"I didn't move into this house thinking I was going to move into this house full of ghosts and write a haunted house novel," author Aimee Pokwatka, 45, told The Post. But that's exactly how things went.
In 2019, she and her husband, Jason Kyle, bought a Westchester home dating back to the 1750s for themselves and their two sons, then ages seven and nine.
With historical features like a "coffin door" -- leftover from the days when people held funerals in their living rooms -- a dangerously steep staircase in the back and an underground tunnel that cut through the property, the Lewisboro, NY, home was strange from the start. The idiosyncrasies were a selling point for Pokwatka.
"My dad, when I was growing up, was obsessed with Bob Villa," she said. "We watched 'This Old House' like it was our cartoons."
Then odd things started happening.
The radiators hissed like human voices and a creepy babydoll appeared in the yard. More than once, Pokwatka said, someone asked for napkins in the kitchen, and the right drawer just mysteriously popped open.
The novelist couldn't help but think, "What if a family moved into a house ... and failed to notice that the house was actually haunted?"
The result is the new horror novel "Accumulation" (out now; G.P. Putnam's Sons), which tells the story of a family besieged by paranormal visitors -- among other destabilizing marital dynamics -- after moving into the wife's dream home in an unnamed New York City suburb.
For the most part, Pokwatka and Kyle have enjoyed their home's quirks.
When the doll, with its dirty cheeks and lifeless eyes, appeared in the yard, it inspired a years-long game.
"We started hiding it for each other ... As one does, upon finding an obviously cursed object in one's yard," Pokwatka said with a laugh. "He would put it in my underwear drawer and I'd be like, 'now it's my turn' and I'd put it in the console of his car, or in the grill."
A similar doll plays an important role in her book.
A number of bizarre things have happened that neither she nor Kyle could take credit for.
Once, Pokwatka stepped out of her home office for a moment only to find her bookmark untied when she returned. Then, there was the day she started hearing music — "a cliche, childlike kind of music, like a music box or something" — trickling through the walls. Her husband heard it too, but they never figured out where it was coming from.
One evening, Pokwatka got out of bed to use the bathroom and saw something that made her shiver.
"It was late at night, I had been reading, my husband was snoring in bed beside me," she said. "I saw this silhouette, just a head and torso [on the wall].
"Even though I'm not even religious, I don't consider myself spiritual, I never believed in ghosts before, in that instant my brain was just like, 'that's a ghost,'" she said, describing the image as looking "like a photo negative."
"It felt so real, I ran into the bed, I pulled the covers up. I was convincing myself that this ghost couldn't hurt me."
But unlike her book's characters, who are terrorized by their ghosts, the novelist said that she and her family have no plans to leave their home. They're comfortable sharing space with ... whatever is behind the things they've seen and heard.
"I consider myself ghost agnostic," she said. "I don't have the bandwidth to understand what happens after we die."
More importantly, she said, is that "we never felt like we were being threatened or in danger."
After the various incidents, Pokwatka started exploring the history of the home and learned of its colorful backstory.
It was once owned by President John Tyler's first cousin. In the 1900's, it served as shared housing for the Italian workers who moved up to the region to build the dams. She found out about an infant boy, named Nehemiah, who had died on the property.
"That was the only confirmed death that I know of," Pokwatka said.
She even connected with one of the previous owners, who explained that she, too, had sensed a spiritual presence.
"At one point she had had a medium come to the house," Pokwatka said. "They said there were definitely ghosts, but they were all benevolent."
Once she started opening up about her experiences, Pokwatka realized that they were far from unusual in the small town of Lewisboro, a woodsy suburb with roots that go back to the Revolutionary War.
One neighbor admitted she'd seen a ghost in her 18th-Century farmhouse; another friend, who lives in a circa-1900's home, said she'd felt an otherworldly energy there, too.