The Ominous Winds

Part I
Do you believe in ghosts or spirits of the undead? Do you think you're safe as long as you don't believe in them? You're endangering yourself by thinking that. I have a story for you... on ethat will prove to you that not all ghosts are nice or can't hurt you. I'm telling you this for your own safety, your fate is determined by whether or ot you believe it.

Four years ago I bought my first apartment, I worked at a hotel for two years beforehand, saving up enough money to begin a life on my own.

Excited, I unpacked my things within just a couple of days. But then, things began getting strange.

After just a week of living there, I started noticing things going out of place. First it was my watch; I could've swore I had left it on my dresser the night before upon going to bed, but in the morning I found it on the window sil. At first I thought I had just not remembered putting it there, but then it started happening constantly: my CD's, my phone, even pictures off of the wall were disappearing when I woke up in the morning. It started getting out of hand when my furniture kept getting rearranged.

That's when I finally decided to get a security system installed in my house. I called a telephone number that would have their company put one in for me. For the next few days after it being installed, and even tested a few times there were still things being moved and getting lost, but my security system never went off. My doors always remained locked, as did the windows. It had to be an inside job, somebody else had to be living in my own apartment with me, and my guess it was for a prank.

After I thought of it, considering how it wasn't impossible, I decided to set up cameras, one in the corner of each room in order to see all enterences to the room. The next morning, things had gone missing and my couch was angled differently than how I had it, so I watched the tapes.

It was so strange - the first camera to capture this intruder was my hallway camera: an old man calmly walked down the hallway, walking normal, as if he weren't even in somebody else's house, not looking like he was up to something or anything like that. Because my hallway leads straight into my living room, I watched the film from the living room's camera. The old man looked like a recording from an older camera, because his color was faded compared to the rest of the room, and his presence made the film lose some quality for some reason. He looked kind of like someone put an old man from an older film into the different, newer film. It was just so strange, but I dismissed it easily, never having used this camera before and not knowing how the quality was.

The old man simply walked around the room, periodically stopping and picking something up off of the shelf to look at it. He'd walked with it and then put it somewhere else. If some piece of furniture were in his way, he'd walk into it as if it weren't there, but it'd move as if he were pushing it with no problem.

He did this for a couple of hours, picking up a total of eight objects and setting in very random places. One other thing that I noticed was that he didn't really seem to come from anywhere, he pretty much just... appeared. From the hallway camera, which was the only camera that was not in the corner because of door casing being in the way (so the camera did not see two enterances that were only my room and the bathroom anyways) it was made to look like he came from one of the rooms behind the camera. But in my room's camera and the bathroom's camera, there was absolutely no footage of the man, there was no footage of him appearing at all.

As for the third thing I noticed that really caught my attention: In the background of the footage, there appeared faint blue waves floating around behind the man off and on. Then I started to notice how it looked like they were somehow forming the man, as if these waves were shaping themselves to look like an old man in a very detailed way.

After he was done walking around and moving things, he walked to the kitchen and opened the window, climbing out. Now, this was one out of two windows in my entire apartment that didn't have anything outside it that could stop your fall, such as stairs or something. My apartment is four stories up, so anyone to climb out of that window was to meet their fate.

After I saw, from the kitchen camera's film, the old man push the rest of his body out of the window and the window closing as the hinges were broken, and no longer being able to see the man, I couldn't tell if the man fell or simply disappeared, the camera didn't angle to see outside of the window. But I was freaked out, because at the time I didn't know that this man was a ghost. I thought he killed himself. More shocked by suicide, I still, however, had a few unanswered and intriguing questions: Where was the news report on this man's death? Why did he decide to commit suicide on the first night I ran the cameras? But most of all - how was the window locked again when I went to check?

Part II
Studying this film throughout the rest of the weekend, I couldn't notice anything more. I couldn't sleep, my mind kept reminding me: I had just watched a suicide. Throughout the 36 hours I was awake, there was no phenomena happening, other than every now and then I would feel a presence, or at least I thought I did.

That's when I went downstairs to have a cigarette - it was a mess! I didn't recall hearing anything the entire night, and just a couple hours before that it was clean and normal. But there had been broken glass artifacts, tipped over chairs, and my television fell on its screen. It was just a mess. The glass was scattered further than it should've been if it had simply dropped and been left alone, someone had obviously been here.

My first guess was that I didn't hear anything because I was too tired to notice it, too focused on the tapes. That there was another person in here, about to do the same thing as this old man. It was an explanation that indeed fit the pattern of feeling someone behind me upstairs every now and then, but this person must be very sneaky, because if I hadn't payed full attention to the tapes, I would've noticed someone coming up from the basement. I still thought that I should've, but obviously I didn't.

I couldn't believe it. Not only that, but my lighter was gone. Thankfully my cigarettes weren't though. I lit my cigarette up with my stove and opened the apartment window. I called the police, hopefully they'd send an investigator here to look at the tapes and explain everything to me.

Reality wasn't making sense to me anymore after seeing that tape, after seeing that and not understanding how anything in it could possibly make sense, I believed that anything could happen at any moment.

9-1-1 answered my call with; "9-1-1, what is your emergency?"

I told them that somebody was in my house, that I doubted they were dangerous, and that I needed an investigator as soon as possible.

They sent one over, who arrived a couple of minutes after I hung up the phone. The investigator looked over the film and had me step out side as his crew and him searched my apartment and my apartment's basement. On my way out, I could've swore I heard low mumbling sounds coming from my basement... I let the investigators handle it, I figured they could.

But two hours later, they came and told me that they couldn't find anyone in my house, they told me they searched to the dust, but someone had definitely at least been in there earlier.

I told them, "But the door was always locked! You can't lock it from the outside without the key!" and I had the key.

They were uncertain too, but there definitely wasn't anyone in there, they reassured me. I guess arguing was pointless, so I just gave them the tape, explained that I wanted answers for that, and kicked them out. I believed that they did a good, thorough investigation, but I was not satisfied with their results, which was why I was disappointed with them, though not at them.

I still hadn't slept throughout the next two days, I was losing my mind, always hearing a low mumbling sound from the next room in my apartment, sometimes even in the same room whenever I turned my head. I was paranoid of just about anything, but I think it was more of an honest paranoia. How often do you hear low mumbling sounds and the clinging of things when you lived alone?

Later on the same day, I began seeing things, those blue things that I saw in the film that appeared to be forming the man. Upon seeing those faint, blue waves, and yet receiving no reply from the investigators who were supposed to study the tapes, I came to the belief that my apartment was haunted, that there were ghosts in this apartment.

Those blue waves of energy were the only thing bothering me. After that realization, the faint blue waves became thick, orange waves. I seen them only out of the corner of my eye, and they often formed into detailed human shapes. They started to touch me, poke me, and I started to hear little giggles of a little girl off in the distance every time I was poked by this energy that encircled my apartment.

I went outside for a while, hoping to ditch my apartment for the rest of the night and return in the morning to get my things and then move out.

I hoped things could be fixed soon and I'd be able to live on my own again without having to be bothered by ghosts or even the fear of them. I decided that I'd sleep at my parent's house, and stay there until I can afford my own house, instead of an apartment this time.

Part III
I stayed at my parent's house for one night and they ran off, afraid of me, of what I become. I guess I was crazy. I didn't sleep the whole night, in fear that the waves that I now considered were ghosts would return to me once again, just to find me and bother me.

My parents left, telling me that they were going to the store and would return in an hour. After a few hours with no return, I decided to finally get off of the couch and turn the TV off. It was dawn, so I was less afraid.

While walking into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, I found a note on the table:

''Son, we're worried about you. You're acting strangely, and scaring us because of that. We are not going to come back for a while, but in the meantime, please seek a counselor to talk to about your problems. We wish we could be here for you, but you seem so distant tonight. You can stay at this house until you feel better.''

Love, Dad

I was unmoved. My parents never loved me as a child, they always ignored me. The fact that I looked and acted like I wanted to murder somebody probably threw them way off. I didn't care, I have a house all to my house, no need to find one of my own right away.

Well, that was what I thought, but the next couple of nights, with only an hour of sleep, I started to see the ghosts again. They never took form, but they were following me, everywhere, even when I left the house. There was simply no escape from them.

There was nobody else left to turn to except for a mystic. No average person, except for me, seemed to notice these beasts, so it had to be a mystic.

I was too afraid to talk to these ghosts myself, especially because they kept tormenting me with their low moans and giggling whenever they messed with me. It was almost as if the sounds they made were recordings from various people: the low moans from an old man, the giggling from a little girl, the different tones of whispers from different people, etc. With each sound sounding like they were off in another room, but the orange waves were usually seen or felt around me.

Often, in the corner of my eye I would see a detailed form of a human being or animal standing there and quickly disappear. Even in the daylight, there was simply no time of day that I escaped from it. Once, I saw someone sleeping on the ceiling, for example, but when I actually turned to look at it, it disappeared.

The mystic came that night, and I held high hopes that she would talk the ghosts out of messing with me constantly like they did. She was a phony, as you'd expect of a mystic who had their own internet page with a charge of twenty dollars. But it was worth a try, since she was the only mystic nearby.

I was deemed hopeless, these ghosts would forever haunt me, and I still had no understanding of why. With this as my conclusion, I banged my head against the cushion walls, begging for escape from this madness. I cried to the ghosts to choke me until I died, because my arms were tied to my sides and I couldn't do it myself...