Reedsy Contest #272 (Fright Night) Entry: The Unaware Ghost

I have been stuck on this property for a couple decades now, I can leave the house but I can not take a step outside of the property. There seems to be invisible barriers that I cannot cross, and I have not entirely understood the cause of this. My hands slip through everything I try to touch or grab unless I focus really hard on whichever item it is that I am trying to move to be able to make it move. I look normal to myself, in fact I still look human, but every one that has been to this house throughout the last couple of decades seem to not be able to see me. Every single person that has been here during that time span just seems to look right through me like I am invisible. I can hear the conversations they have and the way they call my house their house. Which I don’t remember ever putting my house up for sale, it should still be my house but so many different families have been here throughout the last couple of decades. After awhile I decided to start trying to scare them away, I started throwing random objects on the floor and moving things in the house around as well as setting off the different electronics they bring to the house with them.

There is supposed to be a family of five moving into the house today, a wife, a husband, and they have three kids; a nineteen year old son, a seventeen year old daughter, and a thirteen year old son. I managed to scare the last family away but I guess it did not make my house scary enough to keep any more families from moving in. The house is a decent sized house, it has four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The living room is spacious, and the kitchen is about half the size of the living room. The kitchen has marble counters and mahogany wood for the drawers and cabinets; While the refrigerator is stainless steel and the oven is a basic silver stove; The microwave is just a simple modern microwave because you don’t need an expensive microwave for microwaveable food. The bedrooms are all about the same size as each other besides the master bedroom which is about one and a half times bigger than the other rooms. The house has concrete walls that are pinkish-brownish colored, and the house also has a garage. The garage is never really used besides for the families putting their vehicle in there but outside of that no one really has ever gone into the garage for anything. The garage is only big enough for one car, it has a slightly raised concrete platform to walk on to be able to enter the house through the door in there and it probably has space for a couple toolboxes. The new family will be here soon and I am going to try to scare them away from wanting to live in this house because this is my house, my sanctuary.

The new family finally arrives and they enter the front door. They begin to start moving their stuff into the house, this is my chance to begin trying to make them not want to live in this house and scare them away. The wife has brown hair and brown eyes, and is about 5’6” and wears glasses; her arms look thin but you can tell that she is stronger than she looks. The husband has black hair and dark blue eyes and is about 6’4”, and is muscular. The two sons mostly resemble their father, while the daughter mostly resembles her mother. I begin to try to scare the family away, I start by making the cabinets in the kitchen swing open and shut but the wife tells the husband that the screws are probably just loose. That many screws being loose should make anyone reconsider buying a house for as much as they bought this house for. The husband placed a TV in the living room next to one of the outlets, so I turn the TV on and start flipping through the channels even though it is not plugged into the socket. The husband draws his wife’s attention to it.

The husband said “So how do you explain the TV flipping through the channels like that?”

The wife replied “Maybe you plugged it in and forgot you did?”

The wife inspects the power outlet and sees that the TV is indeed not plugged in and is flipping through the channels seemingly by itself. The husband and wife look at each other quizzically, they decided to just take it as an anomaly and continued to move their stuff inside the house. Their children started moving some of their stuff into their rooms, so I decided that if I scare their children that might make them decide to change their minds about moving into the house. I start by making the thirteen year old son’s stuff in the closet in the room he was going to be staying in levitate and fly back and forth across the room. It gives him quite a scare and he goes and get his parents. They come back to the room and watch the items fly back and forth in the room.

The husband asked “I don’t think you can come up with an explanation for that.”

The wife said “We could just be seeing things, all of us are tired from the packing and moving so maybe it isn’t actually happening.”

The husband said “Possibly, maybe if we get some sleep then things will seem more normal.”

The family goes back outside to their vehicle to take a nap, since they have not brought all their stuff into the house yet. Scaring this family away might be harder than I thought it would be, I might have to do even scarier things to get them to decide to not to live in my house.

The family comes back into the house and begins moving more of their stuff into it, they put some stuff in the kitchen drawers and set up TVs in the children rooms. I yank the drawer they put their silverware in out and cause the silverware to spill all over the floor, the wife and husband calmly conclude that the wheels on the drawer are probably loose and that they will fix it up when they get more settled into the house. I turn all the TVs on in the children rooms and change the channels to channels that have static, I turn the TVs up loud so the static will possibly annoy the family. The family says that the TVs probably just had a stuck button or glitched, which I don’t know how that would be the conclusion that they came to considering that would mean all three TVs ended up having the same issue at the same time. I then start scraping pieces of glass against the windows of the house to make a high pitch squeaking noise, I do it on multiple windows to make the squeaking noise more intense. I think to myself this has to make them start to consider leaving, but the family just comes to the conclusion that it is the wind that is making the high pitch squeaking noises. I’m guessing that I am going to have to try harder to scare them, I’m going to have to actually try to scare them if I want them to get out of my house.

The entire family is sitting in the living room on a couple couches that they moved into the house. I go into the kitchen and open a drawer, I take a knife out and throw it at a wall in the living room in the direction the family will surely be able to see it. It startles all of them, and I notice a look of horror on their faces. I take that reaction as a start to being able to scare them enough to make them decide that they do not want to live here, in my house. I think that I’m still going to have to ramp up my scare tactics some to be able to achieve that goal though. I find a paint brush and crimson looking paint, and I come up with an idea that will surely scare them enough to make them leave the house. I start to make whisper noises to make them think that they are hearing voices, and I paint different phrases on the walls and on the bathroom mirrors to scare them. The phrases I write on the walls and mirrors are “You do not belong here”, “Leave and don’t come back”, “You will have a terrible time if you stay here”, and “This is my house not yours”. I then make all the TVs turn on and off, turn on the microwave, and start throwing all their silverware and dishes around.

The husband says “I think this place might be haunted, I think I understand now why so many people have left this house and why it was on the market for so long.”

The wife replies “I think you might be right, I guess all those things that were happening before this weren’t just anomalies and whatever is still here was trying to tell us to leave because it does not want to be disturbed.”

The husband says “I think we should decide to leave this place and stay in a hotel until we can find another house to live in.”

With that the family begins to move their stuff back into their vehicle, and I am able to live peacefully in my house again. I managed to scare them away and I am sure that they will report that my house is too scary to be able to be lived in. After a few hours, the family gets all of their stuff packed into their car and drives away. Now I just need to clean up all the paint off the walls and mirrors and fix that hole in the wall from the knife that I threw at it.

I manage to finish cleaning up all the paint, and I patched up the hole in the living room wall from the knife. I am finally able to relax and feel at peace in my home, but I can not help but think about what the husband said when he said that this place might be haunted. My house can’t be haunted unless there is a ghost inside it haunting it. I go outside and try to leave this property but I still am not able to, it is like I am actually bound to this property for whatever reason and a barrier is still keeping me from leaving. I decide to go look in one of the bathroom mirrors, something I haven’t done in a long time because I hate mirrors, I look and I can barely see myself in the mirrors. I look transparent, like a very thin veil with a blue tint to it, and I realize that I am most certainly a ghost. I come to terms with the fact that I have not been a living human in decades and that I have been scaring people away from trying to live in the house which was still mine when I was alive but I just wanted to not be disturbed. It seems that I am in some kind of purgatory and I need to figure out what it is that I need to fulfill in this world to be able to move on from the state of existence that I am currently in. I think to do that then I need to finally be able to let go of my house and allow another family to live in it, so I can move on from this realm or maybe I am now just a lost soul forever.