Every year, I book an Airbnb, so my team and I can spend a couple of days together relaxing and reconnecting. We need a place with lots of bedrooms, plenty of beds, and enough space for everyone to decompress. I found what looked like the perfect spot, an inner-city mansion, beautifully decorated, modern, clean, and big enough for all of us. So we booked it.
From the outside, it looked perfect. But the second we stepped inside, the atmosphere felt wrong. It was one of those moments where your body registers danger before your mind can piece together why. The air felt heavy and thick. The house looked pristine, but it was like standing inside a held breath.
One of the women, who is extremely sensitive to energy, was sitting next to me and had a very odd expression on her face, and looked very uncomfortable. When I asked her what was going on, she said, “The house has really bad energy.” She was working on putting a positive, energetic bubble around all of us and spent a good amount of time that night holding it. While she was doing that, her car alarm continued to go off for no reason. Every time we would shut it off, it would start again, and it happened throughout the next 2 hours.
Later that night, our medium friend arrived and told us she had nearly been in three separate car accidents on her way there. “Something about this house didn’t want me here,” she said.
Before our reading, the medium walked through the house and did a light cleansing because she could feel something wrong, too. She went through each room, and in the ones that felt the worst, she closed off the doors. She only closed doors off in the basement and not in the rooms upstairs where most of us were sleeping.
We completed our reading, and the woman, who is very sensitive to energy, then said that she could not stay overnight in the house. She proceeded to leave with her friend, who was the medium and would return the next morning.
That left the rest of us to sleep there.
Originally, I had chosen a bedroom across the hall from the room I ended up in. It was at the front of the house, but once I lay down in it, I realized the street noise was too loud, so I switched rooms. At the time, it was a practical choice, but looking back, it felt eerie, as if I had been redirected into the back room for a reason.
The room I moved into had a black paneled wall, a low queen bed, a dim nightlight, and, at the end of the bed, an old crib. A crib that felt wrong, like something out of an abandoned asylum. Similar to the feeling I got when I was younger, when I had entered an abandoned house with a couple of friends. Inside that house were old toys and dolls and newspapers that just felt dense with horror in the way that they were preserved.
I tried to sleep, but the room’s energy felt targeted. It is almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced trauma or extreme emotional environments, but energy can feel physical, like weight on your chest, like being stared at in the dark. That room felt aware of me.
The house came with its own set of sounds. Being in the last room, next to the outside of the house, you could hear the water dropping from the rain outside and the wind in the trees.
I drifted in and out of sleep, caught in that strange place between dreaming and waking. In one of those moments, I had a vivid dream that someone was gripping my arm and dragging me across the mattress. I could feel my body sliding, my arm stretched forward, my shoulder straining.
I startled awake, heart pounding, and for a few seconds, I believed I had simply dreamt it. But then I realized I was actually bent forward in the middle of the bed, my body in the exact position from the dream. My arm was outstretched and almost reaching the other side of the bed, my shoulder was aching, and my left foot was completely numb—dead numb. Not the pins and needles of your foot falling asleep, but the complete lack of feeling in your foot that comes way past that point. As if the circulation had been cut off for way too long.
The collision between dream and waking reality was disorienting. I remember sitting there trying to understand how the exact thing I dreamed had physically happened to my body. It made no sense. The confusion was worse than the fear, because the dream had been too real, and waking up in the same position made me question what was a dream, and what was not.
Still half in shock, I reached for the side table, only to realize it was much farther away than It had been when I went to sleep. I pulled it closer, trying to make logical sense of what I was seeing.
The sounds in the room continued all night. And sometimes in the middle of the night, a new sound emerged. I sat and listened to the cadence, and once I realized it wasn't stopping, I got out of bed to peek out into the hall, where I felt the sound was coming from. But when I next heard the sound, it was behind me. I slowly shut the door, and turned around, and to my horror, I saw that the bed had been dragged away from the wall. A full two feet. I went to move it back and realized how heavy it was. It was an iron frame. There was no reality in which my body weight, shifting in sleep, could have pulled that bed across the floor.
In that instant, I knew the dream hadn’t been “just a dream.” Something had grabbed my left arm and my left leg and pulled me hard enough towards the crib that it moved the heavy iron bed as well.
I was over-exhausted and still continued to try to get to sleep with not much success.
Around three in the morning, too afraid to shut my eyes, I tried what my team member had done earlier, creating an energetic protective bubble around myself. The minute I imagined it, the pressure in the room lifted. It was like an invisible weight rolled off my body. I passed out instantly in sheer exhaustion.
Twenty or thirty minutes later, I woke again to that same suffocating heaviness. I rebuilt the bubble. The weight lifted again.
I repeated that cycle about six times:
bubble, relief, sleep, attack, bubble, relief, sleep.
I was fighting something I couldn’t see, something that kept coming back each time I let my guard down.
When morning finally arrived, I received an alert notice from my smartwatch that I had three outliers in my metrics. The data terrified me. My stress level was off the charts all night. My heart rate and respiration had also been elevated all night. My HRV, a number I track closely, had crashed to eighteen; it’s normally in the thirties. My body had not rested once.
Shaking, I went to see my team. Someone asked what was wrong, and I burst into tears. The kind that takes over your body without permission. I couldn't stay another night there; we were done with that house.
As I packed, one of the ladies came to help me, but the moment she stepped into my room, she froze. She said her hair stood on end, and she couldn’t stay another second.
I continued to pack while swearing at whatever was there, telling it I was leaving, slammed the door shut, and walked away shaking. I've never needed to be out of a house faster than I needed to be out of that one.
The teammate who had left the night before returned with sage, pepper, holy water, and everything she had. She cleansed each person and each bag at the door, and while she was doing it, she heard doorknobs shaking and doors shutting deeper inside the house.
Later, we learned what the house had been.
This house was an all-male transitional rehab residence for roughly thirty years.
To someone who has never stood inside a trauma building, that might mean nothing, but transitional rehab spaces are not neutral. These are places where people detox, break down, rage, hallucinate, scream, relapse, shake with withdrawal, and pour out decades of pain. They are places soaked with shame, abuse histories, childhood trauma, mental illness, and grief, and most likely even death.
Trauma does not vanish. It imprints. It layers. It saturates walls and floors, and air. A house like that becomes a container holding the emotional weight of hundreds of men who passed through it.
And there we were, a team of women, led by a woman CEO, stepping into that accumulated masculine trauma.
Earlier that same day, we had talked about misogyny and work. In hindsight, the symbolism was unnerving.
When I got home, I pulled up the Airbnb listing again. In the hallway image that reflects the doorway to the room I slept in, there is a mist in the reflection, clear once you notice it. And behind it, in the exterior door glass, vague shapes that look like faces.
When I slept at home the next night, everything was normal, no stress, no spikes, no terrors.
The comparison graph from midnight to 8 a.m. was unmistakable:
chaos at the Airbnb,
complete calm at home.
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The next day, I conferred with my team as well as the medium that had joined us, and a couple of extra spooky details arose. When the medium went through the house, she closed off three of the downstairs doors. Two by the entrance door, and another one at the bottom of the stairs, which was extra creepy due to the furnace being in there. When I left that day, I made sure that all the doors were open and saw that the bedroom at the bottom of the stairs had its door open. Confirming with my entire team, no one opened it.
The medium did not close any of the doors up top, however. When I spoke with my team, two of the girls who were sleeping in the upstairs room noted that every time they would come back to their room that night, their doors were shut. They took specific notice because they normally would keep their doors open.
That house wasn’t just haunted. It was angry. It didn't want us there. It especially didn't want our medium there, and it did everything it could to get us out of it.
