East Stroudsburg Apartment Haunting

I am a student at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. This recent semester, I moved into an off campus apartment with five new roommates; I'd soon learn about a sixth. Our apartment was decently sized with a living room, kitchen, long corridor and three bedrooms, each of which was designed for two people.

Before starting my story, I should explain some history about East Stroudsburg University. The town had once been a mining town but no longer houses any abandon mines. It is located in the middle of the Pocono Mountains and is about two hours away from Philadelphia and New York City. There are several noted stories about hauntings in or around the school, most of which stem from a severe flood in the 1950's that killed almost 200 people. The most famous haunting takes place in one of the dorms where the ghost of a girl who hanged herself allegedly tends to revisit her old dorm room whenever one roommate is out.

My first experience with our ghost came in the middle of the day, at about 3pm. There were four of us sitting in the living room when suddenly a calculator came flying off the kitchen table and landed in the middle of the floor between us. My roommates didn't think too much about it, but we spent the rest of the day attempting to derive a logical theory of how this could have happened. Needless to say, we couldn't.

The next experience came while the superbowl playoffs were going on in late January one Sunday. Myself and two of my roommates were watching the game on the tv in the living room and we had recently brought a plastic storage bin into the apartment to use as a cooler. We left the cover to the bin in the hallway, leaning against the opposite wall, and our door was wide open while we watched the game. The hallway was completely empty and I had a good vision of the entire hallway out of the corner of my eye. We were suddenly startled by a loud noise and when I turned around, the cover to the bin we had been using as a cooler appeared to have been thrown violently into the doorway of the apartment. I then got up and knocked on all our neighbors doors to ask if they had done something, but most of them were either not around or undeniably occupied.

After this, I came to hear stories from my roommates. One story involved a roommate of mine waking up in the middle of the night to find a sweatshirt of his hovering in the air as if being put on by an invisible person. A few more stories described televisions being turned on and off, unsightly drafts, and the sighting of what one roommate believed to be an old woman in his room hiding behind his bed.

To spite all the activity, one of my roommates remained a skeptic until one night when he and his girlfriend were alone in the living room. My roommate explained how he'd gotten up and walked to the kitchen but, upon walking past the hallway, sighted a college-aged kid standing at the other end appearing transparent. The figure was completely invisible below his waist and was dressed in winter clothing. At last, he too admitted we had a ghost in the apartment.

Weeks later it was the birthday of another roommate. His bedroom had been decorated with helium filled balloons as he and his girlfriend laid in bed together at about five in the evening. To their surprise, one balloon suddenly drifted down off of the ceiling and out the open door as if being carried by somebody. The rest of us were seated in the living room when we saw this balloon, still about five feet off the ground, travel up the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the apartment door. We immediately concluded that the wind took the balloon but soon determined that was impossible because the hallway ceiling is covered in pipes and vents, and would've surely stopped the balloon dead in its tracks. Whatever took the balloon out of the apartment needed to have an ability to navigate through the hallway and kitchen, and around the furniture.

With all of us agreeing that a ghost had to be present, we decided to hold an EVP session late one night. The people attending the first season were just myself and two of my roommates. We had an electronic tape recorder and I set up the video camera feature on my laptop before turning it onto the three of us in the living room. We turned off all the lights and began recording.

We asked about 20 questions in the pitch black and heard no responses at all during the session. There was a point however, about three quarters of the way through the interview, when we all simultaneously began to feel uncomfortable and my roommate suggested that the far corner of the room was giving off a terrible vibe, to which we all agreed and stopped the session. We then proceeded to play back our recording.

Of the 20 questions we asked, the first response came about seven questions in when my roommate asked "do you know who we are?" On the recording, and almost instantly, in a clear male voice, something answers "uh huh." A few questions later my roommate asked "where do you live in the apartment?" to which a male voice, whispering, answered "I don't." about 16 questions in, my roommate asked "can you make something move?" and the same whispering voice replies "make something move." And finally, when my roommate said "I don't like the vibe I'm getting from that corner," in a clear man's voice, with a clear Pennsylvania accent, it answers "nope." Needless to say, we were done with EVP's that night.

We played the recordings for our other roommates and they did not believe they were real, despite the fact that the clear voices were obviously none of ours. We decided we'd do another EVP session that night, this time a little bit earlier, and try to learn more about whatever we captured on the tape recorder. We again set up the same equipment for night two.

The second night of EVP recording had all six of us sitting around the living room in a similar fashion. It started out rather slow as we asked question after question still yielding no answer. My roommate at last decided to say "we will give you a minute of silence to make your presence known," and we all remained quiet. It was about thirty seconds into this minute when I heard something. It was the same exact voice from the previous night and it came from the hallway. The voice, very clearly, said only one word: "hello?" Once I heard this, I froze in my seat and could not contribute any more questions to the investigation.

My roommates continued to ask questions and we eventually migrated to the hallway where we, once again, asked for the spirit to make a noise so we knew he was present. A few seconds later we heard what sounded like something falling in one of the bedrooms and got up to investigate. We couldn't find what it could have been, but we asked "was that you?" into the tape recorder and got no audible answer.

The second our EVP session was done, I told them about the voice and no one else heard it. We then proceeded to play back our recording. We had asked about 30-40 questions this time around. As we played them back, we got absolutely no responses up until we gave the spirit a minute of silence.

To my surprise, the "hello" didn't record on the tape recorder. A few questions later, one of my roommates asked "what is your name?" to which we heard a clearly audible "Matthew." From this point on, Matthew had an answer for just about every question we asked him on the tape recorder. One question was "how old are you" to which Matthew responded by saying either "ten," "twenty," or "twelve," we assume it was twenty. "Were you a student here?" prompted an uncertain response, but clearly something. "How can we communicate with you?" was answered by what sounded like "Get out." Finally, the "was that you?" question asked after we heard the noise was answered with "yup."

It was definite to us that we captured something and this apartment was haunted. We had attempted to find out who Matthew was and I had pursued this by asking a local campus police officer about what deaths he'd known about in or around the campus in recent years. His answer had only informed me of three deaths on campus in the last 26 years, one was a kid who froze to death in the snow after passing out while walking home, one was a homeless man who froze to death on a bench outside of the registration building, and the third was a kid who killed himself in his dorm room. We looked up the names of the two kids and learned that neither of them were named Matthew.

It was a few nights later when Matthew returned, but not as a poltergeist like he'd previously been. I had been lying in my bed trying to go to sleep when I suddenly felt what seemed to be someone punching me in the stomach. I quickly opened my eyes to find no one and nothing around. Assuming I was dreaming, I went back to sleep.

We heard a rumor that Matthew had lived in the apartment next to us some time in the late 70's. The neighboring apartment had a small ledge outside of its living room window which tenants were able to stand on. The rumor suggested that Matthew had fallen off this ledge to his death however, we are yet to find any information backing this. While this is only a rumor, it is the only information we have on Matthew's death.

A few weeks later I was trying again to sleep in my bed when I was abruptly woken up. This time what I felt was a punch in the arm, again very lightly. When this happened again the following night, I stopped sleeping in my bed. I began to sleep out in the living room on the couch every night.

For the last six weeks of the semester we were surprised to find that Matthew had almost disappeared. He was no where to be found and kept very quiet. He made no more noise and no longer threw stuff or moved things however, when I returned to my bed for sleep one night, I was again woken up by a punch to the arm. I continued to sleep in the living room.

Our final encounter with Matthew came with two weeks left in the semester. It was again about 3pm and myself and one roommate were seated in the living room watching tv. While we sat, a football suddenly rolled out of a storage bin in the corner and across the floor until reaching the other end of the room. We had merely chalked it up to Matthew and ignored it.

Last week I decided to review the videos on my laptop which I recorded during our EVP session. Both videos prompted their own eerie addition to our story.

In the first video, there is an eerie light which rises up from the far corner of the living room, right where the storage bin was, at the exact moment when my roommate asked "where do you live in the apartment?" and Matthew answered "I don't." The light only lasts for the duration of Matthew's response.

The second video proved to me that I was not insane. When we decided to give Matthew a minute of silence, you can hear clearly on my computer, after about 30 seconds, "Hello?"

In the end, I am not sure if I am moving back into the apartment. Matthew seemed to be a friendly ghost once we began to talk to him, but his poltergeist nature could be dangerous.