I've lived in a couple of places where strange things have happened. The most recent was my last apartment that I lived in for a year, back in 2001. It was an small, old apartment building located at the end of a dead end street.
I moved in with my dad, my brother and my boyfriend at the time. Everything was fine at first. But we slowly began to notice that the atmosphere of the apartment felt oppressive. It just felt stifling and heavy there. Like, the air of the apartment just seemed very oppressive and heavy. And it never felt like home. When you first move into a new place, it takes some getting used to but eventually you acclimate and it feels like home, like "your" home. This apartment never felt like that.
There were a number of incidents that happened there that I can't explain. A few times, there was a loud pounding on the screen door at the entrance of our building (we lived on the 2nd floor). One time it happened at 10:00 PM and the second time it happened at 5:00 AM.
The first time it happened, I was hanging out with some friends when we heard a loud banging on the front door to my building. My dad went downstairs to see who it was but there was no one there. He went out into the small front yard and even down to the driveway and around back. He found no one. The second time it happened my boyfriend and I were up (we were serious night owls) and laying in bed, talking, when suddenly we heard the same really loud banging on the downstairs front door. It scared us because it was so loud and sudden. We peered through our window down onto the front porch, but there was no one there. There was this little awning that hung over where the front door was, so obviously we couldn't see under it from where we were.
My boyfriend said, "I'm going to go downstairs and check it out." I pleaded with him not to but he went downstairs anyway. While he was on his way downstairs, I stayed in our room and looked out the window, looking to see if I'd find someone running away. He went outside just like my dad had done the last time this happened. I saw no one while I kept a lookout, and when my boyfriend came back upstairs, he said there was no one there, of course.
One night, my brother and I were hanging out watching a movie. Suddenly there was a really loud crashing/banging noise on the front door of our apartment. My brother got up and tried opening the door. It wouldn't budge. He tried for a couple of minutes to get the door open, but it just would not open. We had a back door to the apartment, so he went out our back door, down the stairs and out the back door of the building and came back up to our apartment's front door through the front of the building. He got the door open and a pile of boxes came tumbling into our apartment when he opened our door.
We had this narrow landing outside of our apartment in the hallway. My father had boxes of books stored there. They were pushed back on the landing, a couple of feet away from the door to our apartment. Now, my dad was very meticulous in stacking these boxes. They weren't stacked lackadaisically. The bigger, heavier boxes were on the bottom, and they got lighter and smaller toward the top and they were stacked about five or six boxes high. They sat there for months without ever being moved or knocked over. But somehow they not only fell over after sitting there for a long time, but somehow moved forward and "then" fell over and into the door in such a way that they landed underneath the doorknob and kind of wedged it shut so that it couldn't be opened.
The building we lived in was built in the 1920s or so. It had been a house at one point but was eventually converted into two apartments (first floor and second floor) and there was an attic on the third floor. We checked out the attic one day. It was empty save for an old trunk and pictures of trains from a magazine taped to the walls of the attic. Nothing happened while we were up there looking around. But after checking the attic out, I would wake up some mornings from a nightmare and I would think to myself, "The attic is giving me nightmares." I don't know where that thought came from and it kind of freaked me out. That would happen from time to time.
I remember talking with my best friend (who's now my boyfriend) once and telling him how I kept getting these really bad headaches. I casually said, "The attic is coming down here and giving me headaches" and I laughed. After saying that and laughing I thought to myself, "Why did I say that and why did I think that was funny?"
There were times where I would be in my room, reading or just hanging out, when all of a sudden I would "smell" the attic. It was that old, musty smell that the attic in our building had. It would show up out of nowhere and just as suddenly disappear. This would happen even in the middle of winter, when it wasn't humid out.
In addition to the apartment feeling oppressive and suffocating, stuff broke there all the time. At the end of the year, right before we moved out, I made a list of all the things that had broken and I ended up with a total of 30-35 things, appliances mostly. These weren't old appliances either, some of them were brand new but they would just stop working or would "literally" fall apart.
One night while I was in bed reading, I heard a loud "tap-tap-tap" on my bedroom window. I pulled the curtain back and of course there was nothing there (we lived on the 2nd floor). This tapping noise wasn't a bug flitting against the window. It was a set of loud, deliberate knocks, as though someone was rapping their knuckles against the window.
The creepiest thing that happened to me there happened at like 2 AM when I was home by myself. My dad and boyfriend both worked nights and my brother was spending the night at his girlfriend's. I was in bed reading, when I heard scratching at my bedroom door. I looked around and saw my one cat at the foot of my bed sleeping. I thought, "It must be Grey (my other cat)." But I was a little freaked out because she never scratched at the door when she wanted to be let in, she would always meow.
I was so cozy in bed that I told myself, "If she scratches again, I'll get up and let her in." I went back to reading and sure enough, about a minute later, there was scratching at the door again. The scratching emanated about a foot from the floor onto my bedroom door. It was a loud, slow and purposeful scratching. I got up and went to the door. This took me all of 5 seconds. I opened the door and said, "Come on, Grey--" and stopped. There was no cat. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I peered into the dark living room because I was sure I'd see her, but I didn't. I then looked down into the kitchen (it was kind of a railroad apartment) and there, up on the kitchen table, was Grey. She was sleeping. I walked into the kitchen and she was passed out in a deep slumber. There was no way, in the five seconds it took me to open the door that she could've run all the way into the kitchen, hop up on the table and then pass out. I mean, cats are fast, but they're not that fast.
There were other things that happened there. Things would disappear never to be seen again, even though I know I left the item in a specific spot. It would feel like you were being watched, or rather, glared at in the living room. The glaring seemed to originate from the couch in our living room, especially at night. You'd walk through the room to get a drink from the kitchen and it would "feel" like someone was sitting on the couch intently staring at you.
And there was always that feeling like you were being smothered there. It never felt like "our" home. We kind of felt like we were guests who had overstayed our welcome pretty much the whole time we were there. We were only there for a year and thankfully the next apartment I moved into (the one I live in now) is perfectly normal and not creepy at all.
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