I’ve been on a few ghost tours in places like Salt Lake City, packed into a miniature bus with an EMF meter in my hand while a guide shares the sordid details of some of the most famously haunted local spots. We pile out at places like The Rio Grande Depot, the Shilo Inn, and the Salt Lake City County Building. Nothing particularly spooky has ever happened to me on any of the tours, and if the needle on my EMF meter budged at all, it’s because thirty other people around me were pulling out their cell phones to snap photos of empty windows.
Fun as those tours are, I’d really love a chance to be (relatively) alone in one of those places for an overnight investigation with a very small crew. I’d love the opportunity to capture some audio recordings, photographs, or even just memories from being somewhere so notoriously haunted.
But even though I believe the stories of paranormal goings-on, those infamous places don’t scare me.
What scares me is a tiny house in North Salt Lake.
I won’t even drive past it. And if the current owners offered to let me do an investigation in the basement, I don’t know if I could. As I type this, I’m imagining being there, standing in the crooked little corner bedroom where I used to nap as a child, and the hairs on the back of my neck are warning me that even my memories of that place aren’t particularly safe.
From the outside, the house looks normal enough. It’s a little red brick bungalow with a wide porch on one side. A white fieldstone facade covers the left half of the house like the Phantom of the Opera’s mask; I remember the stones used to sparkle in the sun, which six-year-old Caryn thought was incredibly fancy. My grandmother watched us after school and during the summers, so my brother and I spent a lot of time in the house and the yard.
I haven’t been inside since my grandmother sold it in 1991. I remember the upstairs front room a great place to watch “I Love Lucy” re-runs and “Body by Jake,” the garage in the back was a great place to light matches with my brother, and the basement was my least favorite place on Earth.
Not all of it; there was a living room with a fireplace downstairs that wasn’t terrible as long as you weren’t alone, and the laundry room was a fun place to bring friends on the occasions my brother helped me make it into a spook alley.
But in the northeast corner of that basement, a friend of my grandmother helped frame in a small bedroom. My parents say the proportions of it were just a little bit off, so the corners weren’t square and the door wasn’t hung straight.
That explains why the door would creak open all by itself… but not why it would close itself, too.
The little bedroom had a twin bed in the corner, and it seemed like a convenient place to take a nap. But multiple members of my family quickly stopped sleeping there, because everyone who did had terrifying experiences.
Mine was a dream that started with waking up. A tall, thin man stood beside me. His face was shadowed, so I couldn’t see his expression, not even when he leaned over the bed like he was about to pick me up. I would wake up, heart racing and terrified, and the bedroom door I’d left open would be closed.
I asked my aunt if she remembered the experiences she had when sleeping in that room. “How could I forget?” She recalls that if she was sleeping when the door closed itself, the bed would start to shake. Once, she woke up in the shaking bed and felt a force pressing down against her, pinning her shoulders to the mattress. She isn’t sure what it was—she just describes it as an “entity,” and she thinks it followed her home one night to her apartment because her bed shook there, too.
The paranormal activity wasn’t limited to the basement. In the mid 1980s, my family moved in with my grandmother so my parents could save for a house. One day while my mother was home alone with my brother and me, she heard me scream from my bedroom. It wasn’t the usual cry of a toddler; something had startled me awake. When she went into my room to pick me up out of the crib, a loud boom sounded from the front of the house, as though someone had slammed the front door.
When she went to investigate, she found all the kitchen chairs leaning against the table, each one balanced precariously on a single leg. Had my brother done it? No, she could still see him out the front window, playing in the yard with his friends. Had my father come home from work early and decided to play a prank on her? If you know my dad, you know it’s a likely scenario. She shouted around the house for him, but he didn’t answer.
To rule it out, she called his office. He answered the phone and her worst fear was confirmed: someone–or something–else was in the house. She told him she didn’t know what was going on, grabbed my diaper bag, and waited in the safety of the sunlight with my brother and me until my dad got home. She only managed to go back into the house because his teasing helped her feel like she’d imagined something, but her experience along with all the other incidents has me convinced the house was haunted.
Grandma sold it when I was six and we never went back. But for years afterward, I had the same recurring nightmare about that house. I dreamt we were there, visiting my grandmother, and someone asked me to go into the kitchen and take something out of the oven. When I opened the oven door, an enormous hand made of smoke and shadows exploded out and grabbed for me. I would run out the front door and up the street, toward home and safety, but the hand would hook me around my belly and pull me back into the darkness.
After my grandmother sold it, the house changed hands several more times, sometimes going up on the market just months after new owners moved in. From what I can tell, the same family has lived there for 17 years now, so I have to hope they haven’t had any scary experiences.
It’s entirely possible the spirit latched onto one of the subsequent owners and followed them away from the house before the current owners moved in. After all, as Yuri Dyedov of the Soul Searchers would say, “Poltergeists don’t haunt places, they haunt people.”
But just to be on the safe side, I’ll listen to the goosebumps on my arms and stay away from that basement.