A childhood spent moving from house to house

Because my family is a media family, we moved from market to market frequently. Though most families prefer not to move that often, my family thought nothing of it. We lived in so many places I can’t remember all the names. We kids thought it was fun and exciting.

Once we lived in Newport News, right across the street from the James River. My brother and I loved it there. We were forbidden to cross the street to the river side, but when no one was looking, we did.

Eventually, we were caught and had to stay in our fenced backyard until we moved. Despite getting caught and restricted to our backyard, we still loved living in that house. We could look out our bedroom window and see the James River.

Our next move took us to a big house in the country. That house had a porch downstairs and upstairs. We loved it. However, my brother and I were forbidden to set foot on that porch. We did, of course, but only when our parents were too busy to pay attention to us. That second-floor porch was awesome.

We stored pine cones up there to drop on our siblings and friends when they came to visit. We had fun until we got caught and were sentenced to our bedroom until we moved to another house.

So far we kids had loved every house we had lived in, but the next place was different. When we stepped inside, we all felt something wasn’t right. During our first night there, we heard strange sounds, like moans and groans. Our parents didn’t hear anything, but we kids certainly did.

By morning we were ready to move. Our parents laughed and told us we were being silly. The following nights found us scared and sleeping under our beds. We stayed scared and slept under our beds until we finally moved. The next house wasn’t particularly interesting, but at least it wasn’t haunted.

When our parents finally settled down and we no longer moved so often, we were relieved when we determined our new house was not haunted.

I will always love houses, but only the haunt-free ones.

Laura Moore can be emailed at lehmoore1@gmail.com.