Jeremy P: 13 Asylum Lane
This isn’t really a ghost story as it’s just sort of a series of stories about the house I currently live in, because something is sort of wrong about the house I currently live in. Our house is old, like 90 years old, and it’s located down the street from a mental hospital. It used to be known as Asylum Lane, but it turns out people don’t want to build houses on streets with names like Asylum Lane, so they changed the name to something less likely to be found in a Goosebumps book, and then built a bunch of houses. Our house is house number 13—so technically I live on 13 Asylum Lane, and every day patients from the mental hospital shuffle up and down my street to get to the bus stop. I am being 100% truthful right now, which is a first for anything I’ve written here.
Our house was also abandoned at some point in the 60s or 70s, and sat empty and unattended for 30 years while some family fought over who had the ownership rights or something. Then either someone died or gave up, and the house was bought, refurbished completely, and flipped to the person we are renting from now. Pretty much everything in the house was ripped out and replaced, except for the foundation and the hardwood floors. There was apparently a full tree growing from the basement and through what is now my living room. So, 13 Asylum Lane, where I currently live, used to be the weird abandoned house that I’m sure neighborhood kids had weird stories about and where teenagers probably broke into and drank beer and burned things. And now I live there with my wife, cat, and dog, pretending to be a grown up.
The basement of this house is unfinished. We use it to store things we don’t normally need, like my four boxes of sealed Star Wars toys (nerd) and Christmas decorations, and we also keep the cat’s litter box down there. I like that I just wrote “cat’s litter box,” because I’m sure if I didn’t specify it was for the cat that you’d all think I normally shat in a sandbox in my basement. Anyway, the basement is definitely the most creepy place in my house. The walls are peeling, and I don’t really know why. I think it’s just that the owner did a shoddy job of sealing it, but at the same time sheets of the wall paint will just fall off.
Also, my dog will NOT go in the basement. He’s not afraid of stairs, he will run up and down the first floor stairs all day long, but he will not go into the basement. One time I carried him downstairs because I was working down there, and he would not do anything but shake, whine, and look at the door at the top of the stairs back to the main floor. I didn’t think much of it at the time because my dog is also a giant baby, but he still won’t go down there, and we’ve lived in this house for over a year. I also have seen things moving down there, but always out of the corner of my eye—most notably that one time I swore I saw the cat walk downstairs to go to the litter box, but then I turned to head upstairs and the cat was sitting on the top of the stairs. Nothing else really happened in the basement yet, but I don’t really like being down there.
We have an attic, which has a window in it that points out to the street. Unlike most attic windows on the street, it doesn’t have shutters or anything blocking it – it’s just a window into the attic. From the street you can see that there is a box or something that half blocks the inside of the window. The owner of the house swears she has never used the attic for anything, because the only access is a tiny panel in the ceiling of the guest room closet. We have also never used the attic for this same reason. I looked up there when we moved in, and it’s empty except for that box which is way on the other side of the house from the access panel. I’ve never tried climbing over to it—mostly because it’s not my stuff and the attic isn’t designed for storage so the floor isn’t real sturdy, but also because I don’t really want to know what’s in there. I like to assume it’s filled with leftover building materials from when they refurbished the roof or something. It’s safer that way.
Last year, my (now) wife and I went to go see Paranormal Activity, a movie that people either loved or hated. One of the things that struck me about the movie was that the view outside their bedroom door (the stairwell on the left, the extra bedroom and bathroom on the right) was pretty much the mirror version of our house. This sort of creeped me out a little bit, but I sort of ignored it – until they got to the scene where they go into their attic and find that old picture of her as a kid that she didn’t put there. My mind immediately went to the mystery box. For the rest of the movie I just kept thinking about the mystery box and pretty much every other odd occurrence in my house that otherwise would be coincidental. Why does the guest bedroom light constantly go out? Why do I hear noises coming from upstairs when I am the only one home and my pets are sitting on the couch next to me? Why do I never see any of our neighbors or see lights on in the nearby houses? If it wasn’t for the ending to the movie being the least scary thing ever, I probably would have creeped myself out enough to just move out of my house that night.
Later that same night, it’s maybe 3:30 in the morning, and my dog starts going batshit insane and barking. He only does that when someone is in the house or when he sees another dog. I jumped out of bed and ran to the top of the stairs to see lights shining in my windows, and the shadows of 6 or more people standing on my porch. Remember that crazy people from the hospital just wander around my street, so my first thought was that a bunch of them had escaped and were on my porch. I grabbed a golf club and ran down to open the door – and I am greeted by 6 police officers, who appeared surprised that I answered the door.
I asked what they wanted and I was told they received a phone call from a child screaming from the phone in my house. The thing is – we don’t have a house phone. We only have cell phones. We also don’t have children. So I told the police that we don’t have kids or a phone, but they were welcome to look around and check out the house to see – I mean, I could be a complete wackjob with half-eaten kids locked in a freezer in my basement. But the cops just said “no thanks,” got in their cars, and drove off. All of them. It was a very weird event.
So I go back to bed and after maybe 30 seconds my eyes shoot open. All I could think about was the mystery box. I imagined myself going into the attic and crawling through the years of spiderwebs and other assorted crawly things, and getting to the box. It’s 3:30 in the morning, I am sitting in the dark with a flashlight shining on this mystery box, and I open it. It’s a phone.
I freak out, and jump out of bed. I’m sort of half-awake and half-asleep, and I’m completely horrified because I’m not sure if that really just happened or not. After a few minutes, I realize the “going into the attic” portion of the night was not true, but the police did come for that child distress call, and then I decide whether or not I should venture into the attic. If I really did open that box and find a phone, or bones or something, I would probably completely lose my shit and run into the night never to be seen again.
Instead, I decided I would just go downstairs and play Final Fantasy XII or something to completely take my mind off that box. I really don’t want to know what’s in there now – because I know I will be disappointed when it’s just leftover roofing tile, but also because there’s still a small chance it could be something else. Maybe I’ll be able to open it when we are moving out, but for now it remains the Mystery Box in the attic of 13 Asylum Lane.
