Sarah was a 22 year old who enjoyed traveling, animals, music, spending time with family & friends, and was a horror movie fanatic! Spooky season was a 365 days out of the year fascination for her. Other than snakes there was not much that could strike fear into Sarah as she had come desensitized to most horror movies and scary stories.
In the spring of 2007, Sarah graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in Chemical Engineering. She landed a great paying job right out of college that she started in the summer of 2007. Life was going great for Sarah and she decided to purchase her first home.
After a few weeks of searching, she found her dream home. Sarah closed on her dream home in late September. The house was a classic tudor style home built in 1927 and located in the historic West End of Hartford, Connecticut. It was the perfect size home with all of the amenities that she was looking for.
Sarah finally moved in and settled in quickly. A week had passed in her new home and Sarah was thrilled. Things would quickly change though and Sarah’s perfect life would soon unravel.
Night #8 in new home: Sarah crawls into bed just before midnight. She sets her alarm and finally lays her head down after a long day at work. She quickly starts to doze off when she hears a scratching noise on the hardwood floors beneath her bed. Being so exhausted, she doesn’t think much of it. Moments later, the scratching noise intensifies. This startles Sarah to the point where she becomes frozen in fear. The noise then reduced back to a slow scratching. She chalks it up to the age of the home and turns her mind off, falling asleep.
Night #9: Sarah goes on about her day and forgets about the weird noises from the night before. After another long day at work she returns home where she cooks a dinner and watches a new horror movie on Netflix. Afterwards she goes to bed. She stays awake for a few moments while lying down and remembers the noises from the night before but on this night she doesn’t hear anything and quickly falls asleep. At 3:47 AM, she suddenly wakes up and realizes her room is freezing cold. As she becomes alert, she notices that her covers and pillow cases are ten feet across the room. She becomes frightened when she sees the sheets from her bed are wrapped up tightly around her ankles, causing her inability to walk out of bed. Sarah couldn’t think of any plausible reason how the covers were across the room and the sheets were tied so tightly around her ankles. She stays awake throughout the rest of the night, too terrified to sleep.
Night #10: It’s Friday night and Sarah returns home after dinner and drinks with co-workers. Although Sarah is not afraid of much, she dreads going to bed after the previous two nights. She musters up the courage and lays down for the night. She eventually falls asleep after one hour of observing and listening for any strange occurrences. Moments after falling asleep she awakens. She then feels something tickling the bottom of her feet. The paralysis of fear kicks in, Sarah can not move or speak yet the tickling continues. Sarah finally grabs her cellphone on the nightstand by her bed and shines the cellphone light at the foot of her. She is horrified to see the hands of a child furiously tickling her feet while she simultaneously sees a floating head of a toothless, elderly man smiling at her. The head was detached from the hands and moved laterally across the bed post as the hands stayed in place, tickling Sarah’s feet.
After this, Sarah hopped out of bed and into her car. Dressed in her nighttime wear, she drives approximately 2 hours to her parents’ house. Sarah told them about her experiences and vowed never to return to her once beloved dream home. Her parents moved her stuff out and she moved to an apartment on the other end of town. Sarah still watches horror movies and likes spooky things but she is no longer desensitized as now realized that horrors exist in movies and in real life. She occasionally has nightmares about her experiences. Her biggest fear is no longer snakes, it is now the thought of being tickled.