She Fell Alone and No One Came: Investigating the Haunting of Fayes House
“Some of the sounds we explained — building that old talks at night. But a few things came through that I couldn't walk away from without flagging, and the staircase was the center of all of it.”
— Jason Hawes
Some locations carry a weight you feel before you ever pull out a single piece of equipment. The Fayes House — now operating as the Rechic retail store — is one of those places. The story goes that a woman fell down the stairs here and wasn't found for days, and ever since, people have reported unexplained sounds, strange activity, and the persistent, unsettling feeling that something else is in the room with them.
I want to be clear about something before I get into what we found: I don't walk into any location looking for a ghost. I walk in looking for an explanation. That's been my approach since the early days of TAPS, and it's the only approach I trust. So when we pulled up to the Fayes House, I wasn't thinking about the woman who allegedly fell down those stairs. I was thinking about the building — its age, its layout, its history — and what could realistically be causing the experiences people have been reporting.
The story itself is a tragic one. A woman fell on the staircase inside this house and, for whatever reason — whether she lived alone, whether no one thought to check — she wasn't discovered for several days. That kind of event leaves a mark on people who hear about it. And I'll be honest with you: sometimes the story itself is the haunting. Fear is powerful. Suggestion is powerful. When someone tells you a place is haunted before you walk through the door, your brain starts filling in the blanks. Creaking wood becomes footsteps. A draft becomes a presence. My job is to separate what's actually happening from what the mind is constructing.
What we documented during our overnight investigation was a mixed bag, and I mean that in the most honest way possible. There were unexplained sounds — knocking and what sounded like movement in areas of the building where no one was stationed at the time. We logged those carefully, checked for structural causes, HVAC activity, rodent activity, anything that could account for it. Some of it we were able to explain. Older buildings settle, especially at night when temperatures drop and materials contract. A few of the sounds, though, we weren't able to immediately source. That doesn't mean they're paranormal — it means we didn't find the cause that night. There's a difference, and it's an important one. We also documented what some members of the team described as a feeling of being watched in certain areas near the staircase. I take those subjective experiences seriously as data points, but I don't treat them as evidence on their own. A feeling is a starting point, not a conclusion.
The staircase itself — the focal point of the tragedy — was something I paid particular attention to. Structurally, it's the kind of steep, narrow staircase you find in older homes, the kind that genuinely is dangerous, especially in poor lighting. I mention that not to be dismissive of what people have experienced here, but because context matters. If someone unfamiliar with the space felt uneasy near those stairs, or heard something they couldn't explain, understanding the physical reality of that space is part of finding the truth. We ran our full equipment sweep throughout the night, documenting temperature fluctuations, electromagnetic readings, and audio. A few anomalies came through that I'd want to review more carefully before drawing any conclusions from them. Nothing that made me say definitively, yes, there is something here — but nothing that let me walk out and say the place is completely clean either.
The Fayes House left me with more questions than answers, and in this field, that's actually a meaningful result. I'm not ready to call it haunted, and I'm not going to dismiss what people have experienced here. What I can tell you is that the investigation is ongoing in my mind, and the evidence we captured deserves a closer look. You watch the footage, you look at what we found, and you decide for yourself — that's always been the deal.