The Entity in the Kitchen and the Guardian on the Stairs
Growing up in a small town, life felt centered around family. When I was about six years old, my family moved into a double-wide on the family property immediately next door to the north of my paternal grandparents home. My grandfather had passed a couple of years prior, so this would serve two purposes – moving my parents out of a rental and into something they owned, and being next door to be able to help my grandmother when needed. My sister and I spent hours outside. One of our favorite pastimes soon became riding a wooden Radio Flyer wagon down the gentle sidewalk slope beside the house, pretending it was our own personal roller coaster. The small curve at one point in the sidewalk made it all the more challenging and exhilarating having to steer the wagon while sitting in it as if it was a runaway car. At times it really was that idyllic small-town childhood you read about in books or see in movies.
Years later, I left for college, but it turns out that it wasn’t the right fit for me. I ultimately returned home from my adventure that had been spent in the rolling hills of Ottumwa, Iowa a few months later without graduating. Shortly after getting back in town, I received a call from a prior classmate that I had met while in a computer course at Hannibal Vo-Tech (who is now my husband), offering me a job. We quickly struck up a close friendship and within a couple of months decided to move into my grandmother’s former home next door to my parents. The arrangement seemed perfect: we stayed rent-free, and in exchange, we kept the utilities on and paid a few other things for my parents.
What we didn’t fully realize at the time was the history the house had accumulated after my grandmother passed away. My parents had rented the property out to various tenants over the following years. One particular group of residents stood out from the rest; we later came to believe they had actively dabbled in alternative religious practices or the occult. They draped dark linens and sheets over windows, hardly ever came outside, had dim lights on in many late hours of the night, and while I cannot recall whether the one that wore a lot of jewelry wore a pentacle that was normal or inverted, I can say that it is a good indication that some kind of ritualistic practice was likely happening in that house. Whether accidentally or intentionally, I firmly believe that they left an open door for something dark to enter our world.
I had not yet remembered the ghostly visit from my great-grandfather over a decade before. But I gladly would have experienced that over the malevolent presence or energies we were about to encounter.
Early Warnings: The Spherical Light and the Hissing Phone
Upon deciding to make the jump into life on our own, the move-in was mostly uneventful except for the scramble to try to get some kind of furniture to make our new space usable. Luckily, the friend’s family had a penchant for auctions and a great-uncle that hoarded all of it. We were invited to pick through what he had and as we expressed interest he’d shoot us a random price for each item, all under ten dollars ($10) each. We ended up leaving his semi-organized junk storage shed with a few tables, a rolly chair for our office, a waiting room couch, and a non-matching, only ever-so-slightly more comfortable office waiting room chair along with a few other odds and ends.
Not long after we moved in, the energy in the house began ramping up. One night, the atmosphere felt incredibly charged. My friend and I were in the bedroom, which was set up with two separate beds. Mounted on the wall directly above my head was a standard mid-2000s cordless phone handset and base.
Suddenly, a bright blue, spherical light shot directly out of the phone. It zigzagged wildly through the bedroom like a snake, flew out the doorway, and into the living room before disappearing. It all happened so fast, but either during or immediately after, the phone began emitting a loud, chaotic hissing—sounding exactly like an analog radio with its dial sitting between stations. We never heard distinct words, just raw static. We unplugged the phone from the wall, but when we plugged it back in to do a power cycle, the static continued. Even after disconnecting and examining it before moving it to another part of the house for the night, the anomaly didn’t make sense: the phone’s actual backlit screen was green, yet the sphere that had seemingly escaped it was a vivid blue. It didn’t physically harm us, but the intelligence and erratic behavior behind it felt entirely unwelcome.
Our dog felt it, too. She absolutely hated being on the property and became a nervous wreck any time we were not home. She even began acting out against me specifically, almost as if she blamed me for bringing her to that house.
The Stomping Entity in the Kitchen
Following the incident with the blue light, the heavy, oppressive energy in the home escalated. A few nights later, the activity culminated in a new terrifying physical display.
As we lay awake, we felt the entire house physically shake from the weight of something heavy stomping around in the kitchen, which was separated from our bedroom by a single wall. The stomping was as if something that weighed more than both of us combined was exerting extreme force as it walked. I received a distinct psychic impression of its form: it felt half-man and half-canine, but closer to a wolf or jackal, immediately bringing the imagery of the ancient Egyptian deity Anubis to mind. While it’s highly unlikely it was actually Anubis stomping through my ancestral family home almost 6,500 miles from the sands of Egypt, the physical traits of that imagery perfectly matched the energy of the entity walking through our home. It felt intensely hostile and dangerous.
We huddled together and slept with all the lights on in all adjacent rooms that night. The next morning, we found the kitchen in complete disarray. While we were both young men guilty of leaving a mess much of the time, this chaos felt deliberate and amplified past our messy, careless youth. We talked about what we had felt and experienced, but we couldn’t find any seemingly logical explanations.
The Basement Stairs: A Push and a Safeguard
In the weeks that followed, the occurrences persisted. While we didn’t hear from our multi-species adversary again, whatever presence was in the home seemed to develop a targeted animosity toward me—perhaps sensing my natural ability to perceive it, or anticipating that I would eventually learn how to handle spiritual threats. This hostility turned physical one day when I had to go down to the basement.
The basement access was located outside the house; you had to pull up double cellar doors to reveal the concrete steps that lead down beneath the kitchen and the old back porch (which had been converted into the bathroom by my grandfather). I had walked these steps hundreds of times throughout my life without a single misstep. Since puberty and the subsequent growth spurt they had always seemed perfectly aligned to my step.
But as I began my descent, I felt a distinct, aggressive push against the back of my ankle and pressure on my calf, forcing my feet out from under me to trip me forward. I should have tumbled face-first down onto the concrete landing 8 feet below. Instead, the exact moment I felt the negative push from behind, I felt a simultaneous, counter-balancing push from the front that redirected my momentum. I slid safely down the stairs on my rear rather than falling headlong. Since I was carrying something, this let me walk away with scrapes and bruises instead of a potential major injury.
The two forces felt completely different. The energy pushing me from behind felt nearly identical to the dark, negative presence inside the house that gave off that seemingly ever-present oppressive energy. The force protecting me from the front felt entirely different—it felt like a protective bubble.
I immediately recognized that familiar, safe feeling. When my grandmother passed away, we had just recently bought her a brand-new mattress, which she hadn’t been able to use for very long before she went into the nursing home. Being a family of lower means, my parents decided to take her mattress and use it to upgrade the bed in our household that needed it the most—which happened to be mine. Because of that, I slept on my grandmother’s mattress throughout the last year of middle school and all of high school. Whenever I was in that bed, I felt an absolute, impenetrable sense of security, almost as if there was a safety bubble around it that nothing could cross. I always attributed that profound protection to my grandmother watching over me. On those concrete steps, the defensive force that touched me to push me backward felt extremely similar to that energy, and I believe she stepped in yet again to protect me from a dangerous fall.
The Turning Point: Scratches and Spiritual Deception
The situation reached a breaking point on a night when the house felt extraordinarily volatile—perhaps aggravated by environmental factors, moon phases, or cosmic energy.
While lying in our respective beds, my friend suddenly yelped in pain, crying out that his skin felt like it was burning and that he was under attack. We threw on the lights and after surveying the room, which was seemingly untouched and empty other than the two of us and the dog, saw that everything was as it had been when we had settled in for the night. The pile of CDs on the pinewood floor, a pile of dirty clothes, and the general clutter from our day were all normal for us at the time. We then quickly turned our attention to where he had sensed the pain and discovered five to six distinct sets of raised, red scratch marks stretching across his stomach and down his back. They looked like they had been delivered by a large hand or a massive, clawed paw. The tracks were warm to the touch and severely irritated, though they didn’t bleed like a typical animal scratch. Because of where the marks were positioned on his back, it was physically impossible for him to have inflicted them on himself, and the dog was nowhere near that part of his body.
Terrified, I grabbed my Bible. We began to read random passages aloud and prayed earnestly for spiritual protection. As the words flowed with fear, desperation, and anger from my lips, the heaviness in the air lifted with each passage and the more fervor we showed. This finally seemed to quiet the house for the rest of the night.
Desperate for a permanent solution, we eventually accepted help from a contact of ours who practiced Wicca. On a very dark, warm summer night this friend came over and offered to assist us with our otherworldly problem. They walked through the interior of the home to gauge the presence, and then walked back outside to circle the exterior perimeter of the house multiple times, speaking quietly. As they circled the house, their whispering got more intense and you could feel the tension more with each subsequent lap. When they finished, the feeling in the house and on the property was different. An immediate, profound stillness had settled over the property—more peaceful than it had ever been while we lived there.
However, the clearing left us with a chilling realization. A few days later, my friend (now husband) mentioned that he could no longer communicate with a spirit he had been speaking with since his teenage years—an entity he had always believed was the spirit of his late father. Our Wiccan friend clarified that they had tried to only bound and expelled negative, malicious energies from the property.
This left me with a haunting question that I still ponder today: Had he spent half a decade confiding in a dark entity masquerading as a loved one, or did my contact misdirect their intent during the clearing?
Historically, many documented cases of spiritual attachment and possession begin exactly this way. A negative entity mimics a safe, comforting presence to lower your spiritual guards, gain your trust, and systematically dismantle your defenses. Once those walls come down, the barrier for entry is gone. Perhaps we got lucky and got rid of it before it got rid of us.
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