Dante Caravaggio, 21

Caucasian

Los Angeles, CA

11/10/2011

One of my roommates and close friend Dante Caravaggio, often spoke about these spooky occurrences that him and his family as a teenager. I decided to sit Dante down and hear the whole story. We were casually eating dinner and after I was done, he started his story:

“…So after living in um Katy, Texas, which is near Houston, my parents wanted a break from the city life. So we rented a ten acre ranch that had horses and uh a guest house among an indoor swimming pool, it was one of the greatest houses I’ve ever seen. The most fun house ever, three stories with an indoor swimming pool and a two story guest house. My sister, each of us had our own room, and she stayed in the basement and she was the first to hear noises that we couldn’t explain. We used to blame these noises on our cat, but she said that she was hearing the bathroom door opening and closing. Obviously the cat couldn’t open or close a door so we told her the door was creaking since the house is over forty years old. And um, her room was kind of an eerie room because the entire floor was a walk out room and her room was entirely surrounded by glass instead of the regular drywall. So she just said she saw shadows which she hoped to be the cat and the occasional sounds she would hear would be the bathroom door opening and closing. So that was the first thing. I used to hear footsteps up and down the stairs like a lot during the night. And uh you know like your mom would come check on you at night while you were in bed, so for years my mother would come into our bedrooms and check on us when we were like 13, so like we would hear, like I would hear, and I’d ask my brother if mom checked on him, and he said no. We were the only two on that level of the house, so there was a very distinct sound of footsteps going up and down on the stairs and we would hear it every night and we had suspected my mother to check on us, but it didn’t make sense at the hours of the night these events had happened.  So that was the second clue. My mother who had never felt comfortable in the house in the first place and was the biggest skeptic so there’s no way she could have made this up, she was sweeping leaves off of the basketball court and she swears that she saw an older woman wearing an apron standing in the kitchen. She was wearing a red apron, and was a little larger in size. She ran inside to see if the woman was actually there and of course there wasn’t anything there. I also hated showering because I felt like someone was watching me and I remember one time I was using my parents shower because it was way better than mine and it was a super sick shower of course. I was showering and I’m shampooing my hair and I looked through the stained glass and hand on the holy bible and I swear someone walked by. At first I thought it was my dad, but I soon realized that my parents weren’t home and like my brother and sister are in school. I was trying to explain to myself what was going on, but nothing else but a ghost made sense. We asked the former homeowners about the house, and they explained that their grandmother had a heart attack in the kitchen and the ambulance couldn’t make it in time. “

Dante and his family had lived in this house in Katy, Texas for about a year, starting from summer 2003 to summer 2004. After Dante told me the accounts that he and his family had encountered, he later called his mother that night to ask for more details of the unexplained events. His mother had spoken to the former house owners that had lived in this house before the Caravaggio family. According to Dante, the house and ranch was over forty years old, and had been passed down from generation to generation starting from the original family that had built the house. The previous house owners informed the Caravaggios that their grandmother, who was about 80 years old, was cooking in the kitchen one day, minding her own business, and then suddenly she had collapsed in the kitchen. The woman had died before the ambulance could make it to the house. The apparition of the larger woman in a red apron standing in the kitchen that Dante’s mother had seen is more than likely to be the same grandmother that had previously lived in the house. However, the door opening and closing, creaking of the stairs, shadows, and the shower event remain unexplained. We can infer that the house is home to at least the ghost of the grandmother. If the grandmother is the only spirit in the house, we see a common theme of motherhood that is portrayed in ghost stories. The occurrences of Dante’s room to his door opening and closing, the creaking of the stairs, and the shadows that his sister had seen, may be the ghost of the grandmother performing her daily duties in the household, which would usually comprise chores like checking on the children and cooking in the kitchen. The ghost of the house does not seem to be hostile, but seems to be more nurturing and taking upon a caretaker role, just like the grandmother was when she was alive. In conclusion, I believe that the ghost of the grandmother had bounded itself to the house, forever taking care of her house and family.

Yen Hoang, 20

Student

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA