3 Stories That Prove You Shouldn't Go In Your Basement
Basements are not just eerie, sometimes they hold secrets we may not want to know. Today, we're looking at 3 stories of people who experienced absolute terror in their basements.
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SOURCES
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/19/tongues-found-florida/
https://www.thelantern.com/2013/09/ohio-state-students-discover-stranger-living-basement/
https://www.unilad.com/news/us-news/ohio-state-university-students-man-basement-859354-20230820
https://abcnews.go.com/US/osu-students-thought-house-haunted-find-mysterious-man/story?id=20291683
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/weird/article240392156.html**
TRANSCRIPT
Today, I want to tell you three tales of horror from people who experienced strange and terrifying things in their basements. If you grew up with a basement, you know how horrifying they can be, this is basically the worst case scenarios.
This is heart starts pounding, I’m kaelyn Moore, and you can join me here every week for a new story of a horror, a haunting, or a mystery. Make sure to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the notification bell so you never miss a video of my dark creation.
Our first story today comes from one of you. This was in a letter I received here at the rogue detecting society headquarters from a listener named Ryan. He writes
“When I was growing up, the house I lived in was one of the oldest in the town I lived in in Northeast PA.
I had extremely bad allergies, so when I was 12 my parents redid the basement to be my room. It was much easier to keep clean and dust free, and it was huge so I was good with it. About a year after I moved down there, though, I started hearing knocks and bangs. (SFX knocking on door)
I just chalked it up to basement noises like water heater or settling pipes. In the basement there was this HUGE and heavy door against the back wall. It was a mixture of wood and steel and it looked old, like it was part of the house when it was built. I noticed taht The knocking and banging was coming mostly from the other side.
When I was 13 or 14 it was so heavy I couldn’t budge it and plus, It had an old iron sliding lock, two wood blocks and one of those skeleton key locks keeping it closed. So I never really knew what was on the other side.
By my 14th bday the knocking had been going on for years. I almost couldn’t hear it anymore. But One morning I awoke to my room freezing and musty. I looked over to the wall, and to my horror the door was open. Even with all of those locks, the door had somehow opened.
After that, the door would open nightly. Always when I was asleep. I’d get up and close the door. And the next morning I’d find it open again.
After a month of struggling to close and lock the door daily, I was finally awake when it happened. I was pulling an all nighter to finish a project for school and I heard it at like 2 or 3 am. The knocking on the door started, but much louder than before. (SFX Banging on door)
Slowly I heard the first block sitting in front of the door scraping against the wood (cinderblock scaping on a floor). Then the second. More knocking, then the iron sliding lock slowly undoing itself..(SFX Lock unlocking) Finally the click of the old lock disengaged and the door swung open. (SFX- door creaking) I was so freaked out I couldn’t sleep. I told my parents but they chalked it up to a bad dream, (I used to get really bad ones all the time.) We secured the door more with an exercise bike and some cinder blocks and called it a day.
I’d still hear the knocking at night but at least the door stayed closed.
Eventually, I left for university, and that’s when I did some digging. It turns out, The house was a boarding home for coal miners that came into the area. There were a ton of mines by where I lived, and the door must have opened into one of them. I also found out that There were two murders in the house, an escort and a miner, plus several mining disasters involving people who’d lived there for months or years at a time.
I still have nightmares about that house, and when I go home I don’t sleep in the basement, no matter how bad my allergies get.
For those of you who grew up in homes with basements, like myself, you know how scary they can be. Today I want to tell you some stories of truly horrifying things people have encountered in their basements both supernatural and of our world.
But first we’re going to take a short break.
Welcome to heart starts pounding. Coming to you from inside the Rogue Detecting society headquarters. I’m currently sitting upstairs in my study, but today, I want to take you down to the basement with me.
For many of us, basements are a part of the house we rarely go to. Sure, some people have finished basements with sectional couches and mini bars. But I’m ignoring those. No, I’m talking about unfinished concrete rooms that lie under our houses in the dark. The kinds where you have to turn on the light and run quickly to grab a can of vegetables for your mom. The ones where you can almost feel something on your heels as you bolt back up the stairs.
THAT’S the kind of basement I had growing up. And that’s what the basement of the RDS headquarters also looked like.
But before we head down there for some stories let me say thank you to everyone who came out to see me join Annie Elise on stage for her live show last week. It was so much fun to hang out and thanks to Annie for having me. She’ll be in Salt Lake City next Thursday, October 17th and Denver, Colorado the next week so make sure you check out her show if you’re around. Now, to the basement.
On August 5, 2013, an ohio state university student named Brett moved into a house off of Campus, tucked away in a neighborhood near the school. It was a three story house, and he and 10 other students were moving into the top 2 floors.
It was exciting to be living with so many friends, even if the house needed a little work. For one, none of their bedrooms had locks on them. Not great. And then there was how the power kept going off on the third floor.
The breaker was located in the basement of the house, and each time the power went out, all the roommates would look at each other. You go down there, I’m not going down there, you go down there! Finally, Brett would stand up and walk down into the basement, flip the breaker, and the lights would come back on. That happened every few days or so.
So one night, the lights went out- like they usually did, and Brett walked down the wooden steps to the dark basement (sfx footsteps on stairs). He went over to a chain dangling from the ceiling and tugged on it, dimly illuminating the basement. The breaker box was on the other wall across from the stairs, and as he went over to it, he heard a noise behind him. (sfx- like banging from behind a door).
Brett whipped around, half expecting to see that one of his roommates had followed him down there, but behind him there was nothing- except for the chain of the light swinging back and forth.
He went back upstairs to tell his roommates what he had heard, and as he told the group, one of his roommates' faces went pale, like this had confirmed something she knew all along. Guys, she said, I think the house is haunted. And all of a sudden, other roommates started looking like they, too, had seen a ghost. Apparently, Brett and this other roommate weren’t the only ones who had experienced something strange in the house.
One roommate confessed that he had come home once and all of the drawers in the kitchen were open. Not like someone had been cooking though, like something had pulled all of the drawers open at once.
Another roommate confessed that one night she was up studying late after everyone else had gone to sleep. She went to the bathroom and turned off the light as she left, but when she walked to her room, the light was on.
“Yea, but maybe someone else got up and turned on the light and forgot to turn it off” one roommate, Jeff, suggested.
But another roommate, Devin, spoke up. “No, that’s happened to me too, and I promise, no one else was around to turn the light on.”
“It sounds like we’ve all had strange things happen but just assumed that one of the roommates was responsible.” Jeff said. The group all looked at each other, no one suggesting otherwise.
Maybe calling out what happened actually helped though, because the next day, no one reported any problems. No drawers were left open. No lights mysteriously turned on. No sounds with no sources.
That night The roommates were all having dinner in the living room, laughing because of the big deal they made the night before. Of course, when there’s 10 people in a house things are going to get rearranged, obviously there was no ghost.
But just then, the lights went out (sfx lights going out). Causing some of the roommates to shriek (sfx shriek). Someone screamed for Brett to go turn on the lights.
Brett tried to calm everyone down, “guys it’s not a ghost, this has happened before. Relax”. But deep down he got a bad feeling. He begrudgingly turned on his phone’s flashlight and started downstairs towards the basement.
Again, he creaked down the wooden steps and tugged the chain attached to the light turning it on. He started towards the other side of the room, when then, he heard the sound again. (SFX) it was like something tumbling on the other side of the basement wall.
He turned his flashlight where the sound was coming from, underneath the staircase, and through the dark, something reflected back at him. Something small and shiny. What was it, though, he wondered as he approached it.
It was a door handle. That’s strange, brett thought, he didn’t realize that there was a door down here, but then again, he never took time to really look at the basement, he’d just flip the breaker and leave. (SFX tumbling) but there that sound was again, definitely coming from behind the door. Against his better judgement, brett reached forward, and turned the knob (SFX) only to find that it was (SFX- jiggling a door handle) locked. Must just be the water heater or something. Of course its was something normal, what was he thinking.
He walked out from under the stairs, where it was a little brighter, almost laughing at how spooked he had gotten, when he got the overwhelming feeling he was being watched. And out of the corner of his eye, back towards the stairs, he could see a figure .
He whipped around, and standing there, on the last step, was a man. He was a little older than Brett, with bad posture and deep set, empty eyes that stared straight into him. He looked tired, like he hadn’t slept in days.
Oh, you scared me, brett let out a sigh. Do you live on the first floor.
But the man didn’t say anything, he just kept staring at Brett. Finally he spoke. “Do you live in the house?” he asked. Brett nodded. And with that, the man walked back up the stairs.
Brett followed after him, but when he got back to the first floor, the man was gone, almost like he didn’t exist.
That evening, Brett called his landlord and told him about the sounds coming from behind the door downstairs. He told the landlord he probably wanted to check it out in case there was something wrong.
The next morning, his landlord called him back. He said that he had gone down to the basement to check what was happening behind the door, and that the police were with him now.
The police? Why were the police there.
His landlord explained that he had opened the door knowing there was a small crawl space on the other side, but when the door swung open, he found that someone had been living there. There space was filled with clothes and had a mattress on the floor.
It was the man that Brett had seen in the basement the day before. Apparently, his cousin had lived in the house the year before and he had started living in the basement without anyone realizing it. His cousin moved out, but he stayed.
And while he was there, he had access to Brett and his roommates living spaces. The doors were all unlocked.
The landlord threw the man out and changed the locks, but the event had a lasting effect on Brett and his roommates. Every time one of them came home to see a drawer open, they’d always wonder who really opened it.
(back to me in the house) That story gives me chills because finding out someone else is living in my home without me knowing is one of my biggest fears. Sometimes though, it’s not who you find in your basement that’s scary. It’s WHAT you find in your basement. After a short break
Every time I’d go into my basement growing up, I was terrified of seeing something I didn’t want to see.
That’s what happened to a woman who bought a house in Gainesville florida. In 2020, she was having some work done on the foundation, and a bunch of contractors were downstairs in the basement. When all of a sudden, she hears one of the workers running full speed up the stairs.
He told her she had to come downstairs, now, there was something she needed to see.
In a crawl space attached to the basement, were dozens of jars sealed shut. Though they were all closed, she could see that there were specimens floating in liquid inside each one.
She leaned in to get a better look and saw that every jar had a tongue inside. Immediately she calls the police, I mean at that point she was thinking she bought the house from a serial killer. But an investigation actually proved that the man who owned the house before her was an oral pathology professor from the university of Florida. He Had specimens for his classes stored in the crawl space because it was cool and away from sunlight. At least, that’s what his wife told investigators, who knows. The university couldn’t confirm the specimens were used in their classes and said that it was not protocol for professors to keep specimens in their home. However, those were the only body parts the woman ever found.
I guess the point is, you never really know what the person who lived in your house before you got up to, and what remnants of that activity might be left over, and that’s really apparent in our next story.
In 1999, Hamid Tafaghodi and his wife moved into a split level house in Long Island, New York. It was an adorable home in a neighborhood of manicured lawns. It had a cute white fence with an arched entrance, and had bushes growing all around it which added a little bit of privacy. Which would be nice since the houses next to it were closely packed together.
Hamid and his wife spent the first night in the home unpacking boxes and figuring out where everything would go. In the back of the home there was a den, it looked like an addition to the house. Hamid walked around picturing everything they could do with the space. Perhaps a big sectional would fit there for all of their friends. They could put their TV over by the back wall, maybe a nice coffee table in the middle of the room.
He paced around, measuring out the space with his feet, when he noticed that part of the floor looked like it had been cut out and placed back.
Upon closer inspection, it appeared as if the part that was cut was the size of a small trap door. That was unexpected, he thought.
Hamid stuck his fingers in the cracks of the floor, and found that he could pull part of it away, revealing a gaping hole to another room of the house underneath the den.
It was dark and humid inside. Too small to be a room but too big to just be a crawl space. At first, Hamid thought, great! Another storage area. He needed another place to put seasonal decor and winter clothes during the off seasons. But then, something caught his eye.
The light from the den spilled into the hole, not enough to be able to see the entire room, but just enough to catch the outline of something down there. It was bulky, but had rounded edges. It wasn’t boxes that the previous owner left behind.
Hamid called for his wife and asked her to bring him a flashlight. Together, they stood over the trap door, the light from the flashlight illuminating the concrete floor below them. Cobwebs and dust bunnies filled the space, it definitely had not been used much in the last few years if it was that dirty down there.
She moved the light over to the object Hamid had seen, and what they saw only raised more questions.
It was a barrel. A black, worn down, 55 gallon barrel. It must have belonged to the guy before us, Hamid’s wife suggested. What should we do with it?
Well, it can’t stay here. Hamid hopped down into the hole to get a better look. The black sides of the barrel had worn away, revealing a silvery metal underneath. Rust had accumulated on the lid.
He knocked on it to try and hear what might be inside, (SFX-knocking) it wasn’t hollow. The barrel’s mysterious contents definitely filled it to the brim.
Can you help me get this out? Hamid’s wife was hesitant, but she, too, slid through the hole down into the small room. Inside, she could feel how much colder it was in there than the rest of the house. The walls were so black, it almost looked like each side went on into infinity
Together they tried to hoist up the barrel, but it was HEAVY. Like it was full of concrete or something. What was the owner before them using it for?
Luckily, Hamid had the phone number of the old owner, a man named Ronald, and the next day he gave Ronald a call. He told him that he must have forgotten the barrel in the space when he was moving out, and that it was too heavy for his wife and him to move.
Ronald, seemed confused. He hadn’t put a barrel in the crawl space. It must have been there since before he had lived in the house, which was a long time ago.
But, Ronald agreed to come help get the barrel out of the basement, and he hired some movers to bring it out to the curb for trash collection. The only problem was, when the garbage men got there, they wouldn’t take the barrel. For 1, it was way past their weight limit, it was actually a miracle that the movers got it out of the hole in the first place because it was a whopping 345 pounds.
And 2, one of the garbage men got a really bad feeling when he saw the barrel. Something about it told him there was something inside that shouldn’t get thrown away. Maybe it was hazardous material, or something else, but he insisted that the barrel not get brought to the dump.
Not knowing what else to do, Ronald posed a solution to the group. Should we open it and find out for ourselves? Hamid and his wife looked at each other hesitantly. There could be toxic waste in there, they didn’t want to risk any exposure. But before they could process their concerns, Ronald was prying the lid off the barrel.
And to their shock, inside the barrel, was another barrel, with a tightly sealed lid. What was the point of that? Ronald got to opening that one as well. Maybe there was just another barrel inside and this would be a russian doll situation, a barrel just filled with other barrels, how strange.
But when Ronald got the lid off of the next barrel, his expression faded into abject horror. Hamid and his wife watched as Ronald stumbled backwards, bringing his hand to his mouth as if to stifle a scream.
They caught a glimpse of something poking out of the second container, the thing that made Ronald retreat in horror. A human hand. Call the police, Hamid’s wife screamed.
The police found that inside the barrel was a nearly perfectly preserved woman, about 4feet 9 inches tall, The New York Times reported that she was wearing “a skirt, button-down sweater, high socks and a shoe with a mid-high heel. Around the neck was a locket with the words ''Patrice, Love Uncle Phil.'' On the left hand was a wedding band with the inscription ''M.H.R. XII-59'' and another ring with a green stone. An imitation leopardskin coat and a pocketbook filled mostly with makeup were also found in the drum.” She was also pregnant, nearly to full term.
The double lids of the barrels had been sealed so tightly that the inside of the barrel had been starved of oxygen preventing a lot of decomposition. It wasn’t apparent at first how long ago she was placed there, but they did notice that the barrel was from 1963.
The police noticed that, along with the woman and her clothing, deep within the woman’s purse was an ID. Reyna Angélica Marroquín. An immigrant from El Salvador who was last seen by her friend Kathy in 1969. Kathy had called the police when she went to Reyna’s apartment one day after not hearing from her for a while and saw that Reyna wasn’t there. The police seemed unconcerned and never looked into the case.
But Reyna’s purse also contained an address book, and in a wild twist of fate, Kathy was still alive AND had the same phone number.
She told them to look into a man named Howard Elkin. Back in the day he owned a plastics company, one that the police were quickly able to discover made the plastic of the barrel Reyna was stuffed inside of.
And not only that, Howard was registered as living at the address the barrel was found in when Reyna went missing.
Police immediately went to question Howard, who was still alive, but the day after they asked him to take a DNA test to see if the child that had died with Reyna’s was his, he bought a gun at a Walmart and took his own life.
Through the autopsy, police were able to confirm with 99.93% accuracy that the child was Howard’s. The theory became that he had killed Reyna to keep his family from finding out about the affair they were having.
But, one good thing did come of the investigation. After the case was closed, Reyna Marroquin’s body was transported back to El Salvador, returned to her 90-year-old mother, who never knew what came of her daughter who had moved to America. She passed away a month after she received her daughter's body, giving her the closure that she always wanted.
So maybe think twice before going into your basement, you never know what you might find hiding down there, what secrets the previous owners kept, or who might have taken up residence right under your nose.
What mysteries lie within our own rogue detecting society basement 1
That’s all for now. Next week, we’re going to a haunted house. Not just any haunted house. The most extreme haunted house in the world. Until then…stay curious.