Noises And Unexplained Happenings In Old Victorian: Year 3

Side note: I have many photos of this house which I can post if anyone is interested to see any of the rooms in the house, up and down, if you have read my other installments.

This is a continuation of a three-part story. I neglected to write this when I wrote the other two installments because many of these events did not happen to me personally, but to various guests whom had stayed over in the house.

So I was in my final year of graduate school, and I was renting a room in an old Victorian house, built around 1890. This would have been the third year in which I lived in this house. The first, I lived downstairs. The next, I moved upstairs. This final year, I moved back downstairs.

During my first year in the house, much of the activity had centered around the staircase, and the rooms directly underneath it, which consisted of two closets separated by a partition wall and my old room. I now lived in the large front room of the house, which had two beds in it, and I had one roommate in the front room. My old room had one person, and the tiny cramped closet under the stairs was converted into an extremely cramped bedroom for the final roommate.

That closet was where much of the activity seemed to be concentrated my first year in the house. But ever since the creepy closet was converted to a "bedroom" (if you can even call it that), and nearly every inch of the space was taken up by a mattress, television, and clothes, the negative energy in the house moved toward the bathroom and laundry room directly off the living room, which was located only feet away. It's as if the entities were forced to relocate! For some bizarre reason, the door to the bathroom had two glass panes, which would ordinarily have made it possible to see directly into the bathroom from the living room, but to provide privacy to people using the bathroom, a bedsheet was placed on the inside which hung over the window, blocking the view.

I worked very late on most evenings, and walking into the house from the side door, which opened into that same living room, was creepy. The room has four doors off it, and many windows on all sides. It felt as if at any moment something could jump out from behind a door or from the dark corners of the room. When I would come home I would quickly run to my room and shut the door, and try not to come out until morning for any reason.

When I would leave the front bedroom and walk into the rest of the house at night, I would have a persistent feeling of being watched from that bathroom. I felt as if I had a microscope on me, being watched from all sides. As I ran through the living room back to my room, my heart would be racing and I had the feeling as if I was being followed closely behind, and even though I could not hear nor see anything, I felt as if something was right behind me, only centimeters away. The feeling was frequent and oppressive. Sometimes I would quickly turn around, wave my arm in front of me as if trying to swat an invisible entity away, and I would be directly facing the door to this bathroom, and on a few occasions, I would see the bedsheet covering it rustling back and forth as if someone had been in the bathroom peering at me.

One night as I walked back from the kitchen grabbing a glass of water, I swore that I saw glowing yellow eyes at ground level in the corner of the living room behind the television, staring out at me. But when I blinked and looked again, I no longer saw them. I know what I saw, and I tried to come up with any explanation for this, but there was nothing which could've cast such a shadow. This was very unsettling and made me feel sick.

My one roommate, who lived in the front room with me, had only just moved in this year. He regularly complained of a sensation of being watched from the front closet off our room and from the windows outside, and that on several occasions, he would wake up randomly in the night feeling as if he had been shaken awake by an unseen entity, but that when he would open his eyes, I was asleep at the other end of the room and there was no one else there. This roommate ended up leaving halfway through the year for study abroad.

About one month after he left, I purchased an expensive perfume, which I opened and tested, but then placed back into its box. I placed the box on the mantle of the fireplace in my room, since my room had a fireplace and I used that to arrange my perfumes, lotions, body sprays. One day when I opened the box to use the perfume about one week later, I was shocked and upset to find the perfume bottle completely shattered down the middle, all of the perfume evaporated, but the box was exactly where it had originally been placed. I asked every single roommate if one of them had knocked it off the fireplace and was too ashamed to tell me, but they insisted they had not. What was even more shocking was that the bottle wasn't shattered in a way you'd expect if it had fallen. It was cracked exactly down the middle.

Other times, items would go missing, and some would never turn up again. Toward the end of the year, when I was applying for jobs, I had a folder of all of my paperwork which I might need. I had my Social Security card, various copies of my IDs, etc. I placed the folder in a locked cabinet in my desk. When I needed its contents, I checked to ensure everything was in there, but my Social Security card was missing. I distinctly remembered it being in there, I put it in there and had just checked several days prior, but it was missing. No one else had the key to the cabinet, and there was no sign of the lock being tampered with. I never found the card again, and I had to quickly order a replacement.

Another frequent occurrence, which never occurred my other years living in the house, was the water in the shower getting excruciatingly cold when I was in there. It happened to all of us. I called a plumber, but his inspection of the hot water heater revealed no issues, and the upstairs tenants did not report anything similar. This happened repeatedly and it was very annoying. I would end up taking very quick showers in hope that the water would not suddenly go cold.

There was also a regular smell of cinnamon in the downstairs, as if someone had lit a cinnamon-scented candle. But no one had. The smell would randomly appear, and then disappear. This did not bother me, as I love the scent of cinnamon, but I always wondered where it was coming from and could not locate the source.

My roommates all insisted that none of these things were happening and it was all in my head. Whenever I tried to persuade them that there was something not quite right about the house, and that something strange was happening in our apartment, they refused to listen. They had begun doubting my sanity, and so had I. It took one event to rattle them and at least raise their suspicions. The final event which was relayed to me by others, which I was not present for, and took place during spring break. One of the roommates had returned early because he had a job interview, and was woken up early in the morning by what sounded like a smoke detector coming from the upstairs apartment, which although was not in close proximity, was loud enough to wake him. He ran out the front door to knock on the upstairs tenants' door to make sure everything was okay. They stated that there was no smoke anywhere, and that although the smoke detector had gone off, they checked every room and there was nothing amiss. Within minutes, the smoke alarm downstairs began to sound, despite the fact that they are battery-operated and not connected to a centralized electrical source in the house. My roommate checked every room but what puzzled him was, the sound was not coming from any of the detectors on the ceiling. If it had been, it would have sounded louder when standing directly underneath. It was emanating from an unidentified location and seemed to be equally loud in every room, and seemed to get louder, and louder, and louder. My roommate said that the noise got so unbearably loud that he put his hands on his ears, buried his head in his pillow, and began feeling like he was about to pass out... And then suddenly the noise stopped. He never heard it ever again.

We only had several weeks left in the house, but nothing else happened apart from the feeling of being watched, and just an overall sensation of darkness lingering over the house. I think about the house often and wonder who had lived there before, and what the entities wanted. I do not think they were particularly malicious, but they were clearly trying to get my attention. I just believe it was a very haunted house, with a lot of residual energy and spirits who enjoyed playing pranks. Maybe the constant influx of college students into the home was unsettling for them as well as all of the renovations over the years, I cannot say. I drive by the house often and wonder if anyone else has experienced anything similar, or if it was just me.