Normally, we choose a farmhouse for being a bit isolated from the city where we don't hear too much traffic or face too much crowd. But when you find out that your farmhouse is not normal like other farm houses, then you think it is much better to be in the city where you can call for help much faster. And suddenly all that peace and quiet doesn't seem so appealing anymore.
So my dad and I flip houses together. It's what we do for a living. We handle everything ourselves, from the foundation work to the finishing touches.
which means our projects can take anywhere from a couple months to well over a year depending on how much needs doing. About 3 years back, we came across this incredible old farmhouse out in northwest New Jersey. Now, it had to be at least 100 years old, maybe older.
The previous owners had let it sit there completely vacant for 15 years before we bought it. The place had that abandoned look to it, but underneath all that neglect, you could still see what a gem it used to be. We also found signs that squatters had been crashing there at some point, but the house still had solid bones, so tearing it down and starting over didn't make sense financially.
Our first step is always cleanup and demo work. And I've done enough of these projects to know that every house has its own feel to it, its own energy. This farmhouse though, something about it just felt off from day one.
The place was massive. Four full floors if you counted the basement and attic. That meant a lot of ground to cover and a lot of dark corners we'd be working in for months.
The basement especially gave me the creeps right away with its old stone foundation and that musty smell that comes from years of sitting closed up. And whenever you were downstairs on the main floor, everything felt totally just normal. But the second you headed upstairs, then it's a completely different story.
Like the air itself was thicker or something. I know it sounds weird, but I started announcing myself every single time I walked in. I'd come through the front door and call out, "Hey, how you doing today?
Is it cool if I come up to do some work on the bathroom >> or whatever room I was tackling that day? My dad would give me these looks like I'd lost my mind because I'd never done anything like this on any other job. I don't even know why I started doing it here.
It wasn't a conscious decision. I just felt this deep need to announce myself like something in my gut was telling me I had to. So, I did it every single time without fail.
A few days into the cleanup and demo work, my dad found something that made both our stomachs turn. He was clearing out the master bedroom upstairs when he opened this small closet. It had a single bare bulb hanging in it.
There, dangling from a coat hook on the inside of the door was a dog collar. But that wasn't even the worst part. The closet walls were covered in these weird symbols spray painted in black.
Nowhere else in the house, just in there. And on the floor, there was this charred pile of something. Ash and burnt debris that looked like it had been deliberately set on fire right there in the closet.
I completely lost it when I saw that collar and refused to go anywhere near it. My dad could see how upset I was getting and told me to just go home for the day. So, I did.
My dad and our other coworker ended up dealing with it while I cooled off at home. Now, here's something else strange. That closet light never worked.
And we handle basic electrical stuff all the time. So, we tried everything we could think of. then finally brought in a master electrician who'd been doing this for like 30 years.
He replaced the fixture, ran completely new wiring, checked the breaker box, the whole 9 yard, but still nothing. He left scratching his head, said he couldn't explain it. Once we finished clearing out the main living areas, we moved on to the attic and basement.
The basement was honestly fine, just your typical old foundation work. Actually, the entire bottom half of the house felt normal. The basement and main floor with the kitchen, office, and living room all had this neutral, calm energy to them.
But the attic, though, was absolutely horrible. And I physically could not make myself go up there. Not even once during the entire renovation.
Just standing at the bottom of those narrow stairs and looking up made my chest tight. So, I made sure to bust my ass on the other three floors to pull my weight. I wasn't trying to slack off or be difficult.
My dad got it without me having to say a word, which is huge because he's normally the most skeptical, nononsense guy you'll ever meet. He doesn't buy into any of this stuff. There was one day though where he needed me to hold the flashlight while he worked up there.
I forced myself to climb halfway up those attic stairs, but that was my limit. I kept just my head and shoulders poking through the opening, body still on the staircase, shining the light wherever he needed it. The attic had one of those fold down ladders that pull from the ceiling and it was right there in the upstairs hallway between the master bedroom, second bedroom, and bathroom.
The second we pulled that ladder down, this absolutely disgusting smell hit us right in the face. It smelled like death. And there were these huge black flies.
The kind that show up around dead things absolutely everywhere. I'm talking hundreds of them or maybe thousands. Calling it an infestation doesn't even do it justice.
They were swarming all over the place, buzzing around like crazy. The smell and the flies together made it almost impossible to even think about going up there. I stood there on that ladder, almost falling off multiple times because I was swatting at these nasty flies like crazy.
My dad searched everywhere in that attic for days trying to find whatever was dead up there. We fought with those flies for months, literally months, before we finally got them to go away right before we sold the place. But here's the really messed up part.
The new owner decided to rent the house out to tenants, and the flies came right back. It's been almost 3 years now, and they still keep coming back. The renters have called exterminators and pest control people out there over and over again, but nothing works.
Something else weird happened in the master bedroom after we cleaned out that closet. By the way, I convinced my dad to bury the dog collar. We couldn't just throw it in the trash.
It felt wrong, so we buried it in the backyard. Anyway, the master bedroom had four windows total, two on the north wall and two on the west wall. One day, out of nowhere, there were two bats stuck on the north windows.
They were somehow wedged in that tiny space between the glass and the screen. We had no idea how they even got in there. The space was so tight.
All the windows in the house needed replacing anyway, but we didn't want to hurt these bats. So, we spent a good amount of time trying everything we could think of to get them out safely without injuring them. We always worked during the day, and since bats are nocturnal and only come out at night, we figured that's why they never moved while we were there.
But when we'd show up the next morning, you could tell they had shifted positions overnight, so at least we knew they were alive. I was seriously stressed out about these poor bats. I'm a huge animal lover, so this was really bothering me.
Anytime I found dead bugs during the cleanup, and I would carefully place them on the window sill right next to the bats, hoping they would eat them. I know that probably sounds crazy, but I didn't care. These bats seemed completely stuck in there, and I couldn't stand seeing them trapped like that.
And it was early summer, so it wasn't like they were hibernating or anything like that. My dad and I finally decided to set up a ladder on the outside of the house and try to free them from out there. He managed to adjust the screen and window so the bats could definitely get out if they wanted to.
There was a clear path for them to escape now, but those bats just stayed there on that window screen for weeks. Then one random day, we showed up and they were just gone. Eventually, we finished renovating the whole house and sold it.
The new owner decided to rent it out instead of living there himself. But here's where it gets even weirder. Tenants would move in, stay for maybe a month or two, and then suddenly break their lease, and move out.
This has happened four times now since we finished the renovation. After each tenant moved out, the owner would hire us to come back and get the place ready for the next renters. But every single time we went back, the feeling in that house was exactly the same.
Oh, and I should mention, we told the new owner about all the weird stuff that happened before he bought the place. We were honest about everything. My dad, who like I said is super skeptical about this kind of thing.
Even he can't explain any of it. And get this, my dad now announces himself every time we go into that house, too. He started doing it without me even saying anything.
We've met all four tenants at some point while they were living there. They all seemed like totally normal, reasonable people. Not the type who would just break a lease and lose their security deposit for no good reason.
Something about that house is clearly wrong. I honestly think the place needs some kind of spiritual cleansing or something. I don't know what exactly, but something needs to be done.
This happened about 5 years ago. My family spent the summer in Prince Edward Island like we did every year when I was growing up. I was around 15 or 16 years old and I had four younger siblings.
They were between 1 and 7 years younger than me. One sunny day, all five of us went for a walk down a dirt road near our farmhouse as we were bored and had nothing else to do. Now, honestly, we never really walked down that particular road as there was this dog in one of the yards that always sounded mean and aggressive, so we usually avoided that route.
We didn't want to deal with him barking at us or worse. But today felt different somehow. Maybe we were just extra bored or feeling a bit braver than usual.
Anyway, we started walking down the dusty road, talking and laughing about random stuff like siblings do. The sun was warm on our faces and there wasn't much traffic. About 20 minutes into our walk, we were just passing by some old farmhouses when we saw it.
We all stopped talking at the same time. About half a mile up the road, we saw this huge black cat-like animal. It was crawling across the road and disappeared into a big bush.
Now, I should mention something important about where we live. There are no forests around our area, and there aren't many bushes or trees either. It's mostly just open potato fields everywhere you look.
You can see for miles and miles, just flat farmland stretching out in every direction. So this creature, whatever it was, came from an open field and went into that bush on the side of the road. That bush was the only place where something could hide for a long distance around.
My brother, who younger than me, is really brave. As soon as we saw it, he walked right down to the bush to check it out. He looked around but couldn't find any footprints or tracks.
He didn't crawl inside the bush, though. He was worried there might be a den in there or that the animal might still be hiding inside. He was really glad he didn't go in because we told him later that we'd been watching the whole time from where we stood and we never saw the creature leave the bush.
It was still in there somewhere. The only way I can describe what we saw is this. A very large pitch black cat-like animal.
It was crouched down low like it was either nervous about being out in the open or maybe hunting something. The way it moved was definitely feline. Now, at first we tried to convince ourselves it was just a coyote.
They do grow them pretty big up there in PEI, but the more we talked about it, the less sense that made. The shape was all wrong, and coyotes aren't that dark. The only other animal we could think of was a panther or a big cat, but those don't live in Prince Edward Island.
So now we've just agreed to call it some weird thing we saw. We named it the beast. One of my brothers has changed his story now.
He thinks maybe only one of us saw a shadow or something and then somehow convinced the others it was a monster. We were all really scared and confused. Does anyone have any ideas what this could have been?
Now, as a host, I want to clarify that the animal or whatever was out there must have been really, really big because if it wasn't that big, then it wouldn't be logically possible to see it from that distance. And the other thing which bothers me is why the hell was this animal doing there? I mean, there's no forest there, or there should be another explanation.
It might be hiding or living in some nearby houses, and that might be more creepy than just living in the woods. This was told to me by a friend and she is absolutely adamant that everything she said is true. And while hard to believe, I have to say that I believe her.
My friend lived in an old farmhouse all her life. And strange noises or the sound of footsteps walking upstairs were fairly common throughout the years. They were so common that it became just another part of life on their farm and not particularly scary anymore.
Her parents would joke about their guest at dinner, and her younger brother even gave the presence a nickname, Old Thomas, after the previous owner, who died there in the 1940s. The creaking floorboards always followed the same path from the master bedroom to the top of the stairs, then silence. Sometimes they'd hear what sounded like someone rummaging through the attic at 3:00 a.
m. But when they checked in the morning, nothing was ever disturbed or out of place. She had never actually seen anything in all her years living there, but that changed one night at the age of 24.
Her parents had moved out of the old farmhouse shortly after she left home. And a couple years later, they let her and her new family move back in. Of course, she had expected to hear the same noises that she had all her life and did the very night they moved in.
Her husband thought she was crazy at first when she casually mentioned the footsteps. But by the third night, even he couldn't deny what he was hearing. Her husband was really creeped out at first, to the point of not wanting to leave her and their daughter at home at night while he went to work.
But she had reassured him though that there was nothing to worry about, that she had been hearing these sounds all her life and they would be fine. Now onto the night in question. Shortly after they had moved in one night when her husband was at work, her and her daughter went to bed upstairs.
It was around 1000 p. m. on a Tuesday.
She'd just finished reading her daughter a bedtime story and tucked her in when she heard the familiar footsteps start up in the hallway. Nothing unusual. She was laying in bed with the door open and a nightlight on in the hallway for her daughter who slept in her room at the end of the hall.
While laying there just before she drifted off to sleep, she heard footsteps coming down the hall. At first, she thought it was her daughter, but as she listened, she realized it was coming from the opposite end of the hallway from her daughter's room. The footsteps were heavier, too, like an adult's weight on the old wooden floorboards.
Each step made that distinct creek she knew so well, but they were getting closer to her doorway instead of fading away like usual. Her heart started racing. Even though she tried to stay calm, she glanced at the nightlight's dim glow spilling across the hallway floor, half expecting to see a shadow pass through it.
The steps grew louder, closer, she held her breath and watched the empty doorway, unable to look away. Of course, she immediately knew it must be whatever was making the noises her whole life. She laid there and watched the doorway as the steps got closer until all of a sudden a short creature about 2 ft tall scured on two legs across the doorway and headed toward her daughter's room.
Before she even had a chance to comprehend what she saw, her daughter began screaming. She said it moved unnaturally fast, almost hunched over with pale grayish skin that looked wrong in the nightlight's glow. The image burned into her mind in that split second.
Long spindly arms too long for its body. Her daughter's screams snapped her out of her frozen shock and pure maternal instinct kicked in. She threw off the covers and bolted down the hallway and into the room and flipped on the light.
And her daughter was sitting up in bed sobbing and saying something about a monster. She was in shock at the moment. but quickly looked around the room and saw nothing.
Of course, she was afraid though and scooped up her daughter and ran instead of searching any further. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold on to her. The closet door was slightly a jar, which made her skin crawl, but there was no way she was going to investigate.
They rushed downstairs to the living room, turned on every single light on the way, and she immediately called her husband. He left work early, and then they spent the rest of the night on the couch downstairs. After that, she never saw the creature again, but they ended up moving out soon after that.
I don't know what to make of all that, and I'm still a bit skeptical, but she sounded genuinely freaked out when she told us the story. And I believe that she believes what she saw was real. Her husband apparently saw something move in his peripheral vision a few nights later, and that was the final straw for him.
They were out within 2 weeks, staying with her parents until they found a new place. The weird part is her daughter, who's seven now, still occasionally mentions it and refuses to sleep without a light on.
