Under Attack: Surviving in a Haunted House

By Edward D. Olsen

My recently widowed mother of four was financially trapped in a dangerously haunted house. When Dad died, she used the last of our money to purchase a home, not knowing it had been cursed by the former residents.

Mom should have known something was wrong. She was a psychic. But distracted by the death of my father and being suddenly thrown into single motherhood, she just didn’t notice what was in the house until we’d already moved in. By then it was too late to do anything but hunker down and survive.

This is my firsthand account of living and surviving in that place when I was a young boy. We did battle with demons in that house, both physically and mentally. Mother instructed us and stood guard many a night, not letting them pass….. to get to us, her sleeping children. But there were a few times they did get past her. Those are the nightmares I still have today, more than fifty years later.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781105464737

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Under Attack: Surviving in a Haunted House

Under Attack

Surviving in a Haunted House

By

Edward D. Olsen

Copyright © 2012 Edward D. Olsen

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-105-46473-7

Dedicated to my mother who so many years ago kept us all safe…...

Forward….

When I was a young man making my way in the world there was a time when I came to the realization that I had experienced a rather unusual childhood. I never met anyone who could say they had survived growing up in a haunted house and experienced the full manifestation of exactly what that means.

I was in the navy for 13 years and traveled around a lot so I got to make a new set of friends every couple of years or so and once I had gotten to know someone well enough to share some of my experiences with them I was always amazed at how many of them had experienced something supernatural themselves. It seems to me that if my life experience of sharing these stories with my friends and acquaintances can be taken as some kind of crude poll then about one in three of all of us have actually experienced something associated with the supernatural. About one third of us have seen a ghost or heard one or been touched by one.

I ran across one fellow, a senior enlisted man who had spent time on board a certain Navy Destroyer who now would not set foot on it even at the threat of a Courts Martial. I think this man had the closest experience somewhat similar to mine of all the people I had met. The ship was a heroic World War II veteran that saw a lot of blood on its decks. As a result it was haunted and having been away from it for a while he could not go back to stand on its decks again. That is something I fully understand. This ship has since been decommissioned and now stands as a floating museum. When I started frequenting book stores looking for stories written by someone who had been in a situation similar to mine there was not much to be found. This was quite frustrating until one day it occurred to me that I had not written about my experiences so I really had nothing legitimate to complain about. Perhaps there was someone else looking through a bookstore like me who couldn’t find anything either and that would be my fault wouldn’t it?

If you bought this book because you have had a supernatural experience like living in a haunted house I hope my story is somehow helpful to you and I hope you will decide to write your story and publish it as well. If you are simply curious or skeptical and decided to read this on a lark, that’s OK too but I want you to know that I am a real person and the things in this book really happened and were not imaginings. There really is something out there beyond our five senses. I don’t pretend to have many answers but perhaps you can connect something in your experience with mine and make sense of it for yourself.

Chapter one,

The Way Things were.....

When I was a little kid during the 1950’s things were pretty normal for me. I had a mother, a father, an older brother and two sisters. My dad also had a married son and daughter from his first marriage. His first wife had passed away because of a heart condition about two years before he met my mom. She was quite a bit younger than him and with her he started a new family all over again. She had come from Holland just after the Second World War along with most of her family. They all adopted this land as their new home and their new country, becoming US citizens shortly after arriving here back in the late 1940’s.

Our little family lived in a modest gingerbread style country house with lots of ornate woodwork on the rails and banisters of the little front porch. It was a small farm in a town called Murray in the state of Utah. I had my friends, my amusements, and I believe I can say I truly enjoyed myself at that time in my life like any little kid should. It was just a small five acre farm out in the country but for a little kid under five years old it was a lot of fun with an endless variety of things to do, to explore. I knew my mom and dad loved me and I had no worries.

We watered our massive front lawn, adorned with two full grown ponderosa pines by overflowing the irrigation ditch, putting a layer of water all across the lawn upon which I could go surfing, four year old style of course. I would explore and rummage around the yard until I found a flat piece of lumber and I would run with it, holding it like a surfboard then throw it down and jump on it to skim along the flooded lawn. It seemed like I would go skimming for a long way but it was probably only a couple of feet

One time I found a little baby toad no bigger than a thimble as he was swimming through the water. I caught him and put him on the upper right corner of the board. He stayed there for quite a while as we skimmed along the water, me pushing us along with my foot much like pushing a little red wagon. He was probably taking a breather from swimming while sitting there on my surfboard but he finally jumped off when he’d had enough and quickly disappeared in the waters of the flooded lawn.

A little later on when I was about five years old I learned to ride a bike. My dad taught me how. He bought me a little 20 inch bike with hard rubber tires and pushed me along while holding me upright, all the while explaining that I was supposed to turn in the direction that the bike seemed to be falling. After a few days I actually got the hang of it, then I was all over the neighborhood and our neighborhood was big at least geographically. It was a winding country road shaded by trees with a house every few hundred feet or so.

There was a swamp with a little stream running through it down below our house, always good for polliwogs and water snakes. There were lots of minnows in the stream too. They were fun to catch from the side of the stream, banging on the bank while leaning over the grass covered edge with your mason jar in hand at the ready. Sometimes I came home with ten or fifteen minnows in my jar

When I started school I had a good time there too. I had a lot of friends and we ran all over the playground during recess playing soccer or dodge ball. Sometimes we would chase the girls too but we really didn’t know what to do with them when we caught them. When lunchtime came around we’d rush to line up at the lunchroom door, pushing and shoving to be at the front of the line until a girl got in line. Then the pushing and shoving would stop because none of us boys would want to get in line right behind a girl. I mean there were cooties and such to be concerned about, not to mention your self-respect. When that became a problem we’d go look for Edwin Madsen to grab him and hustle him in line right behind the girl. Then it was safe for us to resume pushing and shoving to get in line again. Edwin was our buffer man and didn’t seem to mind the embarrassment nor the risk of getting cooties too much.

I remember my first lesson in chivalry, or was it responsibility. Living on a farm we got all of our milk from the jersey cow we had. Usually there was plenty of it too. Once in a while the cow would dry up and we would have to buy milk for a while.

My dad worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and occasionally he was temporarily laid off. In those days there was no such thing as unemployment benefits or welfare or anything like that. Every time this happened he was only out of work for about a week or a month or so and it didn’t happen very often. When it did he never did go looking for another job because he was always called back to work after a while. If it happened about the same time the cow went dry, things got a little tight and we wouldn’t have the money to go and buy milk at the store. We did have eggs though and when things got real tight we would trade eggs, which we had lots of, to the Peterson’s down the road for milk.

I remember we had this old fashioned stainless steel milk can that had a lid on it, the kind you pushed down into it to seal it. It kind of had a tapered fit. I remembered watching a scene from the classic movie, Fiddler on The Roof, where Tevya was delivering milk around town. It was the same kind of milk can that he was using. It held, I suppose about two or three gallons. When we traded eggs for milk with the Peterson’s it was Emily and I who had the chore of walking down the road to their farmhouse to get it.

We went around to the back door when we got there about 7:00 PM or so and there would be Mrs. Peterson just inside the back porch of her house busy working with this marvelous egg cleaning machine. It was pretty neat, at least that’s the way I remember it. I guess they must have sold a lot of eggs to keep a machine like that busy and they used ours to supplement their supply or they may have just been charitable to us. I really don’t know the truth on that issue. But I do remember being completely mesmerized watching this machine in operation.

The eggs would come down this little single file conveyer belt then go into a tunnel and if you turned your head sideways just right and looked into the tunnel you could see water spraying all around and little spinning brushes cleaning the eggs, then out the other side they would come all clean ready for sorting and candling.

Mrs. Peterson was a real nice lady. She always gave us a cookie or something like that while the milk can was being washed out and filled. I would eat the cookie while examining that incredibly fascinating egg machine. It had lots of moving parts and little axles that protruded through a bearing to the outside. I liked to put my finger on the end of the spinning axles. It felt kind of neat and it was hard to keep your finger right in the middle. The spinning motion tended to push your finger off toward the outside.

Emily and I had made this trip several times before and we had the routine of it down quite well. When the milk can was full and we were sent on our way, Emily would hold one handle and I would hold the other as we walked the quarter mile or so back home with this heavy milk can between us. It was heavy but with two to carry it, it actually was quite manageable.

But one time Emily got this idea in her head that I should carry it home all by myself. It weighed ten or twenty pounds I guess and I was only five years old while she was nine and actually much stronger than me. But she thought I should carry it because I was a boy and she was a girl. While we were walking home that time carrying that heavy milk can she kept on talking about this and explaining to me her rationale for thinking she should not be doing all this work and that I should be doing it, indeed I should be doing it all by myself. Then at some point when we were about half way home she put her side of the milk can down on the road and told me I should take it from there.

I protested and told her that she should help because it was too heavy for me alone and she did have an obligation to help. That’s why mom sent two of us, etc, etc.. Well Emily didn’t think very much of my protest nor my argument. She just left it standing in the middle of the dirt road and said she wasn’t helping any more. She added that I was the one who would be in trouble if the milk didn’t get home that night because I was the boy and she was the girl. I told her I wasn’t carrying it back all by myself and I walked away from it too.

There it stood in the middle of the road behind us a few paces while we both walked away from it toward home. I told Emily that she was going to be in trouble because I was going to tell Mom that she wouldn’t help me carry it, and that’s why we left it in the middle of the road. She kept on with the I was the boy and she was the girl rhetoric and just kept on walking down the road. I knew she was going to be in trouble when we got home so I just kept walking too. We walked silently, side by side for several more paces. I started thinking that a car might come by and hit it or something. I was only five years old but I knew this was our milk and we needed to get it home.

I had made my best argument and played my best bluff with Emily and she just wouldn’t change her mind. But walking away from it meant we would get home without the milk. She was the older one, the one who was supposed to