A Bizarre Haunting

I never imagined that I would experience anything paranormal! To me, they only happened to other people, never realizing that they would occur to me. I have always read/ watched ghost stories, real or fictitious, enjoying that tingling sensation of fear after the story ended. But when it happened to me, I just did not know what to do.

In June 2001, my husband and I relocated from Kansas City, Missouri, to Tulsa, Oklahoma. My husbands company helped us choose a nice apartment from quite a big list. I fell in love with the site where the apartment complex was located. It was right next to the Arkansas River, surrounded by greenery and an amazing array of wild birds. We were shown a model apartment of the type that I wanted. We loved the layout and signed the deal.

The next day I told my husband I wanted to physically see the apartment we are renting. So back we went to the management office and asked for the keys. They were a bit put out, saying that it had just been vacated and was being cleaned, but I insisted and we were escorted to the building. This was on the third floor, and once inside, I felt really scared. The whole place had a look of being deserted for a long time, with HUGE black cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. I suffer from acute arachnophobia and this freaked me out! However, management assured that everything would be clean before our possession (I am sure they lied to us when they said it had just been vacated.)

In the beginning everything was fine. My husband had an early morning shift and would leave home by 4:30 am. After bolting the door, I would just go back to sleep. After about a month later, strange things started. Once I came back to bed in the morning, the blinds behind my bed would start swinging making a clacking noise that plastic blinds make. It was strange since only 2-3 blind would do it (right behind my head) and not the whole thing and would always start at the same time, like 4:45 am. I didn't realize it at first but I would get out of bed, turn the ac vent the other way, check if there was a heavy wind outside (not a leaf stirred in the trees!) However, I didn't think much about it.

Then a weird thing happened! One morning I was asleep, when subconsciously I felt someone feeling my arms, legs and face. It was as if a blind person was feeling someone just to see what that person looked like. I was so scared when I woke up fully and still felt that tingling sensation of touch on my ankles. When the sun was up, I dismissed it as a bad dream and went on with my daily chores. However, from then on, somehow I didn't feel alone in the house. And of course, after my husband left, I always left the lights on and never stayed in the dark.

Things were normal for quite a few months when strange things started. These would invariably happen when my husband was at home and always when we were sleeping. We would hear the dishes in the kitchen crashing down and breaking, making an awful sound. Thinking it were mice we would run to the kitchen, and find everything as we left them! Confused, we would blame it on the apartment next door to our bedroom for creating a ruckus. This happened multiple times (we later found out the apartment next door was unoccupied).

The next bizarre thing always happened in the fireplace. Once, a small bird had fallen down the chimney and its fluttering had spread old soot throughout the living room. To prevent such an incident, I had covered the opening of the fireplace with a thick transparent plastic sheet. From time to time, the plastic would bellow and flutter like as if a bird was trapped inside. Likewise, we would wake up, run like crazy to the living room to save the poor bird, and of course, there is no bird (and also there would be no wind outside).

The third weird thing that happened went on for months. Any kitchen knick knacks, like knives or scissors that my husband touched would disappear overnight! I always blamed him for being careless and untidy and he always denied it. But none of us actually realized that whatever was in the apartment was playing pranks with us. In fact, we still did not realize its presence. Whatever was in the house, just didn't like my husband at all!

In all the passing months, I still did not understand that our home was haunted. Like I said, it always happened to others... Then one afternoon in October, I was alone and reading at the dining table, when someone breathed down the back of my left shoulder. I was petrified! Just put my book down, got up, and left the apartment and wouldn't enter until my husband came home. But I didn't tell him anything.

From then on, I started sleeping less and less at night until I was suffering from insomnia. I would read or watch TV all night and only go to bed when the sun was up. Once I woke up around 10am, I left the apartment as soon as I could and started spending more and more time outside. It was not as if I felt threatened but feeling a presence and someone watching me at all times just unnerved me. I thought about changing apartments, but we would have had to pay a huge penalty as was in the rent clause. All this time, my husband knew nothing about it, since he was under a lot of pressure at work. All this time I would be wary in the evening and shrug it off in the morning as my hallucinations.

The living room and the kitchen was one big open area with just a 3 ft wall separating the two. The kitchen led off to the dining area where there was a door to the patio. In the living room, if I faced the TV, the kitchen would be in front of me and I could watch the patio door from the corner of my right eye. One January morning, around 2:30am, I was watching TV as usual in the living room. I just saw a movement, and I turned and was frozen in sheer terror! I saw a being, silvery white like a glowing thick fog, enter through the patio door, glide into the dining area, then into the kitchen about fifteen feet away from me. When it was momentarily hidden by the refrigerator, I shouted who is it? In fact, I was fully expecting it to come across the refrigerator towards me but thankfully nothing happened! I just sat there for a few more minutes, legs totally like jelly, with my mouth wide open, scared out of my wits. After some time, I ran to the bedroom, and plopped down by my sleeping husband, absolutely relieved that he was home. Needless to say, I still didn't tell him anything in the morning, and as usual dismissed it as a figment of my imagination and watching too much TV.

During this time, the sounds of the crashing dishes and the billowing in the fireplace still continued. They never happened when we were in the living room. And I continued to deny things to myself.

A couple of months later, I was tired for keeping so many late nights and my health deteriorated. I called it a night around 1:30 am. We had a spare bedroom leading off from the living room on the left side. While passing this room, I saw a black shrouded figure standing just inside the doorway. I just didn't stop to see but hurried to the bedroom and collapsed. As usual, in the morning in woke up and dismissed it too.

However, here comes a twist in the story...

The night before, I was cleaning out the kitchen and had left the lid off the flour bin by mistake. When I woke up in the morning and went into the kitchen, the first thing I noticed was the flour bin on the kitchen counter with the lid off. Glancing inside the bin, I saw a strange impression on the flour. It looked exactly like as if someone had taken a cross section of a nautilus fossil the size of the bin and pressed it into the flour for a totally flawless impression. I blinked a few times to reassure myself that I was not imagining it. There wasn't anything like that with us and the impression was too neat and flawless to have been drawn by hand. The only explanation that I could muster was that whatever was in the apartment was sending a sign saying that it existed and didn't want to be ignored...

Thank you all for reading my really long story. Many years later I met a psychic and I recounted the whole tale to her. She told me that the being was a lady (I could not tell the gender when I saw it only it was quite husky) and she was actually protecting me. According to her, the sign in the flour was a protection sign for me sent by the spirit. She did not like my husband and so anything he touched in my personal area (i.e. Kitchen) disappeared. Also, she didn't like to see us together, hence the crashing dishes and the fireplace sounds. It would be appropriate to mention that my husband turned out to be a very unsatisfactory person, and shortly afterwards I was divorced.

A few end notes:

In the middle of my ramblings, I had mentioned all the kitchen knick knacks my husband touched would disappear. When we moved again, the packers found all the missing knives and scissors laid out in a neat row in ascending order under some piles of grocery bags in a closet which we never used!

When we were moving, our neighbour next door (on the living room side) came in to say goodbye to me. We were never close but civil to each other. In fact, she confirmed what I had experienced was real and not a figment of my imagination. In her words: "How could you live in there with that Thing? It was always coming through your living room to my living room all the time!"

All I can say, is I was glad that I didn't need to spend another night there!