(Note: Anders and Peter Eriksen are new contributors to HORROR-WOOD. Anders designed this month’s cover, and he and his brother, Peter, collaborated on this article about a real "haunting." When asked about their backgrounds, Anders replied, "My brother Peter and I both grew up in Rødby, a small town in Denmark. When we both had finished school, and my brother, the gymnasium, we moved from our "haunted house" (featured in this article) to a smaller country house, a few miles outside a town called Nakskov, where we live now. Whereas I had become very tired of school, already in the Seventh grade, my brother just seems to begin one school after the other, but he is still trying to choose a career, while I have always wanted to do comics for a living. I am 22 years old, and although I am currently working on a few different projects, I am still working on getting a job as a comic book artist. I love horror films and good literature. My brother Peter is 26, he is about to finish commercial upper-secondary school, this summer. He loves movies in general, and has an extensive movie collection.")

I grew up in an an ordinary little town in Denmark, and just like any other ordinary town this one too, had a haunted house. In the summer holidays of 1987, we moved into that house, A big house on a small hill just near the outer perimeters of the town.

Little did I know then about the reputation of this house. The house had belonged to a salesman, and the widow was now too old to live in it, only the ground floor was used. The basement, the first floor and the attic was closed.We more or less " swapped" houses as we so far had lived in a somewhat smaller house, than the one we were about to move into.

The big old house was in a bad shape, but it was from an age when good houses were built, and so we were able to renovate it. When I came back to start school again, everybody already knew that we had moved into " that old scary house ", and I was asked questions like; "is it true that there is a forever-burning candle in the loft, and that there is an owl living up there?"--of course not! It was true however, that a gardener had drowned nearby, and that a maid had committed suicide, by sticking her head into a gas oven, because of troubled love.

The Erickson's Haunted House

"It is said that you can still see her ghost in that house," one of my brother’s friends said. But he didn’t believe in ghosts, and nor did I, so we were not interested in hearing such nonsense.

On New Year’s Eve we found out for the first time that there was something strange about the house; we were all sitting in the living room, watching TV, when we all heard foot steps, as if somebody was going up the stairs. Maybe it was our uncle we thought, as he uses one of the rooms on the first floor to keep some of his business things in. We checked, but nobody could have entered the house, because it had been snowing that evening, so if anybody had entered our house they would have left footprints in the snow, but there wasn’t a single footprint to be traced.

In holidays, we would often have friends visiting, and as the house was big enough, they would normally get their own room to stay overnight. In the mornings, it was almost common to hear the guests say, "Were you up last night--I heard footsteps in the room, I thought it was you!"

Opened doors and the sound of footsteps, was nothing out of the ordinary in that house. But it has to be said, that when you’re a kid--maybe even alone, then it is a scary house to live in. It had dark corridors, a few strange angles--not unlike "Hill House " from the movie The Haunting and yet I loved that house, I almost felt that I was destined to live there, for the rest of my life. I think that most of those great houses seem to have a soul of their own--"Hill House" was "born bad," sometimes I got the impression that our house had been "bad" but was turning "good" Sounds weird I know, but even if I don’t want to compare myself with Eleanor in The Haunting, I know how she felt, which is perhaps one of the reasons that The Haunting scares me even today, because I know what it feels like, to be drawn to live in a house, that seems to have a mind of it’s own.

It is true, that you never felt like you were totally alone in that house.

My father would very often sit and watch television late at night, and almost every night he heard footsteps. He would know when it had been one of us or "the ghost" because he noticed that the boards didn’t creak when a person walked over them, but they did when "the ghost" walked over them!

My mother always told everybody "you needn’t be afraid of the dead, it’s the living who can hurt you!" She even named our ghost "Hugo" I always felt that it was a strange name to give a ghost who is supposed to be a dead woman. I guess she did those things to better handle those spooky happenings out of the ordinary, every-day world. People will do a lot of strange things to keep themselves from being frightened or scared.

And speaking of being scared; I remember once when the lights went out--unfortunately they did pretty often--my brother went to check the fuses, but came very quickly running back again. He was white as a sheet, and he told us that when he was on the stair case in the hall, he smelled something very strange, it was a strong smell, but he could not figure out what it was until he was half way up the stairs. It smelled like…gas! He told me that never in his life had he been so terrified, because we do not have anything in the house that runs on gas, so he thought that "the ghost" would appear in front of him, so he ran like hell down the stairs and stayed there, till somebody dared to check the fuses. A bit spooky, don’t you think?

I also have another story, about Anders. We were home alone and watching TV, It was late in the afternoon, when we ran out of snacks. We hurried to the nearest store to buy some, leaving him alone in the house. When we came back, Anders sat downstairs, his face all white (this is where I have to tell you that Anders does not believe in anything supernatural). But this boy was scared stiff!! "Don’t ever leave me alone in this house again!" he said. When we had left he heard strange noises, and believed that he was not alone in the house…he felt he was watched…by something. From that day on he believed in ghosts.

Well all this is something, where you can say it was your mind playing tricks on you, but some friends, my brother and I, have actually seen "the ghost." While we were outside having a party, my cousin saw a shape by one of the windows, but everybody had been outside at that moment! My brother and I saw "the ghost," one of the last years we lived in that house. We were sitting in my brother’s room watching TV, talking, when we saw somebody pass by the room. We thought that it was my mother, until we found out that both my parents had been downstairs all evening.