It wasn’t something I thought about then, but it dawned on me much later: I grew up in a haunted house. The split-level home in Exton, Pennsylvania, appeared ordinary enough, nestled on a quiet street in a neighborhood called Marchwood. But appearances can be deceiving. This is the beginning of my haunted house story.
My father purchased the house from Mario and Dorothy Casavecchia on August 7, 1975, for about $39,000. I was only two years old then, far too young to sense what lingered in the shadows of our home. But strange things began to happen, subtle at first but growing more persistent as the years passed in my haunted house story.
When I was around seven, I noticed my mother’s odd behavior during the night. She would leave the master bedroom she shared with my father and hurriedly walked down the short hallway to the bathroom at the end, passing the built-in closet along the way. This ritual always struck me as peculiar, especially since the master bedroom had its own attached bathroom. I could only assume it was because my father claimed that space for himself—it had only a shower, not a bathtub like the other bathroom. But what unsettled me was the way she moved in the dark. She’d walk briskly, almost as if trying to escape something unseen in the hallway behind her.
By the time I turned eleven, I had followed the same pattern. I would wake in the dead of night with an urgent need to use the bathroom. I’d flip on the light, complete my task, and then—without thinking—I’d bolt back to my bedroom, the hallway suddenly oppressive with an invisible presence. I never felt it wasn’t very hospitable, but it was there, watching. Waiting. This was becoming a central piece of my haunted house story.
Around this time, I began noticing other peculiar occurrences in the house. My bedroom shared a wall with the stairs, and I often woke up to creaking footsteps in the middle of the night. The stairs groaned under the weight of someone—or something—moving up and down, up and down. But the steps would stop at the top of the stairs, and no one ever appeared. I would lie in bed, straining to hear more, wondering who could be wandering the house at 1 a.m. But the living room remained dark, the dining room silent, and no footsteps ever moved into the kitchen.
One night, my curiosity got the better of me. I slipped out of bed and peeked down the hallway, expecting to see someone at the bottom of the stairs, but only darkness greeted me. My mother didn’t believe in nightlights back then, so the house felt swallowed by shadows. I stood there for a moment, listening. The silence was thick, and then the footsteps returned—slow, deliberate—on the stairs behind me. Heart pounding, I darted back to bed, convinced that something unseen lurked beyond the veil of darkness. This was another element of our haunted house story.
But the strangest incident occurred one night after I had returned from the bathroom. Lying awake in the darkness, I heard the unmistakable sound of the closet door in the rec room downstairs clicking shut. My heart skipped a beat. Who could be in the closet at this hour? It was well past midnight, and my parents had long since gone to bed, their nightly routines always ending after Johnny Carson’s monologue. Then, I heard something even more unnerving—the faint scraping of cardboard boxes being dragged out of the closet and stacked, one by one.
I sat up, fear prickling at the edges of my mind. Was someone—or something—moving around in the dark downstairs? I had to know. I got out of bed, crept down the hallway, and flicked on the bathroom light. Walking over to the cast iron railing, I expected to see my mother or father sorting through the boxes of seasonal decorations stored under the stairs. But there was nothing—only the eerie emptiness of the rec room below swallowed in darkness.
Shaken, I retreated to my room, shutting off the light and hurrying back to bed. The hallway seemed to breathe with a life of its own, and the feeling of being watched intensified.
The next morning, I tried to make sense of it all. As my mother sat in the living room sipping her coffee, I asked if she or Dad had been downstairs the previous night, moving boxes. She blinked at me, her brow furrowing in confusion. “No, why would I be in the closet? I haven’t touched those boxes in months.” I insisted that I had heard the noises—boxes shifting, the closet door opening and closing—but she just shrugged, her face tight with uncertainty. A few days later, I noticed she started leaving the lamp on in the living room as a nightlight.
My Haunted House Story Gets Real
Fast forward to the night of my high school graduation in June 1991. My Aunt Marilyn had come into town to celebrate, sleeping on the couch in the living room since our house didn’t have a guest room. The following day, she greeted me with a question that chilled me to the bone.
“Kimmie Ann, why were you sleeping in the hallway last night?” she asked, her voice puzzled.
I stared at her, baffled. “What? I wasn’t sleeping in the hallway. I didn’t even get home until after 1 a.m.”
She frowned, clearly unsettled. “But I saw you. I got up to use the bathroom around midnight, and you were lying in the hallway under a blanket.”
A cold shiver ran down my spine. I hadn’t been home. I glanced over at my mother, who was standing nearby, her face pale and eyes wide with a secret she had long kept hidden.
“What is it?” I asked, dread pooling in my stomach.
“Well,” she began slowly, “when we bought the house, the realtor told us that the wife of the previous owner died in the hallway.”
For a moment, the time seemed to freeze. The creaking stairs, the boxes shifting in the closet, and the oppressive feeling in the hallway all made sense. My aunt had seen something that night, something neither of us had ever expected.
“Great, Mom,” I said, my voice tinged with sarcasm, though fear gripped me tightly. “That explains the creepy hallway.”
“I didn’t want to scare you kids,” she replied quietly.
But now, we knew. And the house no longer felt ordinary—it had never been. Something from the past lingered there, silently watching from the shadows.
Genealogy Research on the Property
This past year, I decided to look up the name of the woman who died in the hallway to see if it was a true story. Here is what I found: Mario’s first wife. She died on December 23rd, 1974, at the age of 54. Mario and Mary bought the house from Bernard Hankin on July 16, 1971.
CASAVECCHIA On June 10, 1974, MARY T. (nee De Ratelo), wife of Mario J.
Casavecchia, of 381 Devon Drive, Exton, age 54; also mother of John F. Casavecchia, and sister of Emma R. Ward and David De Rafelo. Relatives and friends are invited to attend the funeral on at 10 A.M., from the ALLEVA ERAL HOME, 1724 E. Lancaster Paoli.
**Philadelphia Inquirer 12 June 1974. Page 44.
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