Dear folks,

I haven't posted anything in a long while....although I have meant to. I just moved out of my apartment in Brooklyn into one in Manhattan (under circumstances - namely a psychotic roommate with a grave drinking problem - that have nothing to do with this story), and I thought I would wait until I had left to relate the tale of the mother and daughter that "lived" in my apartment with us.

I moved to the place in early August. It's a third-floor floor-through in a brownstone right by Prospect Park ("lower Slope" or "Church-side Slope," for those of you familiar with New York City lingo), a beautiful old building with hardwood floors and wall moldings and quaint modelled light fixtures - the whole bit. My landlady, who lived right downstairs, grew up in the house; perhaps she could have shed a bit of light on the situation had her English been better. In any case, the rent was practically nothing, I had 2 rooms to myself - it was too good to be true.

My roommate had already lived in the apartment for 3 years. He had told me that Jenny, the landlady, often let herself in to "check on things" without knocking. So, when I felt someone watching me, I figured it was Jenny.

Every time I turned around, though, there was nobody there. I often thought I saw the edge of a skirt or a black bootheel disappearing around the corner, but I could never turn around fast enough. Finally after a week or so I mentioned it to my roommate. He replied that he had long suspected the place was haunted. Other sensations contributed to that impression - for example, the cold spots in the kitchen. The entity seemed to concentrate on the kitchen and the back rooms where I lived, the kitchen doorway in particular.

One dog day I was mopping the kitchen floor and sweating like a pig, when I suddenly felt cold to the bone. The hackles on my neck stood up and I knew someone was there with me. Other times, one of us would be cooking and we could feel someone standing right behind us. When you turned around of course there was nothing.

Strange things continued to happen - nothing threatening, but nothing easily explained either. A glass of water I had placed on an end table spilled on me in the middle of the night - from 8 feet away. My shoes were often paired up neatly in front of the closet in the morning. I came up the stairs to the apartment and I would hear voices in the kitchen; then, when I fit my key in the lock, they would pass by the front door and into the living room, which lay sort of beyond the front door, and back into my roommate's half of the apartment. Once in the apartment, I could see there was nobody there.

Okay, so big deal, you say. And you'd be right - I couldn't prove there were entities in the apartment - nothing ever manifested to me visually. But I just *knew* somehow - I knew there were two, both female, one about 30 years old and one younger, maybe 10 or 12 years old, possibly mother and daughter.

I could feel it. Then my suspicions were confirmed on two separate occasions - the door slamming and the cat.

First, to explain the door slamming. As I mentioned before, the apartment is a floor-through, and on windy days the doors will often slam shut if they aren't propped open. But occasionally, if something in the apartment were being rearranged or a great deal of noise was being made, the doors in the back would slam shut, open about 6 inches, slam again, open, slam, open, slam - faster and faster, like a tantrum. After a month in the place I was fairly used to the various carryings on and I would yell "stop" and the slamming would stop like this: slam!...crreeeeeak....and the door would slowly reopen about halfway. My friend Andrew didn't believe any of this so once after a few beers in the living room I called towards the back of the apartment, "Andrew doesn't believe in you. If you're in here, slam the back bedroom door." That door was blocked open with a Doc Marten boot, which promptly rolled into the hall; that trick was followed by a symphony of slamming from the back (closet doors as well) which convinced Andrew not only of the ghost's existence but also of the desirability of leaving for the nearest bar at top speed.

The other thing that confirmed their presence was my kitten. I brought him home and let him out of his cat carrier and he ran under the tub. When he finally consented to come out, he wouldn't go into the kitchen and would meow at something in the kitchen doorway, occasionally growling and fuffing up his tail as if threatened. I always tried to get behind him on these occasions - if I could look between his ears I might be able to see something or someone - but I could never move fast enough.

These presences weren't threatening, as I've said. It was creepy of course, but more annoying than anything else. This is going to sound utterly foolish, but when I was trying to get out of my hellish roommate situation, I actually asked them to protect me from my roommate, who was getting more and more out of control, going through my things, threatening my friends, coming home trashed every night and so on. I figured it couldn't hurt to enlist their aid.

I finally moved out last Saturday. My dad and brother came to help me cart all my gear into Manhattan, and I sent my brother up with the keys to lock the door when we had brought the last load down to the van. He came back down and said the door was already locked. Weird stuff, but I have to say that those two...whatever they were...were probably the most stable thing in my life for two months. (Sad statement about my life, I know....)

This is pretty long-winded, for which I apologize, but I wanted to get all the details in.

Any comments or questions, e-mail me personally at SDB22@aol.com.

Thanks for listening,
Sarah