Foster's

Culverton House .7

1994

The house stayed on the market for another twenty years. A little more than that actually.

The strange happenings outside of the house dwindled down to one incident per year, as the state had decided to put up a massive wrought iron fence around the estate to deter people from getting on the property to cause mischief.

Within a month ivy had claimed the fence, filling in the gaps so nothing could get through.

Of course there were the braver people who would try to scale the fence and people who would try to get onto the property via the field but otherwise it had done as the state had thought it would. It deterred most people.

It had not deterred the many real estate companies from trying to sell it though. The house bounced from agency to agency, they had all sort of come up with a deal of holding onto it for five years, and then another company would take it on. They all tried to market the wrought iron fence as a bonus that it raised the value of the property, but that didn't help them.

They tried doing the house up. Keeping the paint fresh and the lawn freshly manicured. They tried showing it to families from other states, even other countries, but every prospective buyer heard of the house's past and changed their minds.

It became harder to keep the house going. To keep the paint fresh, the bushes trimmed and the lawn mowed. A house with that reputation, with odd things happening inside and around, people didn't want to take the contract. And those that were brave enough, often were scared off a few weeks into the job.

So the town was almost overjoyed when someone new bought the house. They were excited to see what would happen to this family. It was a morbid sort of curiosity, a new fun game the town played.

How long would the new owners last?

It had been kind of boring without some family getting stuck in the throes of chaos over at the Culverton house. Especially since the strange happenings had been getting less and less overt. Now it was just the odd pet going missing, the old curtain twitching. This was guaranteed to be a good time.

The Whites' moved in two months after the purchase.

They were the first family of color to own the house, the first family of color to have money in their town. That was a big deal for their town, they so very rarely got any sort of foreigners, and everyone who mattered there was white.

They had only recently gotten to be more progressive, in all senses, though they were still learning.

So, while they were little wary of the new neighbours, everyone was certain to boast that it had nothing to do with the color of their skin, though really, it kind of did.

The Whites' were a nice family. Darren and Julia were seemingly normal, and their two children, Jackson and Crystal were the all-American kind of kids.

Darren was a contractor who made a lot of money putting up condos in Detroit where he and the family came from. They literally started in the projects and moved their way up, which was commendable.

Jackson was a football star, tall, fast and strong. In the short time he had been at their high school and on the team, the team had won two games. It was looking like that might actually win a title this year.

Crystal, who was a year younger than Jackson was a cheerleader. She became one of the popular girls right away, always busy and out with her friends.

They were a great family to add to the town. Very soon they were all quite sad that they were living in the Culverton House. All the townsfolk took turns trying to convince them to buy a different house, one that wouldn't eventually drive them out of town.

But the Whites weren't going to be intimidated by a house.

What they wanted was a bed and breakfast. The perfect job and house to retire too.

They started by taking apart everything the Millers put into the house to make it more haunted. Once that was done they moved onto modernizing all the bathrooms. They ran phone lines through all the rooms, got them their own TVs, put in better cable, and an internet connection. Top of the line dial-up, completely separate from their phone lines.

Then they turned the atrium into a kitchen. They moved the large dining table by the large bay windows and put a kitchen into the main floor, taking everything out of the basement where it was originally.

This was so their patrons had somewhere beautiful to eat their breakfast.

When that was done they started on the downstairs. They wanted to turn it into a rec room, a common area for their would-be-patrons.

And it was there that they started having all the problems.

They started having issues with the electrical. Power tools would stop working, lights were flickering, outlets shorting. At one point the power saw turned on, on it's own and spun so fast that it practically threw the whirling saw across the room when it broke free.

Things started to get knocked over, what they put up came back down the next day, but this was only happening in the basement.

It was like the house didn't care about all the other renovations it was getting until they got to the basement. All of a sudden it very much awake and up to its old tricks again.

They complained to their new found friends, they told them all about the slamming doors, the weird whispers in the wind, and the sudden electrical issues despite them putting in a new electrical panel. Their friends all told them to leave, that this was the first of the warning signs, and if they ignored it the house would take more drastic measures.

They were adamant, Darren and Julia that is, that they weren't going to let a house beat them. Their children, begged to moved, they wanted to live anywhere except the haunted old place their friends refused to come into, but their parents could not be dissuaded.

That was until one night, the lights went off in the house.

Darren, a life time contractor and house owner, figured he'd just go downstairs with his flashlight flip the switches back on and that would be that.

But in the Culverton House, nothing was every just that.

Darren White went into that basement, flashlight in hand, thinking he was in for a quick fix. Instead, three hours later, he came out blind.

Had to crawl out of the basement to get away from... well... whatever was down there.

No one ever did find out what it was.

The Whites picked up Darren, got in their car and drove away. They took him to a hospital two towns over and just never came back for any of their things.

They didn't say good-bye, no one knew what happened, they were just gone and the house was back to being for sale.

It was the quickest the house had dealt with anyone before. They had only lived there eight months.

And no one won their bets. The only one who had won was the house.