Musings

Haunted House?
4-15-08

My flat is an old Edwardian I think...  Its district was once where the rest of the city would trolly out to drink and carouse.. mostly pubs on the edge of the city out amoungst the sand dunes.  There were many cemeteries here, all maybe five blocks away or so.  Those bodies are long gone, dug up and stored in a columbarium with a big domed aged copper roof about ten or fifteen blocks from here.  (On an interesting side note, it is said that people digging in their gardens occasionally come across human bones that were displaced in the relocation.)..  But I don't think thats where our ghost is from.  If it is, he(she?) stayed quiet for a very long time.

Our building was renovated sometime in the seventies, a tragic affair from which our ceiling never recovered (why in the world did they use that awful popcorn stuff anyway?).  With the addition of a giant fluorescent ceiling fixture akin to the ones that hover menacingly in doctors offices, our flat apparently also aquired some nutters.

I'm told it was a half way house for drug addicts or crazy people... something to that effect during the time.. making that big fluorecent light in the ceiling over my bed a little more ominous.  I'm really ok with not knowing what went on in my bedroom back then.  Really.

I inquired as to the history of the building shortly after I moved in, on account of the strange presence in the hallway.  I've lived in my fair share of haunted apartments, and this one seemed pretty mild..  if I had to admit that I believe in such things and take a guess I would say it is a child or some stuck energy that just mills about between the doors to my bedroom and my roommates in the middle of the hall.  Mostly it stays pretty quiet.

So perhaps we have another visitor.

It was a couple weeks ago that my roommate told me things were moving around on his desk.  Not your average I-swear-I-put-my-stapler-here-and-now-its-gone type of mischief, which is bad enough as it is (I've had my scissors dissapear and reappear *underneath* my body.  Explain that one cynics), but things on his desk were moving around *while* he was in the room trying to sleep.  The sounds woke him up and continued for minutes while he tried to hide under his covers if I recall correctly.

Things crash in my apartment from time to time.  Usually they are things that I could chalk up to gravity finally getting the best of them, but the other day something crashed and I could not for the life of me discover what it had been.  It came from back by our rooms.  I dismissed it eventually as something my roommate had maybe left balancing someplace or...  whatever we dismiss these things as when we search for their source to no avail.  Perhaps it was our new visitor...

I was out of town on Sunday.  Today there was a message waiting for me from my roommate:
"I forgot to tell you!...  Sunday night at 4:00am I woke up and my bed was moving back & forth so much I thought it was an earthquake... so I laid there and waited for it to stop. It went on for like 30-60 seconds! I thought maybe I should get in the doorway cuz it's not stopping... but it wasn't getting worse... so I sat there... when it stopped I turned on the radio: nothing about an earthquake. I checked online to see if it came up on the earthquake maps. Nothing. Freaking poltergeist was shaking my bed! and then...
on sunday eek & max" (cats) "were sitting in my room and my door FLIES open and slams into the closet door... and max just SAT there for like 2 seconds, then he swings his head around... looks at the door... looks at me... then BOLTS.
I get up to see if it was Oni" ((cat)... yes we have a lot of cats.)... "she was asleep on the top of the cat tree."

I wonder who our new visitor could be?  Is it a ghost?  Or perhaps something else creepy and otherworldly?  I tend to be very sensitive to most things, including those that go bump in the night, and I am at a loss why this one has chosen my roommate and not I to be its witness.  I am however, glad of that fact.

There is ongoing debate as to whether it is some sort of Mothman creature warning him that his room will fall off the building in the next earthquake, or a spook that has heard me declare more than once that I do *not* want to be bothered by otherworldly apparitions and has granted my request.
Either way...

We have a new visitor.

 

Haunted House? - Further Evidence?
4-17-08

I must admit I am a little excited about our new visitor as long as it shacks up with my roommate instead of me. Although the prospect of staying here alone for a few days while he is out of town is not comforting. Hopefully The Visitor will confine itself to his room as it has been. My roommates update as of this morning follows:

"There was a problem last night. So I close the door to my room, go to bed.. 20-30 minutes later I hear a "crash" in my room. I wake up, my door is OPEN. And I'm like, wtf... Then I hear CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH... I sit up, turn on the light... EEK" (cat) "is running all over the room slamming into shit & knocking stuff over. He NEVER does that. It was really weird. He was jumping onto my dresser & my desk & the table at the foot of my bed.. every time, taking half of it with him. I was like WTF MAN. He bolts from the room and I'm like half-awake putting everything back up on the tables..How the hell did he get in the room!?"

*note: Yes, I know what you're thinking... "He's a CAT for crying out loud... cats do that." Well, either that or you're thinking "Holy crap! A ghost!"... If you are thinking the former I must inform you that Eek (the cat) is about a hundred years old. His joints are funny, he walks pretty slow and sleeps just about all the time. There is not a point since I moved in four years ago that I can recall seeing him run. You know... just in case you were chalking it up to normal cat behaviour. Normal cats are maniacs. I don't think Eek would run short of someone firing a cannon loaded with dogs at him. (Do not try this at home.)

 

Vomit - Further Evidence?
4-24-08

My roommates cat has vomited all over the couch. This is by no means an unusual event and most likely not linked to the ghost. Still, one can never be sure and while it is most likely not worth a mention, it helps that I do not have to suffer alone.

 

Things that go *BAM* in the night
5-09-08

I was dreaming of a baby deer. Its mother had been hit by a car and killed and I was trying to get it to the wildlife rescue. While carrying it to the car its head morphed into some sort of prehistoric bird and it began lacerating my arm in an attempt to remove it and escape. I was not sure what woke me except that it was loud and had shaken the whole house. My arm still hurt in that weird place where my brain hadn't yet realized that there were in fact *not* 3 inch deep slices torn in my flesh and I would *not* be soon bleeding to death. I wondered about the possibility of an earthquake or a shotgun or bomb but my nightmares weren't through with me and pulled me back into a confused slumber.

In the morning I was notified that a spare door propped against the wall in the hallway had flung itself spontaneously over, hitting the floor with enough force to shake the house and wake its inhabitants.

I find this mysterious and a bit frightening in that the door was by no means at a small enough angle where it was leaning that any manner of thing could have convinced it of its own accord to go flying the opposite direction and slam to the floor. There was no one up, no way a breeze could have caught it, and no small animals frolicking that could have knocked it. It remains a mystery as to why the door fell or what may have caused it.

Perhaps a booby-trap gone awry?... I suppose we will never know.