One incident stands out in particular. Sarah was reading in the living room late one night. She distinctly heard footsteps upstairs, slow and deliberate, pacing back and forth. The footsteps were too heavy to be Tim’s and they were made by someone wearing a pair of old-fashioned leather boots, with a thick sole, distinctly out of place with Tim’s footwear. When she called out, the footsteps stopped abruptly.

Throughout the weekend, the unsettling occurrences continued, each one more profound than the last. Then the whispers that they heard started to grow louder, more telling, and they could hear voices, talking to each other, and then came the most telling sign of them all, Tim saw an apparition that of a woman dressed in clothes that were at least a hundred years old, with a white aura like light around her, and once that’d happened, they knew that it was time to leave the house. It wasn’t about jump scares or frights; it was a pervasive sense of unease, a feeling of being observed by something unseen. They’d been in enough haunted houses, to know that the entities that they’d come across so far weren’t exactly friendly, and if they remained there, things would only get worse. They tried to rationalize it of course, that is the first thing a paranormal researcher does, to find a logical explanation, but the sheer consistency and the emotional impact of these events made that increasingly difficult. They asked around, even the caretaker didn’t know much about the place, but they were certain someone would, and after making some enquiries, they discovered that there was an old folks home in the village, and Tim, was convinced that one of its residents would know what had transpired in the house. They made their way there a couple of days later, and after a brief word with the staff, who helped them ask around, they stumbled across a couple of occupants who were able to tell them what had happened. The house according to them, had belonged to a colonial industrialist who’d set up a factory in the village to make shoe soles. Things went well, and for decades the couple lived in comfort, then rubber was discovered in the numerous countries that they sold the soles that were made in their factory to, and things took a turn for the worse. Business went bad, and the owner ran into debt, and an eviction notice was served on the couple. Not wanting to leave the house, the man killed his wife, before he took his own life, and days after their deaths strange things started happening in the house. No one wanted to move in, the bank despite having the authority to legally dispose of the place could not do so, and the house was left abandoned for decades, and as word of the strange happenings in the house spread, no one wanted to buy the place, and it was left there, and all the bank could do was to eventually appoint a caretaker to make sure that no one went near the place.