My Family Moved To America And Into A Real Haunted House. Here’s What Happened.

As a child, my first brush with a ghost wasn’t Casper or some other spook from a children’s book. I encountered the real deal in the house we rented in Pennsylvania after my family emigrated from Kuwait. It was over a century old, essentially the size and strength of a wet shoebox, and was shadowed by an ominous oak tree in a rundown neighborhood. 

My dad, who grew up poor and lost his father as a teenager, had cultivated a knack for stretching every penny he earned. Years before we moved to the U.S., he squirreled away what he could, which helped him get settled in Pennsylvania when a locally headquartered company offered him a job on an H-1 Visa.

The timing couldn’t have been more off ― he left for America when I was 3 and my mother was pregnant with my brother ― but my parents felt their sacrifices would be well worth the potential opportunities neither of them had been fortunate enough to grow up with. Several months after my dad settled in the U.S., my mom, my brother, who was just six months old, and I joined him.

We began to hear rumblings around the neighborhood the moment our second-hand, beaten-up Buick crawled up the bumpy road to the curb in front of our new home. The house, the only rental we could afford, was larger than any of the apartment-like flats we’d had in Oman, Cyprus, India or any of the other places we’d previously brushed dirt — but it was weathered, wizened and falling apart.

At first, my parents chalked up the peering eyes and hushed whispers to neighborhood curiosity. We were new and my mother didn’t know a lick of English. But we soon learned there was something else going on.

Even though I was very young at the time, I will never forget the first encounter we had. One night, sometime after we’d unpacked the last of the few belongings we’d brought with us, I heard my mom calling for me from the landing that connected our rooms on the second floor. When I left my room and found her, she was turned toward the stairs.

“I’m here,” I whispered. The lights snapped on and my mother’s face came into focus from the doorway of my room. Her eyes were wide, her mouth agape. We heard a loud crash downstairs. An orchestra of metal clattered. And then silence. My mom didn’t move. Seeing how scared she was terrified me. Suddenly, she pounded down the stairs. My dad, who had joined us on the landing, was right behind her. 

My curiosity ― and my fear for my parents’ safety ― got the best of me. I slinked along the stairs, hovering close to the wall, until I got far enough to peek through the rails of the banister into the kitchen. The doors to cabinets and the drawers gaped open. Silverware was scattered everywhere. Pots and pans were strewn across the kitchen floor.

My parents scurried to check the doors and windows but found them closed and locked. This was not a break-in ― and there was no other plausible explanation for what just happened. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. It seemed whoever ― or whatever ― was living with us was just getting warmed up. We’d leave an object in one room, only to stumble across it in another. Pots and pans would clang together in the middle of the night, but when my parents raced downstairs, the kitchen would appear innocently spic and span. 

My parents were familiar with ghost stories. There was a house in Kuwait, where my mom was born, that was rumored to be haunted, and no one would go near it at night. My father had his own tales from India. His brother had spoken to an elderly man on a bicycle, only to learn from the neighbors that he’d died years earlier but still had a reputation for making appearances every now and then.

But hearing stories is different than coming face to face with the real thing in your own home. 

At first, they didn’t want to accept that we were dealing with a ghost. We continued to look for other logical explanations for the activity we were experiencing, but there were none.  

One day, my mom gathered her confidence and, using her fractured English to string enough words together, asked our neighbor if she knew anything about the history of our home. The woman leaned in conspiratorially and whispered that the previous owner had passed away inside of it. The house had apparently been her pride and joy, and she’d been particularly obsessed with organizing her kitchen a specific way. We were officially spooked.

My mom began to pray every night after that. She would extract her rosary beads from a wooden tissue holder, roll out a red rug and squeeze her eyes shut as she swayed back and forth in deep concentration. The musky scent of incense sticks burning from our kitchen wafted beyond the front door to the street. She believed that no evil would befall a house filled with prayers and praise for God. Because we were poor, moving simply wasn’t an option, and my parents tried to face the situation with as much grace as they could, determined to make the best out of a circumstance we couldn’t escape.   

Slowly, things began to change for our family. My dad worked overtime and traveled more. My mom arranged her schedule around his so she could take a few jobs from the slim pickings she was qualified for. The unexplained incidents, however, continued. Sometimes, a month would pass in between them. Sometimes, just a few days. Although those years were terrifying, I also learned many lessons that I still hold close to me today. 

As far as our ghost was concerned, I discovered that if I thought of her as a friendly older woman bustling about her kitchen in an attempt to bake us otherworldly treats, she wasn’t nearly as scary as when I imagined her as a witch trying to butcher us all with her favorite knife. This exercise in positive thinking didn’t always work ― we were living with an unpredictable supernatural entity, after all. But we never felt truly at risk of being harmed, and I learned that fear is only as powerful as you allow it to be.

I also learned a lot from observing my parents’ courage. My dad taught us to be strong and independent, and he and my mom demonstrated this with the finesse they used to handle everything that came our way ― whether it was moving across the world in their 20s with next to nothing in their pockets and two kids in tow, or living with a ghost. 

I was also learning about what it meant to be poor ― and what it meant to be part of a community. Even though I was very young when we moved to America and therefore had a very limited understanding of the world, I immediately knew it was different from any other place we’d lived.  

My earliest memories are of piggybacking on my uncle’s shoulders after dusk in Kuwait, the sand spreading out before us and the wind tinged with the scent of shaurma as we trekked to the local street vendor to grab a mango ice cream. In America, we had no family, let alone many people who shared our background or culture. No one wandered the streets past eight, and no music from nearby vendors’ carts drifted through the crevices of our windows and doors. 

Our family struggled financially but, admittedly, what we experienced was different than when we had been poor in any other part of the world we’d previously ventured.

Unfortunately, my parents hadn’t been so lucky at my age. For them, poverty had meant skipping out on a meal or two, sewing their own clothes and repeatedly mending the ones that tore, and for my mom, forgoing an education. Electricity, water and gas were considered luxuries for even the wealthy, as outages were common for most people, but for the poor, these fundamentals were often completely nonexistent.