Phantom Touches

The following stories are together, because they are short, and there are a few of them. None of them frightened me, though the first one did surprise me, as I didn't expect it to happen.

In my hometown, there is a block of flats that used to be a hospital. I knew nothing of this, when I first moved in in December 1996. I didn't even know it was haunted, either.

Anyway, in the summer of '97, I was standing in my living room, just staring at the fridge, when something or someone grabbed my arm for a few seconds. Now, the only other person in the room with me was my then boyfriend, and as he was standing at a distance from me and on my right. It wasn't him, but just to be sure, I asked him. He denied grabbing my arm. That surprised me, but it didn't scare me.

Two years later, I abandoned that flat, and moved to a different area, because of something that happened to me from a living person, and in 2000, I moved into a private rented two bed terraced house.

That same evening, or it might've been the next evening, I went out. As I sat on a stool in a pub, minding my own business, I met someone. His name was Dave. We started talking, and we seemed to share interests and stuff. We started going out, and to cut a long story short, one October evening, we were sitting on his sofa, cuddling up, and I had a strange thought about him. My thought was: 'you're going to die'. I didn't say it out loud, but the following month, November, he went missing. No one knew where he was; they later found his body in the canal. He'd drowned.

The next year, 2001, as I was sitting in my living room, doing nothing, I suddenly felt a hand stroke the back of my head. I like to think it was Dave, and I'm sure it was him. He used to call me 'chuckles'.

Two years after that, in 2003, his cat, Baby died. I'm not sure what happened to her. All I know is, she was out and didn't come home. I didn't think of her as my cat. I thought of her as Dave's cat. Anyway, I found her body on the pavement, on a corner, near where I lived. I took her home, and buried her, and one day, as I sat watching television, and all the kittens playing, I felt a paw touching my arm. That was Baby, as she used to do that when she lived, to get my attention. None of the other cats/kittens reacted.

Just recently, in the last year or so, I have felt someone poking my shoulder from behind. I shrugged this off as muscle twitches, but I still had to look over my shoulder just to make sure no one is there. And tonight, I felt a hand on my elbow, as if steadying me (I'd leaned over a chair arm to plug something in to charge). It was only a secondary thing, and no one was in the room with me. My friend had gone out to the Chinese takeaway for our tea.

Thank you for reading my story. I will be interested to read your comments.