The Haunting: Part 1 - The Beginning

March, 2004:

As I write this, I literally shake in fear. There was a time in my life when I really knew terror. When I could taste it, hear it, and see it. When my home held me prisoner to the desires of an unseen assailant; when I had no knowledge of what would happen next, or if I was safe. When I laid in bed night after night, shaking in terror, while counting down from 1,000 with the lights on just to try and fall asleep for a few blissful hours.

I was, however, a disbeliever of the supernatural for the first 20 years of my life. I scoffed at the idea of ghosts and hauntings. Who had time to believe such nonsense? When me and my two roommates, Miss Jen and another awful individual whom I will only refer to as Liar, signed the lease to our new apartment, we noted that it looked rather....dilapidated. Scary. Run-down. Foreboding.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have dropped the keys and started running.

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Miss Jen and Liar were always very superstitious individuals who believed in the possibility of ghosts with every fiber of their being. Miss Jen, in fact, is highly intuitive and from day 1 she mentioned that she was a bit creeped out by the house. That something about it was nagging her, almost as if the house was like a creature laying dormant in hibernation until the day it returned to the world ravenous and full of intent. She knew, and the house made her feel uneasy. Liar would join in on the sentiments, and the two of them always looked at me skeptically when I laughed at their fears.

The first ten months of our lease went without a hitch. The unsettling feelings that my roommates initially felt were slightly diffused due to the lack of any sort of bizarre activity in the house. None of us suspected that the last two months would be filled with sheer terror.

Miss Jen and I have tried to come up with a reason as to why the hauntings started then. Why March 19th, 2004? We only came up with one solution: it was anger. After St. Patrick's Day, the three of us had a sort of disagreement about various living situations, and decided through lots of yelling and tears, that it would be better if we all moved out and split up for the next year. We truly believe our promise to leave the apartment and our discord caused the spirit to start acting; to make himself know. Yes, I did say himself. The ghost was 100%, without a doubt, a man.

The haunting started off in a way that made you do double takes, made you question yourself, and others around you. My first incident came when I decided to take a shower in our upstairs bathroom one night after a long day of school. The roomies were contentedly sitting on the loveseats on the main floor, watching some RomCom's while sighing over Hugh Grant. I excused myself and headed upstairs.



Looking at the picture of that hallway still to this very day makes the hair rise on the back of my neck. I get chills. I remember what it felt like to stand there. That picture depicts what you see when you walk up the flight of stairs to our top floor, and stop at the landing. A huge room was converted out of the attic, which is what you see straight ahead through the open door. The bathroom where I was showering was off-camera to the left.

All the lights were off. No surprises there, but I was kind of creeped out anyway, but that's just because pitch black dark freaks me out, especially when matched with eerie silence. I reached over and flipped on the hallway light, one of those simple up-down flip switches that instantly bathed the long hallway in blissful white light.

My shower was uneventful. I wrapped my hair in a towel, pulled on some clothes, and opened the bathroom door. The hallway was bathed in darkness. I hesitated for a moment, and rationalized that the light bulb must have burned out while I was in the shower. Just to make sure, I reached forward and flipped the switch. The hallway was once again illuminated. The switch had been pushed to the 'down' position.

Rather ticked off, I stormed downstairs proverbial guns blazing. Miss Jen and Liar looked up from the TV in mid-laugh. When they saw the look on my face their smiles melted away. I accused them of playing a prank on me and turning the light off. Their blank faces confused me. They knew nothing about it, and in fact, they hadn't moved since I last saw them. I told them that this was impossible, because someone had pushed the light switch into the off position. The light bulb wasn't burned out. I remember how frustrated and angry I felt that no one ponied up to the prank. However I will never forget how hurt and confused they looked either. They genuinely acted like they didn't know, and that was what threw me off.

Soon after this, the memory of the light switch incident lingered in my memory, and would be put to the test. Miss Jen was dating a guy I'll call Director, and they bought a puppy together. I'll never forget the first time the dog came to our house.

Puppy bounded up the stairs, walked into our main dining room, and froze. We all laughed and called her, trying to coax her towards us. The dog ignored us. That's when we noticed that the fur on the back of her neck was standing up. The dog fixated her stare on one corner of our dining room ceiling, and wouldn't break eye contact. This went on even after she slowly backed herself into another wall. We all stood there in silence, watching this dog who two seconds earlier had been bounding through the front door barking. I cannot describe in words how eerie it is to see an animal emit the kind of behavior that I saw that day. It was like she was STARING intently at something that none of us could see with our naked eye. She was dead set on it, and wouldn't move for a very long time. She also began to let out muffled whimpers. Miss Jen looked at me with eyes the size of saucers.

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The presence of a disturbance began to infiltrate my mind and challenge my rationale and sense of reality. I started to sense that certain areas of the house were unnerving. That is the only word I can think of that is remotely accurate. The room where the dog freaked out- that was where my desktop computer was. When I typed at my desk, I started to sense that someone was standing in the middle of the room a few feet behind me, and that their eyes were boring into the back of my head. The hair on the back of my neck started to stand up. The window immediately to my left served as a mirror for me to look back into the room without turning around. To be honest I was too afraid to look, even though I still chalked all of these things up to randomness at this point.


(Here is a picture of that room. The end table with the vase was where my computer desk ended up going).

The landing at the top of the stairs where the infamous light switch incident took place started to give me the creeps, too. I would walk up the stairs and pause after the final step, and stare out into the long hallway. An overwhelming sense of dread and spookiness would wash over me, every time. Something in the house had changed. In fact, when I would walk through the kitchen to the back of the house to even get to those stairs, I would start feeling like someone was sitting on my chest.

Then came the day when each one of us discovered that things were suddenly missing. Miss Jen was missing one rhinestone earring. Its companion glittered from a Dixie cup on her nightstand, where she kept them every night. My tweezers which usually graced the downstairs bathroom shelf vanished. Liar's tiny bag of bobby pins? Gone. All things that we used on a regular basis- all things we would realize were missing. We accused one another, and tensions ran high. I had to explain to Miss Jen over and over that I would never steal one earring. I accused Liar of taking my tweezers. The guilt continued until each of us narrowed our eyes and looked at one another and realized that we were all telling the truth. We were dumbfounded. How could things just....disappear?

My class schedule was such that I was usually gone from mid-morning until early evenings, every day. The roomies, however, got to chill around the apartment together watching movies on certain afternoons when I wasn't there.

One night I came home to find them both wiping tears from their eyes. They were huddled together on the couch, whispering to one another intently. Bewildered, I asked them what was the matter, and for pete's sake, why are you whispering? "Because..." they said. "We don't want it to hear..."

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I found out that night that The Roomies were totally convinced that our house was haunted, and that all the strange things that had already occurred were building up to greater and scarier things. I scoffed and laughed at them, but a small part of me felt frozen in fear. Weird things had been going on around the apartment, and my sense of unnatural things had been flying off the charts. Despite the sliver of self doubt, I stuck to my guns, and figured that I had to laugh it off and dismiss the ghost as a figment of their imagination.

"Really?" I said. "And why are you TOTALLY convinced that there's a ghost here?"

Miss Jen and Liar gripped each other's arms, looked at each other, and gulped nervously.

"Because, Kayleigh...when you're not here, we hear it. It runs on the second floor. It sounds like it's breaking things, but then everything is always fine. It only runs when you aren't here."

They both promptly burst into tears. I'm going to be truthful- I was furious at them for this admission. I honestly thought it was all an act to scare me, since I refused to believe that ghosts existed in the first place. I began to affiliate all the strange things with deliberate actions by my roommates. The thought made me absolutely livid.

That night I tucked myself into bed, in my tiny room the size of a walk in closet, that graced the front of the house and happened to be one room off from the room with my computer. I laid in bed, about to doze off into sweet release, when I hear the first few thumps.

My eyes shot open.

In the darkness my heart began to race. Then, without any mistaking it, I heard a stumble- then rapid, angry, deliberate footsteps running wild on our second floor. The footsteps ran from my end of the house to the other. BOOM, BOOM.....BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM - *CRASH!*. This went on repeat for at least 15 minutes. The footsteps were so loud, and the ceiling and walls so thin, that the LIGHT FIXTURE in my room was SWINGING back and forth from the vibrations. My bed frame shook silently, as if in fear, and my tense body lay paralyzed in a death grip with the comforter.

Crashing ensued. It sounded like everything we owned upstairs had been shattered. The light above me continued to sway, and hot tears sprung up behind my eyes. Suddenly, I knew my roommates weren't lying. Suddenly I knew that I had been wrong. Suddenly I knew I was so terrified that I couldn't have moved if I tried. I remember laying there, thinking over and over and over and over "there is no explanation for this, there is no explanation for this" until I felt like I was going insane.

Just as suddenly as it began, the running and crashing stopped. The house was again bathed in eerie silence along with its inky darkness, except this time it was full of secrets. And now I knew that something was there, watching me.

It had begun.