blog@cliffdweller

When I was a kid in high school, I had the chance to see first hand evidence of living in a haunted house. It wasn't Amityville Horror haunted, but still there were things unseen but always present.

I'm talking about the Lake House in San Angelo.

One time, I was working on my computer there. I had an Apple II+, and I was the only kid, maybe the only private citizen, in all of San Angelo who had a computer. I was working on a presentation that I was going to be giving for the Explorer Scouts on how computers were beginning to invade our homes. In today's game culture, it would have been called a MegaDemo (apologies to Gary Lake for that), while at the same time in today's culture it would have been laughed off at how simplistic it was. But I digress.

I was alone in the house, working on this project. My father and his wife were in Greece. I haven't googled it, but I think Greece is probably about 10,000 miles from Texas, depending of course on what part of Texas you start in. My brother, who was the only other person besides me on this continent with a key to the house was in Abilene, some 111 miles away.

So there I sat, alone, working, playing, coding, whatever on the Apple II when I heard someone drive up into the driveway. I heard them get out of the car and slam their door. I heard them unlock and open the front door of the house.

I thought maybe it was my brother, so I ran over to the window to look out at the driveway but I couldn't see his truck.

I heard the front door slam, and then I heard footsteps on the circular stair case coming up to my bedroom. I quickly ran over to the door at the top of the stairs, closed it and locked it. Then like a dumb teenager in a horror movie, I stood there staring a the door, like I expected whoever it was who came through the deadbolt on the solid metal core front door to be stopped by a hollow bedroom door with a locked doorknob.

While I was waiting there, looking, I saw the doorknob start to wiggle. Someone was moving the door knob. That's when I got really spooked and fled. I ran out onto the balcony and dropped down onto the pavement.

The only car in the driveway was mine.

I went to the end of the lane and watched the front of the house for about 45 minutes. No one ever came out of the house.

I walked back to the house, and let the dogs (we had 5 at the time) out of the backyard and into the house through the front door with me. We, the dogs and I, looked in every closet, every cabinet, in the refrigerator, in the washing machines, under the beds and everywhere else big enough to hold a body. No one was in the house.

The bedroom door upstairs was still closed and locked, I had to pick the lock to get in.

Here's the spooky part: There was no way out of the house other than the balcony door or the front door, or the two kitchen windows. Everything else in the house was locked tight from the inside, with locks that can't be locked or unlocked from the outside. All of the back doors were locked and all of the windows in the house except for the two in the kitchen were panes of reflective glass that didn't open, like a large store front window.

The only escape routes from the house were all plainly visible to me the whole 45 minutes that I stood at the end of the lane.

Whoever had come into the house that night was not a flesh and blood person, but they sure walked and sounded like one.

Unlike The Amityville Horror, this is not based on a true story, this is a true story. I was there, and I'll never forget it.

Read my review of The Amityville Horror movie that we saw tonight.