Unfortunately, for Violette de Ayala and Stephen Sproul—designer enthusiasts and historic preservationists who share their love of old homes on @oldhouseaddiction—their ghost wasn’t friendly like Casper. At the time, the couple owned a design-build business and had always been drawn to historic homes. So in 2004 they bought a Victorian mansion built in the 1880s in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the historic Oakwood neighborhood, after feeling like the home was quite literally calling to them. Located about four houses down from the governor’s mansion, it came with all you’d expect from a grand, old home: crown molding, tall ceilings, solid wood doors, and six fireplaces. “The home had a gentlemen’s parlor, a women’s lounge, and a rose garden,” adds de Ayala. “And the dining room still had a chandelier that utilized both gas and electricity.”
The couple fell in love with the abode and were eager to start renovating it, hoping to flip the house. “When we bought the home, we moved right in,” de Ayala says. The rooms were livable if a bit drafty, but that didn’t matter, as the couple got the home at a good price: Many of the rooms were already renovated—apparently the immediate prior owners had begun construction but suddenly changed their minds. In hindsight, it was a red flag, but at the time, the pair shrugged their shoulders and set to work, thinking they could renovate the building room by room.
It wasn’t until a few months in that Sproul and de Ayala realized something was off. Apparently, the couple could feel a presence in the house; it always felt like they were being watched. “It felt very eerie unless we had people over, and the home seemed the happiest when we had 200 friends celebrating life and holidays,” de Ayala says. At first, only small things out of the ordinary would happen, like the coffee maker would slide off the table by itself, or the security system would go off for no reason. “We always felt like it was the ghosts playing with us and sounding off the alarms for fun,” she adds.
The biggest confirmation of a malevolent presence happened one day when the couple was downstairs. “We were in the kitchen and we heard a really loud smash upstairs, so I went to look in our bathroom,” she recalls. “I found that our heavy wall mirror had not just fallen off the wall, it had flown across the bathroom. But it didn’t shatter, it was like it made the sound. And there was no way it could have flown all the way across the room without breaking.”