I bought my first house when I was forty years old. My mother had died and left me a little money, and I wanted a home, not an apartment. I looked at lots of houses, but my eldest daughter, who was about 10 at the time, hated them all and hated the thought of moving. She wanted to live near her friends so she could attend the same school they did, but that area of town was very expensive. Only one house there was in my price range. So I asked to see it.

The minute the real estate agent turned the key and opened the door, both my daughter and I instantly wanted the house. “This is it,” I said, before I even saw the rest of it. It was an odd but charming bungalow, hand built by the first owner, with two small bedrooms, a large front room, a roomy kitchen, and a front porch. It reminded me of a lake cottage, only minus the lake. Much later I learned that one of the first indications that a house might be haunted is this initial reaction: that feeling of, “I have to live here, I belong here,” is a common theme in many, many haunted house stories. It is as though the house picks you, not the other way around.

Everything was normal and terrific after we moved in. I repainted all the rooms in soft neutral colors (another common theme in haunted houses is recent remodeling projects) and hung my grandmother’s art on the walls. My mother and I had had a difficult relationship all of our lives, and I thought many times after moving in how grateful I was that she made it possible for me to own a home in spite of all that. I had been grieving very hard; not just for the mother I had but also for the mother I knew I would never have a chance to have. The house gave me hope and peace. The world slowly started to return to normal.

After we had been living in the house for several months, I met a man. At the time, I was doing performance art with two other women: a painter and a poet. We were presenting a satirical play about academic women that we had written together called “Blood Letters.” The man I met was at our first performance. He called me the next day and asked me out. I said yes, why not. But I felt nervous and uncomfortable about it. I’d been enjoying my independence and was conflicted about starting a new relationship while still grieving my mother.

That night, I was wakened at 3:33 AM by three loud knocks on my bedroom door. They were so loud, they scared me. I got up, looked around the house, everything was perfectly quiet. My kids were sleeping soundly. So I went back to bed and let it go. But after my date with this man, the knocks started again, always three of them, loud, always at precisely 3:33 AM. I thought perhaps it was a garbage truck or some vehicle that passed every night at that time, but it sounded very clearly like loud knocks on my bedroom door, not noise outside the house.

After a time, my date asked me to marry him and moved in. Again, I was unsure and unsteady. Really, I wanted him to go away but he was ardent and convinced we were made for each other. Once he moved in, the knocks came every night, waking both of us up. One night, after we had set a date, the knocks were followed by the sound of footsteps in the house. I woke him up and we searched the entire house at 3:33 AM, hearing the footsteps the whole time. We even searched outside and kept hearing them. After about 20 minutes they stopped and we went back to bed.

We married after a year of living together. My kids began to see cats in the house and hear other children when no other children were around. Then my new husband and I began to experience the same things. If we were in the basement, it would sound like children were upstairs, but when we went upstairs, no one was there and it sounded like children were in the basement. The cat was black and always seen out of the corner of an eye darting down the basement stairs or out of the bedroom. It was more of a shadow of a cat. That’s what we all took to calling it: the Shadow Cat.

One night, we were all sitting in the front room watching TV, when the Shadow Cat darted out of our bedroom and the door slammed shut behind it. There was no wind, no open windows. The door opened from the inside. Everyone jumped. I thought, this is getting a little weird. The kids had long ago decided the place was haunted and it frightened them, but it didn’t bother me. I just thought it was curious.

Then, around our first anniversary I had a horrible nightmare that caused to me wake up sitting bolt upright in bed in a cold sweat, listening to the pounding on the door. I looked at the clock: 3:33 AM. In the dream, I was sleeping in farm house and a the ghost of a young woman with long amber hair appeared beside my bed. She was very pale, and her hair and white gown seemed to float in the air is it would if she were underwater. She pointed soundlessly to the window and I looked out at a small pond with three bodies laying face down. One was my father, one was a black man I knew in my youth, and the third man I did not recognize. At that moment I heard the words. “Poison! Clean the well!” and I woke up soaked to the bone and terrified.

My husband and I began to bicker. I began to regret marrying him. I resented him pushing me all the time. He stole money from me, he lied, he stole from his work and lost job after job. Finally I left him and left the house too. I was so depressed I went into therapy, where I talked about my grief, my failed marriage, and sad things from my youth involving two of the dead men in the pond. After a year of that, the cloud lifted. I bought a different house, another bungalow, started a new life, made new friends, began to feel happy. And there were no more ghosts or hauntings in the new house. It was just a house. No, it was a home. My home.

What does all this mean? I honestly don’t know, but I’ve often felt that the ghost in that house was trying to warn me about the man I married. To this day, I feel that the dream I had was communication with a real ghost, not an ordinary dream, and I don’t think anyone could convince me otherwise. Like they say, you had to be there. It was unlike any dream I ever had before or have had since.

One last detail:

Just before I left my husband, we were sitting at the kitchen table bickering, and I said, “I wish I could prove these strange things are really happening and someone could explain why.” At the moment I said that, a dark shadow about six feet in width flew through the house making a fluttering or flapping sound. It seemed to come out of an old mirror my husband had hung in the kitchen, and it seemed to fly through the house and out the front door. We were quiet for a second and then he said, “Did you see what I just saw?”

Not long after that, I was out the door too. Best move I ever made.