❦ KRISTIN LEE — STORYTELLER ❦ True Stories From the Bellaire House I’ve owned the Bellaire House and spent more than twenty years investigating its history. That sounds simple enough—until you pause to think about what twenty years actually means. Twenty years is long enough to learn the sounds a house makes when the temperature drops outside. A floorboard groans beneath a footstep. A door refuses to close all the way. Then the furnace rumbles awake. In time, those noises become so familiar that they fade from notice. That is also long enough to recognize when something is out of the ordinary. I’m not someone who hears a pop in the wall and immediately starts yelling that a demon is on its way. Old houses creak and groan. People scare themselves, investigators accidentally contaminate their own evidence, and equipment can act strangely. These things happen. Still, there were nights when something happened that I couldn’t brush aside so easily. Strangely, the event itself wasn’t always the worst part. Sometimes, it was the moment before it. The house would shift. A conversation would die out without any obvious reason. Someone’s laughter would stop. Then a person would begin staring at a doorway they had ignored for the past hour. At first, nobody spoke. Eventually, someone would ask: “Do you feel that?” That question still bothers me. Most of the time, though, someone else did. The Bellaire House wasn’t evil every minute of every day. I wish people would stop reducing it to something so simple. Some of what happened there scared the hell out of me. Other parts felt protective; a few were so ridiculous I still laugh about them. And then came moments so gentle that “haunting” hardly seems fair. The house could hold all of it. Sometimes, all in a single night. Those are the stories that stayed with me. ❦ WHY THE WORDS MATTER ❦ For years, people knew the Bellaire House before they knew who I was. They knew the shows, the attic, and the accounts investigators shared after spending a weekend there. Bellaire House was familiar territory. Kristin Lee, on the other hand, was a name most of them didn’t recognize at all. I kept quiet about it for a long time. That’s just how I am. I’m not going to name-drop, kiss someone’s ass because they’re on television, or pretend to care just to reach their audience. When I like someone, I like them. When I don’t, being famous probably won’t change that. Still, one day it got to me. I was already at my breaking point when this gorgeous woman, with her large breasts, entered the paranormal scene. She had been working in the field for barely six months, but suddenly she was attracting an enormous amount of attention. And there I was, standing inside the Bellaire House, years into this. Years of research, investigators, and television crews. Years of people showing up at my door, eager to experience the house. Then, after everyone else packed up their equipment and went home, years of being the one left behind. I remember looking around and thinking: Are you fucking kidding me? She wasn’t to blame, and I wasn’t angry with her. What hit me was the sudden realization that I had let myself disappear inside something everybody knew. And I said it out loud: “I feel like Mary Shelley.” Everybody knows Frankenstein. But ask how many people know the woman who created him. That was exactly how I felt. Everyone knew my monster. No one knew the woman standing inside the house with it. And that day, something shifted for me. If people were going to hear these stories, perhaps they should come from the woman who had actually lived with the house—not from someone who investigated it one Saturday, whatever survived a television edit, or another person’s interpretation. Mine. That’s why I’m finally telling them. My Thoughts — Kristin Lee For a long time, I thought I needed to catch up with the Bellaire House. I don’t think that anymore. The house has its name. So do I. I don’t have to be the loudest voice in the paranormal field to matter. I just have to tell you what happened. What you believe afterward is up to you. ❦ THE ATTIC ❦ The cameraman who’d had enough When Paranormal Lockdown filmed at the Bellaire House, the people behind the cameras already knew their way around dark buildings. It was their job. Sit with that for a moment. They made their living going into places where people had reported apparitions, voices, unexplained movement—rooms where things happened and nobody especially wanted to go after midnight. Unsettling someone like that took something out of the ordinary. And then there was our attic. I hated discussing it. People always wanted a dramatic story, the kind of thing that happened every time someone went up there. But that wasn’t true. Sometimes, nothing happened at all. Nothing moved. There was no voice, no bang, no equipment suddenly going wild. And somehow, that could feel worse. Some nights, you’d climb the stairs with the sense that the room was already occupied, even before anyone said a word. The sound was different up there. That’s what I remember most clearly. Downstairs, the house could be noisy—people talking, doors shifting, somebody laughing somewhere. But the moment you stepped into the attic, all of it seemed to recede. Not disappear. Just... move farther away. It felt as though the rest of the house had slipped a few feet out of reality while you weren’t looking. I saw people change up there. They’d walk in joking, and a few minutes later, they weren’t. Their gaze shifted. Again and again, they looked toward the same corner, turned away, and then checked it once more. Eventually, someone would ask, “Did you see something over there?” Now and then, the person beside them was already staring at that spot. That was the moment an ordinary dark room started to feel like something else. During the filming of Paranormal Lockdown, one of Nick Groff’s cameramen reached his personal limit. So he left. Not just downstairs to collect himself, either. He walked away from the investigation entirely. I later learned that he had stopped filming paranormal investigations altogether. That disturbed me more than a scream ever could have. People scream. They panic. Then, eventually, they calm down. Quitting is different. It implies that something stayed with him after the adrenaline wore off. I never sought him out for a precise explanation of what had happened. I didn’t want one, honestly. Sometimes a person’s face reveals more than their story ever could. After twenty years in that house, I learned to listen when someone’s body says leave, even before their pride is ready to admit it. The brain can explain almost anything away: faulty wiring, an old building, too little sleep, a shadow—or simply your imagination. Meanwhile, something far older inside you may already be screaming: Get the hell out of this room. I don’t think we always listen quickly enough. My Thoughts — Kristin Lee People love saying, “Nothing scares me.” The Bellaire House had heard that plenty of times. It never seemed impressed. When a grown man whose actual job was filming haunted locations decided the attic held enough paranormal activity for one lifetime, I wasn’t about to follow him upstairs and ask him to play it back. He could tell me downstairs. In daylight. Preferably over coffee. ❦ THE LIGHT THAT ANSWERED ME ❦ Some of my strangest experiences happened when no one was investigating. That’s the part that gets me. No team. No production. No one trying to make anything happen. Just me. I’d driven those back roads in Bellaire a thousand times, rain pounding the windshield so hard that I could barely see. Juice WRLD, Tom Petty, Chris Cornell, and Alice in Chains played while I chain-smoked. Every so often, I checked the rearview mirror because my stupid brain had decided a ghost—or Nathan Brooks—was probably sitting behind me, waiting to murder me. The human mind becomes a complete asshole when all you give it is rain, darkness, and an empty back seat. By the time I reached home, I knew the difference between scaring myself and realizing that something was truly wrong. One night, standing in the kitchen, I had the sudden feeling that someone else was there. It is difficult to explain unless you have experienced it yourself. Nothing touched me, and nothing moved. I just knew. You know the feeling of someone entering behind you before they say anything? It was exactly that. But when I turned around, nobody was there. The kitchen looked completely ordinary. It just did not feel empty. I waited. The feeling stayed. Finally, I said: “I know you’re here.” Nothing. For a second, I thought: Nice one, Kristin. Now you’re standing alone in the kitchen, talking to empty air. Then the overhead light flickered. Once. I froze, staring up at it. It flickered again. That was enough. And yes, before anyone emails me to explain electricity, I know. Bulbs flicker. Wiring exists. Old houses do strange shit. I have never claimed that everything at the Bellaire House was paranormal. Still, a light flickering while you make coffee is one thing. A light blinking right after you tell an apparently empty room that you know somebody is there is something else. Maybe it was coincidence. Fine. But beneath that light, coincidence felt a little different. I remember looking up and realizing I had absolutely no desire to say, “Do it again.” Nope. Two was enough. Conversation over. My Thoughts — Kristin Lee Paranormal investigators crack me up. We stand in a dark room, asking: “Give me a sign.” “Turn something on.” “Let me know you’re here.” Then something happens, and suddenly everyone wants to talk about the batteries. I didn’t need a third blink. I heard you, and you heard me. We were fine. Even so, nothing will ever surpass the death-metal drummer, his arms covered in sleeves, whom I watched hold a baby doll during an investigation. He seemed like the kind of man nothing on earth could frighten. Then he got the response he’d been asking for. He tore out of that house as if Batman himself had crawled up from hell and come after him. A moment later, I found him outside, crying. The baby doll was still clutched in his hands. I have never managed to shake that image. I hope I never will. ❦ LAVENDER IN THE PARLOR ❦ Old houses carry smells. That, on its own, is not paranormal. Wood. Dust. Heat. Rain. A room left closed. Stay somewhere long enough, and certain smells become familiar before you even notice them. That was why the lavender stopped me. The word came through clearly: lavender. Then I noticed something underneath it. Smoke. Not fresh smoke. I never believed the house was on fire. It had the stale smell of smoke trapped in fabric, long after the fire itself had gone out. Afterward, strange little images began slipping into my mind. Not a movie. Not some sweeping psychic vision. Just fragments. A child. Lace. A piano. Flour. Small, everyday details. And somehow, that was what made them more unsettling. Then names began to surface: Eliza, Margaret, Jonah. Almost immediately, I started doubting myself. That is what I do. Had I seen those names somewhere before? Had someone already told me? Had I forgotten? Or was I in a haunted house, drawing connections only because I expected something paranormal? You should ask those questions. I worry about investigators who don’t. If you want every noise to be a ghost badly enough, sooner or later they all become ghosts. That questioning still doesn’t erase the feeling of what happened. For a little while, the parlor seemed to hold another room beneath its own. I can’t explain it any other way. My room remained—the same furniture, the same walls—but something older felt pressed right against it. Close enough that I half expected the room to have changed whenever I looked away and then glanced back. Then the lavender scent faded. The smoke was gone. Everything looked completely normal. That unsettled me more than it should have. One moment, something seemed close enough to breathe beside me. The next, there was nothing. Just the room. I’ve returned to it in my thoughts many times. What if hauntings aren’t always people wandering around after death? What if a place sometimes remembers more than it ought to? My Thoughts — Kristin Lee People expect ghosts to rattle chains. Yet some may carry the scent of lavender. A house might remember a woman applying perfume before going downstairs. It might remember flour drifting through a kitchen. A piano, too. Or perhaps my mind just did something odd that afternoon. I don’t know. Even so, every once in a while, lavender finds me in a place I never would have expected, and for half a second I’m back in that parlor. That’s what a haunting does. It follows you, but it never leaves the house. ❦ THE HAND ON THE STAIRS ❦ I should have fallen. There wasn’t much buildup to this one, because real life had none. My foot slipped. Down I went. Anyone who has fallen knows that quick flash of panic—the body registers what is happening before the mind can catch up. My stomach lurched. Then a hand pressed against my shoulder. Not wind. Not fabric. Not some vague sensation I later convinced myself had been real. Pressure. Enough to stop me. Enough to steady me. I turned immediately, my brain making the obvious assumption: Somebody caught me. Except no one was there. The empty space behind me has lingered longer than the touch itself. My body sensed another person—a hand, a purposeful movement. Then my eyes told me otherwise. Those two realities are hard to hold together. That experience is part of why I resist labeling everything at the Bellaire House as evil. Some experiences there were ugly. And there were nights when I wanted nothing to do with certain parts of the house. But this was different. It didn’t feel ugly. It felt protective. Strangely, that bothered me more. If something had deliberately kept me from falling, then whatever it was had seen me in danger long before I knew I was there. Remember that the next time you walk through your house alone. My Thoughts — Kristin Lee Everyone wants a ghost story where something shoves you down the stairs. Apparently, mine looked at me and thought: “Jesus Christ. Somebody catch her.” I don’t know what touched me. But I know I felt it. No one was standing there, and I hadn’t fallen. Sometimes, that’s the only answer you get. ❦ NOT YET. GO BACK. ❦ This one is harder. I can’t even say what category it belongs to. A dream? Something that happened close to sleep? Something spiritual? My brain doing something strange? I have no idea. There was a woman. Two boys stood beside her. The place itself is no longer clear to me. What stays with me is her. She looked directly at me and spoke in accented English: “Not yet. Go back.” That was it. Four words. Then I woke up crying. The oddest part was that I hadn’t been afraid. Instead, I felt loved—deeply loved—and protected, as though someone had made the decision for me: You are not staying here. You are going back. I’ve had thousands of dreams. Most become nonsense within five minutes of waking. That one didn’t. The words stayed precisely where they had landed. Not yet. Go back. There’s one phrase in it I try not to linger over. Not yet. Because “not yet” is nothing like “no.” It leaves open the possibility of another time. Later. Eventually. That’s the part that can keep you awake, if you let it. Years ago, I gave up trying to solve it. Maybe it was nothing more than a dream. Maybe that’s all it ever was. Even so, I still think about that woman and those boys sometimes, wondering who they were. More than that, though— how did she know I needed to go back? My Thoughts — Kristin Lee If someone on the other side sent me back, I hope they knew what they were signing me up for. Since then, I’ve gotten myself into plenty of shit. Maybe that was part of the point, though. She said not yet. Apparently, then, there was still something I had to do. If that was true, I intended to make the trip worth it. ❦ THE HOUSE WATCHED PEOPLE ❦ This is probably the part people call crazy. I’m fine with that. After enough years there, I started to think the Bellaire House reacted differently depending on who walked through the door. I saw it happen too many times. One team would arrive and get nothing. Hours passed in silence. The equipment stayed blank. No voices. Nobody was touched. Eventually, people lost interest. Then another group would enter the same rooms in the same house, and suddenly everything changed. Someone got emotional. The equipment began firing. One person couldn’t take their eyes off a doorway. Somebody heard footsteps. Someone else said something had touched them. It felt like a completely different building. That was when I stopped seeing the Bellaire House as an attraction. An attraction performs for you. You pay, go inside, get scared, and leave. The Bellaire House didn’t give a shit what you wanted. Some nights, the house seemed almost glad to have people inside it. On other nights, I knew immediately that something was wrong. I realize how insane that sounds. A house does not have feelings. It cannot decide whether it likes you. I know. Still, after twenty years, I knew the building well enough to notice when something had changed inside it. That was why I made rules: Respect the house. Respect its history. Do not walk in acting like an asshole. Don’t start screaming at something that may not even be there simply because you saw somebody provoke a ghost on television. Paying money doesn’t entitle you to evidence. My favorites were the guys who came through the front door announcing that nothing could scare them. You could almost feel the house rolling its eyes. After a while, I began wondering whether everyone had the investigation backward. They thought they were observing the Bellaire House. But sometimes I suspected the house had been watching them from the instant they crossed the threshold. Their fear. Their attitude. Their grief. Their anger. Their ego. Maybe that was why it treated each person differently. Or maybe I had just spent too many years inside a haunted house. Either could happen. My Thoughts — Kristin Lee Walk into someone’s home, insult their family, pound on the walls, shout demands, and then see how welcome you feel. People do exactly that in haunted places and call it investigating. I call it being an asshole. Respect costs nothing. When you’re alone in a dark room at night and convinced something is watching, consider a thought you probably won’t like: Maybe it noticed you well before you noticed it. ❦ MERRY CHRISTMAS, LYDE ❦ This one feels different. It doesn’t frighten me. Actually, it makes me happy. Mike Simpson and I spent the weekend investigating in Bellaire. He’s one of the finest investigators I’ve had the honor of working with: patient, grounded, steady. Not every sound has to be paranormal for him. That distinction matters. By the final day, we were exhausted—the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from investigating. Hours of listening, waiting, watching, reviewing. Trying to figure out whether the faint noise meant anything—or nothing at all. Before we left, Mike and I went into the Bellaire House one last time. Only the two of us. In the séance room, we sat down for a brief communication session. Since it was Christmas, we started talking about the Heatherington family and wished them a Merry Christmas. That was when we heard a voice. Clear as day. “Merry Christmas.” It sounded like Lyde. Mike heard it, too. We looked at each other and smiled. That smile is the reason this story still matters so much to me. No one screamed. No one ran. There was no terror at all. Something had simply answered. “Merry Christmas,” we said. A voice seemed to answer back. Could I prove it was Lyde? No. Could there have been another explanation? Probably. I leave room for that. Still, we both heard it at the same moment, and the words made perfect sense as a response to exactly what we had just said. Sometimes you reach a point where not every paranormal experience has to be examined like evidence in court. Some moments belong to the people who experienced them. That one belonged to us. My Thoughts — Kristin Lee That’s why I hate hearing people insist that everything about the Bellaire House was evil. It wasn’t. There was kindness there, too. Good moments. This was one of them. And if that really was Lyde, then for one Christmas afternoon, the distance between wherever he was and wherever we were felt very small. We spoke. He answered. We listened. That’s enough for me. ❦ FROM MY BELLAIRE HOUSE STORY ARCHIVES ❦ I have plenty more. Twenty-plus years will do that. Some are frightening. Others are sad. And some are funny as hell now, though nobody involved thought so at the time. There are stories about my family, investigators, television crews, guests, and nights when I was completely alone. Some of them make more sense to me now. Others are even harder to understand than they were when they happened. I’ll put them here when I’m ready to tell them. There’s no schedule. No countdown. Maybe next week. Maybe next month. Or perhaps you’ll return one night and find another story waiting here. That feels right. The Bellaire House never performed because anyone demanded it. Its stories shouldn’t have to, either. Another story from the archives will emerge when the time is right. And if one unsettles you later tonight, after the house has gone quiet and you hear something you’d usually dismiss... don’t blame me. You chose to keep reading. — Kristin Lee