by Patrick Grant
(Milford, CT)
In 1988 my girlfriend and I rented a small cottage at 1 Williams Road, in Bethel, CT. The cottage was owned by a man a black man on Sunset Hill Road, who had 2 dogs. It was in his backyard, but had it's own driveway on Williams Road. The first odd thing happened when we went to rent the place. The owner said "go ahead and check it out, I don't go in there anymore". This should have been a red flag, but I was only 20 then, and the cottage seemed like it would be a nice place for us. Things started off kind of subtle, I would hear someone going up or down the stairs to the loft occasionally. But, when I went to look nothing was there, I shrugged it off the first couple of times I heard it. I worked nearby at the Putnam Park Sunoco, which is still there. One day I mentioned where I lived to an old guy named Mr. Yamin, who I worked with, and he looked at me with eyes wide. He said "are you crazy ? didn't you know that place is haunted". I mentioned the landlord's odd behavior, and he told me "he's the one who found her". He then told me the story about a depressed young lady who had hung herself in the cottage a few years before. In my memory it seems like I lived there for months, but it was only 30 days. Just prior to hearing this story from co worker, things had started to get stranger. The refrigerator had several boxes and some dishes on top of it, and simply cleared itself off. Every dish and box came crashing down, so that nothing remained on top of the refrigerator, the floors were quite level, this happened more than once. The place was also infested with wood spiders. One morning I awoke once with one on my face so that I could see it's legs when I opened my eyes. It bit me right between the eyes, seconds after opening them. I swatted the thing off me and beat it to a pulp with a shoe. I had a big itchy sore between my eyes for a while after. At this point both my girlfriend and I also got sick, the doctor said it seemed like the flu. I remember being sick the rest of the time I was there, and the fever and general poor feeling started making me unpleasant to deal with. My girlfriend also started to act out of character. I remember going around the cottage with an aerosol can and Bic lighter every night torching all the wood spiders so I wouldn't wake up with one on me again. Every night I always got some, it seemed like a new bunch would show up every day. She had a pet guinea pig that died while we were there, when I went into the back yard to bury the animal I found grave stones. I was told after showing them to someone, they were either Indian or animal graves. They were unmarked stones, but you could tell they were placed there intentionally. The final episode came after we knew we were leaving, and had about a week left to be there. My girlfriend called me in a panic when I was at the Sunoco station, saying a black cat was sitting on one of the grave markers looking in the window at her. She went out and chased it away once, but it returned shortly and resumed staring into the window. After a couple a terrified phone calls, Mr. Yamin said "go check it out, I'll watch the station". I drove home to find my girlfriend quite shaken and scared, she told me go see the window that faced the back yard. To both our astonishment (and terror), there was now two black cats, each one sitting on a gravestone staring in the window. I went and chased them away, and did my best to calm my girlfriend. I didn't go back into work that day, and was fired which was OK because I was going to quit at the end of the week anyway. We started packing our stuff the morning, I don't think we even lasted the 30 days. I'm surprised I haven't found any other info on this cottage on the various CT haunted houses websites. It seemed to be common knowledge in Bethel, CT, which seems to have always had a lot of suicides. I remember hearing people refer to the high school as Suicide High. I looked on Google maps today and found the cottage, it has been rebuilt and the yard has been cleared.