Me and my husband Drew, our son Jack, and our pets live in an old house that’s over 100 years old. It’s in a nice neighbourhood on the west side of Vancouver, which is home to most of the Jewish folks that live in our city. We once had a conversation with someone who had knowledge of the neighbourhood’s past, and they told us that they believed that many years back, our house was home to the area’s Orthodox Jewish butcher. This is notable because the highly-observant, Orthodox, meat-carving spirit might not take kindly to their ex-home being occupied by an atheist and a converted Jew, who are both gay and vegetarian. So, if our guess was correct that there was a minor haunting in our home, we likely had one pissed-off and resentful ghost.
In the first years in our house, we noticed odd things. One morning, I walked into the kitchen and the heavy, leaded glass light fixture over the counter was swinging. It was winter and the windows were closed, so there was no breeze. Everyone else in the house was asleep, including the pets.
On another day, Drew was in the basement and heard the dog’s footsteps in the TV room next door to where he was. He then heard the sound of the sofa springs as Charlie got up on the couch and curled up. He called out to her and, strangely, he heard her bark from upstairs. Then she came running downstairs to where he was (and where the demon on our couch was, apparently).
Things kept being odd. When I was taking down a thick wall that separated the kitchen from the living room, we noticed that the insides of the wall were covered in large scratch marks that looked to have come from an animal but were much too large to be attributed to a rat or a mouse.
Over the years, we have had many, many things go missing (of course, this could possibly be due to the fact that we are fairly messy people and that our haunted house is where clutter usually goes to die). But still, many things are still missing years later.
Then, our neighbour from across the street told us they witnessed what looked like a solitary female standing still in our front yard at 4AM, staring at our house for quite a while, Blair Witch Project style.
With no hints or direction from us, a friend who claims to have a connection to otherworldly forces has pinpointed a space in our house that had odd and creepy vibes. This is a room in our basement that always feels significantly colder than other rooms down there and has a door that doesn’t seem to stay closed, no matter how often we close it. Being lovers of scary movies, we had recently watched the movie Paranormal Activity, and were 82% sure the demon from that was living in that basement room.
The incidents that we had noticed had been amusing and only slightly creepy… That is, until 2015, when one bad thing after another seemed to happen to me, and my life went completely to shit. I needed someone to blame, so I figured it must be the uninvited guest in our home. You know, the demon from the movie Paranormal Activity.
Given my work and career issues, money problems, parenting struggles, and extreme self-doubt, I felt like I was cursed, and it was going to take multiple appointments with my longtime psychologist, a medication review, and additional self-examination to get myself out of the deep hole I found myself in. And, of course, significant sage smudging and a house exorcism administered by a flaky but entertaining specialist who had long grey hair and carried a tie-die backpack and a cloth bag of candles. You know, a good, science-based mental-health plan.
We went out and bought a bundle of dried sage. We lit it up, blew out the flame and the smoke from it smudged that old house within a centimetre of its life. The potent smell of the dried herb permeated our nostrils and every corner of every room. And then the specialist did their work as well. With eyes closed, mumbling to themselves and reeking of patchouli, they went about supposedly ridding our home of spirits who were annoying, occasionally frightening, and about as welcome at our place as a right-wing Albertan who wanted to discuss book banning and their views on the validity of medical vaccines.
Over time, things normalized. The sun came out. My outlook improved. I was able to see clearly that things were not nearly as grim as they seemed. It was a huge relief. It might have been the meds, maybe the time with my psychologist, but likely just that things got better all around. It probably wasn’t the smudging and the exorcism. If our guest is still cohabitating, it seems like maybe they’ve found a way to be cool, have stopped the annoying behaviour, and have remembered that they’re staying in our gay vegetarian home rent-free.
Having said that, over 20 of our forks have gone missing in the last few months. It could be lingering supernatural activity, but it’s more likely the fact that our teenage son continues to be not great at putting dirty dishes away.
On December 31 of the year in question, as a precautionary measure, I took the calendar that had hung in our kitchen all year, put it in a wheelbarrow in our backyard, and lit it on fire. It was fairly therapeutic to watch the damned thing burn.
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