The House of Lumiar

Photo by Marc Dargent
(www.olhares.com/baphil)

I only started to get involved with haunted houses when I became a realtor. Before coming to Hugo Hauser, I was an administrative assistant who worked in several different enterprises for years, until I got a job as a secretary in the agency, where I stayed for a year before I decided to change carreers and start selling houses too.

As I was new to the job, my fellow coleagues decided to play a practical joke on me and on another young woman, who was also giving her first steps on this profession. The most enthusiastic of them was my boss, the one who assigned us the sale of an house that everyone in the agency knew to be haunted, somewhere in Lumiar.

Haunted houses worth a lot less in the market than “normal” houses. Every client claims not to believe in ghosts, but the truth is nobody wants to buy an house that is suspected to be inhabited by presences from Beyond. We had no idea that the House of Lumiar had been for sale for years, and that it was famous in Hugo Hauser for the existence of paranormal activities.

Obviously, no one in the agency knew about my “special talent”, right? The ability to see and speak with ghosts is not something I’d put in my resumé.

So, we went to Lumiar. We wanted to see the house first, before selling it. As soon as we arrived there, we explored it from top to ground. We checked out every division The whole was decorated with an unexpected luxury:  furniture in solid wood, huge lamps, sofas in leather, Persian rugs, beautiful paintings on the walls… There was no reason why that house was still for sale, and we were precisely commenting on that when, on our way back to the main room of the house, we found a man of very old age right in the middle of the sofas.

- Who are you? – I asked, surprised.

Then I looked around:

- And how did you come in here?

The old man looked at us, wide opening his eyes with surprise. He didn’t say a word. Instead, he raised his arms and started sliding toward us. His aspect changed suddenly into something meager and ugly, covered with scars and what seemed to be burns all over his body. When he was just about to reach us, he opened his mouth and a hideous scream reverberated throughout the house, making the walls tremble.

It scared the hell out of me, but my coleague fainted, hitting the floor with her head. When I looked again at the old man, he was gone.

- What the hell is going on in here?! – I asked loudly, still trembling.

It took me a few minutes to calm down, looking around at every direction. When I stopped trembling, I tried to wake up my coleague, softly pocking her face:

- Joan… – I called – Wake up, girl, come on…

She slowly opened her eyes and soon took her hand to her head. She moaned, not awaking completely. I helped her to get up and sit down on the sofa.

- What happened? – she asked, with a weak voice – My head is… I feel like I was hit by a truck.
- It was no truck.

She looked weirdly at me.

- You felt sick suddenly and fainted. – I rushed to explain – Stay right there and don’t move. I’m going to call an ambulance.
- An ambulance…? But do you have to…?
- Yes, I have to. I didn’t l like the sound your head did when it hit the floor.

I called the emergencies number in my cell. She took her hand to her head again and looked around, confused:

- Wasn‘t there an old man?
- What old man? – I immediately answered – There was no old man here! Now, stay still.

While I was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I went looking for the old man in every division of the house, but he didn’t show up again. I thought about the expression of suffering he had in his face when he released that horrible scream. I felt shivers running down my spine again. But there was an infinite supplication in his eyes. That man wasn’t trying to scare us. He was trying to communicate with us.

I called the agency. My boss’s secretary answered with her smoking voice revealing her over fifty years old of age:
- Hugo Hauser, Inc., good afternoon, Grace Meyer speaking.
- Hello, Grace. – I greeted – Is Paul there?
- Not at the moment, dear.
I was about to explain what happened, when I heard someone else talking behind her:
- So, have they seen any ghosts yet?
A general laughter invaded my ears.
- Shut up! – shouted Grace, not covering completely the phone’s speaker – Go on, Emma.

I hung up the cell. I felt stupid and angry at the same time. I looked at Joan, semi-fainted on the sofa. Concerning ghosts, there are three kinds of people in this world: the ones who believe in ghosts, the ones who don’t believe in ghosts and the “others”. Of all of them, the “others“ are the most dangerous. They don’t believe nor cease to believe, and deal with these phenomena like kids playing with matches.

When the ambulance came, I told them that the young woman felt sick and fell round on the middle of the floor. From her cell, I found her parents contact and I informed them that they had their daughter in the hospital. After that, I went straight to the agency.