Can We Live Here?
Something’s In The House In Bloomfield
I live in Bloomfield and yesterday morning my folks were going to Pennsylvania to the casino. They usually don’t wake me to tell me they’re leaving. I’m sleeping upstairs and around 8:30 AM I heard something that woke me up. I looked at my bedroom door and it started to open, like sort of slow. It opened about three quarters of the way, then stopped. (There was no wind, none of the windows were open). Then I started to hear the stairs creaking, like someone’s walking down them. I got up and went to the bathroom to look out window to see if the folks’ car is there, but it was gone. I went downstairs and there was a note saying they left at 7:30. So I grabbed my gun and checked the whole house from top to bottom. I thought maybe someone broke in, but all was clear. The windows and doors on the first floor were all locked.
I made some breakfast and went back upstairs. Then I started to hear a ringing sound, like the phone, but it was not ringing in the other bedroom where the phone is. I called the downstairs phone from my cell and then I could hear the upstairs phone ringing. So I’m sitting in my bedroom and I hear a few of the stairs start creaking again. I got up and looked, nothing. I turned the TV off, sat there and heard the ringing again. I got up, ran downstairs, looked around and there was still nothing.
Last night, I went to bed around 1:00 AM. At around 2:30 AM I heard a noise and woke up. My door opened up slowly again and there was someone standing there. I thought it was the old lady. It was just like a black shadow, like an outline of someone. So I yelled out, “What’s wrong?” The person didn’t say anything. It stood there for about five seconds then it closed the door. I guess I fell back asleep. I asked my mom this morning what she was doing in my room last night, and she said she was sound asleep and didn’t get up or come in. So today I set up my webcam on the computer and aimed it at the door for the next night in case something happened. It was a long day and I was freaked out and didn’t go to bed until almost 3:30 AM.
But about an hour later I woke up and started hearing a whooshing sound. Then a few minutes later, cricket sounds! Then the weird whooshing started again, like a wind sound—but definitely not ordinary sounds! Then there was a loud “HONK,” like a clown’s horn. But the whooshing and cricket sounds went on for about an hour. I have all the audio saved but there wasn’t any movement on the camera. So nothing yet today, just my pee-soaked underpants drying out.
But that’s not the only weird instance that has happened in the house. That was just the latest one. My parents bought the house in 1962, and there was always something “not right” about it. When they first bought it, the cellar was full of slot machines and it had a bar. When they closed on the house, the cellar was completely empty. It was built in 1920.
There are dozens of stories that have happened throughout the years. I keep seeing this apparition of a “big-headed boy” that runs through the house from time to time. I’m not even sure what that means. One time my father was sleeping, and he woke up to find a dishrag covering his throat, choking him. We have had glasses lift off the kitchen counter in mid air, then just drop to the floor, shattering. One time I looked out the window and I saw an old woman in a rocking chair in the back yard.
One time (I swear this is all true), we were sitting in the kitchen when all of a sudden this pair of slippers just walked across the room—just the slippers—nobody in them! They kind of slid across the floor. The weird thing is whatever is possessing the house likes to come out into the garage also. Stuff in the garage goes missing for months, then shows up again. My mom has a craft room, and one day she noticed that her chair was missing. She looked all over for it, and finally found it stuffed in the closet in my bedroom.
One of the stranger things happened to my sister many years ago. At one time my two sisters shared the bedroom I’m in. One night my sister said she was sleeping and she heard the door open. She was scared so she closed her eyes. Then she heard footsteps coming into the room, but she said it sounded like “clown shoes” flapping against the floor. (Remember the “HONK” sound I mentioned?) Then a voice whispered to her that said, “Can we live here?”
My father told me recently that he was sleeping and woke up in the middle of the night, only to see the ghosts of his parents standing at the end of the bed, both looking at him. Then they disappeared. This place would be a ghost hunters’ paradise. -Floyd
Ghost Image At Alstede Farms
I recently visited Alstede Farms with my family located in Chester, NJ (pumpkin picking hayride) when my wife randomly captured what appeared to be a bizarre, yet paranormal image with her Blackberry.
The unexplainable image appears to be in the form of a young child who can be observed either standing or kneeling behind a barrel. The strange thing is that at the exact time my wife took the picture, she immediately noticed it and compared the image on her phone with what she could see with her own eyes. In other words, there was nobody there, and there were no items located behind the barrel. (I was there to witness.)
To add another bizarre twist to it all, if you are able to enhance/zoom in on the photo with an updated computer, you can clearly make out a face of what appears to be a demon-like figure located on the top right side of the boy-like figure’s head.
As far as the image in the field, we don’t know. It looks like it could be a woman, however, we didn’t notice her when we were passing by. But at the same time, we weren’t looking that far out.
I know this sounds far-fetched, but I can honestly tell you that this picture is real and has not been altered or enhanced in any way, shape or form. My wife and I show all of our friends the photo from our phones and they are baffled by the whole thing. –Joe D’Agostino
We did enhance the photo a bit for clarity, and to us it seems like an older man, not a child, possibly with a beard, but the proportions of his body and the size of the barrel just don’t match up. The man seems much smaller. –M&M
A Very Haunted House In Flemington
After being on the road one day with local historian Jim Davidson, we stop for lunch at a local cafe and he asks us if we want to hear his ghost story. We said sure, and took out the tape recorder. This is what he told us. -M&M
We bought this old house, circa 1750, in Flemington in 1970 when I was a teacher. The house had no heat in it. The woman who lived there died in the house. They had an outhouse outside that they put a toilet in so the house could be sold. The house never had improvements made to it. I decided to gut the house, as I was a carpenter, also.
As soon as we started working on the house, all sorts of stuff started happening. It always sounded like someone was walking from one end of the upstairs hallway to the other. The kitchen cabinet doors would slam shut, then open at will, and people would see apparitions or shadows across the rooms.
I never believed in this stuff, but one day when I came home all the furniture from one of the bedrooms was piled on top of the bed. One day we noticed that someone had been sleeping in the guest bedroom, but we didn’t have any guests over. I know this is all classic stuff but it gets scarier.
We were working in the kitchen and we had scraped off about 30 coats of paint from the woodwork and windows because we wanted to get it down to the wood. The last coat of paint was a blue stain that we couldn’t get off, so we decided to paint it a mustard color. My wife was painting the back stairway when she heard a woman’s voice as clear as day telling her “That’s always been blue!” She thought it was a neighbor that stopped in but no one was around. Then the paint can in the kitchen lifts up by itself and the paint pours on the floor.
That night we had the principal of the school and his wife come over and we told them that we thought we had a ghost in the house. He said he didn’t believe in ghosts, and at that instant the front door flew open!
There was a woman who was working for the Hunterdon County Democrat and compiling ghost stories of Hunterdon County. We called her to come over and she said, “Ah, I can feel the spirits in this house.” And I’m thinking this woman is a weirdo. She suggests we have a séance and I said I’m not having any séance. She then suggests using a Ouija board. I didn’t even know what a Ouija board was. My wife was very psychic and her grandmother was a clairvoyant. So my wife became interested.
My wife calls her friend and asks her if she has a Ouija board. There was dead silence on the phone and then her friend says that she just drove to Baltimore to pick up a Ouija board, and she’s had nothing but bad vibes with it ever since she got back. She said we could use it, but doesn’t want it back.
Being the skeptics, we tried it out. We put our hands on the pointer (planchette) and start asking questions like “Is anyone here?” etc. This goes on for an hour and nothing happens. I said that’s enough. But my wife said to try it for a few more minutes. All of a sudden the pointer starts going around and around. I could feel some kind of electricity shooting up my arm. Then the pointer shoots straight across the room! I said, “What the hell…” Anytime from that point on, whenever we sat down with the Ouija board, we had this “spirit” contact us who identified himself as Henry Wensler who lived in the house in 1857 and died there in 1887. He said he moved in with his third wife Eva, who died. Now check this out. He identified the name of the town as being Tuxtown, which I never heard of. He said the house was once a general store, which I did not know. He told us he was in the Civil War and what New Jersey regiment he was in.
All sorts of crazy things were going on in the house at this time. Things would disappear then reappear a week later. A hinge pin on the door pulled itself out of the hinges and flew across the room when we were standing there. It was pretty weird.
The woman from the Hunterdon County Democrat came back and did the story. She was upstairs taking photos in one of the rooms, and when the photo was developed there was an image of a woman standing in the room.
We had a dog that I would give a chew ring to play with when we left in the morning. When I’d come home at night the chew ring would be up on the mantel over the fireplace. The dog lost all its hair for some reason. Probably freaked out being there.
We would hear crashes in the house all the time, but never saw anything broken.
So I started reading about ghosts, and I read that sometimes ghosts stick around because they have a guilty conscience about something, or can’t make the transition for some reason. So we got the Ouija board out and I asked Henry why he was still here. He said he caught his wife fooling around with another guy. He named the guy. He said he hit her over the head with a gun and accidentally killed her.
I started to look around at old church records in town and the graveyards, but no Eva Wensler is mentioned. I went to three other graveyards around here but did not find her name.
I go back on the Ouija board and tell Henry I cannot find his wife in any of the local graveyards. Where is she buried? Henry replies through the Ouija board that “She’s buried in the crawlspace under the dining room, along with the gun.” I said, “Holy shit!”
It’s 11:00 PM on a Friday night and I get my power saw and start sawing a 3 X 5 foot square in the floorboards. I pull the boards away and look under the floor and there is a mound of dirt, just about body size! I’m saying, “Holy shit, holy shit!” I didn’t go any further. I didn’t want to.
We go on the Ouija board again, and Henry keeps telling us to “dig her up.” I’m starting to get a little nervous over all this. Ed and Lorraine Warren, who study the paranormal, were doing a talk at Farleigh Dickenson University on demonic ghosts. We went to see them and the stuff they were talking about was really scary.
We talked to them afterward and told them what was going on in our house, and they said that was a classic style haunting. We told them we were communicating with the spirit using a Ouija board, and they both said together, “Whatever you do, never use a Ouija board. We’ve been in this business a long time and we believe in good and evil spirits, but you can really open yourself up when you’re exposed to a Ouija board.”
The Warrens then said the spirits always try to get you to do something for them. I’m thinking to myself, “Oh man, this ghost is making me cut up my dining room floor trying to dig up his wife!”
So we didn’t use the Ouija board after that, but all kinds of things were still happening around the house. People would be walking by the house when we weren’t home and they told us they could he a man’s voice screaming, “Help me, help me!” My sister married a minister and one day they were over the house. He said that sometimes reading the Bible would help people pass on. So I get the Ouija board out once again and ask Henry if he’d like a passage from the Bible read. He communicates back by telling us what passage to read! It was something like “Pray for me I’m being possessed by the devil.”I said that’s enough. We had to get out of this house and sell it.
The house was sold but we didn’t tell the new owners what was going on. The new owners were elderly and told us they couldn’t move in for six weeks, and would I mind checking in on the house every once in a while. So I go over there. There wasn’t any furniture in the house at all, and I swear it feels like someone is watching me. I never had that feeling before. I get nervous and walk out. The neighbor yells over to me, “You gotta come over here—I gotta tell you what’s been going on in your house. She tells me she went over to dig up some flowers and she hears banging and screaming coming from inside the house. She got so freaked she dropped her garden tools and ran away.
So anyway, the new people move in and they have a son and daughter-in-law living with them also. As fate would have it, the daughter-in-law gets a job teaching with me at my school. She comes up to me and says, “Did you ever have anything happen in that house?” I said, “No!” She tells me there are things moving around, doors locking by themselves, etc.
30 years go by. My son is doing a report about East Amwell’s historic structures and we talk about the old house. He said, “I wonder who lives in that house now?” I said it’s been over 30 years, the people that bought it from us have to be dead by now. So we go to the house and knock on the door. The door opens and it’s still the same people living there! And it looks like they didn’t age one day. It’s like that story The Picture Of Dorian Grey. The weird thing was nothing had been changed in the 30 or so years since we lived there. It had the same paint, wallpaper, appliances, everything! It was like I walked into The Twilight Zone. I asked them if there was anything happening with the house, but they said no, not too much. Maybe the rocking chair would rock by itself, but not much more. I thought maybe the spirits have finally passed on.
I guess about two years ago the last of the two of them died and the house was put up for sale. It was then bought by a car dealer. He calls me up one day and says, “I hear you used to own this house. We’re having some problems.” He tells me that he was standing on the back porch and this apparition of a woman walks right up from the back yard, passes him and walks right through the kitchen door! So we go over and I said to myself that I’m not going to tell them all the stories of what happened to us when we lived there. They are young and they just moved here. We go over and sit with them in the kitchen and the first thing my wife yells out is, “Did you find the body yet?” but I guess they thought it was a joke. I didn’t offer any information about anything. They were telling us that when they’d be upstairs they would hear the dining room table being moved around and plates clanging. But what they said was weird was that they have two cats who are very well trained to use the litter box, but for some reason in the new house they always urinate and defecate in this one spot. He points to the dining room and the spot they go to the bathroom on is the spot where I cut up the floorboards! Then the wife tells us that they were thinking of insulating underneath the house before the winter. We got outta there in a hurry.
