Another epic H.P. Lovecraft yarn with an eerie, real-life anecdote...
The Shunned House--plus the real life version...
Ok, so I just re-read another one of my favorite Lovecraft tales yesterday: The Shunned House.
Something about it stuck with me—something about people getting sick in an old house and slowly dying. Then finding a glowing fungus in the earthen basement that eerily resembles some emaciated humanoid creature.
Something about the mad efforts of the main character, staying in the basement and watching it through the dark nights, digging deeper and deeper into the earth to find its source... man...
Then something hit me yesterday while I was telling a friend about the story: my father once told me the real-life version, many years ago.
My father used to run a cleaning company in Canberra, Australia. He would go into people’s houses—sometimes commercial, more often personal homes—and clean them while they were out at work or wherever.
One job in particular stood out glaringly to him, above all others.
He had to clean the house of an elderly woman who had recently died.
The catch? Her dead body had lain in her bed for over a week before anyone realized something was wrong.
When my dad showed up to do the job, the body had thankfully already been removed—but there were other peculiarities.
As he gazed upon the bed, the very scene of her death, he began to question the choices that had led him to this moment. For there, upon the bed where the woman’s corpse had lain for a week, was a dark, moldering groove—sunken deep into the mattress from the weight of her body, and stained dark from the death oils that had leaked out over the seven days post-mortem.
If the description here is creepy, the smell was worse. It cannot be imagined and should not be repeated.
The first thing he did was get help removing the bed.
He cleaned the entire bedroom over the next couple of days, yet something odd and sinister remained—something beyond the bed.
There was a certain black mold growing on the window of her bedroom. It was found nowhere else in the house. Admittedly not strange in and of itself—old house, dying woman, probably didn’t clean... etc.
Yet here’s where it gets really weird: he swears he cleaned it off thoroughly with bleach... and two days later, it was back.
This went on for about six days. Every two days, he’d check back on that room, and the mold was growing back. He tried bleach. He tried other Australian fungus and mold-killing brands—and each time, the stuff came back.
The homeowners, who were monitoring the cleanup, grew scared and superstitious when he told them what was happening.
Though my dad didn’t really believe in the occult, they were a superstitious couple. They hired an exorcist—or spiritualist, or medium, or whatever you want to call it.
Apparently, this person came in, walked through the house with candles, said some things, did some rituals.
And, you guessed it—this time, when my dad cleaned up the mold, it didn’t grow back.
He was able to finish the job and move on to the next one.
Fairy tales? Maybe… But my dad will always swear by that story.
Thanks for reading, feel free to share a spooky story of your own in the comments!
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