That Old Lady Told Me to Get Out!

Listen to Jeanie Rhodes' story.Jeanie Rhodes used to live in an old house in Cape Girardeau, and the place never felt right. She had nightmares, sensed weird things. Nobody ever felt comfortable in that house.

“The entire time I lived there, I had the feeling that somebody was watching me,” Jeanie says. “If I was awake, I would feel like somebody was maybe looking in to the kitchen while I was cooking. Peaking in the front window if I was watching TV. I got that feeling quite often. When I was asleep, I guess it would be more of a recurring dream. I dreamt that somebody was peering over me, and watching me sleep, and I was terrified to open my eyes because I was afraid that he would be there.”

Jeanie would often have the feeling that her watcher was hiding in the large cedar closet in the master bedroom. “And there was also an unfinished part right off the master bedroom,” she says. “In my recurring dream he lived in the unfinished part right off the master bedroom.”

Did Jeanie ever get a sense of what he looked like?

“No. Just a creepy middle-aged guy,” she says.

Jeanie wasn’t the only one who was uncomfortable in the house … and the creepy guy in the unfinished part wasn’t the only ghost. Apparently, a previous owner … an elderly lady … had passed away there.

“My daughter, who was about two at the time, was down in the basement playing, and her ball rolled into the unfinished part of the basement,” Jeanie recalls. “And when she went in to get it, I heard her screaming. I ran down to the basement. She was pale and shaking. I said, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘That old lady told me to get out!’ She never went back to the washing machine again.”

“The only time we would go into the unfinished part of the basement, which is where the laundry room was, was to do laundry,” Jeanie says. “It was not an area that we played or gathered ever. As far as the unfinished part off of the master bedroom, that was primarily used to storage for Christmas decorations, and I was so scared to go in there that I wouldn’t get the decoration out. They just stayed.”

It’s almost as if the unfinished parts of the house did not even belong to Jeanie, but rather to former inhabitants.