Haunted Condo

I decided after posting my first story, I would just tell my stories in chronological order. If you read my previous story, you know that the house I grew up in was haunted and that I believe that a lot of the paranormal activity originated with my father (who is not a nice person).

So this story takes place in 2001. My then fiance (now husband) and I were living in a small town north of the Bay Area in California. We were unsure of what we were going to do now that we had both finished college. This was a temporary living situation. We were in the process of planning our wedding and after the wedding we'd be moving somewhere more permanent.

My father allowed us to live in one of his condominium complexes he built and owns (he's a real-estate developer). We still had to pay rent, but it was cheaper than where we were currently living.

The way this condo was laid out felt weird. Neither my husband nor myself liked it. The first floor you walked into was just a very small entrance that led directly up to the second level. Basically, you came in the front door (or the garage door) and walked up to the main living area. At the top of the stairs was a bathroom door that had inlaid frosted glass. Once you were on the second floor, you had the kitchen and family room area. The next staircase went up to the third floor which had one master bedroom, one spare bedroom, and one bathroom with the washer and dryer. When you go up that staircase it had a half-wall on one side so that you could have more light. This condo unit was a middle unit and pretty dark, even with the various windows.

The minute we stepped in there we felt *off*. At this point we had no other choice except to live with one of our parents. My house that I grew up in was OUT of the question and my husband's parents lived in a small condo themselves, so they had no room. This was our best, most affordable option until we were able to get married and figure out what we were doing and where we were going.

At this time I had 3 cats. All of which had acted normally, were social and fine in our previous apartment. However, in this condo they were spooked. One of them actually just hid the entire time. She never came out.

We tried to brush off the feelings of oddness as just the condo having a weird layout and it being a new place. I should have known since my father had a hand in building them that this place was going to be awful.

The condo was always dark no matter how much light we tried to let in. My cats were spooked and uneasy and my husband and I fought A LOT there. We had been together 3 years and got along great and now we were fighting all the time. I was looking for work and he was commuting to a larger city while we were planning our wedding. It was a stressful time, but I think the condo just added to it.

Neither one of us said anything at first about feeling uncomfortable. My husband is a solid guy. Nothing bothers him. He's not easily spooked. He's very logical and rational and doesn't let his emotions or imagination get the best of him. But he felt weird in this place. He didn't confide any of his feelings to me at first because he didn't want to scare me. He knew how sensitive I was and how awful my home was growing up, so he didn't want to play into any fears I already had.

At first we just had the feeling of being watched all the time. We never felt alone in that condo. But what finally got us to conclude that there was something paranormal going on was what was happening to us and more so, what was happening to me. I became severely depressed and suicidal. My husband was scared to go work because he thought he'd come home and find me dead. That's how bad off I was. I was having a hard time finding a job so I spent the majority of my day at home, alone. I was looking for jobs, sending out resumes, making phone calls, planning wedding appointments with vendors...etc. I tried to keep myself busy. But the more that time went on the more depressed I got. I couldn't make sense out of it. I had gotten my degree, I was marrying a man I loved, our future was laying ahead of us. I had no reason to be so depressed.

Then things started happening beyond feeling stared at and me being depressed. My cat, who was really more like a dog (traveled well, social, and she fetched) started acting VERY weird. We used to have this game with her where we'd throw her favorite toy and she'd go running after it and bring it back--Just like a dog playing fetch. In our old apartment she would to this for a solid hour until she got tuckered out. So one evening we were sitting on our couch playing fetch with our cat and the toy got flung halfway up the staircase going to the third floor. My cat's instincts kicked in and she started to run after her toy until she came to a dead halt about three stairs up. She froze, stared up towards the ceiling, her hair raised and she slowly backed down the stairs and left her toy. My husband and I just looked at each other like WTF?!

I went and got the toy and threw it somewhere else. She wouldn't fetch it. She just kept staring at the staircase. After that event, she never went upstairs again unless one of us went with her, and even then we had to coax her. When she was up there, she'd sit on the half-wall ledge and just stare up at the ceiling.

Of all the places in the condo, the third floor felt the worst. The second level sucked, but the third level was the worst. We both felt like we were being watched while in the shower. When we were on the third floor we'd hear sounds coming from the second floor or first floor. No matter what floor we were on, we heard sounds coming from somewhere else.

I never saw anything except one time and it was in the bathroom on the second level that was at the top of the staircase from the ground floor. I was in there with the door closed and through the frosted glass I saw a person walk past the door. I was home alone. There is no way anyone else was there. After I got out of the bathroom, I searched the condo, but found no one.

Things started escalating from there. Being watched, the fighting, my cat refusing to fetch, one cat flat out never coming out from hiding, my severe depression. It was just boiling up.

Then one morning, I'm lying in bed still asleep (my husband left at about 6am for work so I was home alone) and I felt my bed shake. It was the kind of shake that feels like when your pet is on your bed and it's scratching itself--that fast-paced vibrating jiggle. Naturally, I thought it was one of my cats, so I moved my leg down to nudge it so it would stop shaking the bed and when I did I felt nothing. The shaking stopped and I just figured my cat jumped down. I went back to sleep.

The next morning, my husband left for work and the bed shaking starts again. This time I sit up to nudge the cat and no one is there. This time I wrote it off as some small California earthquake. The odd thing was nothing else was moving or shaking or making a noise. Just the bed shook. But, again, I was trying to just be logical.

The next morning, same thing, except this shake was strong. This was no cat jiggling the bed. It felt like someone was standing at the foot of the bed and just kicking the crap out of the mattress. I flung back my covers and ran down the stairs. I called my husband at work and told him what was going on. This NEVER happened when he was at home with me. The bed never shook when he was in it. He believed me, but didn't know what to do except offer comfort and try to get home as soon as he was able.

My depression started morphing into sheer terror. I refused to go upstairs unless my husband was with me and even then I was so scared I started sleeping with the lights on. But that wasn't doing any good. We ended up moving the bed to the spare bedroom (that had been the office) and moving the office to the master bedroom. No good. The bed didn't shake in there, but I was still terrified. I was sleeping with the lights on and music playing. But I just never slept. I just felt like I was being watched and like something was circling the bed. My husband felt like there was something there and he was creeped out, but like I said, he just doesn't really get scared.

We tried saging the house and things calmed down a bit, but it never fully went away.

I was so exhausted from never getting to sleep at night that I laid down on the couch to rest one day during the middle of the day. I kind of went into this deep sleep. My husband calls it "death sleep" because you're so far under you're beyond regular sleep. So I was in this deep sleep but it felt like I was awake. I'd later find out I was astral projecting to a certain degree. But I was sleeping and I thought I had woken up and I sat up on the couch. I looked at the staircase and standing halfway up the staircase was a man. A young white man... Late teens, early 20s. He was in jeans and a plaid shirt. He had brown hair. He said nothing and I sat there frozen in fear staring at him. Then the room fell away and I'm in the woods and here's this young man and I watch him hang himself from a tree branch with a noose. It was *right* where my staircase is. At that point I screamed and woke up.

Then everything just clicked--Why I felt so depressed and suicidal, why my cat was afraid of the stairs, why she'd stare at the ceiling.

I don't know why this young man felt the need to kick my bed except for the fact that maybe he wanted to tell me his story?

But seeing this didn't make me feel any better. All I knew now was that my condo was being haunted by a young man who had killed himself. I scoured county records and newspapers to see if I could find any information on a man who had hung himself, but I found nothing.

I contacted my father and asked him what used to be on the property before the condos were built. He said "Eh, it was all forest and there was a stream running through it. We diverted the stream and now it runs through a tunnel under all of the condos."

My father, having no respect for the environment and only looking to make a profit, completely shifted the natural landscape of this stream so that it ran underground, cut down all the trees, and plopped condos on them.

Fortunately, we moved out a couple months later. Our total time at that condo was 11 months, but it felt like so much longer.

On our last day there, the final thing we packed up was our computer desk and computer (which was still in the master bedroom). I'm sitting there with my husband and he's leaning on the desk reading something over my shoulder and the desk shook violently. I looked at him and said "Did you feel that?!" He said "Yes. I sure did." I cried and told him that's what the bed had been doing.

I'm assuming it was our final goodbye from the young man that hung himself.

We packed up and moved across the country far away from my father and California.