Encountering unexplained happenings in one’s own home can be pretty unnerving. When it occurs around Halloween, such instances can feel even more loaded with meaning.
Strange noises, mysterious objects, odd sensations, seeing apparitions — these are some of the uncanny things that can come with paranormal activity, experts like Shari DeBenedetti of Ghost Hunters say.
These spiritual encounters don’t just happen in ghost stories — some of Inman’s own staff have witnessed them first-hand. As All Hallows’ Eve approaches, we caught up with two Inman staff members who have sprightly guests in their homes, and heard all about their encounters.
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The spooky basement in Upstate New York
Inman Chief Strategy Officer Denise Robbins owns an investment property in Hudson, New York, that was built in 1848. For several years, when she first bought the property, she rented it out to tenants, unaware that there was anything unusual about the home.
But in 2016, she, her husband and her daughter started using the home as a weekend getaway, then ended up spending much of the pandemic there.
Once the family started spending more time there, they realized something seemed a bit off about the unfinished basement.
Robbins’ dog, who typically follows her everywhere, refused to follow her into the basement when she did laundry, and started growling at a hole on the first floor that led to the basement. When Robbins went down there herself, there were times when she felt like she was walking through very cold patches, the lights occasionally flickered and she thought she heard people whispering.
Her husband, who sometimes records podcasts for work, started recording in the basement during the pandemic, but ultimately decided to stop because he felt like he wasn’t the only person in the room — and he also heard people whispering.
But something even more unusual happened just this month, when Robbins’ husband did some laundry.
“On Saturday morning, I’m sitting in the bedroom and he’s coming up the stairs from the basement, and he’s going, ‘Do you know what this is?'” Robbins relayed. “And in my mind, I’m like, it’s a cursed object, because anything in that basement is a curse.
“He opens my bedroom door, and he is holding a lacy, white, Victorian wedding gown. And I was like, ‘Where did that come from?’ He’s like, ‘It was on the floor. I thought it was a sheet or a towel I had dropped when I was doing the laundry last weekend.'”
Robbins’ husband asked if it was maybe a dress from their previous tenants’ wedding, but Robbins reminded him that they attended the wedding, where both brides wore matching tweed suits.
“I was like, ‘They wouldn’t be caught dead in this. The only person who could be caught dead in this is dead,'” Robbins said.
“So, I was like, ‘Get it out of the house. Throw it out!'”
The littlest ghost, with an attachment
Inman Director of Customer Success Jasmine Franz moved into her 1875-era house with her family about six years ago, and for the first year, things were pretty peaceful. At that time, her two children were ages one and four.
Once her daughter, Sierra, was just old enough to talk a bit and crawl around on her own, she started repeating something strange: “Baby Monster wants my ‘biko.'” (Her “biko” is what she calls her pacifier.)
“After she said it multiple times, I was like, ‘Who is Baby Monster? Where do you see Baby Monster?’ And she would point to the doorway. And then, ‘What color is Baby Monster?’ And she would say ‘White,’ and I was like, that’s weird, but maybe she saw something on a show or whatever.”
But one night when Jasmine and her husband, Brandon, were hanging out around the kitchen after the kids had gone to bed, they heard what sounded like a child laughing and running around upstairs. “It got so loud, that me and Brandon both stopped what we were doing, looked at each other and were like, ‘Wow, Sierra must have gotten out of her crib.'”
So, Brandon went to the stairs to put Sierra back to bed, but stopped in his tracks at the foot of the stairs and turned pale.
“And he was like, ‘I saw an oblong-shaped shadow go up the stairs,’ and he was shook,” Jasmine relayed. “So I pulled out the baby monitor right away and looked, and Sierra is in her crib asleep.”
Brandon decided to go see his mom’s psychic (she is very much a believer, though Jasmine and Brandon never had been before this), and immediately when he walked into the room, the psychic asked, “Who’s this little person following you around?”
The psychic said the ghost had been in the house for a long time, was sorry for scaring her kids and just wanted to live in the home peacefully — but didn’t like something that had been changed in the house recently. The psychic also said the spirit seemed to be attached to Brandon in particular.
As it turns out, Brandon had been removing the home’s old doorknobs and hinges and restoring them because they had been painted over several times over the years.
