Time Travel House

Date: 8/9/2020

I was on vacation with some relatives on my mom’s side of the family in this cool old house that was advertised as “the most verifiably haunted building in America”. We apparently found it on AirBnB. It was very old and the floor plan was weird, for example you had to go through a bathroom to get to my room. There was a large covered porch on the first floor. My cousin Hannah and I were there, and we were looking around. The porch had a thick yellow-brick wall instead of the wooden walls of the rest of the house. There was a wooden trim that went around part of the wall, then disappeared. Hannah examined the trim, then said that if the roof were gone, a person could walk on top of the wall all around the porch, except for where the trim was. We went outside and found that we could easily walk out of a second-floor window, over the roof of the porch, onto the fence that surrounded the property, and follow the fence to a hill that we hadn’t even known existed. The hill had some ancient-looking ruins on it, but we couldn’t get there—somehow it was only accessible by walking on top of the fence, and the fence had big metal spikes. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, and when I opened them, my vision was very blurry but I could tell I was somewhere different. I blinked a couple of times and was able to see that I was in a nice, 19th century-style garden with a yellow brick wall. I looked beside me and saw the same house that my family had been staying in. It took me a moment to figure out that this was the same space as the covered porch I had just been in. Hannah was also there, and she was looking around confusedly. There was a big tree against the wall, and carved into its bark was a bunch of graffiti: “where the f—- is this place”, “how did I get here”, and one that was just a giant question mark. I realized we weren’t the first people to accidentally visit this alternate reality. Hannah called my attention to a piece of paper stapled to a nearby tree. It seemed to be an advertisement for a local music festival, but scrawled all over it were people’s names. I knew that those were people who had been here before and wanted to contact others. Hannah took out a pen from her pocket and gave it to me. I started to write my (legal) name, then stopped and wrote my Instagram account instead so that if someone saw it, they could easily find me. I climbed up onto the wall and realized I could walk all the way around the garden. The only place where the wall was too thin was where the wooden trim had been added. I walked along the wall, to the fence (which now did not have spikes on it), and to the hill that had formerly had ruins. Now it was a gorgeous Ancient Greek-style temple. I remember snatches of the next few days that my family stayed there. Hannah and I figured out that if we closed our eyes for a few seconds, we would be temporarily transported to what the place looked like in the 1870s or 1880s. A lot of the changes were subtle— like my bathroom door having a latch instead of a knob lock— but the kitchen downstairs was completely different. Sometimes I saw maids passing through the halls, but they never paid attention to me. My dad could never “pass through”, no matter how hard I tried to teach him. It was really hard sometimes—I would close my eyes, then when I opened them my vision would be blurry, then if I blinked to clear the blurriness I would be back in the present. Eventually, two paranormal investigators, from a well-known organization aimed at disproving ghost rumors, came to look at the house. We were all standing in the (modern) kitchen: the investigators, me, and a big crowd of previous guests who wanted to prove that something about the house was supernatural. None of my relatives were there. The lead investigator explained that although this place was supposedly “verifiably haunted”, she doubted there was anything going on, and none of her investigations had ever turned up real evidence of ghosts. People from the crowd started shouting at the investigators, describing their experiences and explaining that there weren’t ghosts in the house, it was the house itself that was supernatural. The lead investigator yelled at everyone to shut up, and a lady at the front said, “just close your eyes for a few seconds.” The investigator did, and nothing happened. Then I suggested, “It helps if you think a historical fact while you do it. Like, ‘Back when this house was first built it took a whole week to do laundry’ or, ‘Joan of Arc lived in the 14th century but wasn’t canonized until the 20th’.” (I had actually seen maids doing laundry in the backyard, but I have no idea how the Joan of Arc fact popped into my head). The investigator looked skeptical, but she tried again. This time, she opened her eyes and said, “That was amazing.” We all cheered because she finally believed us, then she said, “I don’t know how I’m going to write this report.” Suddenly I was looking down from high above as the house got remodeled. I got the idea that I was watching a very fast time lapse of all the ways the house changed since the 1880s. I saw the ancient temple on the hill get torn down, and the roof get added to the garden. Then a bunch of bulldozers came in and made a giant hole in the front yard. I’m not sure what it was for, since the hole didn’t exist when I stayed there, but they kept making it bigger and bigger until the dream ended.