Halloween Haunts: Sparkles: A Haunted House Story
Halloween Haunts: Sparkles: A Haunted House Story
by Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar
When I imagine a haunted house, my mind conjures up broken windows, sagging floorboards, and cracked ceilings. I picture cobwebs in the corners and old-fashioned, dust-covered furniture. Rodents skitter about the hallways, their scratching claws punctuating the deathly silence.
Generally, people don’t think of a brand new, two-story, single-family home with white siding, black shutters, and a red door flanked by similar houses. They don’t picture my former house.
We moved in on Halloween night in 2007. Twice the size of our previous residence, it was constructed specifically for us with all of our preferences; we had hand-picked the details from the floorplan to the countertops. After fifteen impatient months driving by the construction site and stalking our future home as the foundation was set in place and the wooden frame was erected, the skeleton slowly transforming into a fleshed-out home, it was all ours.
Exhausted and scatterbrained after moving furniture and boxes all day, we didn’t even remember to capture a photo of our then nine-year-old daughter in her costume when we took her trick-or-treating. Stumbling past the well-manicured lawns like a trio of zombies even though Serena was dressed as a Disney princess, we barely grunted our thanks as new neighbors doled out candy.
Still, when I lay my head down that night, I fell asleep with a smile on my face. I was home.
We settled in, furnishing the rooms and spreading out into our larger and more luxurious space. Our cat, Dexter, had to adjust, as well, meowing properly for the first time ever to summon us to feed him. In the cavernous house, he must have realized that his birdlike chirps were insufficient to rouse us from our slumber.
But one day, not long after we moved in, we began to suspect that we were not alone.
Serena and I were out shopping while my husband, Simon, stayed home one Saturday afternoon. I was the superstitious one in our family, making sure to throw spilled salt over my left shoulder and avoiding walking under ladders. In contrast, Simon had never really thought about whether or not ghosts existed.
But that day gave him pause. According to him, he was walking from our bedroom when he noticed a little girl sitting at the top of the stairs. He barely registered it, thinking it was Serena.
“I saw someone,” he told me in a hushed tone when I came home. “But then I remembered that the two of you weren’t there. I did a double take, and she was gone.”
He wanted to believe it was a trick of the light—that he imagined it. As for me, though I hadn’t been the one to see this specter, I was on alert for ghostly happenings.
For several years, nothing out of the ordinary occurred. But then, one night, we heard the spirit’s voice.
Serena was downstairs in our finished basement with a friend for a sleepover, and I had stayed up late. By the time I went to bed, Simon was already sound asleep. I read for a while and finally turned off my light, lying awake before sleep enveloped me.
And that’s when I heard it: a young girl’s voice.
“Daddy!”
My prone body turned rigid as my blood ran cold.
Now, one might wonder why I didn’t think this was Serena. After all, she was in the house. But, now that she was fourteen, she only called Simon “Dad,” not “Daddy.” Also, she was all the way down in the basement. Finally, it wasn’t her voice.
Simon continued snoring next to me, so I protected myself from this nefarious force the only way I knew how: pulling the covers over my head and praying. Somehow, I eventually fell asleep and made it through the night without being cast down into the fiery pits of hell.
The next morning, after I had settled my nerves with some coffee, I told Simon that we needed to talk. Lowering my voice in case someone—something—was listening, I started to fill him in on what happened.
“Wait—was it a girl’s voice saying ‘Dad’?” he asked, cutting me off.
It turned out that he had heard her, too, when he went to bed an hour or more before me. Each of us heard her at separate times, clear as a bell, with only a slight variation in what she said.
By now, it was certain: Our house was haunted by the spirit of a young girl. Secondly, something about Simon made her think of her father.
And, just in case Simon had any remaining doubts, he saw something one afternoon to erase them all: A human form, comprised of sparkling lights, appeared in front of him before winking out.
“It was like when they energize in Star Trek, the version with William Shatner,” he told me. “Just like that, but only her head and torso—no legs.”
I’ve never been a Trekkie, but he showed me a scene on YouTube so I could understand. On the show, the sparkling lights glittered until they formed a complete person. In the foyer, though, she didn’t—or couldn’t—fully break through.
If we lived in an older house, I would have guessed that the entity we named Sparkles died there. But there weren’t any houses there before ours, just farmland. Researching our property turned up nothing; there were no mysterious deaths of young girls reported there or anywhere nearby. I stumbled across information on a murderer known as the Route 40 Killer, Delaware’s only known serial killer, close to where we lived, but none of his victims were children.
Who was she, this ghost girl who seemed drawn to my husband? Did she die on our property? Was she with her father or looking for him when something happened, an accident or crime? Whatever caused her demise, we will likely never know.
We ended up moving, not in fear of Sparkles, who never harmed or bothered us outside of those minor events, but because I got a new job in Pennsylvania. Having read as many horror stories as I have, I wondered if Sparkles would come with us, if she had somehow attached herself to Simon.
But she didn’t. I’d like to think she moved on, that she found peace somehow.
Our “new” house—where I live now—was built in the late 1800s. While beautiful, it shows its age. A grand Victorian duchess with Frankenstein monster-like additions tacked on over the many decades, it could use a new coat of paint, and some of the boards on our porch have rotted. As I sit in my study and type this, I notice the spiderweb crack in one of our front windows.
And then there were the bats, who crept out of various crevices and flew through the house, delighting our cats yet terrorizing me. Thankfully, after we replaced the damaged, decrepit roof, they haven’t come back. (Knock on wood.) We still hear some scratching from inside the walls every once in a while, though, and our cat Basil caught two mice in the last week.
In the light of the setting sun on a crisp autumn day, one might say that my house looks haunted.
Still, I think we’re alone.
Then again, there was that one time I fell asleep while grading essays. When I awoke, the message “I didn’t know you had a daughter” was scrawled on a student’s paper.
Obviously, I whited that out before returning it to my student. I was probably dreaming and wrote that. That must be what happened.
Right …?
Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar is a writer and associate English professor in Pennsylvania. She holds a Doctorate of Education with a Literacy Specialization from the University of Delaware and an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on horror fiction from Wilkes University. She is the author of the Regal Summit Book Award-winning dark suspense novel Darkness There but Something More (Wicked House Publishing), the short horror story collection Keeper of Corpses and Other Dark Tales (Velox Books), the forthcoming horror novella Close the Door (Unveiling Nightmares), the forthcoming middle-grade mystery The Hidden Diary (Tiny Terrors), and the forthcoming young adult mystery Lake of Secrets (Horrorsmith Publishing). Her shorter work appears in more than forty creative publications including The Horror Zine, The Stygian Lepus, Wyldblood Magazine, and Tales from the Moonlit Path. Read her work and find links to her books at https://cassandraosullivansachar.com/.
Oh yes. Quite eerie, Cassandra. LIKE very much.
Enjoyed it Cassandra! Gave me the heebie jeebies. I shouldn’t have read it on my phone in the dark while in my bed. Too close to home! lol
Great story! And very creepy!