Haunted Apartment 2

Continued from Part 1...

As Rick told me this, I felt a cold shiver through my whole body. I went upstairs after awhile and told my wife and her eyes just got so wide; she was shocked. She stood up and faced the kitchen, then said something like, "We don't wish you any harm. We're nice people and we don't mind if you're here - just please don't frighten us." We both thought it felt strange talking to something we couldn't see, but at this point we really thought there was something to these strange events. I started keeping a log of things as they happened.

Things quieted down until September or October 2008. One night we were sitting in the living room watching a movie, and we both saw a small, sudden flash of light in the hall, to the left of the kitchen doorway. In almost the same exact place I had seen the grayish apparition over a year or so before. It made no sound, and was gone almost as quickly as it appeared. We thought it might be static electricity in the air, as it was getting to be that colder, drier time of year. Still we couldn't figure out anything that may have caused it - no outlets nearby, and we were about 10 feet away from the "spark".

About a year went by without anything strange happening. We didn't talk about it--almost superstitiously, I suppose--and we just hoped the ghost had moved on. I was working full-time, and now attending night school, and a few nights of the week I'd be away at class from 6-9 pm. Many nights I'd come home and stay up for hours to complete my assignments.

One night I was reading a few chapters of a book for class and was very tired. It must have been after 2 am and I kept catching myself dozing off. Suddenly I had this feeling that someone was watching me from the kitchen. I ignored the thought and kept reading as I was almost done. But every couple minutes the feeling would come back, with stronger dread each time. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I sensed motion in the kitchen. I looked up slowly, and I saw something like dust or mist particles moving in the air of the darkened kitchen. I strained my eyes to see what looked like a man - or shadowy figure of a man - just standing there, looking at me and SMILING. He was an older man, and appeared to have a cap on his head - he seemed friendly, and seemed to be leaning on something to one side. I sat speechless, I couldn't move or blink. I was deathly afraid to speak to him. So in my mind I told him something like, "I hope that you can move on, I'm tired and need to get to bed now." I then brought myself to look away and I shuffled off to bed without looking back. I hoped it was just my over-tired imagination, and I didn't even tell my wife about it for a few days.

When I told her what I'd seen, she asked her friend Anne to come over to our apartment. Anne is her childhood friend, and has always had a very keen psychic inclination. My wife hadn't seen her, or even spoke to her in several years as they were both so busy anymore. We asked if Anne could check our place out and give some impressions - we only told her that my bottles were being moved by something we couldn't explain.

Coming up the stairs, she said she felt nothing but some "residual energies" from people going up and down the stairs over the years - particularly younger people, who were here before we had moved in. But when she came into the hallway upstairs, she was immediately drawn to our spare bedroom - where I had recorded the "EVP". She said something was "still in here", but couldn't define it. She then went into the living room and looked at my bottles on the shelf, and said she thought someone might be moving them around. I told her we thought they might just be shifting with movements of people moving around in the apartment. Anne said that an older woman spirit had seen me looking at them, and she started to move them around to get my attention! Anne thought maybe the woman had been a collector of things herself.

Anne looked into the kitchen and said she saw an older man in there. She even drew a picture of what she thought he looked like: he wasn't wearing a hat, but he was smiling. Then she seems to have located an "energy vortex" right in the middle of the kitchen, in front of the refrigerator. I asked if it could be energy that the fridge was giving off, but she believed it was actually a vertical vortex running up from moving water underground, up through the floor and ceiling above (our lot had once been a drainage pond from a nearby farm). Anne thought that something was "coming and going" mostly in the kitchen, but couldn't tell if the spirit or spirits were coming from this place or other places.

After this we broke our silence and told her everything that had happened. She said she didn't think we had anything to worry about concerning evil, but she was pretty sure that one person had died in our apartment at some point.

This was all we needed to hear: our place was haunted. By at least one ghost, maybe two or even more.

Several times in 2010 when I was sitting at the kitchen table, one of the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture above would start flickering. Twice my wife was there with me, and saw it happen as I sat below it. We figured it was a bad bulb; but it continued even after I replaced the bulb twice. Then we reasoned it must be bad wiring in that one fixture connection. The weird thing is, (a) it only happened to me, and (b) the flickering stopped altogether after 3 or 4 months. I was sure that this ghost was reaching out to me in particular.

One night in August 2011, I was up doing homework around 9 pm after my wife went to sleep early. She was exhausted, and had gone to bed an hour or so before. I was tired too by this point, so I quietly walked into the bedroom as I sometimes would do, and went toward the bed, like many nights. She suddenly jumped up in bed, turned around and stared at me in sheer terror: she screamed! And kept screaming loudly! All the while she was looking right in my eyes.

It shocked me at first, but then it scared me that she didn't seem to recognize me. I kept telling her it was me, and she just kept screaming bloody murder. I ran over and flipped on the light, and went over to hug her and tell her it was just me. She screamed again, the same horrified look on her face - every time I got closer she wouldn't let me near her! I backed away from her and she suddenly went quiet and looked confused, and started crying. She kept saying "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry! I didn't know who you were!" We sat and talked about it, even started laughing, that it was probably a "night terror". She couldn't remember any dream, just that she felt like someone had come into the bedroom earlier and she had assumed it was me. Then when I really came in, she thought it must be someone else. I assured her that I had not come in earlier, and that I was just now coming to bed. We both tried to laugh it off, but she was really shaken by the experience since she had never had a night terror before that, or since.

That November we were cleaning up the apartment one Friday night, around 9 or 10 pm. We had a busy weekend ahead, and were trying to get the cleaning out of the way. I was washing dishes in the kitchen, while my wife was cleaning back in the bathroom. I kept getting a funny feeling that someone was watching me; I started getting spooked, so I kept trying to ignore it. But it was persistent: somehow I felt that if I looked out the kitchen window I would see someone. Almost like "someone" wanted me to look. "Yeah, well maybe someone's outside," I thought to myself. I started humming but to no avail: I had to look out the window. I looked up and immediately saw an old woman's face reflected in the top-right corner of the glass: light-gray curled hair, with army green-colored curlers in her hair. I looked away in shock; then looked back in the window and it was gone. Then over my shoulder to my right, out of the corner of my eye I saw someone walk up to the kitchen doorway, look in, and then walk away back down the hall. I looked at the doorway but saw no one, but heard my wife still clanking about in the bathroom.

My heart was racing - had I just imagined it? The face in the window was large in scale - smaller than the reflection of my own face, but larger than someone standing in the yard down below (no one was down there). I stopped what I was doing and leaned against the counter, trying to convince myself it was nothing. Not more than 30 seconds later, my wife walked into the kitchen and was startled to find me there. I started to panic, yelling to her about what I saw, when she suddenly cut me off. She asked me if I had just walked down the hallway past the bathroom, and into our bedroom. I said, "No, I've been here washing dishes the whole time." She told me she was in the bathroom, standing on top of the toilet to clean the ceiling when she saw something white or flesh-colored go past her down the hall and into our bedroom. She thought it was odd that it made no sound, while she still heard me cleaning dishes in the kitchen.

I then told her about the face I saw, and then it hit me: was it a reflection of someone behind me? I asked her if she had walked up to the kitchen and looked in earlier; she said she didn't. I asked her to walk up the hallway and look into the kitchen from the doorway, and I watched the kitchen window: the reflection of my wife's face appeared in the same position and size of the old woman's. But my wife has long, dark hair without the puke-green curlers.

At that point I just broke down, had some kind of panic attack where I was breathing fast and struggled to breathe. Something hits you when you see/experience something that you know can't be possible. We were sure that the old woman's ghost knew we were cleaning and came to check in on us. But we both agreed we would start looking for a new place to live, things were getting way too real here... And if the ghosts wouldn't move on, WE would...

Early in 2012, my wife and I were planning to have a baby. We knew we'd need a bigger place eventually, and we started looking. When my wife was pregnant, she'd often hear noises in the apartment when I wasn't there: someone "sniffing" their nose, footsteps, etc. We chalked it up to noises maybe coming in from outside, or other neighbors in the building downstairs. During her pregnancy we didn't notice much out of the ordinary, and our son was born in November.

In April, just a couple months before we moved out, my wife was feeding our son in the kitchen one night. She distinctly felt something tap the top of her head several times - of course no one was behind her. We just took it as a sign that the old woman approved of her as a mother?