Students celebrating Halloween in Westport have two choices: embrace the comforts of your cherished Halloween movies indoors or venture into the eerie darkness with your friends and family. While the holiday is meant for fun and innocent pranks, there are real, spine-chilling experiences people have faced.
Everyone in the neighborhood was kind of afraid of [my mom’s old] house. They would come home and the furniture would be moved around. One time the refrigerator was completely upside down.
— Christina Kavanah ’25
Darkness and abandonment are two qualities that are often associated with paranormal activity. In horror movies, they create the eerie ambiance as characters engage in forbidden activities, such as playing with the Ouija board or arranging pencils for the game ‘Charlie, Charlie.’ But while horror films are characterized as fiction, at times, these fabricated movies prove to be true, as Christina Kavanah ’25 attests to.
“Everyone in the neighborhood was kind of afraid of [my mom’s old] house,” Kavanah said. “They would come home and the furniture would be moved around. One time the refrigerator was completely upside down.”
The house’s abrupt change in scenery left the family feeling paranoid and on edge.
However, even if your house doesn’t tend to shift in position, Halloween in general or watching horror films can trigger your paranoia, making you more alert to all types of movement and sound, even if it’s not as particularly serious.
“One time, I was sitting in my boy’s house,” Amire Williams ’25 said. “He had closed the door to his garbage can and I swear it opened back up by itself. I’m not even joking.”
Stella Weinbrenner ’25 has also experienced some strange happenings.
“When I was in my old house we had this really weird attic and I swear there were voices coming out of there and I would hear them in the middle of the night,” Weinbrenner said. “One time I got out of my bed and I sprinted out of my room, went into the attic and found a secret door leading to a secret room and it was freaky, it looked straight out of a horror movie.”
The realm of paranormal activity remains a subject that continues to intrigue and mystify individuals worldwide. From ghostly apparitions to unexplained encounters, these experiences challenge our understanding of the natural world.
“I do believe in that kind of stuff, but I don’t think it’s scary,” Rakel Swanson ’27 said. “When we say ghosts and other spirits are scary, I think that’s the wrong connotation.”
