The Roxbury House — or just “The House,” as it’s called by those investigators most intimately familiar with the strange goings-on documented over the decades on its grounds — is supposedly located somewhere in central Vermont. Not Roxbury, itself, of course; that would make the house too easy to find. But somewhere around there, up a disused track, shrouded in a stand of old growth forest, or down in a hollow in the rolling, ancient Green Mountains, is the House.
Judging by its outward appearance, the Roxbury House would fit seamlessly into any B grade movie filled with ghosts, spooks and poltergeists. Any of the half dozen or investigators privileged enough to have studied the structure and its phenomena, though, will assure you that whatever’s going on here, it has nothing to do with the dearly departed.
No flying crockery or slamming doors plague the House’s residents. They do, however, have a near-constant reminder that their home is shared otherworldly residents. Any time between sunset and sunrise, an observer can catch sight of shadowy silhouettes, two dimensional but seemingly floating through mid-air without an object nearby to cast a shadow. The Roxbury House has possibly the most perfectly aligned case of shadow people ever recorded.
One of the typical characteristics of a shadow person sighting is the apparition doesn’t line up with our world, as it were. Figures pass through walls as though the wall didn’t exist, suggesting that if this silhouette were a real entity as we understand the term “real,” it might be living in a physical world overlapping with our own in such a way that we can see the entity’s shadow, but not the inanimate matter around it.
In the House, however, the movements of the shadow people line up perfectly with the doors, walls and windows. They stroll down the hallways, climb the stairs and even putter in the kitchen with a disturbing similarity to flesh and blood and humans, barring their two dimensionality, insubstantiality and, of course, attendant cold spot phenomena.
The shadow people inhabiting the House are always accompanied by cold spots, zones of inexplicable chill that move with them around the House. Regardless of the local temperature, whether the wood stove is lit or not, a shadow person is always significantly cooler, by twenty or more degrees. Touching the silhouette of a shadow person is always a shock, but usually one has warning that it approaches, as the local temperature gradually cools. A shadow person almost seems to absorb heat as it moves around the House. Even in the day time, when shadow people aren’t normally visible, the rise and fall of temperatures seemingly at random — although they have their own morning and evening routines, which fall into that realm of odd comfort other haunted residents experience; “Oh, that was George the ghost slamming the toilet lid” — can be more eerie than seeing the shadow person outright in the dark hours.
Continue reading