Do Baby Zombies Eat Your Face Or Can They Only Reach Your Ankles?

I live in perhaps the oddest house I personally have ever seen. It's a farmhouse and the original rooms were built over two hundred years ago. Bits and pieces have been added throughout the years and sometimes I feel like I'm living in The Burrow--the Weasley's tottering home in Harry Potter.

The house has four floors. Let's start in the basement, shall we? The original basement was an approximately 15 by 10 foot room with beams running through the very low ceiling and a walk-in fireplace. Previous owners added a large cinderblock room under an addition which we finished to make a large rec room. Unfortunately, to get to this carpeted, paneled, rec room with it's pool table, sofa beds, and TV, you have to pass through the creepy old basement with it's rickety stairs, cement walls and floor, and exposed wires and pipes running the length of the ceiling. There isn't much we can do about it because we can't cover up these pipes and wires in case we need access. Feeling that this root cellar like atmosphere wasn't deterrent enough for our guests, we added a frequently used litter box to the mix. I have no idea how our daughters convinced any of their friends to venture down into this area to reach the playroom when they were little, but they did, and the basement has been the site of more parties, play-dates, and sleepovers than I can count. When you consider the fact that any little girl who had to use the bathroom in the middle of the night had to pass through here alone on her way, I'd say the Catholic Church should add this to it's list of miracles.

On the main floor, you have the dining room and living room, which made up the original house. A previous owner added a kitchen, family room and laundry room off the dining room and added a powder room under the stairs, which puts it right in the dining room. It's always a nice touch to be able to hear the sound of urination and a toilet flushing at your dinner parties. This powder room was the site of the unmentionable spinning party guest incident. Another nice touch to have that story in the back of your mind during meals around the dining room table.

Open a closet door in the dining room and you will find not a storage place for linens, but a spiral staircase leading to the master bedroom. The staircase is narrow and is unused because the same previous owner built a closet in the master bedroom that required lowering the ceiling in the staircase. A normal staircase was also built between the living room and dining room and I'm guessing that took place after the owners tried to pivot a dresser or headboard up the spiral one and got it stuck. There used to be a window in the wall of the now powder room, so they just put hinges on it and made it into a small storage cabinet.

On what we call the second floor (even though technically, it's the third) is the master bedroom, the master bath, and another bedroom. When you come up the stairs from the first floor, you are presented with the choice of three doors (It's just like Let's Make a Deal!). To your left, is the door to the master bedroom, immediately to your right is the door to the master bath, and slightly down the hall to the right is the door to the second bedroom. How is this possible when the house has four bedrooms? Well, someone throughout the years designed the layout of the house so that to get to the two bedrooms and bath on the third floor, you have to either go through the master bedroom or master bathroom. You can imagine the complications of that. If someone is taking a shower in that bathroom and someone else is asleep or changing in the master bedroom, you are stuck in the hall waiting for entry. This also means the master bath not only has the door to this hallway, but has a second door leading to the stairs to the top floor. I can't tell you how many guests have shared that they sat down on the toilet only to look up and realize there was a door wide open right in front of them.

The master bath had the only shower with the third floor bath containing only a claw foot tub, so you can imagine life with six people (four of them being teenage girls) and only one shower. Our stubborn insistence on keeping parts of history plus the herculean effort involved in carrying a cast iron tub down two flights of stairs kept us from putting a shower in even though it was greatly needed. Now, that three of the girls have moved out and are only occasional visitors, we, of course, came to our senses and we are in the process of installing a shower in that bathroom. It only took us twenty-two years of no one using the tub to realize, hey, maybe a second shower would be a good idea. It's no wonder our daughters know every spot on the ceiling when they spend so much time rolling their eyes at my husband and me for our inability to see the obvious.

The master bedroom has a closet with another spiral staircase leading to . . . nowhere. Previous occupants eliminated the exit at the top of the stairs by putting in a hardwood floor in the bedroom. The third floor used to be an attic, but was made into two bedrooms and a shared bath when the roof was raised by dormers.

In the long history of the occupants of our house, one thing was constant until we moved in---each family who lived here had five children. We, alas, broke the tradition by stopping at four. But even so, there have been many, many babies and young children living here throughout the centuries.

I personally am an open-minded person and don't believe in nor negate the possibility of ghosts walking among us, aliens flying above us, or intelligent life existing in Hollywood. I don't pretend to have absolute knowledge of whether these things are real or not. I can say that, despite living in this old house for twenty-two years, I have never felt an evil presence (other than my in-laws) nor have I seen anything out of the ordinary (well, I have, but I'm speaking in paranormal terms here, not my everyday abnormal living, breathing human sightings).

But others claim that they have experienced things while in our humble home. One case was of a couple who came to feed our cats while we were away. As the wife was opening cat food cans, the husband picked up the baby monitor from the kitchen counter and flicked it on. He casually mentioned to his wife that the kids sounded like they were having a good time upstairs. She froze and reminded him that the reason they were there in the first place was because no one was home. They listened to the sound of children's voices and he suggested that perhaps the part of the monitor that picks up sound was turned off and the receiving part, which he held in his hands, was picking up a signal from a neighbor's monitor. That can happen only if the transmitting part is turned off. She begged him to go upstairs and see if it was turned off. He refused and they dumped cat food onto plates and got out of there. They called us to tell us what happened and when we got home, we checked the monitor. It was turned on upstairs. We also reminded our friends that there were no other children living within the monitor's range. Many times over the years, we turned on the monitor to hear the same lullaby playing. It wasn't playing in our house and it was always the same one.

But baby monitors aren't reliable and there could be any number of explanations. So let's share our next story.

We asked two construction worker friends of ours to do some remodeling in our bedroom closet while we were away on vacation. These are tough, burly, hockey fan kind of guys. When we arrived home from vacation, excited to see the finished closet, we were shocked to see the work half done and tools lying abandoned on the floor, paint cans left open and drying, and general disarray. We'd had these guys do work for us before and knew that they were reliable about cleaning up after themselves.

A call to one of the workers resulted in an explanation of sorts. He said they had been making good progress on the closet when he casually mentioned to his co-worker that he wished I would pick up the baby because the crying was giving him a headache. His co-worker agreed before they both froze at the realization that I wasn't going to be picking up any baby since I and my babies were in another state. They stepped out into the bedroom and both were absolutely positive that the source of the crying was within the house and right up the stairs. They dropped their tools and pushed and shoved each other to be the first down the stairs and out of the house. Both refused to return until we were at home and could assure them that they weren't about to be slimed or have their faces eaten off by a zombie toddler.

I will say that when they did come back, the job was finished in no time. It's the fastest I've ever seen construction workers move.

Perhaps I should share this story with all future workers I hire. I could even rig a tape recorder to play a tape of a baby occasionally crying in case they are tempted to slack off a bit. I could program the lights to go on and off by themselves, have doors slowly creaking open . . .

Well, if it doesn't get my new wallpaper hung faster, it might at least discourage the in-laws from dropping by.

Of course, if there really were ghostly presences in my house, the time that my in-laws have already spent here probably convinced them to move to the light and cross over. Whatever unfinished business was keeping them here was probably forgotten as they came to the same conclusion I have--moving to the light is preferable than living in the hell of having my in-laws in the same house.