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Haunted Apartment #1
November 23, 2002
Every building I lived in while attending University was haunted. There were three in total.
The first was a creepy place. It had once been a cheap motel situated on the highway far from town, but when the town grew, it grew around it, surrounding the motel and leaving it stranded far from the new highway, and far from business. Someone smart turned the place into low-cost housing aimed primarily at students. The apartments were two rooms with a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a sizeable closet. They were small, ugly, roach-infested, and shodddily put together. The rooms on the upper floors were more expensive than the basement - yes, I said basement - apartments. And so I had a basement apartment. It was at the end of a long dingy corridor that was dimly lit by frugally-spaced bare bulbs. I knew I had neighbors in that nether region, but never saw any. It seems the ‘basement people’ were a quiet bunch - I never heard a peep out of them - with solitary habits. The place would have made an excellent setting for a teen slasher film, and indeed I once did get chased through the parking lot by a man who seemed intent on harming me. I fled into the building and slammed the steel security door - one amenity NOT commonly featured in teen horror flicks - to hear him banging and swearing from the other side.
But he wasn’t the ghost. And neither was the elderly and seemingly senile homeless man who often slept nights in the pool-shed and could be heard ranting loudly in the early morning hours , ‘Where’s that damned maintenence-man! The pool needs to be cleaned immediately!’ and the like. The pool, of course, had long been empty and in disuse and disrepair. Oh, and there was no maintenence man. But I liked the homeless guy - he was friendly to all but the invisible maintenance man - and I’m glad the management took no objection to his presence in the pool-shed.
The ghost seemed to haunt the corridor, which I had to traverse whenever I did laundry, as the laundry-room was located at the opposite end of the long narrow hallway. It seemed impossible to keep the light-bulbs in working order, which indeed could have been an electrical problem - one which was unlikely to get quickly solved in such a low-budget dump. There were also cold spots, even in summer. And whenever I would walk to the laundry room, I would hear footsteps directly behind me, and would turn around only to find nobody there. Sometimes I would find myself racing down that inevitably too-dark corridor to dump my clothes quickly into the washer and rush back to my apartment to avoid those ghostly footsteps. Its no wonder that no-one else ever did laundry in that room - I never saw anyone anyway, and I never had to wait for a dryer.
I only stayed in the place for three months. I didn’t move due to the ghost, but to the fact that most of my friends were prone to mocking my rather modest abode. And with a new part-time job I could afford a better apartment, and found myself a fantastic and spacious one-bedroom luxury (at least for me) flat in a high-rise in a premium location. No way it could be haunted, right? |
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