If you’ve ever felt like your home wasn’t quite as empty as it should be, you’ll likely find the latest video from Utah-based true crime podcaster Crime With Kourt particularly chilling. Usually, she’s busy breaking down complex crime cases, but in a recent post on TikTok that has already racked up over 700,000 views, she decided to pull back the curtain on her experiences growing up in a house in Yakima, Washington.
She stated that her story begins back in 2008 when her family moved into a small, older home built in 1935. While the house needed plenty of work, they were initially just happy to have a place of their own near her grandparents. That excitement didn’t last long, though.
She recalls, “From the second we got the keys to this place, we all kind of had the same feeling about the basement that it was creepy and no one should go down there.” The basement door featured a slide lock on the outside and, even more unsettling, the inside was painted in primary colors with scratch marks, as if someone had been trapped down there.
Things escalated quickly after they moved in
She describes waking up their first morning to find a “rotten tooth” in the bathroom sink that didn’t belong to any of them. Her animals were a major indicator of the paranormal activity, as they would often sit in a circle and stare at the basement door, with the cats hissing and the dog growling. Her grandmother, who lived next door, even heard a sound in her ear that reminded her of the movie The Grudge.
One notable segment of her 23-minute-long story involves a time she was home alone at age 12 or 13. She heard the front door open and what sounded like her mother walking down the hall and slamming a purse down.
She called out “hey mom” and heard a “quick hey” in response. When she looked out the window, she saw her mother’s car just pulling into the driveway. She realized, “That entire time she wasn’t home yet whoever answered me and said hey sounded exactly like my mom.”
Kourt noted that the activity wasn’t limited to auditory hallucinations. She recounts a moment in her bedroom when she was taking mirror selfies and noticed a “cloud of black smoke” moving from one photo to the next, eventually obscuring her face.
In another instance, she found a photo on her iPad where a transparent, hollow-faced figure resembling a little boy appeared to be creeping out of her sister’s room. She also describes a night where she heard “crazy hysterical laughing” coming from the living room that sounded like something straight out of a horror movie.
Her audience was quick to express how unsettled they felt, especially about her audio and editing choices. User @Suzie commented, “Its 3:36 am why would you play that sound,” while @Anonymous_Girl added, “why would you play that noise 😭😭😭.” Others, like @Kathleen, offered support, saying, “GIRL WE BELIEVE YOU. WE DIDN’T NEED AUDIO DEMONSTRATIONS. 😭😂.”
Meanwhile, @pavlovanpakanat pointed out a cultural connection, noting, “The story at 7:22 sounds like what we call etiäinen in Finland :D. It’s a visible doppelgänger, sound or premonition that precedes someone’s arrival or an event that is about to happen.”
When asked by @youbaldough if her grandparents had ever spoken to the previous owners, Kourt replied, “We did know the previous owners!! Well kind of. It was (I think) a single mom and her son. They didn’t have an easy go at life! But I don’t know what happened to them once they moved out.”
At the end of her storytime, she mentioned that even after moving out in 2017, the house made her feel unsafe in every place she has lived since. As @Givemescary bluntly put it, “You just f—ed up my night, thank you though 😭.”
TikTok is filled with the stories of unexplainable situations. Recently, TikToker Dylan Peroutka shared his spooky experiences as the sole resident at a haunted cabin in California’s Big Sur. Not long before that, Ellie took to TikTok to share that she has been hearing voices and seeing shadow figures in her house.
Published: Jun 22, 2026 12:29 pm