Strange Happenings in Cuernavaca
Most of the houses I've lived in have been haunted. Footsteps from the floor above when no one was there were common in one apartment. There was the lady ghost on the farm where I was born, the strange scratchings of my cousins, and the girl with the long blond hair where I live now. But of all of them, the most haunted place I've ever lived was in Mexico, in a town called Cuernavaca.
I rented a three bedroom house with a two bedroom guest cottage, on a quarter acre of land. A long time ago it had been a graveyard, which had then become an agricultural station. About 25 or 30 years before I came along the land had been subdivided into a compound where about 10 or 12 houses were built, among them the one I lived in.
It was the busiest place I've ever seen for unexplained happenings. Everyone who spent any time there seemed to have some kind of weird experience. A cousin came down for a visit and gave me a rather shaken report about a man in the back yard around twilight who, after crossing the yard, walked through the stone wall that surrounded the property. The cleaning woman who would stay in the guest house overnight sometimes, refused to do so anymore after claiming to be dive-bombed by a small man who hovered and flew around the room, attacking her repeatedly with an ice pick. Some children I temporarily gave shelter to, reported similar experiences out there.
I had a bedside lamp that had a busted switch, and I would have to unscrew the lightbulb to turn it off at night. Eventually I began removing the bulb altogether, since no matter how far I unscrewed it, it would be screwed in tight and the light would be on the next morning. Even removing the bulb didn't stop it. Most mornings, I would find it in the lamp and the light on. My curtains were inevitably dangling by one or two hooks every morning, and I would have to rehang them daily. I dreaded having to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Something strange would inevitably happen when I did. The scariest was when the hooded figures would appear. I would see shadows on the shower curtain that looked like a procession of hooded figures. It seemed as if they were walking along outside, and a light on the other side of them was throwing their shadows through the window. The house next door, besides being on the other side of a stone wall and a mango tree, housed a young family who went to sleep early and turned off all their lights. I never did figure out what was throwing the shadows, or what they were.
The most spectacular occurence happened one night when some friends were visiting. One of them had adjourned to the restroom and the rest of us were conversing, when all of the sudden there was a loud snap, a bolt of blue light from one of the wall electrical outlets, and we were plunged into darkness. We got out candles and were trying to figure out what could have happened, when the friend who was in the restroom came out looking terrified. He was shaking and pale as he told us that he had distinctly felt hands around his neck while in the bathroom, and asked hopefully if one of us had been playing a joke on him. None of us had, of course. The next day, when the electrician came to see what had happened, he was mystified. It seems a steel plate in the wall had snapped cleanly in half. In all his years of experience, he'd never seen anything like it, and couldn't explain it for the life of him.
Because of the children, I cleansed the house and its surroundings. After that, nothing happened again while I lived there.
