I was living in a haunted house when I was a teenager. My family and I moved to a town outside of Buffalo, New York. Our new house was called the Obadiah Baker House. It was big, white, colonial and haunted. It has served as the last stop on the underground Railroad before it went into Canada. Sited in a former Quaker community in the 1800’s its residents worked to abolish the slave trade and would routinely help people in their flight to be free. Started in 1860, it was completed in 1865 and inhabited by many generations of the Baker family. When we moved in, the lady who lived next door, Mrs. Becker, had grown up in the house when her last name was Baker.
Mrs. Baker Becker told us of the escape tunnels that were below the house and how you used to be able to access them from behind the fireplace in the living room but they had been closed up in the 1950’s. Around the yard in the grass there was the occasional pipe sticking out of the ground that had a metal cover with holes used to aerate the tunnels. So the slave tunnels were not to be explored but we scoured the house looking for where they may have hidden the escapees. We found a door in the floor and hidden closets. It was great fun and soon school started.
When we got to school, everyone told us we were living in a haunted house. It seems the home had been for sale for over a year and the previous owners had left after a short time living there. We scoffed until things started happening. People would cross the street before walking in front of our house. We started thinking things had gone missing or moved. We noticed that the doors would close by themselves. As we settled in the town and started learning its rich history, we found out things about how the Quakers lived, how they made paint from milk and local berries and that the doors were built thicker towards the threshold so they would swing shut automatically for temperature control. Aha! We heard this and decided our house was not haunted.
A short time passed before I found myself frozen solid in my bed, fearful of a man’s face hovering in my window. My room was on a high second story! The police found no footprints or bent bushes. Later, my mother and I both saw a red scarf float down the stairs and go across the kitchen. Heavy old wooden windows with wooden screens would be found half open and no footprints in the snow outside. My mother heard someone sleeping behind her. She slowly rolled over and saw that the covers were puffed up as if someone was in the bed. She flattened the lump, rolled back over, and starting hearing the deep breathing behind her again. We all then knew that we were living in a haunted house.
The house itself was fascinating and its stories were many. It had been used as a community house. Weddings and funerals were held in its generous living room and dead bodies had been “laid out” in the living room as well. The basement was deep dark and dank. There was a dirt floor and wooden beams that someone had scratched into with the year 1890. But we all loved our haunted house as we felt we were being watched over. Nothing bad ever happened but you could definitely feel heavy emotions in certain parts of the house. In a crazy twist that I am sure bolstered its legend, our family got transferred to Chicago and we has to leave after only a year in the Haunted Baker House.