My Sister's Haunted Crack House

It was in 1998 when my sister Stacy and her first husband, Richard, moved into their first house at 1431 Thornberry Avenue in 1998.

This house is in an older neighborhood, off of Taylor Boulevard within a half mile of Churchill Downs. My mom described the house as the nicest crack house on the block.

She and her family moved to Arkansas in 2001 and my dad moved into the house when he separated from his second wife for a while and then my brother lived there before she sold it off and the family moved to Florida.

My dad came over to my mom's house one night and my sister was there when we were sitting in the kitchen and my dad told a story how he got up the other night, swearing there was someone in the house as he heard footsteps.

"Doesn't surprise me," she said casually. "The house is haunted." She said it in such a casual manner, it took us both a couple seconds to digest what she said.

The screen door slams

I just sat there listening as my dad had what I would describe as a sense of relief, if that's possible, because he thought he was going crazy.

The back door of the house had a very heavy screen door that was impossible to open and even more impossible to close. When you let it close naturally, it had three distinct points that it would stop, swing back out a little and then continue to close. It was impossible to make this door slam.

My dad said earlier in the week he heard that screen door suddenly slam shut in the dark hours of the morning and he woke up immediately, sitting up in bed. He walked out if the master bedroom, through the adjoining room that was Calvin's bedroom just across a hallway that was only 3 feet long.

The adjoining bedroom had two doors on opposite sides and the far door led into a room that looked like an extension that was added after the house was initially build. This was the family room. Around the corner was a small hall that led to the kitchen and the back door was here, opposite a full bathroom. The kitchen ran back the length of the house to the front of the house to a living room where the hall that connected the two bedrooms and the central bathroom sat. There was also a stairwell to the basement area where they put a bedroom for Jessica, Richard's daughter from his first marriage, and a play room for the kids.

My dad walked through the entire circle of the house and walked into the basement thinking someone had broken in. He stopped first at the back door, unlocked it and tried to push open the screen door and it was as stiff as ever taking a lot of effort to open it and it would not shut. Even pulling it shut, the door was resisting as he pulled it. He also noted there was no wind that night.

He went back to bed, but he said he just felt like there was someone in the house.

Stacy nodded.

That had happened to her as well.

Then dad talked about the footsteps one night and grabbed a bat and walked the full circle of the house looking for an intruder and there was no one else in the house. He kept the bat next to the bed after that.

And we danced like spirits in the night

Stacy had started letting the dog go to bed with her if she was going to bed before Richard got home. Often the dog would suddenly sit up and go walking out of the bedroom and then come in by himself and climb back into bed with her. When Richard would come home and the dog would go out to greet him. The best we could figure is perhaps Sierra thought Richard was home hearing someone out there and she'd get up and go out.

Stacy thinks it was someone else, perhaps someone who had died in the house. In fact she said she thought it was the ghost of an old man in the house with them.

I did not experience anything directly as my sister or dad did, but there were two things in retrospect that I mentioned that night and my sister nodded.

When they did not have Jessica and I was visiting in town, I stayed in Jessica's bedroom in the basement. It was near Christmas, perhaps as late as February, and I went to bed well after midnight. I heard footsteps and being in that dark bedroom without any light, I had no idea what time it was. I honestly thought it was Richard returning from work because he forgot something.

I found it puzzling when I mentioned him coming back in the house the next day and he said he had not returned. I can dismiss it as perhaps the dog, but the dog had a fast gait being a whippet; much faster than the slow creaking of the floorboards overhead the basement bedroom. Calvin was still a baby and Stacy said she didn't get up.

I don't think at that time she suspected the house was haunted.

But that night in mom's kitchen I told her something that I saw, it was nothing significant at the time, but it was like having a piece of the puzzle without knowing what it was a picture of.

The door between the family room and Calvin's bedroom would latch shut when it was closed. We would be sitting there watching TV or playing with the kids and it would unlatch by itself and swing open into the family room and hit the wall. What happened in mom's kitchen though was the realization that I also had witnessed on several occasions the door close by itself from the wall to the door frame.

And Stacy and my dad are sitting there and Stacy says, "Yeah! I've seen that, too!" Dad nodded as well. He had seen that, but he had not thought about it.

It was nothing we really thought about, usually a door will swing just one way in an old house because perhaps it has settled over the years, but to swing both ways from a complete stop (or being latched) is bizarre.

Spirits above and behind me

A few months later, I was home and my brother was living in the house with a roommate. It was Derby weekend and I remember Brandon and his roommate were hanging out.

I mentioned something about it being the first time I visited the house since dad, Stacy and I had that conversation about the house being haunted and Brandon nearly had a fit.

Brandon had several experiences he started telling us about and he had been freaked out living there as the medication he was taking had an effect as well and he thought he was going out of his mind.

When Brandon's roommate came out, I don't recall his name, we told him about the stories of the house and we saw a grown 26 year old man reduced to tears. He and Brandon apparently had never discussed some of the odd things they had seen or experienced in the house with each other.

Brandon's friend was not on medication affecting him. One day while reading on the couch in the living room, he felt like he was being watched and as he looked up, he saw an old man standing in the hallway where the two bedroom doors and the bathroom door meet in the three foot hallway, then the man just disappeared. It scared the $%#* out of him.

He was shaking while telling us the story and crying because he thought he was going insane with a couple of the things he had seen, including the apparition. He thought there was something wrong with him.

My sister had indicated before this that she always "felt" it was an old man's ghost in the house and it was funny that Brandon's roommate said he saw an old man in the hallway that just disappeared in front of him. Stacy never felt unsafe or threatened, just occasionally uncomfortable and creeped out by a presence she thought was there in the house.

I've always wanted to go back to the house, but she sold it and I've wondered if the current residents ever experienced anything there.