For some reason I was really never afraid to live in our house—although it occasionally had somewhat unusual things happen within its walls—I was never afraid.
It was during the 1960’s that my family moved into a new house in Española. Absolutely no one had lived in it before but that didn’t mean that the history beneath its foundations was less than 500 years old. It was off all the main highways and tucked in neatly by one of the little wooded areas near the river. It might have even been part of the Rio Grande River at one time. The neighbors were nice and the area seemed safe. We were there for almost four years.
Late at night—about midnight—the national anthem would play on TV and then only static could be seen and heard on the only three channels everyone received at the time. NBC, ABC, and CBS had little competition in those days and each prime viewing hour was tightly packed with entertainment, news, or documentary. Few, if any, products had more than a minute to sell themselves. Commercials were only a minute long instead of our current one to five minutes of commercial breaks stuffed into our favorite programming. Today’s ads are placed in manipulative zones—usually right before something exciting is about to happen in the shows we are watch—so we will stayed glued to our seats—hypnotized into watching the ad and not missing the exciting part of the program coming up. Of course when the program begins again, the expected excitement has gone away or has morphed into something much less interesting.
But when the house was truly silent, in the wee hours of the morning, the house would breathe. In and out—this comfortable feeling of quiet observation would blanket the house. Checking on the rest of the family, who sometimes were not there, or working out of town (which meant that absolutely no one was home), this was when the quiet rhythmic breathing would begin and linger for hours. It obviously was not my breathing or anyone else—and it never happened during the day. But it did not seem malicious.
My father always went to bed early, about eight or nine at night because he was in the habit of rising before dawn. One evening about ten o’clock, he walked into the living room where my mother and I had been watching television for several hours.
Frustrated, he asked my mother, “Why do you keep going in and out of the closet in the bedroom? What are you looking for?”
Mom and I looked at each other in disbelief and then she answered him.
“I haven’t moved from this couch in over two hours,” she said. I backed her up saying I was there the whole time.
“Well, it was someone who looked just like you!” he said to mom, obviously not believing either of us. He turned and went back to the bedroom.
My mother and I just looked at each other. This was not like my dad. It was so strange it was almost funny.
I always kept the door to my bedroom closed because the rest of the family smoked and my room was my little haven of fresh air and peacefulness. I started noticing that when I would suddenly open my door after an absence caused by school, a movie, etc., a horrible putrid stench would come out of the room. It would hang in the air for about a minute and then completely dissipate—as if it had never been there in the first place. I almost felt like I had surprised something that was in my room. No one believed me because by the time I had told anyone, the stench had gone. I have an unusually strong stomach, but the initial reaction of the horrible smell almost made me want to retch. I never kept food in my room, or even ate in there. I was sort of a neat freak and would have noticed anything that would have caused a bad odor. Also, a bad odor doesn’t disappear after a minute, does it?
Suddenly, one day I had an idea. Bobbie was my sister’s friend (and a family friend) and she was a traveling school nurse for several northern communities. She often stayed with us for her convenience and we enjoyed having her around. She had a day off and we were just sitting around in the kitchen talking. I asked her to go open my bedroom door. She thought it was a stupid idea and I wouldn’t tell her why. Finally after much complaining, she walked over and opened the door. She quickly withdrew.
“What the hell is that smell?” she said. “It smells like something died.”
Then, only seconds later she said, “What! Now I don’t smell anything!”
I was leaning against the doorway smiling. Finally, I found a way to show someone what I was experiencing!
Certain it was a dead animal of some kind, Bobbie immediately ran outside and looked thoroughly beneath my windows, above them, and all around. She never could find the source of the horrible odor.
Now, I have to mention that I was between the ages of 14 and 17 during my time in this house. I have learned that spirits (and odd occurrences, i.e., poltergeist activity) often happen around certain young adolescent women. I guess I was one of them.
Later I learned that the smelly spirit, called an elemental–and who is a very bad entity often behaves in this manner.
One spring was very windy and one particular evening I kept hearing something in the garage. The garage was very small and we kept it closed, including the big pull-down door and the regular door in the back. At first, I thought it was a tom cat after my female Siamese. The first time I went into the garage I found no other animal except my cat and she came inside the house with me. Again and again I kept hearing something move and clatter around, but upon each investigation I found nothing. Finally, I heard clattering and animal noises coming from the garage and was angry about the constant bother. By this time the rest of my family was standing around watching my persistent checking. I started to open the door to the dark garage and suddenly it seemed that someone was pushing in—against my attempt to shut the door. A sound of flapping paper seemed to cruise past my ear (it sounded like the mad dance from a piece of paper held outside a moving car window). I was once told that the flapping noise I heard by my ear is also the sound of a bat’s wings
I screamed and the door suddenly slammed shut. I picked up an empty, but heavy glass Coke bottle by the neck to use as a weapon and opened the door once again. Everything was perfectly still and quiet in the garage, nothing seemed out of place, and all the doors were locked and secure.
“Yeah,” I thought, “the Coke bottle does it every time.”
The next morning, I was gathering the trash and went out into the garage. I looked down at the concrete floor and thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of oil!”
I continued to stare at the dark drops and realized to my horror that it was not oil. It was blood!
I ran into the house and got my mother. We both looked closely and noticed that it followed the outline of the front of our car that had been parked there the night before—the night of phantom noises and sounds. We called my sister, who had driven the car to work in Los Alamos that morning and asked her if there was any possibility that she had hit something. She told us she was sure she didn’t hit or run over anything and she even went out to check the car. Nothing was on the car or within the engine that would explain anything about what we were seeing.
The amount of blood on the floor was probably close to two cups. It made a strange path around the front outline of the car—as if it were too big to go under it. It was also too much blood for a small animal to lose, and a small wounded animal would have gone under the car. Something was bleeding and it had to be tall and large enough (like a person) to slide between the car and the rest of the garage. I would not have missed anything (or anyone) that large the night before.
Finally, my mother and I started back inside the house. I happened to look up and saw the small crawlspace completely open in the ceiling. Cold chills went down my spine. It was never left open and I had never known the wind to move it either. It was impossible to reach without a ladder and the ladder was kept in the shed outside. I was suddenly afraid that someone might be up in the crawlspace above the house. My mother called the Española Police and they came to check things out. They confirmed that it was certainly blood on the floor, but found nothing else.
About a year later a neighbor a few houses away had a similar experience. She said she went to lock up and closed her back door when she suddenly felt resistance from the outer side.
She got scared and yelled, “I don’t know who you are but you’re not coming in here!”
“Oh yes I am,” said the unseen male voice. The neighbor increased her grip and threw her weight against the door. She was finally able to close and lock it. She never knew who she spoke to and didn’t see anything as this all happened in the darkness of night. She seemed to think it was just some drunk.
However, during the entire time I lived there, I don’t believe I ever saw anyone come into our neighborhood who didn’t belong there and I never knew any of the neighbors to have mental, alcohol, or drug abuse problems.
Maybe it’s just as well the neighbor didn’t see exactly who spoke those words.
Before some of these things happened, I didn’t really believe in ghost stories or haunted houses. However, I was a teenager who couldn’t resist playing around with an Ouija Board and I unknowingly allowed some unwanted activity to come into my life. Bad activity—I might add.
I know it’s extremely tempting and exciting to young people, but it just needs to be left alone. I was once working in an office when I found a really neat Ouija Board mouse pad that someone had discarded into the lost and found. I thought “Its just a mouse pad, what harm can it do?”
I was sitting on top of the world in a new job, everyone was happy with my work, and they were getting ready to hire me into their organization. I blithely used the mouse pad and stupidly watched as everything at work fell apart. Suddenly the secretary began telling outrageous lies about me, the supervisor was making my clients leave the building as we were laying out documents and planning critical chapters, and good friends were just no where to be found. It was only later that I tied all the events together that I finally got smart and got rid of that mouse pad. I found the next person who took it from lost and found and warned them that it might hold a curse. She smiled as if she didn’t believe me. In a few weeks she mentioned that she and her boyfriend were moving to a town (a town that I knew was hard to live in and was sinking fast). They had both quit their jobs and headed out on this dubious journey and I haven’t heard from them. As for the mouse pad—I haven’t seen it since either. I hope it got to the correct person or that it just left . . . Occasionally these strange pieces of wood will simply disappear on their own. I know mine did and so did my friend’s board. Both of our families denied having anything to do with their demise.
When I was a teenager I heard a story that an Ouija Board scared one family so much that the father took the board and threw it into the fire. It was said that the board screamed as it was burning and stopped only when it was nothing but ashes.
I also had two rather strange prophetic dreams while in that odd house. One was that I would have to live in a town that I hated. It came to pass that in about a year and a half. I did have to live in this town but I only had to stay there for one year. The other dream was that I had fire on each tip of my fingers. It didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t get rid of the flames or put them out. Then I woke up. That very morning, the Santa Fe Opera had burned down.
—Raven DeVille
