A tragic death…an invisible, crying child…two terrified women… House of spiders

Jan 20, 2013 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

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By Michael Jordan

Lot – Stanleytown, West Bank Demerara isn’t your typical ‘haunted’ house. The doors don’t creak open on rusty hinges. It has no imposing, gothic towers. It isn’t over-run with vines or built over a Dutch burial ground.
In fact, it’s quite an ordinary-looking, three-bedroom concrete house. It’s painted in pink and surrounded by the thick vegetation that seems to thrive in that tranquil section of Canal Number Two, West Bank Demerara.
But Shemika and her cousin, D—-, weren’t happy about stopping at that ordinary-looking house when we drove there last Friday. They had lived there once. They had fled after four months. They say that something inside that house had made them feel unwelcome.
Shemika was three months pregnant when she took up residence at Lot—-Inner Stanleytown back in January 2010. Because her husband was overseas and due to Shemika’s condition, D—-, the cousin, stayed with her, along with D—-’s two-year-old son.
One of the things that Shemika remembers was that she was sick most of the time. She couldn’t keep her meals down, and became so listless that she was barely able to speak, and mostly communicated with her cousin through notes she wrote on bits of paper. At first, she put her listlessness down to the early stages of motherhood.
The other thing she remembers was being unable to fully unpack her belongings when she moved in. “The minute I moved in I would have dreams of moving out, but I could never finish unpacking.”
And there were the spiders. Every evening, at around 6:00pm, huge black spiders would suddenly appear in the house. They would crawl around in the kitchen. They would swing and skitter in the toilet. The two cousins sprayed the house with insecticide. The spiders always returned.
There were also huge frogs; the largest they had ever seen. Where the creatures were coming from, and how they were entering the house with its mesh-covered windows was a mystery to them.
Shemika says she also found it strange that, try as they might, the house never stayed clean. They would wipe the inner walls one day and the following day they would be grimy again.
Then the women said that they began to hear things. At odd hours, they would swear that they heard a baby crying. They would peer outside, thinking that perhaps someone had abandoned a newborn at their doorstep. But there would be no abandoned babe outside.
By then, both women were beginning to wonder if some unwelcome presence inhabited the house. But, according to Shemika, it appeared that this ‘presence’ didn’t want them to leave.
“Whenever I would talk about leaving the lights would go out,” Shemika claims. But finding a house to rent was no easy task, so she stayed.
And she continued to feel ill. Eventually, her husband, who was still overseas, suggested that she take a vacation. Leaving her cousin and the woman’s two-year-old son in the house, Shemika spent four days at a highway resort.
She says that immediately, her illness ceased. “I was able to eat, I went kayaking.”
But the moment she got home to Stanleytown, the sickness consumed her.
“The minute I entered the house I called for a bucket and I vomited in it.”
And D—, the cousin, said that she also had an uneasy time while Shemika was away, since her infant son was constantly crying for no reason that she could discern.
They eventually confided in D—-’s boyfriend. The boyfriend scoffed at their fears.
One night, though, while sleeping in the Stanleytown house, the skeptical man reportedly felt ‘something’ sitting on his chest. According to the women, he sprang up and ‘saw’ a woman sitting in a chair near his bed. He began to curse and the ‘woman’ vanished.
By then, the cousins were convinced that some malevolent presence inhabited their home. Shemika began to wonder whether their Stanleytown residence had a ‘history.’ She questioned her landlady.
Reluctantly, the landlady revealed that someone had died there.
They say it had rained heavily one night, some 20 years ago, and the heavy winds caused an electric wire near the property to snap. That live wire fell in the front yard of the Stanleytown property.
Back then, there was another house on that land. The tenant at that time was Nancy Williams, who was reportedly pregnant at the time (another woman who looks after the house denies that she was). The following day, Nancy Williams was walking out of her yard when she somehow came into contact with the wire.
According to what I was told, some of the woman’s small children were present when the volts of electricity hit her. She screamed to them to keep away, thus saving their lives at the expense of her own. Shemika says she was told that the old house was torn down and a new one erected with some material from the old structure. She believes that this tragedy is somehow connected to her own unsettling experiences in the house.
By April 2010, Shemika had had enough. One evening, she contacted her husband who was still overseas. After the call, she told her cousin that they were moving.
Shemika said that though there was no power failure in the area, all the lights in her house immediately went out. The two cousins immediately began packing, frantically “throwing stuff in barrels.” Shortly after, a truck driver they had summoned arrived. He beamed his headlights on the house and began to load the truck. As the women were leaving, the downstairs light flickered on, then went off again.
Shemika said she returned the following day for the rest of her belongings. A week later she learned that another family had moved in. She was intrigued to find out whether Lot—Stanleytown was still ‘misbehaving’, but was always too scared to check.
But after contacting me late last year and telling her story, the two cousins and I travelled to their old home. We called at the gate. Two dogs bounded towards us and began barking furiously. Shortly after, a pleasant-looking woman peeped out one of the windows and came to us.
Shemika explained that she was a former tenant, and we enquired whether the woman had any ‘trouble’ with the house.
Yes, the woman said; the foundation was weak; the house shook whenever heavy vehicles passed.
Had any strange things happened in the building? No, the tenant said.
After understanding what we meant by ‘trouble’, the woman agreed to our request to enter the house. Once inside, Shemika questioned her further. No, the woman said. She had never heard a baby crying and she had been living there for two years. But yes, she would often find black spiders in the house; along with large frogs. And somehow, the house never stayed clean, no matter how much she tried to keep it that way. And she did sometimes hear ‘things’ in the roof. I suspected that there might be bats in the ceiling.
She had heard that a woman had died on the property but she wasn’t afraid.
“Once I put my head down and pray. I expect to sleep comfortably,” she said.
But she did have one troubling experience.
One morning she had awoken and gone into her yard and stopped dead in her tracks.
The overhead GPL wire – strung in the same place as the one that had killed Nancy Williams so many years ago – had snapped. It lay there, like a coiled, waiting serpent, in her front yard…

If you have any information about this or any other unusual case, please contact Kaieteur News by letter or telephone at our Lot 24 Saffon Street, Charlestown offices. Our numbers are 22-58465, 22-58473 and 22-58458. You need not disclose your identity.
You can also contact Michael Jordan at his email address mjdragon @hotmail.com.

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