The Haunted Trailer - A Day of the Dead Story

All Souls Day/Day of the Dead 11/1/2024

There was haunted or poltergeist activity everywhere I've ever lived—even in my dorm room. I will tell those stories some other time. But right now, I will tell you the story of the most violent and haunted place I have ever lived.

In 1987, while attending Cal-Arts, I gave up my dorm room to move in with my soon-to-be husband, Grant, and his roommate. After I moved in, I found out they hadn’t paid their rent for 6 months. They were squirreling away the cash and planned to hand it all over when they had the total they owed. I was mortified. I told them, “he probably doesn’t know you’re late, or he would have evicted you by now.”

It turned out I was right. Not long after they handed over the cash, the old man realized he needed to not only evict them but let his son take over his business. We were promptly kicked out with no place to go. We moved into my studio at school. My “studio” had three sheetrock walls and a plywood door in a two-story-tall classroom. All the “studios” had been cut out of the room into 8, 10 x 12 spaces with 10-foot tall walls open to the rest of the room and the skylights above.

It was better than living in our car, but when our parents came to visit. They freaked out. Together, they hatched a plan to get us into some kind of housing. We were about to get married, so they pooled resources and came up with a few thousand dollars to put down. We looked at condos, but there was a housing bubble. Everything was crazy expensive. Condos sold for twenty thousand dollars just a couple of years before but were eighty thousand dollars when we looked. My husband worked for a company near Cal-Arts, and I had a year left of school. Rent was expensive in the area. All we wanted was something small and affordable. We couldn’t find anything.

We finally looked into mobile homes. They were cheaper than renting an apartment, but the prices had gone up, too. The mortgage on a fifty-thousand-dollar loan plus space rent was still too much. But there was this one double-wide that was 20 grand. We could swing it.

I asked the realtor, “Why is this place so cheap?”

“The couple just want out of it fast.”

“Why?”

“Oh, uh…” he said, tugging at his tie and looking away. “They're getting a divorce.”

I knew he was hiding something. But this was before disclosure laws were passed requiring realtors to let buyers know when a house was haunted. The place had a weird vibe, but we were desperate, and hey, I had lived in many haunted locations. I had studied magick. I had crazy, intense psychic and paranormal experiences, and so had my husband. I figured we were up for it.