My First Apartment

From: Mike Schmidt (mschmidt@wxc.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Wisconsin
Source: Form Submission

My First Apartment

After one year in a fraternity house and a second year in the dorms, I'd had it and lied to my college so I could get an apartment (you had to have 60 credits or live with your parents in order to be excused from dorm life). It was an old building and I just happened to work in the music store on the first floor.

I don't remember the exact order of the events, and they weren't frequent occurrences.

The first thing I remember was my bedroom closet light. Because my roommate had an unending parade of people that

I didn't know over at all hours, I decided to keep my LP collection in my closet, out of sight. On a given evening, I might have gone to that closet 3 or 4 times to replace one LP and get another. Typically, I'd turn on the closet light, replace one album, get the other, turn off the light, and leave the bedroom. I usually closed the bedroom door because it was adjacent to the living room and the bedroom was usually a mess... this is college, remember.

Anyway, I'd go back to get another album and find the closet light on. I'd get friends to witness my actions. We'd leave the room, play the record, and when we returned, the light would be on. The switch was up, too - this wasn't just a short circuit. In addition, the light never went on while I was in the bedroom - asleep or otherwise. This would happen one evening, then not again for weeks. Toward the end of my 5-year occupancy, it stopped completely.

Three other occurrences happened only once each:

I was in the bathroom "reading" one evening. I kept a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of conditioner on the towel rack in the tub area. The bases of the bottles rested on the square bar of the rack and the tops of the bottles rested against the wall opposite the shower head and faucet. For some reason, I suddenly looked up at the bottles to see them fly off the rack, one at a time. The tops of the bottles resting against the wall moved away from the wall and they fell into the tub.

Another event happened to my roommate. He woke me up one morning had me come into his room. We had very deep window sills and he used his as a bookshelf. He was able to store books 2-deep on the sill. Anyway, every last book was on his bed. He'd been woken up by the books - probably 30 or more - which had been dumped on him all at once.

This one is probably the best. I had recently received a kitten - Dodsworth. We had a ratty old chair with short legs, about 6 inches. The chair was in bad shape, so we covered it with a tapestry-like sheet. Dodsworth liked to get under the chair and I'd play with him through the sheet (sitting in the chair with my hand between my feet). One day we were engaged in the usual playtime when I looked up to see Dodsie across the room, hissing at me with his hair standing on end and his back arched. I got severe goosebumps, put Dodsworth in my jacket pocket (he was just a kitten) and left the apartment for several hours. In fact, I got a good case of goose bumps just writing this story.

There was a tavern next door and after I told the owner about these events, he told me that an entire family had perished in a fire in that building many years earlier.

Hmmmmm.