22nd & H Street House: It Looks Haunted, But Is It?

For years, I've heard stories about this house. KFBK, one of Sacramento's news-talk radio stations aired a halloween-themed story about the house on 22nd and H streets over twenty-five years ago. At that time, the owners related stories of hearing strange, unexplainable sounds while they were in the process of renovating the house. Additionally, they told of seeing fleeting, but regular glimpses of what looked like a small boy, (about 9 years old), hiding within a crawl space underneath the stairs on the first floor of the house, as if playing hid-and-go-seek with them. Within the last ten or twelve years, wrought iron gates have been erected around the property, the result of too many curious onlookers no doubt. Yet to this day, no one inhabits this home; it remains empty, sealed off from prying eyes by locked doors, shuttered windows and the generally creepy feeling it gives off.

A nighttime winter visit to the property, a few years ago, left us with digital images of "orbs," several sets of drained camera batteries, and unexplainable sounds of what seemed like an old dial-up telephone that began to ring; it was well after 10:00 p.m., and it seemed odd that someone would place a phone call to a home that nobody had lived in for the last fifteen or twenty years. Moreover, who would keep a phone plugged in within a home that was, for all intents and purposes, empty? Even more strange was that the rings seemed noticeably louder than normal to all of us, as if the phone had been perched atop the sill of an opened window, yet all of the windows were tightly shut and presumably locked. Was it the wind that tricked us into believing that the rings were louder than normal and coming from this house, rather than another nearby house? On the other hand, who would leave their home with it's windows open, in the dead of winter, so that their phone might be heard so loudly?

More time has passed. There are still no new occupants in the home on 22nd & H. To look at the place from the outside, it appears dead, yet it also seems that someone at least is still accepting phone calls there. Could it be the ghost of the little boy I heard about so many years ago on KFBK?