My wife’s father, Max, passed away back in the fall of 1988, a few years after her mother. Her sister and my family had the task of cleaning out the house. They had moved into the house, a rental, back in the mid 1960’s.

The house was built around 1900, before electricity, village supplied water, and sewers were put in. You could see where the outhouse used to be and, when electricity came into vogue, the wires were run through the gas pipes. Whoever had the house built were quite the moderns, no coal furnace for them! The gas lights and gas furnace made the house quite chique, for the turn of the new century.

Max was an avid reader, all the Chicago and local papers, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and much more. 25 years of much more. Max never threw any of it out. The basement was full of them.

Now, my wife and her sister were hardly able to deal with the massive amounts of personal effects they had to go through. Luckily for them, my brother Daryl, his strapping young son Aaron, in his early 20’s, and I were available.

Daryl, who starred with me in my Quasi Theory entitled, “An Occurrence on Munger Road”, is enthusiastic about organizing these sorts of events. He is also good at getting paranormal things stirred up. Well, really, most of my family is. My sister currently has something leaving single pennies around her house. It left one outside the bathroom door yesterday. It wasn’t there when she went in. Her husband wasn’t home and her cats and dog aren’t noted for handling spare change. She should be happy that something is concerned about her fiscal well being.

So, we were all going through stuff on the first floor, deciding who could use, or deserved to have all the utensils, toasters, and which items, of all that mound 25 years worth of debris, went into the rented dumpster.

Evening drew near and one of us, I can’t recall which one of us, declared that the house had gone all creepy feeling, like something was watching us. That’s when my wife said that she and her sister had always thought the house was haunted. Great. Now she tells us.

There are some things that are common to people who are, as is said, sensitive. Sensitive, as in sensitive to the unseen entities and forces around the planet, and apparently, Max’s house.

First, the lighting seems to change, brighter or darker, but without actually changing. Things seem visually sharper and sounds sound a bit dampened. You’ll feel a little colder, or warmer. You may get the old goose bumps and the hairs on the back of your neck rising routine. To my family this means it’s time to hunt the thing down.
We went from room to room, and the weird feelings went in front of us, or crept up from behind. We decided the obvious thing to do was head to the basement. That’s got to be its lair.

So, Daryl, Aaron, and I tromped on down there. We could sense it moving ahead of us. We had it on the run. While still generating very intense feelings of, waves of, nasty intent, it moved away whenever we got near where we felt it had moved to. It finally seemed to stop in the southeast corner of the basement, in front of a small door. We hadn’t really noticed the door before.

Beyond that end of the basement was the area under the front porch. A newer house would just have dirt under the front porch.
We hadn’t a clue as to what was on the other side of that smallish door. It was less than six feet tall.

I went to open it. Daryl said,”Dean, don’t do it. Leave the thing alone. It’s really nasty and too strong for us.” Aaron, whose face was a bit whitish by now, didn’t say much of anything.

I opened the door, of course. The entity was really feeling royally pissed off about it. I could feel it trying to surround and envelop me. So I told it to do its worse and stepped in. It was very musty and damp, but the little room had a light with a pull chain, a cement floor, and a hand pump. It was a well room set up so you didn’t have to freeze your ass off going outside to get water in the winter.

The nasty, spooky bugger suddenly quieted down as I felt it going down in the well. It was just some little nature spirit defending its adopted territory, probably a gnome. No, not like the little guy you bought at Home Depot and put in your yard. This was the real kind.

First revealed during:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:
https://youtu.be/e0R7XqXuaCQ