In all honesty, I thought buying a house near a lake in rural Texas would be nothing short of a genius financial move. Over these next few pages worth of authentic life experience, whoever just happens to read this will learn why it wasn’t.
It was the year 2020, and just like anyone else, I wanted an escape. I had money inherited from my father laying around but with nothing to reasonably spend it on. During August of that year, my friend Johnny had informed me that his grandmother was moving out of a home that she had owned for years, and was selling the entire property for a mere 26,000 dollars. It was a nice place with an abundance of land, and it was an absolute bargain as well. There was no possible way I was going to turn that down, but if anything, I absolutely should have turned that offer down before anything else.
When I first moved into the house, it actually seemed quite nice. It was a 7 bed, 6 bath, and it had a spacious backyard. I didn’t have to deal with any neighbors pestering me either because the nearest houses to mine were still a considerable distance away. Even if it was for a brief moment, life was surely great. That was until August 27th, a full two weeks after I had moved into the house, when I noticed that the TV in the living room was broken.
I had always made sure to keep the doors locked, and it’s not like I went outside for too much besides just walking around and enjoying nature. The only signs of life nearby were the geese walking over to the lake to do whatever they had to do. Besides that, there was nobody coming to my house or leaving either, and I sure wasn’t the type to smash a brand new flat screen TV for no reason. That’s what I thought at first, anyways.
As the days went by, the house just seemed less organized. Although I made sure to clean the place more and more as time passed, it seemed nothing was doing the trick. Whenever even the smallest and most insignificant of objects was put back in its place, it only took a few seconds for it to seemingly be thrown across to the other side of the room. If that wasn’t bad enough, I noticed that there were more and more feathers appearing in random places across the house.
I invited my Uncle Carl to the house, given he was a self proclaimed expert in “paranormal real estate”. He noticed as soon as I did that just about every piece of furniture looked like it had just been thrown right into the house by some clearly agitated individual, and that there was no way that the house had become so disorganized by pure chance. When I asked Carl what he thought was causing all of this, he just simply began staring at me silently for a minute straight, not blinking even once. Even though reasonably, I should’ve been confused by that, I knew exactly what the idea was: all of this was simply my fault.
There’s no way this could be my fault, none. Maybe I was wrong about that, though. Regardless, over the next few weeks, less and less people were willing to visit my home even though I had begun sending out invitations more often than I had at any other point in my life. Then again, considering the discounted price that I purchased this home for from none other than one of my least trustworthy family members, it seemed like a predicament like this was simply inevitable.
Then, once October came around, I realized what was going on this entire time. My grandmother was obviously not one to be trusted, but that never meant I was meant to be trusted either. If anything, my entire family tree should’ve provided proof that there’s no trusting anyone, especially those I knew the closest. In fact, the entirety of my dad’s side of the family, including my grandmother and Uncle Carl, had always just wanted to find a way to make some quick cash, even if that meant deceiving anybody and everybody. Up until that point, I thought that I had followed in their footsteps too much, but I also thought that everything that had happened since buying the house was just proof I needed to be more like them. If the universe worked in strange ways, I could give it a run for its money as well.
I wanted to prove to everybody that it was me that made the house become as cluttered, disorganized, and as overall unappealing as it was. Not only that, but that it was all on purpose to sell the idea that I’m always 7 steps ahead of everyone else, that I was none other than a genius in a world where everyone was foolish yet so full of themselves at the same time. There’s no way I could have been fooled, as I was the master behind all of this, and everyone else was none other than a mere pawn.
The only way to fully execute this plan was for me to make my house become a true attraction. Nobody wanted to come there, regardless of how desperate for company I was, so I had to just make the house become appealing by nature. How did I do this, exactly? By figuratively selling the house as none other than an actual haunted house, where the true horrors of the place could be lurking, walking around without a single care in the world or any eyes on their movements. Little did I know that this fantasy that I was crafting was indeed a reality, forged not by myself but by the seemingly innocent geese that just wanted their food and to complete their journey to the lake.
My father had always told me to watch out for geese no matter what, claiming that they were as dangerous as any monster in a haunted house, if not more. I had never believed it when my dad said it, because just like everyone else in his family, he simply couldn’t be trusted, and he had admitted that himself multiple times. After seeing the geese destroy the patio of the house in plain sight, knocking down the bird feeder and kicking about every last piece of furniture until nothing was left in its right place, I had no idea what to believe, or who.
As Halloween and the Halloween event at the house drew closer, I couldn’t stop thinking about the geese. They only began showing up more inside of the house, wreaking more havoc than anyone could ever imagine. None of it felt real, but in every sense of the word, it definitely was. The geese were the only company I even had until Halloween, but once that day arrived, there was absolutely nothing left of them. Once the house opened up to the public as a haunted house with a 5 dollar admission fee, all the geese had suddenly disappeared, but none of their damage went anywhere. Everything was apparent to those just walking in. All the furniture was knocked over and ripped to shreds. The walls had multiple cracks, dents, and holes in them, and any wires connecting to electronics were nothing more than just shreds of what they once were. It was like this in every room in the house, whether it was the living room, the bedrooms, or the bathroom. Nowhere in the house was safe from what the geese had brought, but even then, the only proof of their existence was merely the damage they caused.
Despite the constant advertising, nobody saw the house as being remotely haunted. It just appeared to be an absolute trainwreck, a dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires. Multiple guests shouted at me, if not outright hitting me, for apparently being a scam artist and a crazy person just trying to find some excuse to cover the shocking amount of damages that the house had faced. I panicked, immediately explaining that there was a massive group of geese that were breaking into the house and destroying everything, despite my best efforts to keep everything, including my own sanity, together. Not a single soul believed it, although every single word uttered was simply the truth. In fact, one person even outright accused me of hating animals, claiming that “a goose just needs a friend,” and that any possible friendship could be anyone in the world besides me. I had seen the destruction unfold with my own two eyes, and what did it even matter that nobody else saw it or that there wasn’t video evidence? That doesn’t make it any less true, and I’d know because I’ve lived with it all, even if it was for just a few months. For whoever ends up reading this, I can imagine it could be difficult to trust me, but if not me, who else even is there to trust? If I only had reasons to tell the truth, why would I even lie to begin with?
