Ghost Story In China 4

As always, if you have spare time, please read my stories before this one to have some clearer accounts of my situation.

I moved to my first apartment in Beijing at my second year, in the middle of Beijing's super hot summer. Indeed, it was the hottest summer I've ever felt, it even reached 45 Celsius degrees for a few days.

My apartment was located in an old building with thirteen floors (bad number, right?). I lived in the ninth floor. To reach my room, you have to pass a long corridor, turn left, turn right, turn left again, and reach the door at the very end; that's the place. Many people who came for first time ended up lost their way in the maze-like corridor and called me to pick them up. Some, especially the girls, did not have enough courage to brace the dark, menacing corridor at night.

The corridor was long, with smooth grey stone floor, old antique windows with dirty iron railing, dull obsolete walls with the paint peeled off in some places. Some of my friends told me that they felt like walking in an old, creepy hospital's corridor when they walked in that corridor. Plus, the lamps were the yellow lamp that only lit when their censor sensed a loud sound (from the footsteps, I guess), and I need to say that the censors were extremely stupid. Often, I had to stomp my feet as hard as I could to make them lit. So you could see how creepy it is, when you walk in a long dull corridor with darkness in front you, in the middle of the night, not knowing whatever may stand behind you, a week after you actually knew somebody died in the building.

Yeah, a week after I moved, I went home one night around ten to find a hearse in front of my apartment. I waited the elevator, and when it opened, two men were dragging a bunch of sacks with God only knows what inside, and a bunch of funeral flowers. I stepped alone inside and imagine the creeping fear I felt, smelling the flower's scent inside. But that was not an important point to my story, though it did make my friends, already unwilling, more opposed to come to my home after hearing it.

One night, when I was sleeping, I woke up in the middle of the night (I am a light sleeper and rarely have a sound sleep) and saw a girl in white sitting on the edge of my bed. In a flash, she vanished, but it was enough to make me turn on the lights and slept with it on for months.

Often, when I did Skype video call with my friends in Indonesia, they had to cut the call quickly after witnessing the white clothed girl walking back and forth behind me, and I was sitting on my bed with my laptop placed on a desk (my room was small), and my bed was moored to the wall, so no place for walking. But they saw her walking BEHIND me. After a while, nobody besides my parents wanted to Skype with me as long as I still stay in that room.

I had three housemates, all of them boys. We had three bedrooms, one double and two singles. Two boys slept in the big room with two beds that had in-bathroom. My door was opposite to the outer bathroom, and beside the bathroom, just facing the living room was the other boy's room.

In this boy's room, let's call him Ed, stayed two ghosts, one grown-up man and one a little lad. I had two friends coming down one day at 3 AM (don't ask why it was 3 AM), and Ed wasn't in the room (the three guys played DotA in the nearby internet cafe almost every night until morning, leaving me alone in the night most of the time). Now, we always let our doors open when no one is in the room. We could see clearly a little boy squatting just beside Ed's computer desk, next to the window (the room's lights was off but there was enough light from outside to see him). They freaked out and I had to close the door until Ed came home.

We, the inhabitants, didn't get bothered by them anyway, and Ed developed a habit of saying, "Hi dudes!" out loud and waving his hand as if he was greeting someone invisible in his room every time he came home. Guess we just got used to it. But they had paid their tribute to me one day because I never greet them. I was sleeping in Ed's room one afternoon, with a friend. I've mentioned I'm a light sleeper, and rather insomniac, so it usually takes an hour or two to sleep after I lay on bed. When I was getting very sleepy, like, the state when you know in the next five minutes you'll go under, I felt a hand gripped my face. I had my eyes closed, and couldn't open it because of the grip. It was very rude, and I was angry instead of freaked out because of the harsh treatment. So I shouted in my heart, "Cut the crap! I'm very sleepy so let me sleep! Go bother someone else." After that, the pressure was gone.

Our bathroom outside also had an invisible inhabitant. My front door was never locked when somebody's at home, so our friends used to come and go as they pleased without knocking. There was this particular guy who was very close to us, you could say he was our half-housemate since he spent most of his nights sleeping in my or Ed's room (I'm a girl but I'm okay with sleeping with a guy friend as long as he doesn't grope me). He came one day when I was playing laptop in my room (well we never knocked the bedroom's door also, we are very free people anyway), and asked if someone else was in the house. I replied no, I was alone, and asked why? He said he saw someone was stooping in front of the toilet (the bathroom door was half open, he said) but he could not see who. We came out of the room and checked, but the door was wide open. He swore it was only half opened before, and he was not a weak-nerved man, and did not tell lies.

The incidents did not stop there. Once, my housemate (call him Eric) came to my room and asked did I hurt my head again, which made me confused. He told me just ten minutes ago he heard I screamed "Oww!" from the bathroom, and thought that I slipped and hit the bathroom's floor (I am very clumsy and careless, and has twice fell like that in the bathroom). But I had been sitting on my bed playing laptop for two hours straight, and never went to the bathroom, let alone slipped.

There were small incidents as well, such as the lights turned on and off by themselves; I once slept with my lights on one night, and it was turned off when I woke up, and it happened at the summer vacation where my three housemates went on vacation to Guilin, and I was alone in the house. Doors also closed on their own sometimes though the windows were all closed, sound of water running in the middle of the night, and the most hilarious part was, sometimes, at night, we could smell the scent of pizza or burgers or fries from our kitchen. We even joked that the ghost must be a westerner, not Chinese ghost.

Guess we got used to them overtime, and even thought of them as our invisible "housemates."

I stayed there only for a year, and changed apartment. My new apartment is clean from ghosts, and my friends are no longer afraid to Skype with me.

Next, I will write about my kumanthong (those from Thailand should know what it is).