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I live in a house with ghosts.

The activity itself seems to go in cycles. And now it's ramping back up. This past weekend I was laying on the floor of my livingroom with my eyes closed. I felt my cat walk past me and rub herself against my heiny [as cats do]...so I reached around to give her a scratch but I didn't feel her. Thinking she was probably sitting just out of reach [as cats do], I flipped over and didn't see her. So I called for her, and then Craig yelled down from the third floor that she was up there with him and had been for the last hour.

It was likely just the phantom cat....I've been living in this house for almost 3 years and from day one we've seen the apparition of a cat on the stairs to the third floor and the second floor hallway. He's rubbed ankles, tripped people by walking in between their legs [as cats do], and done normal cat type things. We're not talking an evil demon cat or anything. He just hasn't been really "active" lately and I've never seen or felt him on the first floor, so that's something new.

I also have been noticing figures walking through the kitchen for the last couple of weeks. Nothing real concrete -- just images of people crossing the kitchen occasionally.

We've only had two other phenomena since we've been living here. One was the grey torso of a man that would appear to peek out of the kitchen doorway into the livingroom. That happened nightly for about 6 months and then it stopped. And then the last one happened only once [and I'm glad of it because it sort of scared the bejezus out of me for some reason]...I was in the bedroom looking in the mirror above my dresser. When looking in the mirror you could see the bed reflected in it. At any rate, I looked up and saw the crystal clear reflection of a woman in a long nightgown sort of drape herself over the pillows of our bed. I whirled around and she wasn't there anymore, and I couldn't see her in the mirror either....but I remember what she looked like because she was so clear....she had long brown hair, was kind of petite.

Lest you think I'm insane, my husband has seen the torso and the cat, and many others have seen the cat.

It wasn't always like this -- I grew up in a relatively normal house. And when I moved to college there were no ghosts in my dorm...or even in the first there apartments that I lived in. The fourth apartment I lived in is the one.

I lived in a bilevel apartment in South Philly for about 3 or 4 years. It was super dirt cheap [even by South Philly standards], and I didn't understand why until I moved in. Everything was fine at first -- I lived by myself and I knew that you could spook yourself out at things so I never really gave any consideration to the fact that I might have a ghost.

The layout of the apartment is this: you walk in the front door to the livingroom and then through to the kitchen and then there was a small bathroom off the kitchen. There was an enclosed staircase in the kitchen that led up to the bedroom, which was the only room on the second floor.

OK, so I was dating Craig at the time so he was over at least 2 or 3 nights per week so I wasn't alone 24/7. But no matter who was there, I kept getting a really horrible feeling of being watched when I was in the bathroom. Since I was alone most of the time, the bathroom door was open when I was in the bathroom....and then I started to see a grey shadow standing in the kitchen. It didn't have form or anything but you felt it staring at you in a very hateful way. I thought maybe it was just me imagining things -- I mean, the bathroom was always about 2 degrees even in the summer and, like I said, it's easy to freak yourself out when you're alone.

One day Craig said, "You're going to think I'm crazy but I keep seeing something staring at me in the bathroom." And about half a dozen other people said the same thing. So I knew I wasn't completely insane.

The staircase to the second floor was another problem spot....everyone once in a while whatever was in the kitchen would fuck with me by chasing me or following me up the stairs.

But I didn't want to move because the place was so cheap and I could deal with something that just didn't like me being there, so long as things never got physical. Considering that I no longer live there, I'm sure you can guess what happened: things got physical.

Craig moved in during my last year at the apartment. I was taking night classes so I wasn't getting home at night until about 9pm almost every day. I got home one night and Craig was sitting on the steps of the apartment building reading a book.

He told me that he was laying on the couch watching TV when he felt a sharp pinch on his hip. He thought maybe it was just one of those weird bodily aches and pains thing. But then it happened 3 more times in the exact same spot. So he looked at the skin on his hip and there were what looked like finger mark bruises. So he grabbed a book and left the house because that was just too freaky.

I came home the following week from class and he was sitting in his car outside the building. This time he had been washing dishes in the kitchen. He had been collecting soda caps for one of those contests and they were sitting on the counter next to the sink. He watched all 15 of them pop off the counter one by one, and got so freaked out that he ran out of the house. We never did find the caps -- who knows where they went.

But neither of us felt comfortable with the direction that was going so we moved out about a month later.

And now we live in this house [there was a house in between the South Philly apartment and where we are now that was pretty normal]. Nothing seems threatening here and I'm prone to just living with it.

Posted by Nicole at May 29, 2002 08:15 AM | TrackBack