Our First Apartment Came With An Unexpected Roommate

About ten years ago, my now-husband and I moved to a new city and into our first apartment, on the second floor of a two-story house. To this day, he swears that he saw and felt nothing, but I am sure that we had a ghost. I always believed it to be the former home owner, who had passed away some time before. I'm told that she was a lovely person in life, and I never felt threatened by her presence - in fact it was odd that although some very eerie things happened there, I rarely felt afraid.

It started out with very small things - it took me a while to believe anything "spooky" was going on. I would occasionally go into a room to find a lamp on that I thought I'd turned off, that sort of thing. Then came an evening when I was home alone, and decided to take a shower. I should explain that the bathroom light was controlled by a dimmer switch, located in the hallway just outside the bathroom door. Well, as I showered I started to notice that the bathroom light was slowly growing dimmer, until finally I was standing there in the dark. I was surprised, but didn't think "ghost" right away - I figured there must be a problem with the bulb, or the switch. I stepped out of the shower and into the hall to fiddle with the switch, and was surprised to find that it was off - this was one of those twisty dimmer switches, and it had been turned all the way back and pushed in to shut it off. When I turned it back on, it worked just fine.

Shortly after that I arrived home from work and hour or so before my husband, and lay down on the sofa to take a nap before dinner. While asleep I had a dream - I guess it was a dream, anyway - that I was lying there on the sofa, and heard someone unlock the front door at street level. I listened as they came up the stairs, opened the door and enter the hallway. I woke up thinking my husband had arrived home and called out, but he wasn't there. I was so sure that I had heard someone come in that I searched the whole apartment, but of course I found no one.

A few days later I was getting ready to leave for work - my husband was still in bed asleep. As I reached for the upstairs door knob, I heard someone run up the stairs, loudly and at great speed, and stop, suddenly, right on the other side of the door. I froze, thinking it was an intruder, and then took a deep breath and threw the door open. There was no one there. I went downstairs to check the bottom door, but it was locked and dead-bolted. I went back upstairs and exclaimed to my husband about it, but he'd slept through the whole thing, and, skeptic that he is, just suggested that I lay off the morning coffee.

Anyway, other things happened in the apartment from time to time. The funniest was the time I was standing in a corner of the kitchen taking something out of the microwave, when I heard something fall to the floor a meter or two behind me. I turned around and found, right in the middle of the kitchen floor, my toothbrush. It seemed like it had been taken from the bathroom and thrown down the hall into the kitchen, just to get my attention!

However, one of the oddest things happened when I wasn't even at home. On this particular evening, my husband was working late and because I was pretty swamped I had decided to do the same. Everyone else had left for the day, and I was sitting along in my office when I heard a voice - a woman's voice, clear as a bell! - say, "you need to go home..." I didn't feel worried, but I found myself getting up, putting on my coat, and leaving the office - I walked straight home without another thought. I was in the apartment for a few minutes when I started to smell smoke. As I raced around trying to find the source, the smoke became thicker until I was coughing and my eyes were watering. I raced downstairs and pounded on the door of the first-floor apartment. No one was home except the cat, which mewed frantically at me through the kitchen window. I ran to my landlord's house two doors away, and he dashed over with a key. He entered the downstairs apartment and found that the tenants had left a pan of bacon grease on the stovetop. The knobs on the stove were quite loose, and the burner under the pan had somehow been turned on - we suspected the cat. The pan hadn't yet ignited, but was billowing black smoke when the landlord walked in. The people downstairs didn't come home until late that night, nor did my husband - if it hadn't been for that voice telling me to "go home" there probably would have been a fire.

Anyway, I think our ghost was upset when we were leaving, because that was the only time she was ever really destructive. One evening shortly before we left I was packing our things in the living room - from where I was sitting I could see clearly into the kitchen. As I sat there working I saw a whole stack of dishes levitate off the kitchen counter and smash to the floor. For some reason, I felt a bit "freaked out" for the first time ever - I think the ghost "wanted" to spook me a little bit. I actually waited outside on the step until my husband came home! As for the dishes, they were ugly ones that my husband had been carting around for years, and I never really liked them. He was really not impressed when I told him the ghost did it!