By James Donahue

A story about an unexplained warm water stream that poured from electric sockets and lights in a cottage in the UK village of Adisham, and eventually destroyed the home, reminded me of an experience we had in one of the many haunted houses we have lived in.

While the story of the Adisham house involved an extreme unexplained poltergeist activity, that could not be stopped or even believed by town officials, our personal experience was a bit more subtle. But it had the potential of ruining a nice country home and like the home owners in the UK, we found no solution.

My wife and I enjoyed buying older somewhat neglected houses and restoring them. We found it an inexpensive way to find housing and gave us a great hobby of repairing and redecorating homes to suit our personal taste.

This particular place was a nice three-bedroom brick country home, located on a quiet back road and it came with a barn, lots of garden space, and about five acres of land. There were fruit trees and other out buildings, which gave it lots of appeal.

One major problem, noticeable when you first entered the house, was that a large portion of the living room’s plaster ceiling had collapsed. You could look right up through the ceiling to the roof boards over the attic. That did not stop us from buying the house “as is,” since I had lot of experience with ceilings and wallboard.

Before we moved in, I cleaned up the broken plaster and patched that hole in the corner of the room, in an alcove in front of the front door, with a square of ceiling tile. It was a quick patch job, or so I thought, just to get the ceiling covered until I had time to install plaster board later.

Not long after we moved in, it rained. I was shocked to find that my ceiling tile was not only stained from water, but the water was dripping through my temporary ceiling to the living room floor. I realized that I had a leak in the roof to repair before I could expect to fix that living room ceiling.

As soon as the weather cleared, I was up on the roof with a bucket of tar. There was a chimney near the area where the leak appeared to have originated, so I put a lot of tar around that. I also smeared tar over every part of the old roof where weathering might have caused a leak. I went all the way up to the peak of the roof, just to make sure. My tar work make the roof look bad, but I thought I probably had the problem solved.

It wasn’t. The next time it rained the water was dripping through the ruined ceiling tile as fast as ever. By now the tiles were starting to collapse from the damage.

I bought roofing tile and returned to the roof. I retiled that entire side of the dormer, installed roll roofing in the valley, and roofed the roof over the main part of the house on the side facing the leaking area. My roofing went right to the peak.

When it rained the leak was just as severe, if not worse.

I bought more roofing and finished the entire house, carefully installing a roofing cap at the peak, where I thought the water must be getting in.

The problem was not solved. During the next rain I was in the attic, attempting to trace the source of the water. I found it running down one of the roofing rafters but the upper part of the rafter was dry from about two thirds of the way up. I could not find a place where the rain was coming into the house through the roof. It was just appearing. How could this be?

After months of struggling with this problem, I found that the only solution was a large bucket. I put the bucket on a board located right at the place where the water dropped to the attic floor. As long as we lived in that house I had to remember to empty the bucket after every rain, or risk having to replace the living room ceiling again.

I never did install plaster board on that part of the ceiling. I just replaced the damaged ceiling tile when it was needed. And I had to do this more than once while we lived there.

That entire house was quite haunted. We experienced other strange experiences that included a room full of flies, a bad energy that kept the family on edge for as long as we lived there, and a severe influenza that laid us all out for a week. It was about as sick as any of us have ever been. We also suffered a severe ice storm that left us without power in the winter for 14 days.

We later learned that a former occupant committed suicide in that house. The energy from that event apparently remained.

We sold the house to a man and his wife who proved to be the perfect tenants for such a place. They made the entire sale process a living hell, accusing us of removing fixtures that were never there, and claiming we cheated them on land lines. The realtor that handled the sale gave up most of his commission just to appease this mean cheating pair.

In all the fuss, I may have forgotten to mention the bucket in the attic.