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From: KC (kaseym24@my-dejanews.com)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: Our apartment (long)
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 06:30:55 GMT
Hi All. I'm really glad that everyone liked my first post, hopefully you'll enjoy the this one too. My girlfriend and I first moved into our current apartment about a year and a half ago. It's a tiny one bedroom, the kind where you can sit in the living room and see into all the other rooms if the doors are open. Still, it's home and we felt pretty comfortable here until we started to notice that we had another roommate. It all started about four months after we moved in. We live upstairs in a group of four apartments and we share an outside staircase with the other upstairs apartment. This other upstairs apartment had been empty since we moved in and any traffic on the stairs was for us (although there was none). We began to hear footsteps coming up the stairs every night. These were loud steps, like elephants stampeding up and down the stairs. They would come in the wee hours of the morning and we would wake up instantly every time. After a few nights of dismissing it as a)our imaginations b)our downstairs neighbors out for a stroll or c)the building settling, we decided to stay up and investigate. When the steps began we ran out onto the balcony to see what was going on. As we waited the steps came up, but nothing was there! We stood there for about a second, trying to make sense of this, and then ran back into the apartment slamming and locking the door. The steps didn't cease, they just went back down. A few minutes later they came again; we decided to stay inside this time. The steps still come and go. They are not so frequent now though. We finally got upstairs neighbors and they tend to be out and about at weird times so we are not sure who to attribute the noises to now. Ah, but it doesn't stop there. From the stairs, the presence in our building seems to have moved into our apartment. I get really strange feelings about the small bit of hallway to the bedroom and bathroom. Occasionally I'll even see people standing in there. For instance, one evening I was lying in my bed looking out into the living room. I closed my eyes for a second and, when I opened them, there was a man there. He was dressed in a black business suit and wearing a fedora. He seemed to be staring at me but I feel that he was actually looking beyond me, his face was twisted with rage and I felt that at any minute he might come at me. I pulled the covers over my head and spent the night that way, since it had always saved me from the monsters in the closet when I was a child. A few nights later the same man appeared again, and he has off and on since then. I now look at it as a sort of stuck record player playing the same thing over and over, he never changes...it's always the same clothes, the same hat and the same facial expressions. When we got a dog we found that he was really in-tune to what was going on in the apartment. At night he would sit in the doorway of the bedroom and stare at one spot in the hallway. Occasionally he would jump up from his bed and run into the hall to growl and bark at something that was just not there. There were two occasions that the dog scared the bejesus out of us though. One night we came home rather late to an apartment that was completely dark. We usually leave at least one or two lights on so we don't fall and break our necks. I opened the door and the dog went right in. Suddenly I heard the dog growling, only it wasn't his usual warning growl - he sounded vicious and a little frightened. I don't know exactly how to describe it, it just sounded as though he were growling for all he was worth. I quickly shut the door, believing that whatever was in there he could take care of it. As soon as I closed the door the dog ran to it and began to scratch and whine to be let out. When I opened it again he scrambled out the door and promptly wet himself on the balcony. We decided to stay the night with my girlfriend's parents that night and come back when it was light. Another night as we were lying in bed, the dog jumped up and ran out into the living room. We could see him in the dim light of the room, his hair was standing up on his back and he was growling like before and showing his teeth. There was nothing there for him to growl at though and we decided he was just being a little jumpy. Suddenly though we heard someone (thing) yell "GET AWAY FROM ME DOG!" He did, he came running back into the bedroom, jumped up on the bed and buried his face into the sheets. We also buried ourselves under the blankets, spending the next minutes praying that whatever that was wouldn't come in to get us. To this day we can't explain the voice. If it had come from the balcony it would have been muffled. I still can't believe that a voice that sounded that menacing could have come from a human being. Nothing this frightening has happened for quite some time. After the voice we spent some time trying to cleanse the apartment using prayer. I guess it has worked although the dog is still jumpy at night. We were just sick of sharing our home with something that seemed to be getting increasingly angry. Hopefully when we move at the end of our lease we can find a "spirit-free" place to live.
-KC