The City House

When I lived in the city with my boyfriend, a lot of weird things happened around the house for awhile when we were all moving in. At first I didnt think of any of it as 'paranormal', because it just started off as creaks and bumps and pops, and our house was well over 80 years old in the middle of the city. My original explanations were usually simple like humidity, age, or even rats. But then it started sounding like other people were home when I should have been the only one there.

The first time I was actually startled was a day that my boyfriend and I were planning on going out to a late lunch together because it was our day off. I told him to go outside and wait for me while I dug around our room for my shoes.

I was sitting on the edge of my bed tying my sneaker when I heard my boyfriend talking in the bathroom, and the only reason I knew it was the bathroom was because it gave off a specific 'sound' when people spoke in there. I wasn't paying attention to it really, I could only hear it in the background.

I locked our door behind me, and turned the corner to the bathroom to see what all the commotion was about. But nobody was there. I called out for my boyfriend a couple of times, but he didnt answer.

I ran down the stairs, and got outside to see him waiting on the sidewalk. I asked him who he was talking to in the bathroom, but he said he walked straight down the stairs right after I said to hurry out without me while I looked for my shoes. I told him what I had heard, and he widened his eyes a bit. Apparently he had heard the same exact thing the morning before while me and the other roommates were working.

Prior to us moving here, my boyfriend was very skeptical of these kinds of things, but living here proved otherwise. Things began happening in our bedroom, and our bedroom only, and it started becoming a nightly routine. I could have sworn it all rooted from our closet.

Things started moving around by themselves, and one thing in particular that we had to get used to was our bags getting tossed around whenever we came home from the supermarket.

The first few times that we heard it, our best assumption was that there was a mouse in our room, and was running its way under the plastic bags. One night after work, I stopped and picked up milk, eggs, and some junkfood. I put the bags up against the same wall where we usually kept them, plopped myself on the bed with my boyfriend, and played a bit of Ocarina of Time.

We heard the bags start moving, but this time when we looked over, you could see the tops of the bags moving and swishing around themselves. It was as if your mother had just come home from a huge shopping as a kid and she told you she bought you dunkaroos or something, and you tore through every bag to find them.

This happened on the regular. And then I began seeing something in the basement whenever I did our laundry. I could only see it from the corner of my eye, but it was always the same. It was a solid body of grey that went from right to left. I could never see it looking directly at it.

One night in the kitchen, all of my roommates were home for a change. Somebody had mentioned seeing something in the basement, and one by one they all finished each others' sentence about what it did and what it looked like. And it was the exact same thing I had described.

There was even a night where somebody responded to me that wasn't there. We had faulty wiring that ran partially upstairs, so sometimes half of our hallway would have no electricity. One night, I leaned over from the top of the stairwell and yelled, "Hey guys, could somebody go in the basement and hit the button on the box? My lights are out again." I didnt get a response, so I just sighed and turned around. As I walked towards my bedroom I heard, "I know."

I stopped dead in my tracks, because it certainly did NOT match any of my friends' voices. I looked around downstairs to find I was the only one home. I ran out the door and stayed at the pizza shop down the street until one of my roommates got home from work.

Later that night, my boyfriend and I called it in around 2 in the morning. I was nearly half asleep when I heard him choking. I turned around to see he had his back towards me, so I put my hand on his shoulder and asked him if he was alright. Right as I was doing so he asked me the same question. He shot straight up and said, "Oh my god, I thought that was you."

We ran out of our room and called out for one of our roommates, the one who didnt necessarily believe us whenever something happened. We had him come in our room for awhile because we said things were acting up. I turned the TV on, and 5 minutes later, my roommate stops drawing and drops his pencil and puts his arms in the air. "I shit you not," he said. "You were right." He told me that while he was drawing my scarf had caught his eye. It was hanging from the side of my bookcase, when he noticed it was suspended in the air horizontally and didnt stop as soon as he looked at it.

But like I said, things always seemed to originate from my closet. Our closet didnt fit very well with the rest of the house. It was recently boarded up inside of it, and it didnt match the shape it should have been when you opened it. It was sealed kind of funny, and had random bolts in it. There was even a wall that was much closer than what should have been the end of my closet.

Finally, we moved out of that bedroom. Too many sounds were bothering us, and I didnt want to deal with it anymore. When I would lie down to sleep, I couldnt relax, I was always waiting to hear something. Our once-skeptical roommate took that bedroom while we moved into the one next to it.

That day it was just us three, my boyfriend, that roommate, and myself. Throughout the day we were both finishing up putting our rooms together and putting our art and posters up. Our roommate lined his walls with his beloved movie posters, and it looked fantastic.

He locked his door and hungout with us for a little while. When he went back to open his door, I was in the bathroom ironing my hair when I heard him say "What the fuck, who was in my room?"

All of his posters had been taken off the walls and were placed neatly on top of each other on his bed with all of the tacks in a pile.

Before everyone went to bed that night, I could hear my roommate saying that whatever was in his room needed to leave, because it wasnt welcome there anymore. My boyfriend and I looked at each other sort of in a worried way, but weirdly happy at the same time only because we were glad other people were experiencing these things too.

There were a couple of ugly fights in that new bedroom we had, and sometimes when it was just me alone, I would cry and call my mother and tell her how much I wanted to come back home. There was a night I called home, and while speaking to my mother I sobbed with my face buried in the opposite hand of me holding my phone. I said, "Mom I just can't do this anymore, I want to come home and never come back to this place." And from behind my bed I heard an exhale and a stressed, elongated "dooooon't" as if it were whining. I instantly stopped crying and turned around but there wasnt anything there. My mirror flipped itself and that was that. After that night, nothing ever happened again. There was a different feeling in the house from that time on.

(This story is credited to a person named Skella.)