The House

From: Jennifer (imspoiledrttn995@aol.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Highpoint, NC
Source: Form Submission

This story is one that my aunt told me. It happened when she was a child growing up in Highpoint, NC.

There was a house down the street from where they lived at the time that no one had ever lived in over night because of the ghost that would appear on the stairs every night. The family that owned the house was trying to give it away to anyone that would stay in it a whole night.

A family from up north had broken down there and needed a place to spend the night, there was a man and his wife with five children, and the owner told them that he had a house where they could spend the night, and if they stayed the entire night he would give them the house, no strings attached. They took the man up on his offer, he took them to the house and explained to them why no one had ever stayed the entire night in that house.

The lady took the five children inside and put the older four to bed up stairs. The smallest one she had laid on the couch in the living room.

While all the children where asleep, the man went back to the owners house to borrow some tools to work on his vehicle. While her husband was gone, the lady heard the footsteps of what seemed to be a large man. She went to the bottom of the stairs to see if she could see anything. About the time she started up the stairs, she saw a shadowy figure start down the stairs toward her. Scared, she slowly back to the door. As the figure came closer, she noticed that he had a hole in the center of stomach that she could see through. She started to turn and run out the door, she remembered the four children she had upstairs and the one on the couch.

As the man made his way to bottom of the stairs, she asked him what he wanted, and he replied, "To tell you where I hid my treasure." She listened as he said, "Go to the bedroom on the left at the end of the hall. When you go in, go to the wall straight back and count five boards up. Pull the boards off the wall from that board up all the way around the room."

Then the figure went back up the stairs and disappeared.

Not long after the lady's husband came back and she told him what had happened.

They moved all the children to the first floor, and they went to the room and pulled the boards off the walls as the man had told the lady. They found that the man had hid gallon jars in the walls stacked from the floor to the ceiling filled with ones, fives, tens, and twenties.

The next morning the owner came over to see if they made it through the night. When the lady described what the man she saw looked like to the owner, he told her that it was his grandfather and he had died of stomach cancer years before.

He told them that they had stayed the night and the house was theirs. The couple told the owner that before he gave the house to them that he needed to see what they had found that night. He went up stairs with them and they showed him the money they had found. They tried to give it to him and he said, "NO, the house is yours and everything that is in it. If I had not gotten frightened and left he would have told me where the money was."

After that night they say that the house wasn't haunted anymore. The family moved everything they had to the house and lived there until the house was eventually sold and was torn down.