Readers Stories
Our Haunted Apartment. About 20 years ago my husband, Roscoe, and I lived in the middle of a redwood forest. It was just a few miles from the beach in Pescadero, California. Our Golden Retriever had full run of that gorgeous forest. We loved our beautiful, secluded home but the commute to the music school where Roscoe taught classical guitar took an hour and sent us up a steep, winding mountain road. It eventually became imperative that we move closer to Roscoe's job. His boss knew of a vacant apartment and we soon moved into a large one bedroom in San Bruno, California. The building had once been a three story Cape Cod style, single family home. We rented what used to be the attic. The floor below us, and the ground floor, had been turned into separate apartments. Two parallel areas on either side of our living space had been walled off into storage spaces, and just off of the kitchen there was a small alcove, which my husband began to use as an artist studio. Soon after moving in we went into one of the storage area to stow some of our belongings and immediately felt extremely terrified to be in there; no sounds or movement, just an intense feeling of panic. We also noticed a small pool of green liquid on the floorboards in there, which we decided not to touch. The only way into or out of this enclosed storage area was through small, latched door that entered into a short closet. One afternoon I was crouching down in the closet adjacent to the eerie storage room retrieving a pair of my shoes when there was a sudden and persistent banging on the storage room door from the other side. It was semi rhythmic and sounded like a fist banging on the wooden door. I was in the kitchen in three strides, shaking, staring at the closet. Roscoe asked me what was wrong. I told him "There's someone in the storage space, and they want out! They're banging on the door!" He calmly replied that no one could have gotten into that area since the door was always snugly latched. I shrugged, said, "Yeah, I guess you're right." and totally dismissed the whole incident immediately. I got my shoes and that was that. It still amazes me that I just accepted Roscoe's comment. He was to have his own "experience" soon, though. As I arrived home from work one day Roscoe greeted me by asking me to grab the back of our stove, (the upright portion that displayed a clock), and try to move it. Perplexed, I gave it a go. The thing was totally rigid and wouldn't budge no matter how I tried. Then he related how he had been painting in the alcove earlier when he began to hear a ticking sound. The sound got a bit louder and a tad faster over a few minutes time and he finally emerged to see what was causing it. To his shock he saw that the back of the stove was moving back and forth all by itself. Roscoe tried to grab it, to stop it, but had no control over the stove. He ran to the other room and watched it from behind the door, afraid that something was about to blow up. He said that it kept getting louder and faster, and that the sound evolved to a whirr and the motion to a blur until he finally ran through the kitchen and out onto our back porch. At that point it instantly stopped moving. It seemed impossible to me that it could have moved at all. I was experiencing other odd things, as well. I could never stand at the kitchen sink to do dishes without suddenly knowing that someone was standing right behind me staring at me. Indeed, the light around me dimmed as if someone had blocked the sun's rays that streamed in through the kitchen windows. I'd turn around each time to find no one there and the sunlight perfectly normal again. From time to time coldness would linger on one side of my husband, an occasional visitor, or me. There was never any draft, just an area of cold air right next to one of us. It would finally leave, and when it did we'd glimpse the last second of someone leaving the room. We never actually saw who it was, but we had the distinct impression that it was tall and thin and that it was male. Our dog had been used to freely roaming an entire forest before, and here we had moved him into an attic apartment. The poor dog was ill equipped for being pent up in an apartment when we were out, (me at work and Roscoe at school). This was the reason we gave ourselves for repeatedly finding our laundry basket empty and all of our dirty cloths lying in a perfect ring around our kitchen table. As much as we loved having our dog with us we hadn't the heart to keep him in the apartment, and finally gave him to a loving home. Our laundry basket was never tampered with after that. In the alcove we had a small bust of the composer, Brahms, and Roscoe had taken some oil-based clay, formed it into an open hand, and mounted it atop Brahm's head, for fun. From time to time we would find the hand on the floor, it having been jostled loose by the vibration of a passing train on the nearby tracks, by an occasional earthquake tremor, (of which we experienced many at that time), or by an unexplained violent shaking of our apartment. The hand frequently fell off and Roscoe would always replace it onto Brahm's head each time it fell. My brother came to visit us one day in hopes of talking to our ghost. He hoped to convince it that it was dead and needed to cross over to the other side. On and on he talked to no apparent avail. Later, after my brother had left, Roscoe happened to go into the alcove. He called me over. There we spied the clay hand atop Brahm's head, the fingers curled down in a threatening pose over the face of the bust. None of us had been in the alcove to disturb it during my brother's visit. Later on my brother and several of his friends brought over a tape recording of a seance that had been held in our locally famous Winchester Mystery House. Again, he hoped to correct our ghost's perception of its existence and urge it onward into eternity. During the entire listening of the tape that area of cold air visited each person in turn. At one point my brother handed me some item or other and a sharp, icy cold needle of air shot from his finger into mine. We both jerked back when we felt it. All in all, the phantom seemed bent on staying with us. Our ghosts, (for we came to realise that there were two of them), seemed to enjoy playing little pranks on us when we weren't thinking about them. This was especially true of the second, smaller ghost that began to manifest a bit later than the first. For instance, I was in the bathroom one afternoon, sitting on the commode, when I saw a strange light before me. At first I thought it was a reflection on the door opposite me, but then I noticed that it was standing free of door in the middle of the room and only a few feet in front of me. It bore the shape of a very large light bulb with an extended trunk and down through it's center I could see an internal, swirling double helix, all in pastel colours. I looked up at the small window behind me and then back at the image. It continued to stand there, it's interior spinning, for several minutes. Then it suddenly just wasn't there. Instantaneously it was gone. Another time when I sat atop the commode I felt it violently shaking beneath me. I called out to Roscoe "Are we having an earthquake?" "Nope." he replied. Again I asked, "Well, is there a train going by?" "No." he said, "Why?" I jumped to my feet, realizing what was shaking the commode, and it stopped moving all together as soon as I did so. I was the only one ever bothered while in the bathroom, and always at the most awkward moments. Now and then our apartment would become terribly cold, even on a warm day, and the thermals generated by our heater would only permeate a foot or two from it. At times all of our doors would simultaneously thump open. Each door stood at odd angles to one another. It was as if there was some gravity well in the center of our apartment. One night, as I lay sleeping in bed beside Roscoe, I was awoken by an acute awareness that someone was staring me in the face from only a few inches away. I fought to keep my eyes closed and finally went back to sleep. Time and time again that night I awoke to the same horrible sensation, but no way was I going to open my eyes. The only way to reach our apartment was to use the outside stairs that followed the building up to our landing. As I descended the stairs, one day, I felt myself heavily pushed from behind by a person unseen. I managed to catch myself before falling far, but the heal of one of my shoes had flown off, landing neatly on the ledge of the window opposite me at the foot of the stairs. It hadn't hit the window, just landed on the sill. There was no one there but me at the time. I finally went down to speak with the young lady who occupied the large apartment on the floor just below us. Ruth lived there with her father and had grown up in that apartment. She had experienced many weird things over the years. Ruth mentioned that she'd often seen a man, out of the corner of her eye, in the bathroom down the hall and was afraid to pass the bathroom when she was home alone. She, too, had felt someone standing close behind her while she did the dishes and had felt her rooms become icy cold for no explainable reason. We spoke of the times when our apartments would shake of their own volition, and found that, except for the earthquakes and the moving trains nearby, our quarters didn't shake on the same days, but seemed to be moved independently of each other. Ruth also told me about the long shed in the back yard and of how, when she was a girl, she and her friends had found a way into the shed. In there they had come across an old trunk. In the trunk there was a picture of a woman in a frame, the glass broken, and an old rusted sword. When they took the sword outside into the sunlight they realised that the rust didn't just look like rust, but like dried blood. They quickly replaced the sword and left the shed and it's contents behind. Her father severely scolded her for entering the shed, and after that it was tightly locked against all entry. She then related to me that some sort of trouble always happened to whoever lived in the bottom apartment. She said that she had never know any but childless, religious couples to live there, (Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.) and that, over time, they would grow to hate each other and ultimately move out, to be replaced by yet another religious couple. I'd met the Mormon couple, Eric and Shelly, who lived there then. They were a decent, loving couple at first. Then, true to what Ruth had said, Shelly began to play some strange, and sometimes disgusting, pranks on Eric. She'd even tell me about them, laughing hysterically as she did so. We on the top floor began to hear the bottom floor doors slamming and small fights breaking out from down there. Within a few months of residing in the building Eric and Shelly divorced and moved out, and were soon replaced by another childless, religious couple. A friend of mine, named Ruby, was talented in the art of white magic. I told her what was going on in our apartment and asked if she and her husband would please visit us to see if Ruby could sense something in our home. A few evenings later they arrived and one of the first places Ruby went to was that storage area. Right away she bolted towards the landing, apparently suffocating. As Ruby relates "I recall that I couldn't breath. Like the air was suddenly gone. The smell was over powering and smothering." It has been suggested that she may have reacted to dry rot, but Ruby had lived in a house with dry rot before and had not been affected by it. It took Ruby quite a while to regain her composure. Finally, pen and paper at the ready, she sat at our kitchen table and tried a bit of automatic writing. I sat at the table, too, and hung out while she wrote and wrote. While I sat there I kept feeling cold on my right side. Now and then the coldness would settle across my lap and then return to my right side again. After sitting there for half an hour I asked Ruby if she knew where the ghost was. "Oh yes." She said. "He's been standing right beside you, on your right, the whole time we've been sitting here." When I asked her if she could sense an entity there she said, "I do feel some kind of presence. Something small and frightened. Think of a child cringing in a corner, afraid of being punished." Sometime later Roscoe's uncle, Fred, came to visit us from Ohio, and we had been warned that he, being a strong Christian, might try to proselytise us. Far from being wary we elicited his story from him. Roscoe and I were always seeking out the answers to life, and would entertain most "ism's," for a while to see if they would pan out. Well, Fred ultimately told us "I found God in Romans." So, one afternoon soon after that I got out my ratty old Bible and Roscoe and I thought we'd see if God could be found in the book of Romans. "I don't see Him. Do you?" I asked Roscoe. "No, I don't see Him in there, either." he agreed. I finally said, "Why don't we, just for a second, accept that this is Gods holy Bible, and that God is Who He says He is, and that this is His holy word." All at once the most intense blazingly bright, totally soundless explosion went off, and I felt myself, chair and all, being forcibly propelled across the room and through the far wall. In the next instant I realised that my chair and I hadn't moved, and that everything looked normal again. When I looked at my Bible the words I found there made a new sort of sense. Roscoe saw and felt nothing of this, even though he was sitting right beside me the whole time. From that day until we moved ghosts never again bothered us. One of our friends had asked us to move in with him and share the rent, and we finally vacated the attic apartment after spending a year and a half in residence there. Another of our friends, Don, decided he'd like to live in our attic apartment, and he moved in right away. Some time later Don told us that he had felt a strong presence of energy in a definite area of the bedroom. He also related an incident he had experienced there. He had been sitting in the bedroom playing his guitar one day, and when he put his guitar down beside his chair, preparing to stand up, all at once a tall, dark, fuzzy being and a short, light one began to dance around his chair. They danced and danced so quickly that Don couldn't get up. Then both entities suddenly raced out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, and disappeared past the landing. Several years later Don came to visit us in our Sonoma County home, and the subject of the attic came up. He volunteered that he'd seen an apparition in the attic abode. Roscoe immediately stopped him from giving out any details of what he'd seen. He asked Don and I to go to separate rooms and draw our apparitions out on paper. I drew the light bulb shaped spectre that I had witnessed and returned. Roscoe took Don's drawing and my drawing and said, "You've drawn exactly the same image!" Then, Don and I talked about what we'd seen and, together; we filled in all the details. They were an exact match. I have no idea who lives there now or whether the ghosts are still there. I do wonder about it sometimes, though.
J.Teal ©
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