By Donna.
Haunted House.
My family and I moved into a two-story house in Cordell, Oklahoma, in 1978. When family friends found out we were buying the house on Magnolia Street, they begged my parents not to, warning them it was haunted. My father did not believe them, and we moved in anyway. Strange things began to happen soon after.
We are a large family, and through the years, as many as 10 of us lived there, including my parents, my siblings, and two young nephews.
The first strange event happened one day while my father was working in the yard. Suddenly, he stomped into the house, angry, and demanded to know why no one would pick up my crying nephew, who had just been born. We just looked at him like he was crazy and showed him that the baby was fast asleep. Dumbfounded, he returned to the yard but later told us he kept hearing the baby’s cries as soon as he went outside. However, my nephew was fast asleep.
On another occasion, while my father was drinking coffee at the kitchen table, he looked up at the staircase and saw a woman with long brown hair staring down at him. Immediately, he called my mom over, and she saw the same mysterious woman.
Odd things often occurred in the kitchen. For example, when my mom and sister were having coffee before work, a dish drainer full of dishes suddenly lifted itself off the counter, crashed to the floor, and shattered all the glass. Mom said she guessed they didn’t like the dishes cluttering the counter.
Once, when Mom got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, she had to pass through the kitchen. There, she saw a woman standing at the kitchen sink. Thinking that if she ignored her, the woman would go away, Mom passed by the apparition and continued to the bathroom. However, when she reached the bathroom door, she felt a hand on her shoulder and heard, “What the hell do you want?” When she turned around, the woman was gone.
My sister often reported that she felt something sleeping with her every night. At first, she thought it was my younger brother getting cold at night and curling up at the foot of the bed. But one night, when something pulled the blankets off her children, she reached down to pull them back up, and though nothing was there, she could see an imprint where someone or something had been on the bed.
Every night, my mom could hear a baby falling down the stairs and hitting the kitchen floor, crying all the way down.
We determined that several spirits were haunting the house, including two women, two men, and the crying baby. The other woman who often appeared was a gray-haired old lady who my brothers said was extremely evil, so much so that one brother took to sleeping outside, regardless of the weather.
The two men generally just passed through, making no fuss or racket. On one such occasion, when Mom was sitting in the living room watching television, she looked up at the back door and saw a cowboy standing there. When she got up to ask why he was there, he had disappeared.
Finally, we gave up. The house was demolished in 1988, and workers found an eight-inch-thick abstract of the land dating back to the 1700s in its walls. The walls also contained old newspapers and a pair of antique hook-and-eye lady’s boots. These were donated to the Cordell Museum in Cordell, Oklahoma. Today, the land stands vacant, with only the cellar remaining to testify that a house ever stood.
Submitted March 2005, updated March October 2026.
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