We Bought a House — The Previous Owner Never Left !
A True Account from Mitchell & Renee Halberd, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
We were not the kind of people who believed in ghosts.
I want to make that clear from the start — because when I tell this story, people always assume we were. That we were the type of couple who burned sage and kept crystals on the windowsill and watched paranormal television on Friday nights. We weren’t. Mitchell was an engineer. I was a high school chemistry teacher. We believed in what we could measure, test, and prove.
We bought the house on Delacroix Street in the spring of 2019. Three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a wide covered porch, and a yard full of old oak trees with roots so thick and knotted they looked like the hands of something ancient pushing up through the ground. We loved it immediately.
The price drop should have given us pause.
It had been listed at $289,000. By the time our realtor, Sandra, showed it to us, it was sitting at $247,000 — and when we offered $245,000, the sellers accepted within two hours. No counter. No negotiation. Just: yes, please take it, please take it fast.
“Motivated sellers,” Sandra said brightly.
We signed the papers and moved in on a Saturday in April.
The footsteps started that first night.
Mitch and I were lying in bed — our mattress still on the floor because we hadn’t assembled the frame yet — surrounded by boxes, exhausted in the good way that comes from a day of lifting and carrying and building a new life. The house was quiet. Baton Rouge nights have their own soundtrack — frogs and cicadas and the distant hum of the city — but inside the house it was still.
Then we heard it.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Slow, deliberate footsteps. Heavy, the way an older person walks when their knees don’t cooperate — measured and careful, heel-to-toe, crossing what sounded like the room directly above our bedroom.
Mitch and I both sat up at exactly the same moment.
“That’s above us,” I said.
“We don’t have an above us,” Mitch said.
He was right. The house was a single-story ranch. There was no upstairs. There was no room above our bedroom — only the attic, which had a pull-down stair access in the hallway closet and which we had not yet opened.
Mitch grabbed his flashlight and went to check. He came back two minutes later.
“Nothing,” he said. “Attic door is still sealed. I didn’t even pull it down.”
“Settling,” I told myself. “Old house. Hot day, cool night. Wood expanding and contracting.”
We went back to sleep.
The footsteps came back at 3 AM.
Over the next two weeks, we catalogued what we came to call — with the detached language of people trying very hard not to be frightened — the disturbances.
The footsteps happened every night, between midnight and 3 AM, always moving in the same direction: across what would have been directly above our bedroom, toward what would have been above the hallway, then stopping.
The television in the living room turned on by itself four times. Always the same channel: a local news station. Always at low volume, like someone who didn’t want to wake anyone.
The back door, which we had deadbolted, was found unlocked on three separate mornings. Not open — just unlocked. As though someone had come in, found what they were looking for, and thoughtfully locked the handle on the way out but forgotten the deadbolt.
Our dog, Biscuit — a six-year-old beagle who had never shown anxiety in his life — refused to enter the hallway. He would walk to the edge of the living room carpet, look down the hallway toward the bedrooms, and simply stop. Every time. As though there was a wall there that only he could see.
And then there was the smell.
Old cigarette smoke. Not like someone had just smoked — like the smell was living inside the walls, in the plaster and the wood, years of it pressed into the bones of the house. It came and went with no pattern. Sometimes the whole hallway smelled of it. Other times it was concentrated, weirdly specific — a single corner of the master bedroom, as if someone were standing there, smoking, invisible.
I started researching.
The previous owner’s name was Harold Eugene Trosclair. He was seventy-seven years old.
He had lived in the house on Delacroix Street for forty-one years. He had moved in as a young widower with his two kids, raised them in that house, watched them leave one by one, and then lived alone there for the last nineteen years of his life — just Harold, his cigarettes, and whatever he watched on the local news at low volume so the neighbors wouldn’t complain.
He died in the house. In the master bedroom. In January of 2019 — three months before we bought it.
Natural causes, the public record said. He was found by his daughter, Celeste, who lived in Shreveport and drove down when he stopped returning her calls.
I found Celeste on Facebook. I debated for a week before I messaged her. When I finally did, I kept it vague — I told her we had bought the house and wanted to know a little about its history, about Harold, because we wanted to honor the space.
She called me within an hour.
She cried for the first ten minutes of our conversation. Not because she was sad — or not only because she was sad — but because of what I told her. The footsteps. The television. The back door.
“That’s Daddy,” she said, with complete certainty. “He walked like that. Slow. Bad knees. He’d get up in the night because he couldn’t sleep and walk to the kitchen for water, then back to bed. Every night. Forty years.”
“The television—” I started.
“Channel 9,” she said. “Local news. He always said he liked to know what was happening in the city before he went to sleep. He kept the volume low because he said loud televisions were rude.”
I had never told her the channel.
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
“The back door,” I said quietly. “Why the back door?”
Celeste was quiet for a moment. “He used to go out to the backyard at night to smoke,” she said. “After my mother died, he promised her he’d quit, but he never could. So he’d go out back, under the oaks, so the smoke wouldn’t get in the house. He was always worried about the smell. He’d go out, smoke one cigarette, and come back in.” She paused. “He always forgot the deadbolt.”
We don’t fully understand what we’re living with on Delacroix Street.
But here is what we’ve decided: Harold Trosclair spent forty-one years loving that house, and we think — we genuinely believe — that some part of him hasn’t found a reason to leave it yet.
We’ve stopped being frightened. Mostly.
We leave the television on Channel 9 sometimes, at low volume, before we go to bed. We leave the back door unlocked some nights — just the deadbolt, just for a little while.
It feels like the right thing to do.
It feels like being a good neighbor.
And Biscuit finally walks down the hallway now. He just stops sometimes, tail wagging, looking up at something we can’t see in the corner of the master bedroom.
We’ve learned not to look.
Some presences aren’t here to frighten you.
Some of them are just home.
Mitchell and Renee Halberd still live in the house on Delacroix Street. They’ve repainted the porch, planted a garden under the oaks, and hung a photo of Harold Trosclair — found in a box left in the attic — in the hallway. They say the footsteps have slowed. They take that as a good sign.
