Growing up, for most of my childhood, my father worked to earn money for our family, while my mother stayed home to take care of me and my little sister. However, around the time my sister and I were ten and eleven, my mom decided that the two of us were old enough now that she could finally start working again—the idea being that, after my dad got off work, she could take on later shifts, and my sister and I would be able to manage without too much stress on my dad after a long day’s work.
After looking around and applying to a few places, she ended up landing on housekeeping for a rental business in a nearby town. The place she worked at specifically specialized in “casual vacation homes,” which could be rented for days or sometimes weeks at a time. When my mom was still there, they had a lot more traffic than they do now, as well as a lot more houses and cottages on their listings. Because of this, when the housekeepers did their schedules, they sometimes were able to pick what houses they cleaned.
For the most part, it was like any other job—it had its own ups and downs, a busy schedule for relatively good pay, and after a while, my mom started to settle in just fine. Things were about as normal as you could expect. Except, just a few weeks in, my mom noticed something sort of strange. There was one house that all of the other workers seemed to avoid. In fact, thinking back on it, my mom could only remember her boss, the head housekeeper, ever voluntarily taking on the house. Naturally, she grew curious about this, so one day she decided to finally bring it up when talking to another worker, a lady who also came from our reservation and was a family friend named Jeanie.
“It Pushed Her”
She told my mom that the reason why no one ever wanted to clean that house was because all the workers had “experienced things” there. It wasn’t just little things—unexplainable noises or glimpses of figures seen from the corner of the eye. That would have been one thing, more manageable for sure, but it was always more than that. Jeanie herself even had stories of her own, from before she started refusing to work there ever again.
The first time she had ever cleaned there, she had teamed up with my aunt Josephine to tackle it together, with my aunt taking one side of the house and Jeanie taking the other. Something that all these houses had in common was a dedicated storage area. Whether it be a closet or an actual storage room, each rental had one. In this particular house, the entrance to the storage area had a small set of three stairs you had to walk down to get inside.
At the time, things seemed to be going fine. My aunt and Jeanie thought that maybe they would get away without anything going astray. When they finally were getting close to being done, my aunt went to the house’s storage area to grab a broom. However, as she was stepping into the doorway to make her way down the three steps, she felt herself being pushed by someone, causing her to stumble the rest of the way in. She went to see if, for some reason, it was Jeanie and she had maybe come to grab something and accidentally bumped into her—but when she looked up, no one was there. They left after that, not even finishing the job. Apparently, that was common for first cleans at that house.
“Again, and Again, and Again, and Again”
The second and last time Jeanie cleaned that house, she decided to bring her daughter Iris along to help her. This time around, Jeanie decided that instead of splitting up, the two could stay together while they cleaned, only separating when needed. When they arrived, they decided to start with the main areas of the house—the living room and the kitchen—which felt like one big open area, with no wall in between to separate the two spaces. Jeanie took the living room and Iris the kitchen.
When you enter the living room, if you’re looking straight ahead, the first thing you’d spot was this little table that was set just off to the side. It held a random assortment of things, but in the very middle was a decorative glass bowl with sand inside and a bunch of mini seaside trinkets—seashells, sand dollars, dried starfish. When the two had first arrived, the bowl had been spilled over, the contents all over the table and the floor. So Jeanie swept up the sand and refilled the bowl, making sure everything was back in place.
When she finished, she moved on to the other areas of the living room. So focused on what she was doing, she barely noticed that, just minutes later, the bowl she had just cleaned up was suddenly knocked over again. She figured maybe Iris had bumped into the table when cleaning and just hadn’t noticed, so she cleaned it up and went back to what she was doing. But then, just moments after, she looked over, and it had spilled once more. After cleaning it up a second time, the both of them were ready to move on to cleaning the bedrooms, so they packed their supplies and made their way down the hall.
Later on, Jeanie walked out to grab something from the kitchen and immediately froze because, sure enough, the bowl was knocked over. This time, instead of just brushing it off, she felt herself beginning to get upset, even confronting Iris about it, asking her to be more careful. But Iris seemed confused, like she had no idea what her mom was talking about. Jeanie didn’t quite believe her, even when she claimed she hadn’t knocked the bowl over at all. At the time, Jeanie thought Iris just didn’t want to own up to it after seeing her mom so upset. So she let Iris go back to what she was working on and cleaned up the mess once again.
When she was done, she continued over to the kitchen, grabbing what she had originally gone to get in the first place, and when she turned to make her way back to the bedroom, the first thing she saw was the tipped-over bowl and the sand spilled all over the floor. This time, it hadn’t been minutes but mere seconds—and Iris was all the way back toward the rooms. There was no way she could have done it, and so Jeanie realized Iris had been telling the truth the whole time.
“Your Neighbors Like to Visit a Lot”
After hearing Jeanie’s story, it didn’t take much else before my mom, like everyone else, was trying desperately to avoid having to even step foot in the house. At the same time, just like before, the only person seemingly untouched and unbothered by all the commotion surrounding the house was the head housekeeper. But eventually, my mom’s luck ran out, and there came a day when the head housekeeper wouldn’t be coming in, which meant someone was going to have to take the job. That day, it just so happened to be my mom.
When she arrived at the house, she brought our cousin Malia, a recent hire, with her—not wanting to clean the house alone. Before they even started cleaning, they decided to go around and see what needed to be done and make a game plan. One of their last stops was the master bedroom, which had this sliding door that led out to the deck where the hot tub was.
When they first entered the room, everything seemed to be mostly in order—it wasn’t too messy, but it was obvious there had been people staying there, the duvet blankets on the bed wrinkled and slept in. After looking around the room, they stepped out on the deck to check on the hot tub, which was part of their protocol to see if it was dirty or needed fixing. When they went out, it seemed mostly fine—the only thing was the wet puddles on the deck from people getting in and out of the hot tub. Once they saw that, they made a note to come back later and turned to get started on the room. Malia entered first, stopping as soon as she made her way in, staring at something inside. Not even a second later, my mom entered after her, looking to see what had caused her reaction. The once relatively made beds were stripped, the blankets and pillows all in a messy pile at the end.
Even though it felt hard to ignore it, that’s what they chose to do, just wanting to be finished already. After a while, my mom had gotten most of her tasks finished and remembered that they still needed to go back to clean up the puddles on the deck. So she did, stepping outside onto the deck and making her way to where the hot tub was. But as soon as she did, she felt her body go cold—the floor was all of a sudden covered in what seemed to be pistachio shells. My mom really wanted to get out of there after that, but they stayed and finished the job anyway.
The rental business my mom worked for kept a guest book of sorts in every house they rented out—a place where you could log your favorite memories from your stay. Before she left, knowing she wouldn’t ever go back again, she decided to take a look through. Every page was a different story, the normal reviews heavily outweighed by former guests telling about their own experiences. The most recent guests, the people who had stayed there before my mom went in to clean, had simply written: “I really like it here, but I think your neighbors like to visit too much.” That house wasn’t near any other houses. All there was nearby, placed almost directly in the backyard of the house, was an old graveyard.
