A Very Bad House: Stories of Dreams, Spirits, and a Family Gift

As I was walking, at some point, it wasn't me anymore. It was a girl with long, long hair, with this long dress, like from maybe the 18th century. The strange events began with footsteps in the night. They didn't end there. It would continue for generations, crossing countries, homes, and even dreams. My name is Edwin. And here is Lucia's and Aradia's true scary story. My name is Lucia and I am originally from Italy, but I've lived in the United States for the last 25 plus years. My stories, it's actually family stories too, because I come from a family of women who've had the gift basically starting from on my mother's side my grandmother and her sister my grandmother could see spirits so she would tell us stories just to give you a little bit of background My grandmother's sister had a very peculiar ability. She was able to feel the energy of houses. I'm from the south of Italy and in the south we have this tradition, this belief that each house has its own spirit. My grandma's sister was able to actually feel the essence of the spirits and see them too. She would always be the consultant if somebody had to buy a house to see if it was a good house or not. And in fact, when my mother was pregnant with me, so this was back in the early 70s, My parents were about to buy the house where I eventually grew up. And, of course, they called her. And she did a tour of the house. And she gave her blessing. She said, this house has very good energy. And there's a girl. She's about 16 or 17 years old. That's the spirit. And she's blonde with long, wavy hair. And she's a very good spirit. So my parents ended up buying the house. It was a very... good and happy childhood. I have two older brothers, so it was always a happy family. My mom's sister, on the other hand, she was about to buy a house also, and my great aunt told her not to. It was a really bad spirit. It was a very bad house. My aunt ended up buying the house anyway, but her life was always, like, if there was something that could go wrong, it would for her, every single time. Sometimes it was comical. The two families, I remember when I was really little, we had to cross a border from Italy to Switzerland. At the time, there was no EU, so there were still borders. We would cross the border just fine with the car, and they would stop them, and they would just basically. Search strip them, open all the suitcases, even the smallest thing. And then of course there were bigger things that happened in her life. She lost her son. It was a very, very troubled and sad life that she had. My grandmother and her sister had the gift. My mom didn't want to explore that much, but when I was a child, I could hear footsteps in my house almost every night for years. I was basically born in that house, so I knew all the noises, and I knew it wasn't any of us. We kept all of our doors open when we went to sleep, so I could hear if my brother would get up in the middle of the night. I could recognize his footsteps from the footsteps of my other brother or my parent. And these were very strange footsteps. One night, the footsteps started straight in my room. So it was that of the night. I was still awake. Everything was quiet. And then all of a sudden, footsteps started from where the door to my room was. And they started to walk towards my bed very slowly. I was absolutely terrified and I couldn't open my eyes, obviously, to see what was there. They stopped right by my bed, by the side of where my head was. And after that, all I heard was a sigh in my ear. And after that, nothing. All the hair on my body stood up and I couldn't sleep for hours, but I couldn't hear anything after that. Every morning I would wake up and I would ask everybody just in case, hey, did you get up? Did you do this or did you do that? And nobody could say anything. They would say, I don't know what you're talking about. And my mom's only solution was like, just say a prayer, Lucia, just say a prayer. Don't worry about it. I was never able to see anything. I would always hear it. One other episode that was really unusual, let's put it this way, is this was probably late 80s. So I was probably around 19 or 20 years old. I was in my house and my good friend was there too. And she was on the phone. So she was in a room sitting on a bed talking to somebody on the phone. I happened to walk in front of her because I needed to get something from the room. So I walked in front of her and I see as she was talking, she suddenly stopped talking, was looking at me and her jaw dropped and her eyes got really big. I started to look at my clothes. I didn't know if there was something wrong with me or what I was wearing or my hair or something. And I was like, what's going on? And she was like, nothing, nothing. Later that night, she told me that as I was walking, at some point, it wasn't me anymore. It was a girl with long, long hair with this long dress like from maybe the 18th century. And then it was me again after maybe three or four seconds. And she didn't know that Years and years before, my great aunt had said that, you know, the spirit of the house was a blonde girl with longer hair, and she was about, you know, like a teenager, 16 or 17 years old. A few years, I ended up moving to the United States. This was before when I was married and before I had my daughter. we lived in a in a condo and we had basically our next door neighbor and her condo was basically we shared a wall we had stairs that shared a wall with the next door neighbor and there were stairs on the other side of the wall also the next door neighbor was an older lady We thought she was an alcoholic, unfortunately. She was a little odd lady. But one night, the police came over because nobody had heard from her for a few days. So her friends were worried. And it turned out that she had passed away in her house. We didn't know that she was there dead for two days before she was found. After that, of course, you know, her daughter came and she was remodeling the house and she was going to rent it out. So we had talked to her and she had told us that the house was going to be vacant for a few weeks. And we knew that during the day there were going to be workers, but at night it was going to be empty. And then things started to happen at that point. We heard knocking on our walls and it was coming from the neighbor's apartment. My ex-husband at that point, he was also very spiritual and he also had the gift. He was knocking back and the more he was knocking back, the louder the knockings were from the other side. Until at some point he used to say, okay, Daniela, stop it. Daniela was the name of our neighbor. Daniela, stop it. And then it would stop. But then after maybe 20 minutes or so, it'd start again. Sometimes when I would be all by myself in my house, I would be sitting at a desk, you know, on my computer and I used to have a cat at the time. And so it was just me and the cat in the house and the cat was always sitting next to me. I would start to hear noises right behind my back as if somebody was moving boxes or doing something, messing with objects. And whenever I turned around to look, the noises would stop. As soon as I would turn back to my computer, the noises would start again. And it was getting, it was like every day. Even the cat would hear them because I could see that his head was moving towards the noises. And then one day... there was a huge, huge noise as if something bulky and heavy was falling down my stairs. It was so loud that the cat jumped out of the desk and ran towards the stairs to see what was there. And I went too after him and of course it was nothing. A few days later, speaking with another neighbor, we found out that when she was still alive, she at some point fell down the stairs. And of course, the stairs were on the other side of my wall. And she broke her leg. So it was a big, big deal in her life. After a couple of years, we had our daughter, our beautiful daughter, Aradia. My daughter sees things, but I can only hear it. Things happen when she was a child, a little, and I could tell right away that she also had the gift. First of all, when she was born, she had a birthmark on her leg, and it was a perfect five-pointed star. You know, after a couple of years, that birthmark disappeared, but I knew that that was some kind of a sign. Before, when she turned two years old, my grandmother passed away. Whenever I put her in bed in her room, in her little toddler's bed, we also had a video monitor so we could see her and hear her. At some point one night, it looked like she woke up. She stood up in her little bed and started talking and laughing with somebody. And she was having a great time. I could see a little orb. floating in front of her face. By the time I went upstairs to her room, she was asleep as if nothing had happened. Nothing. That day, speaking to my mom, she reminded me that it was the first anniversary of the death of my grandmother. So I am positive she was talking to my grandmother. And then at some point, our cat died. The day he passed away, I threw away all of these things because I just didn't want to look at anything. It was just such a sweet cat and I loved him very much. And he was always with me, cuddling. So I threw away his litter box. I put it in the dumpster outside so it wasn't in the house at all. But for at. Least two weeks. we could hear the cat going into the litter box. It was the noise, the typical noise of a cat digging in the litter, scratching the sides of the litter box. And the first time we heard it, my ex-husband and I looked at each other and he's like, do you hear it? And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, that's the cat. You know, nothing was there, but It was still going into the litter box. And then after a while, I could feel the little paws walking on my legs like he used to and climbing up all the way to my chest. And then I would feel his weight on my chest like he used to be on my chest until I fell asleep every night. After a few months, my ex-husband's mother died That's when my daughter started also to see things. Every night we were going to my mother-in-law's house because my ex-husband was cleaning up and emptying everything before selling it. So we decided every night we would just, all three of us go there. And then I would be with the baby while he was cleaning up. I was feeding the baby. She was about maybe two. She was in the high chair and I could hear my ex-husband was on the other side of the house because I could hear him making noises, putting things in boxes and moving things. As I was feeding her, she started giggling and looking like moving her head from side to side, looking at something behind me. She was looking and laughing and then looking on the other side and laughing. somebody was playing peekaboo with her behind me. It was kind of creepy, but she was happy, so it was okay. I was thinking, I'm just not going to turn around. I'm just going to let her do as long as she's giggling and happy. One other time, we were at our house and again the baby Aradia was in the high chair at some point she pointed at something and she said grandma because my mother is still alive I asked her so which grandma and she said grandma Mary which is the grandma who passed away and I said is she there and she's like yeah she's right there and she kept pointing And then I said, okay, we'll say hi to grandma. So Aradia, with her cute little smile, she waved at her. Hi, grandma. At some point I said, well, is she still there? She's like, yeah. And then I said, what is she doing? Aradia looked at me and she said, she's mad. Unfortunately, that woman was always angry. very tense. She was not a happy woman. So when Aradia said she was mad, I thought, yeah, that's her. I knew right away that Aradia had a more powerful gift. Her father actually passed away three years ago. Her father was also very spiritual and he had a He used to say that he had things stuck to him, probably demons, and he was always very dark. And he was very, very powerful. At some point when he got sick with his tumor, I let him stay at my house. We were divorced at the time. And the day he came here, the energy of the house changed. We could see things moving like shadows moving. from our corner of our eyes all the time. I'm Aradia. My story that stands out the most actually happened when I'd say I was in my sophomore year of high school, about 15 years old. This was the first time I was going to a big group sleepover with my new group of friends. I had never really set foot in this person's house before, but as soon as I arrived, I could kind of tell something was off. Like my heart just felt heavy, like there was a weight on my chest. There was nothing wrong with her family. Her family was very kind, very welcoming, and everyone else was also very kind and very welcoming. So it's not like I was tense around people, but there was just something felt off. It was an apartment building, so it was three floors, the first one being the garage and the living room and then the bedrooms upstairs. For some reason, when I entered the second floor, the living room, my eyes were stuck on the staircase. I could not peel away my eyes. And I should preface this by saying that I have OCD. So sometimes my brain just tells me, oh, I have to look at the wall. I have to look at whatever, this lamp. But for some reason, I kind of told myself, you know, this is probably just OCD being in an unfamiliar place. But I just, I could not look away. I could not, for the life of me, tear my eyes away from the staircases. When I sat on the couch, we were eating, watching a movie, whatever. I couldn't watch the movie because I was staring at her staircase. I stayed like this for around two and a half hours throughout the entire movie. I didn't register in a single thing just because I felt this energy. Something was very, very off. And my other friends had mentioned, like, oh, I think I saw something out of the corner of my eye. But they were watching a horror movie, so I kind of just discarded it because... These people were also extremely paranoid in general. I'm not a paranoid person. I don't get scared easily, so I didn't really care. I wasn't even really on edge. I just felt off. At some point, we turned off the lights because, you know, it was nighttime, and we were watching another movie. This one wasn't even a scary movie, but there was a flash of light from one of the scenes, and I was still staring at the wall. No one has stopped me from staring at the wall and the stairs. So when this light... lit up the house. It lit up the staircase. I screamed so loud because there was a figure standing there, I'd say maybe seven feet tall, completely slender. It looked like a black trench coat with this white, pale face. It was definitely an older man, and he looked like he was melting, like an ice cream cone. His mouth was open. kind of gaping, kind of like a scream mask with a ghost face kind of look, but with white eyes. The top of his head was kind of flat, just melting. I screamed so loud, I actually threw a water bottle I had. I got so scared. I grabbed a water bottle and I threw it and I ended up soaking the person next to me. I got up and I was screaming and I was like, we need to get out of the house. Like there's someone in the house. And of course these people have anxiety and they're paranoid. So I freaked them out. I was hyperventilating. This was probably the scariest figure I had ever seen in my life. You know, we turn on all the lights. There's no one there. They had to call my friend's parents to actually sage the house because I was pretty much inconsolable. I didn't sleep all night just because of how freaked out I was. It followed me home, unfortunately. When I went to bed that night in my own house, I got that same feeling, except I was staring at the corner of my wall from my bed. And I was thinking, I was like, okay, I'm extremely paranoid because I just saw the scariest figure I've ever seen. I've seen figures before, but Not as clearly as I did that night. So I was telling myself, I'm just very freaked out. I'm probably just going to have to roll over and go to bed and just get over it. But I stayed staring at the wall yet again for a few hours. And lo and behold, I opened my window to let some air in. And there it was again, standing and staring at me from the. Corner of my room. Completely still. It was like looking at a picture, like an old picture. It was looking at me and I was looking at it and it didn't make a sound. Even though it knew that I could see it because I was staring it in the eyes, it didn't do anything. Because I didn't sleep the night before, maybe I was just freaked out, sleep deprived. That could be it. And then it happened again. And it kept happening. It actually happened for a year. I had this thing in the corner of my room for a year, every single night. But, you know, after a week, I kind of got used to it because it's just standing there. It's not doing anything. It doesn't make noise. It doesn't touch me. And I was like, you know, I can live with that. It's kind of like a friend. I don't acknowledge it, but I'm looking at it. I can't stop looking at it because it's really scary. And I still remember the face, the long, just melted face. You know, the time came where my friends were like, hey, why don't we have a sleepover at your house? So I invited my friends over and we were sitting on the couch. I've made it abundantly clear that this pale figure does not walk around. But of course, the one time I have my friends over, we're watching a movie. It starts stomping around upstairs. Very heavy thuds. I was the only we were the only people at home. You know, it was upstairs. It was walking around. Everyone just stopped. We paused the movie and we just listened to it stomping around. I have a pretty fat dog as well. So, you know, I kind of told myself, hey, maybe it's the dog walking around. And then I kind of looked to the right and the dog was already downstairs. So it's like, OK, that's not good. It's not a cat for sure. So I did the only thing I could do or thought to do was take sage and start burning it, open all the windows and kind of say, why don't you go to my neighbor's house instead? Don't come to my house. Go to my neighbor instead. And we did it. We were all kind of chanting this throughout the house. And when we finally closed the windows, it should be known that I am also in an apartment. So the living room. Is not ground level. And when we got back to the living room, it started full on knock on the balcony window, like a repeated just. We were all scared. I was trying to stay level headed because I don't want to freak anyone out. We kind of just had to close the curtains because what else are you going to do? It's not coming back inside. I actually never saw it again after that. It was surprisingly easy to get rid of him, and I don't know why I didn't do it before. But even still, it's been, what, three years since I've seen him, and I still stare in the corner of my room waiting for it to come back. I've woken up to things... peering over me and I just kind of have to walk around them because I have things to do and I don't really have the time to deal with it. I'm so used to just seeing things. And the worst one was probably more recent, I'd say a few months ago, where it was grabbing at my feet while I slept and just putting its hands on me in general in undesirable fashions. I mean, any sort of touch from something like that is undesirable, but this was extra undesirable. That was about the worst of it. I have a bowl of rock salt in my room now because, well, I just have so many things that are drawn to me that it's kind of difficult to resume day to day life. So about three years ago, my father passed away and also my aunt passed away. It's the same aunt that had bought that house, the story that I told in the beginning. I was very close to her. So she passed away after two days, my father passed away. So two big losses at the same time that I had. I flew back to Italy because of course they were both in Italy. My mom has dementia. So I was also there to basically make sure that she was okay, take care of her and all that stuff. One night I was sleeping in the sofa bed and My eyes were closed, but I saw a wall of white roses. Incredible. It was so bright and it was so beautiful. And in the middle of it, there was this light, this warm light. I could feel the energy and I felt it was my act. I was laying in bed and I was laying on my side. And I felt pressure on my arm as if somebody was leaning on my arm. And then I felt a swarm on my cheek, like she was kissing me. And then she left. I know it was her. I felt her energy everywhere. So that was a really good, that was really good moment. My father, I know he's still in the house where we grew up. I know he's waiting for my mom. So I could feel his presence in the house the whole time I was there. I was there for a couple of weeks. One night, something incredible happened. I was sitting at a table and my mom was sitting right across from me. And my mom, in her dementia, sometimes she gets stuck in the same thoughts or the same activities for a long time. So she had taken out a lot of boxes of jewelry and she was looking at each box and she was in her zone. And then she found a box with my my father had two gold chains that he used to wear with a little medallion of saints. He was very religious. And these two chains were completely tangled. It was a big knot of both chains together. So I saw them and I said, oh, mom, give them to me. It's a shame. Let me entangle them. She was doing her thing. I started entangling the first one. And it took me a good 10 minutes to entangle the first one. And I laid it on the table. And then I said, okay, mom, I have to go to the kitchen. I have to check. I was cooking something. I had to check the oven. I left the second chain. It was still in a knot. I put it on the table. I went to the kitchen, checked the oven, came back. It was maybe 30 seconds, less than a minute. I came back and the second chain was completely untangled and laid perfectly next to the first one. I know it was my mother. My mother is very slow. She couldn't reach from across the table. She had to get up, walk around the table, sit where I was sitting, untangle it, get up, walk around, and sit down again. There was no way it was her. And then, of course, when I came back, she was still in her zone. She was still looking at her own little boxes. So that was something also. Last year, I went back to Italy because my mom needed help. She had to have surgery, so I spent about three weeks with her. Before going there, about six months before, I had told my brother that I was looking for these movies, these old Italian movies from the 60s. And the actor was this comedian. He was one of the most famous comedians in Italy. And so I was looking for a collection of these movies. And they're not selling those movies anymore. You can't find them anywhere in Italy for some reason. So I was like, I had asked my brother, hey, can you find them anywhere? He also looked, he couldn't find them anywhere. When I went to Italy to see my mom, to help my mom, my brother came to the house one night and he went to what was my father's studio where he had a big bookcase and Mind you, my brother had gone through that bookcase multiple times because the bookcase is where also my father had documents, important documents, important certificates. So he had looked through everything multiple, multiple, multiple times. Well, that night he went to the bookcase and right in plain view was this package with a bow. with my father's handwriting. And it was saying collections of movies by this actor that I was looking for. And so it was a whole collection of DVDs of the movies that I wanted. And it was like a gift. It was like a package with a bow. And my brother, who's very rational, doesn't believe in ghosts, doesn't believe in anything, is just very rational. He was completely baffled. And he said, I can't explain this. I don't know where this comes from. It wasn't there. It hasn't been here for like three years. I had always made it abundantly clear to my father before he passed. I was like, listen, if you become a ghost and the afterlife is real, I don't want you in my room because it will scare me. What you do will scare me and I will be very upset with you. And he always said, oh, I'm going to do it anyway. Oh, whatever. I was like, just come in a dream or something. Unfortunately, one night I had my cat on my chest and I felt her immediately tense up. And, you know, sometimes she looks out my window and sees a bird or something. It's the same sort of feeling. But my window was closed and my room was completely dark. And as soon as she tensed up, I felt myself tense up, which doesn't usually happen. And all of a sudden, my brain was just telling me, it was like, it's your father. He's in your room. I just started yelling. I was like, get out of my room. Get out of my room. Do not come back. To my room. It was lots of insults, lots of anger. Did you see a shadow though? I did not see a shadow. That was one of the few times I haven't actually seen anything. But I felt it. It was a very strong presence. And because it was so strong, it did scare me. And I freaked out. And I yelled at him. And the funny part is... I texted my mother the next day. And I said, something so strange happened to me last night. And I feel like my dad was in my room. And she's like, oh yeah, I sent him over. I was like, why would you do that? So here's the thing well he misunderstood me obviously because you know a couple of days before I was in the kitchen and her birthday was coming up so I thought I I talked loudly and I said hey Dave that was his name it's gonna be out of his birthday why don't you go and Say hi to her and visit her. But I meant in a dream. I didn't say that, though. But he misunderstood me. He got yelled at. Poor thing. No, he loves her. I apologized. In the moment, I was not very happy, though. I was a little scared. Yeah. I think that there's something out there that we're not equipped to understand yet. I don't think we have the ability to comprehend it until we're actually there. I'm not very religious, believe it or not. I don't really believe in God or anything or necessarily angels or anything. However, because of all the experiences I have, I know there's something In the physical world, that happens. But we don't have the brain capacity nor the scientific knowledge to really understand it from a scientific point of view. Lucia and Aradia, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us here at True Scary Stories. I think here is where we bring up the topic about inheritance. Can things like psychic abilities, different sensory capabilities be passed down through a bloodline? And why does it always seem to be women that are able to pass this down? Or maybe as men, are we not, I don't know, paying attention to this? And maybe we do have some ability that we haven't really developed because we don't know it's there. I don't know. I'm, I keep bringing this up every time we think of a bloodline story, like something that gets passed down. But there's something to it. You know, there's also something to Italian folklore, like Southern Italian folklore. And I guess stories that have that cultural layer anyway. Things that affect the way that these stories are told and how they're perceived. So if you're listening from a country where you feel like stories are told a little bit differently... Or how maybe they just hit a little different and you want to share your experiences with us. Like tell me a little bit about the folklore that you have. Maybe it's not a story that happened to you, but there's some folklore. There's some legends that are around where you live. Please drop them in the comments. Send me a DM. You can reach out to me. The contact information is always in the description of this episode. The editing and sound design was made by Sarah Voorhees Wendell of VW Sound. Additional production was by me, Edwin Covarrubias and the Scary FM team. Scheduling by Bianca Chavez and Sofia Perez. If you have any stories that you want to share, something that happened to you and you want to tell it here on the podcast, head on over to truescarystory.com. There's a form there. You fill it out. We get an email. As soon as you send it, we get an email. We reply right to that email that you typed in on the form. And if it fits the format of the show, we'll get you on to tell your story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.