Mortal Kombat would have to wait.

My father is a contractor, so we move around the country often, going where his work is. This particular contract he worked on required the family to move to into a beautiful old farmhouse on a huge farm estate. It had two stories, wooden floors and even had an old laundry shaft like we here see in the movies (It’s not common in South Africa to have these in your home) . I was doing correspondent home-schooling back then, so the majority of my free time was spent fucking around the farm and very seldomly would my mother and I leave the property.

The owners of the house where this elderly couple who had built themselves a little cottage about 500m where the house was. According to them, the house was built by the gentleman’s father and he had lived there his whole life, as had his two children. I thought it was rather odd that they were living in the cottage and renting out the house, but I could understand that during that time money and jobs were scarce and they were elderly, so the house must have just been a little too big for them.

We started to notice that something wasn’t quite right with the house about a month in staying there. My mother would begin cooking dinner about an hour before my dad got home, so by the time he got home his meal was piping and his bath was already run. One evening, helping my mother in the lounge with something, we hear a rattling in the kitchen. Thinking it was the pot which must have been boiling and the lid was rattling, my mom went to investigate. Turns out, all the dishes were removed from the cupboards and set face-down on the counter. Obviously, she blamed me for it and no amount of reasoning would lead her to believe that I didn’t do it. A few days later, we’re in the lounge watching TV and we hear footsteps on the wooden floors upstairs, making their way to the stairs and then silence. We went to see what/who it was, but came up dry. Nobody there.

The footsteps on the top floor and shuffling of cutlery and dishes in the kitchen increased more and more as we stayed there and eventually it was starting to freak us out. We told my dad about it, but he shrugged it off as “wind” or “a duck/chicken must have flown in through a window and those were the footsteps we heard”, though he didn’t say anything about the dishes and probably also suspected it was me.

Then one day, my mother went out shopping and I was at home alone. Playing with my Gameboy, sitting in front of the T.V, I start hearing the footsteps again, walking towards the stairs. This time, however, they didn’t just stop at the top of the stairs and I clearly heard the footsteps making their way down the wooden steps, towards where I was.

I didn’t even think twice. Gameboy in hand, I fucking hightailed it out of the house and towards the gate on the farm (which was bout 3km away). I didn’t even turn back to look once, and thinking about it now, not sure if I even closed the door when I bailed. I ran the whole way to the gate and waited for my mother to arrive, some several hours later. I was literally terrified and to make it worse, my Gameboy had run out of batteries, so I just waited there for her, dead Gameboy in hand and knowing that I had spare batteries on charge in the house, but I wasn’t planning on going back alone. Mortal Kombat would have to wait.

That was pretty much the peak of the strangeness in the house. Sure, we still heard the occasional footsteps upstairs and the odd fork not being where it’s supposed to be, but nothing as freaky as that day. We stayed there for a little over a year and about a month before we moved out, my mom and I visited the owners of the property to ask if weird shit like this had happened to them.

The old man tells us a story about how he had twins, a boy and a girl. At around 16 years old, the girl had been raped on the way to the farm and she was never the same after that. One day, he returned home to see her hanging dead in the kitchen. The brother, who had a very close relationship with his sister killed himself in the same house some years later, though he never told us where and how. He said that the main reason they moved out was because of the whispers, that he could hear his children’s voices sometimes at night when they laid in bed and could hear them talking to each other. That coupled with the burden of losing both children made him build the cottage and move there with his wife.

Look, I’m not going to say the house was haunted because I’m a rational person and like to consider all aspects before pointing to the paranormal, but to this day it’s something that bugs me because I can’t seem to think of a logical explanation to what happened.

– Posted by Nferno ; Reddit