Old House
Louisiana can be a pretty spooky place, especially in the older, more abandoned areas. I spent my early years in a small, rural town called Palmetto. It used to be a plantation town, but by the time I was born it was mainly just abandoned, rotting buildings and forest.
I lived with my mother, two brothers, and sometimes my uncle as well would be there. The house itself had quite the history.
Originally a plantation house, it had seen the deaths of slaves, who were hung on the large tree in the backyard. It was dead by the time I was born, but I used to play around it before I got old enough to understand the circumstances surrounding it.
During the Civil War, the home was converted into a morgue for a few years, and saw a lot of activity, mostly in the form of dead bodies.
After that was when my great grandparents moved into the house from France, and it has been in my family since. My great grandfather was a borderline murderous man, who was literally the only person who could walk into the local courthouse with his gun still strapped to his waist, because literally everyone was too afraid to try and take it from him.
I don't think he actually killed anyone though, but by god did he try a couple times. His wife, my great grandmother actually died in the house, on the very bed that my mom and youngest brother slept on. The mattress and sheets were different, but the bed frame was the same. Myself and my brother had to sleep on the floor, where I spent many nights staring into the darkness beneath that bed.
Flashback to my mom's childhood for a moment. My mom grew up with her father, mother, five sisters and one brother. Their mom was almost always absent, and their dad, while he loved them, also loved to scare the daylights out of them.
He had a whole host of scary stories, most urban myths about the very area. There was a legend surrounding the old Indian Burial Ground not even a mile away from the house, about a large hound that would guard it. As well as the story of Rawhead, a smaller dog that lived underneath the house. Whether or not such a dog existed is up in the air, but my mom and her siblings were petrified of this tale in particular, and her father often liked to close them all in their bedroom, holding the door closed while telling them that Rawhead was coming through the floor to get them. There are small nail scrapes marking the doors even to this day.
There's also a lot of rumored deaths surrounding the house. The two that I can recall; one being that a man (possibly a black man) was shot and killed on the stairway. There's indeed a bullethole through the wall to attest to this story. The second is that a baby was kept up in the attic rooms, and eventually died of some unknown reason. There were also hidden rooms all about the house, and only one of which I ever found the entrance too. I can remember part of myself wanting to go in and explore, but the latter half of me that wanted to stay the hell away won out. Another secret room that I discovered was by peeking through the bullet hole from before. But I never found how to get into that room. From what I could see it was empty, just dark wood walls.
There were definitely ghost sightings of all kinds in that house, over the many decades that family and friends stayed there. The two most common ones were seeing figures in the kitchen and hearing a baby crying.
The figures in the kitchen were always just shadowy silhouettes. A few people claimed to have seen them, always at night except for my uncle when he was a teen, along with a friend. They were outside when they saw someone walking past the kitchen window. They both tailed it inside fast but never found the supposed person. I myself used to see them all the time. There were at least four or five of them, and they always just stood around in the kitchen or sat at the table. The only working bathroom sat halfway down the hallway, and to get there you literally had to walk toward the kitchen. No doorway existed to close it up so you HAD to look into it each time you had to go pee at night. It got to the point where my mom literally brought in a bucket for us to start peeing in at night because we were all so scared.
As for the baby, literally every person that has ever stayed at the house overnight by themselves claimed to hear a baby crying. My grandfather never believed them, or heard the baby himself. I never actually got to hear the baby, but my uncle sure did.
He was at the house alone, in the afternoon. Me and my family weren't in at the time, so it was just him. He was laying on his bed, which sat next the the older bed i mentioned earlier (we all slept in the same room even though the house had like six rooms). He was watching a VHS tape because we didn't have satellite, and had the volume all the way up. This was literally how we watched tv when one of us was alone or at night. The tv played all night every night, at full blaring volume. This was to block out the residual sounds that echoed constantly throughout the house. It could be anything from a distant scratch noise to the sound of feet above or things falling, pretty much all kinds of noises happened there. So as a result we slept with deafening movies going instead.
Anyway, one day he's alone watching some film, when he catches a sound just beyond the movie. He turned the volume down a bit, and can hear the sound of a baby screaming its little heart out from up above. Spooked, and knowing full well the tales of the phantom infant, my uncle lays petrified on the bed. He slowly turns the volume all the way down, listening intently as the sound of the baby seems to move over time. Minutes pass, and my uncle swears that that baby moved down the stairs and to the ground floor, where its cried carried down the hallway up to just outside the closed bedroom door.
Welp, my uncle was up. The house has no air conditioning, just a small AC unit stuck into a half-open window. He ripped this thing outta the window, crawled through the small opening, rolling onto the porch, grabbed the porch's railing and flipped himself onto his back, landing heavy in the dirt of the front yard.
Apparently my grandfather had been nearby, in his own front yard of his small neighboring house. He came walking up and said something along the lines of "Boy, what's at your tail!?"
There were no baby screams after that, and of course my grandfather didn't believe him. My uncle was waiting for us on the porch swing when we arrived later that night, refusing to go back inside alone.
There are definitely plenty of other stories surrounding this house, some of which I've experienced myself. Not to mention the area itself was filled with strange happenings fueled by the beliefs that the people held. Hell, my mom once took me to a witch doctor when I was an infant, because I was very sick. My mom couldn't be present for the ritual thing that happened, but apparently the doctor said she summoned spirits to keep watch over me. After that I got better, according to my mom, and supposedly I still have these spirit things hovering around me today. /shrugs/ who knows, I go back and forth on believing these things.
But I feel this post has gotten long enough (sorry!) so I'll close it out for now. I might submit more at a later date, if people were interested.
Hope you enjoyed the story of my wonderful childhood home from the backwoods of Hell Palmetto, Louisiana!
