Around two-in-the-morning or so, the house was once again silent. Those who were sober enough to drive, brought home everyone else who couldn't, leaving just myself, my dad, and grandma on the farm. Dad and I were still a little too wound up to sleep, so while he took some time to watch some 80's action movie in the main room, I sat at the kitchen table and played World of Warcraft. All was well, and the ghosts who were actively making their presence known throughout the entire party also seemed to quiet down.
Still, as I sat alone in the kitchen eviscerating hordes of demons in my favorite MMO, I couldn't help but wonder just what on God's green earth was going on in that house. Were we all just going crazy? Were our imaginations just running away from us? Was there a carbon monoxide leak somewhere?
I started to get kind of paranoid about the whole carbon monoxide idea, and got up to check around the house for a working detector. Sure enough, there were several working carbon monoxide detectors plugged into the walls of various rooms: one was in the kitchen, one was a smoke and carbon monoxide detector in the main room directly over the kitchen doorway, one was in the entryway above the basement door, and one was plugged into the hallway by the stairs. All of them were blinking too, signaling that they were in working order.
We couldn't have been hallucinating these "ghostly" experiences as we slowly suffocated to death. Even if we were, we probably wouldn't have been hearing and experiencing the same shit together. Yet, here we were, in a toxic-gas-free house, not always focused in on a possible haunting on our hands till something happened, which we'd all hear and experience at the exact same time. It was all very, very strange.
I then began to wonder if there was, perhaps something else causing the noises, such as pipes in the ceiling between the upstairs and the downstairs. But, when I asked my dad about it, he glanced up from his phone and explained that, no, there were no pipes hidden behind the sheetrock above us, and the wires that were there were installed in the early 1990s when my family updated the wiring in the house.
"So, not only did you guys not put pipes up there, but you also updated the wiring?" I asked.
"Yup. We had to completely rewire the place in order to move back into this house from the brick house in the 1990s." Dad replied, "It was a severe fire hazard otherwise. But, there never was a bathroom or any sort of plumbing upstairs. In fact, before the 1970s, there was no running water in this house at all except for in the kitchen. There was a little outhouse and shower in a separate building outside the back door by the basement."
(For reference, the brick house was the farm that my uncle Wade now lives on that my grandma and grandpa first purchased after their marriage. My great-grandparents Alfred and Lenora still lived in the Victorian farmhouse at the time. When Alfred grew older, my grandparents moved into the Victorian house to take care of the farm as well as him. While my grandparents and their children took over the Victorian house, they rented out the brick house, and my great-grandparents were moved into a manufactured home adjacent to the Victorian farmhouse, which was there until my great grandma Lenora died at the age of 95 in 2009. Alfred died in that manufactured home in 1985 after suffering from numerous age-related aliments. He was 85 years old.
In 1990, my uncle Wade decided he wanted a house of his own, and my grandparents wanted a change in scenery. So, while Wade stayed at the Victorian house, my grandparents moved into the brick house. But, Wade's first wife hated the Victorian house so much, that in 1992, my grandparents and them switched places. Wade's wife still hated the brick house, but liked it a little better than the Victorian house. When he had the money, Wade knocked down the brick house and buried it in the well adjacent to it, and then built a new house on the foundation of the brick house).
"Really?!" I gasped.
"Yup. Grandpa Alfred didn't like change enough to put a bathroom in the house. He was very old-school, and thought everyone who used most modern technology, including bathrooms in the house, was a sensitive little wuss." Dad chuckled, "You can even see what we called the 'shit house' in the aerial pictures of the farm leading up to the early 90s when that tornado came through and took it out, as well as several other out-buildings."
"Wow. I never knew any of that." I exclaimed, "I only heard about the barn that got wrecked by that tornado, as well as how the bathroom down here was a bedroom until grandma and grandpa moved back here in the 70s. I guess I just never put two-and-two together."
"Well, now you know." Dad smiled.
Not only were there no pipes that could rattle and groan above us, but the wiring was also fairly new, which seemed to debunk the idea that we felt "weird" in the house because of the EMFs caused by crossed wires. The mystery had only grown.
Being the wuss of the family, so-to-speak, I decided not to investigate further. Instead, I simply sat back down in the kitchen and attempted to immerse myself in the video game. Except, I couldn't focus. I kept getting distracted by my surroundings, such as the numerous family photos my grandma had hung up on the wall, stuck to the fridge, stuffed behind light switch covers, peeking out from under books and other documents.
There were also lots and lots of things, such as several pairs of whitetail deer antlers from bucks my grandpa hunted before his aneurysm took hunting away from him. Or the numerous paintings, photos, and figurines of Hereford cattle in nearly every nook and cranny. Those were just the things I could see from my place at the kitchen table. I couldn't even imagine the family history that house held, though I could begin to explore it.
Starting in the entryway where the basement and garage doors face each other, I searched through the various dusty knick-knacks left on the shelves by grandpa's gun cabinet. There, I discovered even more Herefords, as well as more family pictures containing younger versions of my grandparents with other people I didn't know or recognize. I also found an old Budweiser drinking mug with a living wolf spider within it, so I called off my exploration of the shelves early.
As mentioned before, grandpa's gun cabinet right next to the shelves was empty. There used to be five shotguns and rifles behind the glass (which had a frosted image of a whitetail buck on it), but when grandpa died, he left them to his kids. My dad ended up getting two of his father's guns because my aunt didn't want one: a 12-gauge shotgun and a little semi-auto .22 rifle.
From there, I explored the items left by the garage door. Most of the things were in a few boxes I didn't open. Besides that, there were a few small rusty tractor parts leaned up against the wall by a box of soda. Nothing that unique or interesting, really. Most farms I've visited have those things just lying around somewhere.
I moved on into the kitchen by the front door (or, what has been used as a front door for the last twenty years or so). On the brown patterned-papered walls nearby were more paintings of Herefords, as well as aerial images of the farm dating back to as far as 1950 or so. Old kerosene lanterns with Clydesdales painted on them, dangled from the ceiling on brass hooks painted smoky black.
From my position facing the front door, if I looked to my right, I would see into what was the farm's first in-house bathroom, which was once a pantry. Instead of a door, a thick crimson curtain was strung over the worn wooden doorframe. Despite their age, both the toilet and the sink still worked, although the sink's rusty faucet has never stopped dripping every few seconds for as long as I've been alive.
After perusing the pictures on the walls and numerous antique items in the drawers in the kitchen, I plodded into the main room and sat down at the dining table. The pictures and documents passed down the generations were still sprawled out all over the place on the table, so once again, I began to review them, allowing my mind time in the silence to put together a family narrative of sorts. However, my thinking was beginning to slow down and become fuzzy. Exhaustion had finally settled in.
Before long, I had crawled into my sleeping bag on the couch, and passed out.
