I do not want to write this. Remembering what happened November of 2013 is normally at the bottom of my To Do list, but not today. Today this is a story that I need to tell. I’ve told it before to some close friends and family, but never like this. I need to write it. It’s been more than a year and I still can’t sleep, so I might as well type. I'll post updates as I write them.
My name is Rachel Smith and the Nauvoo House was haunted. Sorry if that’s a spoiler for you, but I’ve had enough suspense to last me eight lifetimes. I’m going to tell you about what happened to me, and what happened to my best friend during our second year of college. I won’t exaggerate or change any part of the story because this isn’t just a story to me. I know some people don’t believe me. I don’t care. This is for the people that do, for the people that will, for the people who will experience what I have. If anything like this has ever happened to you, you are not alone, and you can make it through.
I wish I had someone to tell me that. I’ve thought a lot about whether I should change the names or not. Since I’m posting this on my account I’ve decided to keep my name the same, but change the other people involved.
I was nineteen years old and in my second year of school. A Music Major down at Snow College, I aspired to score films. I was going to be the next Hans Zimmer and I was going to change the face of the music industry and the world. In that order. This was going to be a great year.
Our truck pulled in front of the house and I laughed for the millionth time. No more crappy college dorms. I was renting a house with a real kitchen and a living room with couches where everyone could sit and talk. There was a backyard and real bathrooms. The white house was surrounded by huge trees that offered privacy, a newly painted red picket fence, and a cobblestone walkway that led to the front door.
It had taken quite a bit of work to get us here, but I talked to the landlord early enough that our places were secured before anyone else applied. By us I mean me and my best friend Vanessa. I’d met her fall semester of last year in our Music Theory class. We bonded over making fun of the teacher, she walked with me to get my mail, I went to her apartment that night for a crepe party and we were inseparable from then on.
But life is messy and complicated. After a year of near perfect friendship, we had a falling out. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, but by then we’d already signed the contract to live together the next year. Like it or not, we were going to be roommates.
I opened the car door and hopped down onto the cracked Ephraim road. I’d missed this road. My family piled out of the truck and started to unload my things from the back. Before I could worry too much about seeing Ness, the front door opened and she came running out to meet me.
It was like no time had passed at all. I think that’s how real friendships work. We hugged, she was smaller than I remembered, and she immediately started taking boxes out of the truck bed. I don’t have the best memory when it comes to little details, but I remember her outfit clearly. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a camo handkerchief, her shirt was neon orange with the sleeves cut out and she wore big baggy grey sweats. I remember that she apologized for what she was wearing, she switched outfits after my family went home, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to see her after a summer apart. We hadn’t spoken in months, but it looked like everything was going to be okay.
I took hold of a suitcase (the one with wheels because I’m all about minimizing effort) and helped herd my family into the house. Sunlight streamed through the large windows in the living room and the kitchen was a buttery yellow with white trim.
The Nauvoo House, for so it was called, was around one hundred years old. The windows were all the original glass, the kind that was sort of warped and wavy, and the stairs were narrow and very steep. They went up for around ten steps, then there was a three foot by three foot landing, a sharp corner, and four more steps into the smallest hallway you have ever seen in your life. From the top step to the back wall was probably four feet. It was up these stairs that my luggage had to go. At the top of the stairs there were two doorways opposite each other. These were the upstairs bedrooms. Our room was the door on the left. It was the best room in the whole house.
For one, it was the biggest. Our room was directly above the living room and took up 70% of the second floor. After an awkward stair that was placed oddly in the doorway, you stepped down into our room. The ceiling sloped down with the roof at one end and there were three windows in total, two looking off towards the college and one looking into the front yard. The sunlight poured in through these windows. The trees reached the top of the house here and the leaves filtered the sunlight, lighting up the room with bright greens and yellows. We piled my belongings into the room, a seemingly endless train of people carrying boxes and bags. My father and my mother carried the heavy things with me while my three younger siblings grabbed the pillows, bedding, and whatever other such items they could find.
As my youngest sister walked into the house for the first time she looked at me and said, “This house feels… funny. I don’t think that I like it.” Her face sort of scrunched up as she looked around. “Don’t be silly, Laura!” I dismissed her with a grin. “This house is perfect.” The only requirement in my head for the house to qualify was that it be a house. The fact that it existed and was mine made it the greatest house that had ever been built. She followed me up the stairs carrying a lamp and when she entered our room she made the same sort of face. “I just don’t like it. It feels strange."
“I don’t feel anything.” I replied. “Except heat. Is the fan still in the truck? That’s going to be necessary. I’ll go grab it.” Looking back, we did everything wrong. If our life had been a scary movie that would have been the first sign, the harbinger of doom, but our life wasn’t a movie. It was our life. In hindsight I can see all of the signs that we ignored, I can see everything that we did wrong, but at the time we were just living. We were happy. After everything was shuttled into the house my parents took Jess and me to Walmart to stock up on food. As college kids, this was one of the greatest gestures of kindness that we could comprehend. They bought us chicken and rice and cheese and bread, enough for a lifetime, or so it felt like.
At the store, under the harsh fluorescent lights of Ephraim’s Walmart, Ness and I fell back into sync. Whatever differences we’d had in the past melted away. It was like nothing had changed between us, as though it had been a mere day since we’d been together even though we’d spent the summer not speaking.
My parents told me later that they were thrilled to see us get along so well. They had been worried about us, but it took five minutes of shopping to see that we were going to be fine. Maybe better than fine.
Eventually my family had to go. I hugged them, we exchanged our tearful goodbyes, and I watched them drive away. It was sad to be away from my family, I had such good relationships with them all, but there is nothing like living on your own. And now I had a house to live in.
Things weren’t quite perfect though. The house was absolutely filthy. Dirt rimmed the bathtubs, cobwebs hung from the entirety of the kitchen ceiling, and the basement had no positive qualities to speak of. But we were undeterred. The first few hours of our new life were dedicated to an intense cleaning, but it was fun. I was wearing a black lacy dress, a stark contrast to her jeans and plaid shirt, but we got down and scrubbed and polished and organized like it was a treat.
There were a few odd things that we discovered. In the living room there was a four foot by four foot vent in the floor. The floor around it creaked and groaned, bending under the weight of anyone who stepped on it. Outside there were little hand prints rusted into the stucco walls. They were outside every door and under every window. We tried to get them off, thinking they were just dirt hand prints at first, but nothing we did had any effect.
After a while we turned our attention to the basement. The stairs were wooden slats, the kind you see in scary movies. The walls crumbled away if you touched them, and the floor was just dirt covered in layers of rugs. There was trash everywhere, old boxes, packing supplies, extension cords, old food. It was awful. In the initial tour of the house we hadn't been told there was a basement at all. It was news to us, but we were excited about it. We dreamed of cleaning it up, purchasing some Christmas lights and old couches, and turning the place into a den where we could get together and party. It was a good dream.
We immediately set to work cleaning the basement. We picked up all the trash, threw out the rotten food, and cleaned around the old, disconnected water heaters. It wasn’t glamorous work, but this was our honeymoon phase and we were loving it.
In the northeast corner a large refrigerator box stood propped up in the corner. We hadn’t thought about it much. Ness picked up an old cardboard box from the ground and that refrigerator box began to fall, light as a feather, in slow motion. She stepped out of the way, a reflex, and then the basement exploded.
Another water heater had been behind that box. Without reason it had fallen nearly on top of her. 800 pounds of water came gushing out of the top and for a second we stood there in shock. Then we got to work. We couldn’t move it at all, it was much too heavy. But the basement was quickly filling with water, soaking the old rugs and turning the floor into mud. Ness ran upstairs and came back with two plastic ice cream buckets that had previously been under the sink.
We bailed out the basement. She filled up one bucket, I ran it upstairs and dumped it out in the sink, then ran back downstairs and traded her an empty bucket for a full one. I don’t remember how long we did this for. It felt like an eternity.
Then finally we heard our roommates, whom we had not yet met, come home. We shouted upstairs for them to come and help us. Thankfully, they were lovely people and came to our rescue on that Friday night. Bryce, Taylor, Kaylie, and Mikaela helped us lift the water heater off the dirt floor, but it we couldn’t get it to lean back up against the wall. There was a hill of dirt in the way and we weren’t sure how it had ever sat there in the first place. There didn’t seem to be any room for it. Eventually Ness used one of the old buckets to dig out a hole where we could place the water heater.
Once that was done we had a muddy floor and a whole mess of wet rugs. The basement was too humid for them to dry on their own. We would have to take them out. It was a great way to get to know your roommates, that’s for sure.
By then it was pretty late. The next day was Saturday, so we decided to take care of it then. We left the soggy basement and made the long trek up to the second floor. As we walked through the kitchen I thought I something reflected in the far window. It looked like a person standing behind me, but I was last in the line to go upstairs. When I turned around, there was no one there. I just assumed that it was the warped glass doing strange things to the reflections, and went to bed. But that wasn’t the last time I’d see that reflection.
It wasn’t until the next day that I understood the gravity of what had happened. If Ness hadn’t stepped out of the way, she would have been crushed by the water heater. The two of us together couldn’t even roll it. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything to help her. I would have watched my best friend die.
But she had stepped out of the way. So even if there was no reason for that heater to have fallen in the first place, it didn’t matter now. Right?
Submitted March 01, 2015 at 05:21AM by therachel2010 http://ift.tt/1K1dS6B nosleep
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