A report by Agent Zero.
The house had a perfectly creepy name, The Tretheway House, so obviously it had to be haunted. And it was.
I don’t remember when I first heard about the house — I think I was in high school. It was the kind of old place people whispered about: “Did you hear so-and-so sneaked into the Tretheway House on Saturday?” Few of us had dared enter it, although most of us (the ones who could drive) had gone out to see it. Lots of times.
It was out on an old road, maybe 10 miles outside of town. At least 100 years old; we didn’t really know, but just by the looks of the old thing, Victorian and decrepit, it had to be ancient. None of us knew the history, although somewhere in the annals of high school lore, someone had to have known something; we knew the name, Tretheway.
It turns out that the Tretheways had been well-known and wealthy, at least at one time. I got that intel from my Uncle Al. I never found out much more. There was no one I knew named Tretheway, and if they were still around, I would’ve heard the name. This was not a large town.
When you’re 16, you’re braver than you are at later ages, but I was never that brave. I refused to spend the night in the Tretheway House. That’s what my friends were trying to convince me to do: sneak out, meet up, and stay inside. None of us had even dared go into the old dump yet, and these idiots were talking about camping there. No way.
The compromise was: spend a whole afternoon there. It doesn’t sound as frightening, and I’m sure being inside that horrible place would have been petrifying at 3 AM.
But the day we went was overcast and ugly, as if it was adjusting itself for our adventure. Ugly, billowing sky. It was creepy enough, I thought.
Of course, we all brought cameras. I had a 35mm manual SLR and a bunch of black-and-white film I’d rolled myself from a bulk supply (so yes, I was a photo-nerd). Color cost too much, and I couldn’t develop it myself the way I could b-and-w. If I could develop it on my own, then I could have proof sheets ready that very night (which I did).
Here’s what this old mansion was like: after driving about miles out of town, past the Harmony Grove Cemetery, you’d take a right on an old county-maintained road and pull into a gravel area. There was no driveway to speak of. The house was a dirty gray, and you couldn’t tell what color it was supposed to have been. Something dreary. I said before that it was Victorian in style, and I am only guessing, because the railings and ornaments and flourishes were broken and bent, and other parts were just gone, so you couldn’t really get a good idea of what it had looked like when it was new. It looked like it had never been new.
Kevin was already inside the house when I showed up, and I shot a few pictures of him from the outside before I even said anything. The other guys were pulling up, and we all just went inside where Kevin was, as if we’d all been in there before. There was the shell of an old fireplace and some broken-down walls and a bunch of rubble. Kevin stood in the midst of it with a huge, fearless grin while we entered, cautiously.
Everything creaked. The floor creaked as you walked on it, the walls creaked if you pushed on them, and then — god help us — the stairs creaked as we walked up them. There wasn’t much to see downstairs, and the legend was that the cool stuff was upstairs anyway. It was amazing more of us kids hadn’t been hurt in that house, because the stairs were about ready to collapse. There were loose boards, maybe some nails sticking up, and just general danger. Of course, nothing was going to happen to us — we were young.
Unexplained event #1: there were three rooms, as I recall, and each of them was painted (!) a different color. We’d never heard anything about paint. This wasn’t a pro job; it looked like someone had taken buckets of paint and just splashed. One room was all green, one was sloshed with deep blue, and one was red, all red. I spent a bunch of time in that Red Room. It reminded me of the “red room” of Amityville Horror infamy. That was the room where some kind of evil lurked, if you believed the story, and so we started speculating (joking?) that this Red Room had a similar quality. It was the most evil room in the Tretheway House. I remember being surprised when I went into the Blue Room, because it was so much warmer there. The rest of the house was noticeably warmer, too; the Red Room was cold.
I must have shot pictures inside the house, but they’ve been lost to time, as almost all the photos from that day have been. Shame.
How long did we stay inside? I don’t really remember, but I’m sure it was not all afternoon as planned. We decided to go outside and shoot some pictures in case we accidentally caught any of the Tretheway ghosts out for an afternoon haunting.
Unexplained event #2: the thing is, we did. The photos are lost to time — in a box somewhere in an attic? — so you have to take my word for it: there was a vaporous figure in one photo. That figure was not there when I shot it. The lens was clean — the other photos showed no blur or sign of disturbance. Where did this smoky, transparent figure come from? We didn’t know, but we were absolutely certain there was nothing visible that resembled it.
Unexplained event #3: I went back to the Tretheway House only a month or two later, with a girl. I guess I thought I was impressing her, and truth be told, I think I did. Chicks dig scary things. Anyway, I coax her into going up the stairs, which seemed even more rickety than they had the first time, and was going to show her the Red Room.
Only there was no Red Room.
The other rooms were still there — their paint seemed much more faded than I remembered — but the Red Room had no paint at all. No new paint covered up the red. Just bare wall.
Today, I still have no explanation for that.
I’ve heard that they’ve torn the old place down. Too bad. I wonder what it would’ve looked like all these years later.
Tags for this post: camera, ghost, haunted house, haunting, mansion, paranormal, paranormal report, photograph, red room, spirit tretheway
Technorati tag links for this post: camera, ghost, haunted house, haunting, mansion, paranormal, paranormal report, photograph, red room, spirit, tretheway
Related Area51.Org Posts: Bigfoot Museum Raid Successful, Haunted Thanksgiving: Paranormal Report, Did I See a Ghost? — Paranormal Report, The 7 Paranormal Wonders of the World
Things to Do with This Post:
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
