Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

This family bought a house in Missouri which, at one time, was a funeral home. The house turned out to be haunted. Here is Renee’s first hand account of what happened.

My husband and our three young children moved to a small town in Missouri called Hartville about five years ago. We bought a house in town that was perfect for our price range and the size of our family. We had been told that our house used to be the local funeral home at one time but it didn’t really bother us, even though two of the bedrooms were obviously used as viewing rooms at one time. We had planned to remodel anyway because it was an old house (built in 1940).

Only a short while after we moved in all sorts of strange little things started happening. We had lights turn on and off on their own, at night you could hear footsteps up and down the hallway (and everybody else would be sound asleep when you went to check it out), and we noticed that our children would not go by themselves into the bedroom they used as a playroom, saying that they got a “funny feeling” when they were in the room, even in the daytime.

Our youngest son started having a bedwetting problem (never had one before) and he told us the reason was he was afraid to get out of bed and go down the hallway to the bathroom was because when he got up one night he got the same “funny feeling” then heard voices whispering but couldn’t understand what they were saying.

Then about a year ago the activity got more intense. One evening while we were all in the living room watching TV, a picture flew off the wall across the room and crashed, shattering the glass. I was at home alone one evening watching TV again and had all the lights off except a lamp in the dining room when a black shadowy thing floated from the hallway into the dining room and vanished.

We have friends that get frightened in the house. One friend of ours saw a lady in a white gown hanging by the bathroom (the same one by my son’s bedroom) and to this day he won’t go down that hallway. Another friend was taking photos one night with the camera in her phone and caught the same black thing I saw on her camera.

We did learn that our property was the site of the last lynching here in town back in the early 1900′s, in a big maple tree on our front lawn. Supposedly he was an African-American man who had had a tryst with a married white lady in town. When the affair was found out by her husband he and a bunch of the townspeople strung him up on this tree. Then later the lady killed herself by hanging herself. When they found her she was wearing  a white nightgown.

We have been spooked by the incidents but haven’t really felt threatened; we even joke about our ghosts. Nevertheless, if we get the opportunity to move away I think we will, for our kids’ sake. Even though they’re older now they still get frightened occasionally and we feel it’s time (hopefully) for some peace and quiet!

Written by Renee Lancaster, Copyright 2008