House On French Island

The town that I grew up in is made up of many small islands smushed together and separated by a river. One part of this is nicknamed 'French Island' due to the fact that when the town was settled the French families mostly settled there in a cluster.

I lived in an apartment on French Island three years ago with a good friend of mine. The apartment was in a two story house, each story being one apartment and we had the top story. To get into either apartment you needed to walk into the garage and then directly to your left was the door to the downstairs apartment and shortly past that there was a corner and then wooden stairs (rough, not finished, no hand rail etc) that led up to a landing and our apartment door.

There were four significant experiences during the year we lived at the apartment. Three of them happened to me and one happened to my roommate, Liz, and she told me about it the next day. I'm going to post them in separate stories since they're pretty long.

First a small description of our apartment: When you walk in the main door you are in a room about 24 feet square. There are two doorways on the wall directly opposite of the main door, one on each half of the room. The one on the left is to the living room; the one on the right went to my roommate's room. The room is separated into two areas by a partial wall in the middle (not parallel to the walls with the doors on them, it goes the other way) that goes from the floor 3/4 of the way to the ceiling. This partial wall runs from one side of the room to the other with the exception of a 3 foot walking space on both ends. The left side is the dining area, the right side is the kitchen. If you walk from the main room into the living room my bedroom door was on the other end. The bathroom was built into the corner of the kitchen beside my roommate's bedroom. That was the whole apartment.

First thing that happened: My roommate used to have a rocker/recliner in the living room that had a broken spring on the bottom of it. You had to really put some effort into rocking it and it made a very distinct squeaking noise when you did.

I was asleep in my room on a day off. It was about 10 in the morning so I was about half asleep. I was lying on my bed when the squeaking noise that the recliner made when you rocked it woke me up. It sounded like it was rocked back & forth two or three times. I sat up and yelled "Liz?" to see if it was my roommate and the noise stopped. I was really confused because my roommate was supposed to be at work in a town an hour away. I lay back down thinking I'd imagined it and fell back asleep. Then I heard it again. Same thing happened, it sounded like someone was rocking back and forth and when I called out my roommates name it stopped. This time I sat on my bed and didn't go to sleep and about 5 minutes later I heard it again. I yelled out for my roommate again telling her it wasn't funny if she was playing a trick on me. I told her she was scaring me and she needed to stop. The rocking stopped as soon as I had said something to her. After a few more minutes I opened my door and went out into the living room. My roommate was not home (she had been at work all day) and there was no one else in the house.

Just to reiterate, this chair could not have rocked on its own because of the broken spring. You literally had to put both feet flat on the floor and push to rock it back.

Also I should add that I wasn't really very scared. I was a little uneasy when I was in my room but after I went into the living room I felt fine. I actually ended up sitting in that very chair and watching tv after.

More to come!