An Arvada Haunt

     I began having a disturbing reoccurring dream when I was 15 years
old.  In this dream, I entered a strange house, alone.  My heart pounded
very loudly in the dream and as I moved from one hideously decorated
and filthy room to another I grew more and more terrified.  I knew
somehow that I was not alone and something bad was going to happen to me.
After going through several rooms I would awaken in a sweat, heart
pounding and shaking.  Each time the dream reoccurred over a few years span,
I managed to move further and further into the house, but always woke
up before reaching the basement.  I knew something horrible was in that
basement.

     I was 19 years old when my husband, two boys and I moved into the
house of a family friend.  My boys were 3 months old and 2 years old.
Gene's wife had died in that house, bed ridden and out of her mind from
lack of oxygen to the brain, with emphysema.

     Gene and his wife had owned a glass business which Gene ran alone
the duration of his wife's illness.  He was too depressed and too busy
to keep house.  It needed a lot of cleaning when we moved in.  All of
his wife's belongings were still there, stored in the basement.  Their
dishes were still in the kitchen and 3 or 4 of her house-plants still
hung from macramé' hangers about the house.

     From the night we moved in I knew the house was haunted.  I'm
still uncertain as to whether it was Gene's wife or something else.  We
were never alone there something was always watching us.

     My 2 year old had always slept through the night with no problems.
When we moved in to this seemingly normal suburban home, that changed.
In fact, a lot of things changed.  I began having nightmares, horrible,
bloody, murderous nightmares.  I thought I was loosing my mind,
becoming paranoid.  It even got to where I was afraid to go into the boys'
room in the middle of the night when they would wake up scared and crying,
but I would force myself and end up sleeping in there with them more
often than not and that angered my husband.

     We had been there 3 weeks.  I had spent many long arduous hours
scrubbing walls, ceilings, light fixtures, kitchen utensils, toilets,
everything.  It was beginning to look pretty nice, I had even moved Gene's
wife's plants around and put them where I thought they should be.

     Gene stopped by one afternoon to see how things were going.  The
expression on his face when he walked in was a pallid confusion and
mixed emotion.

     "I see you've been cleaning.  It looks good, like it used to."

     I followed him around as he inspected the familiarity of things,
then nearly choked on a panic attack at his next words.

     "Its funny though, you moved the plants."

     "Yeah."

     "You have them hanging exactly where Wanda had them hanging."
Going to the kitchen he inspected the cupboards.  "Yep, you've got
everything exactly as Wanda had it."

     Had she possessed me?  Needless to say, as soon as Gene left I
went around and moved all the plants.  That night I had that old
reoccurring dream gain and woke up in hysterics when I realized the house in my
dream was the very same house we were living in.

     The living room was white, with green and brown long shad carpet,
dark brown cork on one end wall and gold veined mirror on the opposite
end wall, the main bathroom was pink and gray, the master bedroom where
Wanda died was lavender, the boys' bedroom was yellow with yellow shag
carpet, the kitchen was a deep orangish melon color with the avocado
green stove, refrigerator and sink.  The small bathroom off the kitchen
was lime green.  This was the same house in my dreams and I had been
very terrified by some kind of energy I felt in the unfinished, cobweb
laden basement.  The laundry was beginning to pile up because I refused to
go down there.

     I had continually nagged at my husband about the house being
haunted.  We fought about it a lot, because he felt nothing out of the
ordinary.  I remember crying and begging him to not leave the boys and I
there alone while he went to work.  Angry, he would go anyway.

     One day I was dusting in our bedroom.  I removed everything from
the night stands, figurines, framed photographs and the like, placing
everything on the bed.  Turning my back to the bed while dusting, I
turned back to retrieve the items and replace them.  I was stunned to find
them gone.  My search of the room was unsuccessful.  I found everything
in a pile at the opposite end of the hallway.  "Don't mess with my
stuff!"  I yelled in anger but cried with fear.

     Other things began to disappear without a trace, dishes, jewelry,
ink pens.  We would tear the place apart and never find them.  One
night in the shower, it were as if someone cranked the hot water all the
way up on me.  It was scalding so I jumped out still lathered.  Quickly I
tried to get some cold water out of that faucet, but there just wasn't
any.  The bathroom felt like an oven.  The steam was so thick it was
almost suffocating.  Although I saw no one else in the room with me, I
knew with every ounce of blood pumping through my veins that I was not
alone and I was very much in danger.

     I gathered up my boys and went to see my mother in Colorado
Springs for a week.  When we returned to the house, my husband had painted
every room white.  He wanted to make things more comfortable for me, but
during his week alone, he began to notice little unexplainable noises,
tools gone missing and the nagging feeling that he was not alone.

     A really creepy thing about the paint job was that the white paint
in the master bedroom where Wanda died continuously peeled off the wall
next to the bed.  We would touch it up and it would peel off again.

     That night I was plagued once again by that same old reoccurring
nightmare about the house.  This time I actually made it to the basement
where I was stabbed to death just before I awoke screaming and sobbing.

     My husband agreed with me that the house was haunted and he even
took a job in California to get us away from there.  All during the week
we packed to move, the house sounded as if it were coming apart every
night and we could both hear heavy footfall approaching the bedroom
coming from the living room, down the hall.

     One night, at three a.m. we were both sitting up in the middle of
the bed with the bible, reciting the Lord's Prayer.  We were young and
did not know what else to do.  The sounds of the house became so
intense that we stopped what we were doing, drug the boys from their beds
into the playpen in the living room and tried to rest.  I slept on the
sofa and my husband on the floor between me and the playpen.

     I dreamed I was floating above my body, watching the four of us
sleep.  A thick black smoke human-like figure walked into the room,
stopping next to the sofa.  The black figure bent over my husband placing
what would have been and appeared to me to be its head directly over my
head.  It were as if it was examining my face very closely.  I realized
then that there was no oxygen.  I could not breathe.  What ever it was,
was suffocating me.  Panicked, I rushed back to my body and awoke,
gasping and struggling for air.  My husband did exactly the same thing at
the same moment.  When I told him what had happened, he spoke of having
a similar dream.  There was a black figure standing over him stealing
all of his oxygen.

     That day was our last day there.  My husband went to work as
usual.  The boys both had bad coughs and we had been using a very old glass
and metal humidifier, on loan to us by my mother in-law.  I was sitting
on the sofa watching General Hospital.  Both boys were playing
contentedly in the playpen to my left.  Empty and unplugged, the glass
humidifier was sitting on the floor to the right end of the sofa.  I had left
it out of the packing boxes, because my mother in-law was supposed to
drop by and pick it up that evening.

     All of a sudden and out of no where I heard this strange tink,
tink, tink sound followed by a pop, tink.  Highly curious, I circled the
room a few times, my eyes scanning everything like a frightened bird.
Then I saw it and froze in fear.  A perfect triangle shape,
approximately 1 inch, had been cut from the side of the glass humidifier and the
piece lay inside the humidifier.  Within 3 seconds the humidifier was out
on the porch.  That was it for me.  I had had enough.  My husband
arrived home just about dark and within ten minutes we were loaded in the
car and gone to California.  Gene promised to put our stuff in storage
for us and a few months later he committed suicide.