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    Was our house haunted? Memories of the unexplainable are as perplexing today as they were then
    • December 10, 2025

    [Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the “Chapters of Our Lives” issue of PREMIUM Magazine, which featured personal storytelling.]

    I tell you this story only now, at the risk of sounding ridiculous.

    I like to think I’m a rational person. I’m an educated person. I’m not what you would call a fearful person by temperament. While I am, it’s true, prone to bouts of melancholy, I have never been diagnosed with a mental illness that would lead to psychosis.

    What I’m trying to say is that I do not believe in ghosts, and yet I have no explanation for what happened almost 20 years ago in the Gold Country of California, in a house that was the most beautiful and the most terrible place I have ever lived.

    ***

    Picture it: The Sierra Nevada foothills and cold rivers, expansive meadows and green forests northeast of Sacramento, right along old Highway 49, not far from Coloma, where the Gold Rush started. My husband Jimmy had received an appointment from the governor for his dream job, and we’d moved up from Southern California to begin what we thought was a bright future. We’d been married only a year.

    The rambling farmhouse we found was like something out of a fantasy, or at least my fantasy. At the end of a narrow country road, we opened the white gate and drove up the long drive to the house, which sprawled along a rise behind a grove of blue oaks. There were rolling acres and a small stable for the horses, a babbling creek bordering the land, and across the road a quaint vineyard. The original house had been built in 1899 but had seen a few renovations and expansions to arrive at its present form, a five-bedroom, three-bath two-story.

    I don’t think we even went inside before we called the owner to say, “We’ll take it.” I imagined myself writing my next book from an office overlooking the quiet hills. We pictured my stepkids exploring the countryside and building a fort in the woods; Jimmy planned how he’d sow a giant vegetable garden.

    The movers arrived with our furniture, and since we hadn’t decided exactly what we wanted to do with the upstairs — all this space, wow! — we had them put every single thing downstairs. That first day in the house after Jimmy went to work, I fixed my coffee and started to tackle unpacking.

    That’s when I heard it, the distinct sound of a music box — you know, the kind with the little ballerina that twirls when you open the lid? I had one when I was a kid, but it was long gone. At first I thought I was imagining the sound, or that it was coming from something I was unpacking — when did we get a damn music box? — but then I looked over to my Akita, Ronin. He was standing on the first step of the stairwell, ears pinned forward. He heard it, too.

    Emboldened by my protector dog — no one in their right mind would mess with Ronin — I followed him up the stairs to the landing, where there was a small bedroom immediately to the right. The music stopped as soon as we got to the doorway.

    Ronin stood looking in, ears alert, the hair along his back raised as if ready to fight.

    The room was empty. Totally empty.

    Goosebumps the size of welts rose on my arms. I know it sounds weird, but everything inside me suddenly said “run.” I bolted down the hall, grabbed my car keys and, with Ronin at my heels, jumped in the Ford and headed to the nearest town to wait with my dog at a Starbucks until Jimmy came back.

    I was being a scaredy-cat, right? Big old house, me all alone. Jimmy thought it was funny. I was overtired. I was inventing a story. There had to be some explanation.

    Of course. Of course.

    (Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)
    (Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)

    ***

    The house was everything I had always wanted, after all. We decided to make that small room at the top of the stairs a bedroom for my stepdaughters when they came to visit, putting in a cute trundle bed and a small bookshelf where I placed kids’ books interspersed with stuffed toys. I decorated it, and shut the door.

    The other part of the upstairs I made into the office I’d always dreamed about, with a huge desk overlooking the pasture. That’s where I was a few weeks later, working on that book idea.

    It’s important to emphasize here that I am not making this up. Equally, I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

    What happened was that as I was typing, the temperature suddenly dropped, drastically. I’m talking arctic, instantly. It was so freezing I could see my breath, and in the next instant what I can only describe as a wind blew across my desk, moving the papers next to me.

    What the heck? It was cold outside, a gray November day. Was a window open? No. Did the air conditioning in this old house — the electrical wiring was sketchy — suddenly twitch on? I reached my hand up to the vent. Nothing.

    And then, as quickly as it had come, the cold left. It left as if it had never been.

    Those welt-sized goosebumps again. Ronin was outside this time. I was alone.

    Bolting, keys, dog, car. Starbucks.

    I’m not going to tell anyone this. It’s like something out of a scary movie.

    I must have been imagining it, too, a few days later when I was outside with the horses and got this creepy feeling someone was watching me. I looked around; something drew my eye to the second floor of the house, where the window to my office was. There stood a silvery form, which moved lightning-quick to the side. It was a trick of the light, surely, the sun reflecting off the glass. Probably. The goosebumps along my arm? I’m being ridiculous.

    I started to find reasons not to be in the house, and never without Ronin by my side. I took weekend assignments, teaching gigs in L.A. I all but stopped writing my book.

    (Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)
    (Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)

    Then one early spring weekend, I was feeling motivated to clean the house. I hadn’t had that goosebumpy feeling in weeks; the sun was shining, Jimmy was outside scouting plans for that garden of his. I decided to run the vacuum upstairs — no one went up there, the kids had never come to visit in the months we’d been there — but things do get dusty, so, why not? I had not opened the little bedroom door since I had decorated it for the girls. That rug must need a quick run of the Hoover.

    So I opened the door.

    Remember those stuffed animals I told you about? The ones I used as decoration on the bookshelf? All of them were off the shelves.

    They had been placed in a circle in the center of the room.

    * * *

    I started to Google things like “the science of ghosts” and “evidence of ghosts.” Shocker, there isn’t any certifiable evidence from any discipline, at least that I could determine. Storytelling offers the only indication that people throughout time have encountered phantasms they could not explain.

    But certainly, all those people throughout time must have lacked critical thinking abilities. And I’ve since read a study conducted in France that found people with paranormal beliefs have limited working memory and “inattentive blindness.” In fact, I do have a terrible memory. Maybe I just forgot I went into that room and took the toys off the shelf. And left them in a circle.

    Maybe Jimmy had punked me? He swore he hadn’t; he said it with a look of bewilderment and maybe some concern for my mental state. At any rate, he hadn’t heard any weird music or seen silvery images in windows or felt the room get suddenly cold or had papers moved on his desk. The house never gave him goosebumps.

    Quit being ridiculous, I told myself.

    Around this time we discovered ancient beads right off our back deck, which turned out to be Native American artifacts. (Again, could there be a bigger cliché? It was like some Stephen King novel.) Jimmy became obsessed with learning about the land, looking up surveying records and geological studies. We were living in the area the Maidu people used for their summer hunting grounds. Another interesting fact: There were three graves on our property, two were adult-size, and one was small, as if made for a child. Identities, origin, unknown.

    I wish this were fiction.

    ***

    In an effort to settle in, we decided to have a little neighborhood potluck at our house. We’d lived in the area for about six months and had yet to do much more than wave at our neighbors on the adjoining properties. The handful of families around us all accepted our invites and brought over dishes to share.

    “Hi, I’m Patty!” beamed a woman I had never met, handing me a six-pack of Tecate while her husband delivered a macaroni casserole. She followed me to the kitchen. “So,” she said by way of making chitchat. “Have you guys met your ghosts yet?”

    I kid you not.

    Patty swore she’d seen people “floating” across our land for years. One she thought was an old prospector. Another seemed the size of a child.

    “Something’s going on with this house,” she said.

    I couldn’t wait until everyone left. “See?” I told Jimmy as soon as the last guest closed the door. “Why would Patty say those things to me? I never talked to her before in my whole life!”

    Jimmy shrugged and noted that Patty and her husband also bragged about participating in Renaissance fairs. Plus, they had little plaster statues of faeries all around their mailbox.

    ***

    There is too much to tell about what ended up being three years in that house. Most of it is likely just coincidence. We lost all our money in the 2008 collapse, but then again, many did. We fought. We were miserable. Renaissance Fair Patty, as we called her, seemed to delight in telling me that bad things always seemed to happen to people who lived in our house — one family fell into crystal meth addiction and all the children were taken by Child Protective Services; the previous family had divorced while they lived in the house. No one seemed to stay.

    My dear Ronin developed cloudy eyes and shook his head all the time; the country vet thought it was cataracts, an ear infection, maybe there was a tumor. Anyway, he died.

    My stepdaughters whom I’d pictured loving our country home never, not once, came to see us. My stepson came up one time.

    Just when I thought my heart was always going to be broken, there arrived an unexpected blessing: After a lifetime of being told I could never have children, I got pregnant with our son. I’d gone into the hospital to have a hysterectomy and, surprise!

    We did the co-sleeping, family-bed thing in our main bedroom downstairs, my favorite place in the house. Frankly I didn’t want the baby away from me in a room by himself. Just because.

    When friends or my mother came to visit, we put them in the little room at the top of the stairs, because why not? The trundle bed was so cute. Two of them, plus my mother — none of whom knew each other — reported having the same vivid dream: A little girl standing by the bed, wanting to play, shaking them so they kept waking up. I hadn’t told any of them about the toys in the circle because it sounded crazy, even to me.

    Then, after coming out from New Mexico on an extended visit, my mom fell ill from a preexisting infection. I’ll never forget going up to wake her in that little room and discovering her cold and clammy. By the time the flashing red of the ambulance finally arrived, I knew in my bones she wasn’t coming back. I was right. She died in the hospital a week later.

    After that, I was sick with grief. My career was off the rails. My marriage strung together with threads. I held my baby son too tightly and I cried more than I knew was healthy or right.

    Jimmy must have felt the same. He must have known he would lose me some way or another if we stayed, so he left his dream job and took a gig that would move us back to Southern California, where most of our friends lived and where I could get my career back on track. The news arrived to me like a rainbow amid storm clouds.

    ***

    On one of our last days at the house, Jimmy and I were out in the front yard when we saw a couple at the gate at the bottom of our driveway. They waved, seeming to want our attention. We walked down to greet them.

    “Sorry to bother you,” the woman said as we got closer. “It’s just that we used to live here a long time ago. We’re in the area visiting and I heard somebody bought the place and renovated it. We were just curious if we could take a peek?”

    “Of course!” Jimmy and I said in unison. They looked to be a nice couple around our ages. Jimmy and the man fell into conversation quickly and went off to the garden. The woman and I continued to walk up to the house.

    She turned to me. “I hope you don’t mind me asking … I know this is a super, super weird question … but, uhm, has anything strange happened to you in the house?”

    Well.

    Instantly we were stumbling over each other’s sentences in the rush to share what was impossible to talk about to most anyone else.

    They’d lived in the house more than a decade before, a young couple expecting their first child. They’d bought it as a fixer-upper with dreams about it being their forever home. She said she’d had the same sense of gloom, the unexplained noises, the nightmares, the feeling of being watched.

    But what happened in the upstairs room disturbed her still: They’d planned to turn the little bedroom at the top of the stairs into a nursery. So they painted the beams white, and were restoring the floor and replacing the window. Then one morning they woke up to the smell of rotting flesh. It was so strong they gagged; it seemed to be coming from the room. Inside, they discovered a swarm of red-eyed carrion flies so thick they blocked the light of the window.

    “Really, I’m not making this up,” she said, just as I had said so many times before.

    Thinking it was a rat or possum dead somewhere in the floorboards or the walls — these things happen in old houses — they called an exterminator for the flies and a handyman to help rip out the floors. They spent a day tearing up the room, taking it down to the original frame. Nothing.

    But the smell was gone, and so too were the flies, thanks to the exterminator.

    “You might not believe this,” she continued, “but the next morning, same thing. The smell. The flies.”

    Maybe they missed the dead creature; it was possible. But she didn’t care. Just as I had the urge to run from the house that first day with the music box, she felt in her bones they could not be in the house one more minute. Her husband closed the door to the bedroom and they left to go stay with family. People thought she was cracked; eight months pregnant and selling a house they wouldn’t be able to make a profit on.

    She didn’t care, she said. I remember her telling me, “Nothing was worth that feeling.”

    I understood.

    (Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)
    (Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)

    ***

    We’ve lived in Orange County for close to two decades now. My husband and I are still together and likely will be until death do us part, just like we vowed. The stepkids are over for dinner more than not, having grown into young adults now, and that baby we had is taller than I am and just got his driver’s license.

    I don’t think about that house in the Gold Country much, or at least I try not to. Likely all that happened there to us and to others was the confluence of mere bad luck and overactive imagination, fueled by stories from books and movies that have seeped into our collective subconscious.

    Perhaps.

    I always think of my mother, cigarette in hand, when I was confessing to her what I had seen in that little room and what I felt in the house. With an exhale of nicotine, she had shrugged, quoted Hamlet:

    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

    than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

    Oh, and one more thing: One of our old neighbors up there — not Renaissance Patty, but another — ran into Jimmy once. Another couple moved in after us, folks who’d taken early retirement and now were sprucing up the place. Or had been. The man had been out in the yard and, wouldn’t you know it, had a massive heart attack and died right there.

    He’d looked so healthy, our neighbor told Jimmy. Guess you just never know.

    ​ Orange County Register 

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