Arts

THE BAD ROOM: Residential hauntings in Malden and Somerville

As the author of seven historical-based ghost books including “13 Most Haunted Crime Scenes Beyond Boston,” I hear all sorts of stories about alleged hauntings throughout New England. One of my readers, Michael Marciello, reached out to me about a haunting from his childhood home in Malden. As a kid, he called the off-limits haunted bedroom “the bad room.” I got chills as he recounted tales of his father being pinned to the bed by an unseen force and sounds—he later described as evil and potentially demonic—echoing from a room that was unoccupied … at least by the living. His mother ended up putting a lock on the bedroom’s door so he and his siblings would stay away from the paranormally active first-floor room.”It was always so cold,” he said, recalling the inexplicable temperature fluctuations in the bad room. “We thought it was an animal,” he said, claiming that he would smell sulphur which is an indication of an evil entity. When I posted Marciello’s account on social media, sociologist Michelle Willms talked about her […]