Diana – Living In Virginia

Diana’s experiences over the years since she has been married have been extremely frequent and downright frightening at times. While she had many minor events occur during the early years of her marriage, none of them were much different from what she had experienced while she was living at home, and they really don’t stick out in her mind. Most of what she recalls began back in 1990 when she was living in Virginia in what she refers to as the Vanasse house.

The Vanasse house had no remarkable history to it and Diana assumed the activity that happened there was attributed to the ghosts that had been with the family for so long. She would hear the usual sound of someone walking up and down the stairs and many times she would hear her dresser drawers being slammed shut. Her dog also seemed to sense something in the house because there were numerous occasions when she would stand at the bottom of the stairs and look up and growl.

Hearing the walking up and down the stairs and the dresser drawers slamming are the more memorable events that occurred in the Vanasse house. However, in 1991 when Diana, David, and their two sons, Matthew and Bradley, moved a few streets over to a house they call the Peabody house, all hell broke loose!

Unlike the Vanasse house, the Peabody house did have a story behind it – a rather disturbing story that was relayed to Diana by the neighbors – after she moved in. I would like to note here that this story is hearsay and Diana did not investigate the story any further than with the neighbors.

According to the story, a man named George was the first owner of the Peabody house. The neighbors said that George was an older man and a widower with three daughters and, he also had cancer. Even though he was older and had this disease, he met a younger woman and asked her to marry him, and she agreed. George has asked his bride-to-be if she would agree to sign a prenuptial agreement. He knew his death was imminent and he wanted to make sure that when he passed away his daughters would receive a fair share of his estate. The future bride agreed to sign the agreement and George asked her to stop by the attorney’s office to take care of it before their wedding day.

Apparently George never followed up with his attorney to see if his future wife had signed the agreement and they proceeded with the wedding. Shortly after they were married, George found out that his new wife had never gone to the attorney’s office to sign the agreement. As the story goes – remember this is being told to Diana by the neighbors – George became depressed about his wife’s deception and one day he took his own life. He reportedly went upstairs, took out a .22, used one of his toes to pull the trigger, and shot himself.

Some of the neighbors thought that the new wife had a hand in George’s death because they allege that when she came home and found the body that day, her first call was not to 911, but rather to the attorney to find out about the value of George’s estate. The wife, however, had an alibi since she was at work when George allegedly shot himself. The police also investigated the incident and ruled it a suicide and not a homicide.

This is the story that was relayed to Diana by the neighbors and whether or not it is true, one thing is certain, George definitely died in that house and this is where her paranormal events became more significant and more frequent.

After George’s death the house was put up for sale but sat vacant for a long period of time. No one wanted to purchase it given the fact that someone had died there. Eventually, a young man bought the house and lived in it for some time before he was transferred. After he was transferred, he decided to rent it out and Diana and David, needing a new place to rent, decided to take it since it was only a few streets over from the Vanasse house they were renting at the time.