My wife, Lucy, and I lived in a shitty apartment with our dog and two cats just before the Lower Garden District in New Orleans, LA. We lived there for just over a year, despite the fact that both the building and the landlady (who we refered to as The Slumlord) were atrocious. The building itself was an 1800’s style mansion before it was piecemealed into separate apartments by the Slumlord’s father. Each apartment was essentially a studio or a one bedroom. Every one of them was dingy and what we optimistically would call “quaint”; The Slumlord wasn’t a fan of paying for maintenance.
We mostly got along with our neighbors. Lucy saw them more often than I do, which is ironic considering the fact that I’m stay at home and she’s not. We’d heard the occasional argument, but never got involved. The arguments where usually about whether or not they should put out the trashcans during a tornado warning or what does and does not going in recycling. They usually ended as quickly as they began, and they ALWAYS involved Jeb.
Jeb was a Vietnam vet who was deaf in one ear because of the mortar fire he and his platoon constantly sent into the jungle. He lived alone, but had his own special routine that mostly centered around the neighborhood strays, both human and feline. In the late afternoons one would see him with his copy of Weapons of WWII on the front porch, chain smoking cigarettes while his favorite of the stray cats would come to eat. Every time Jeb moved he would wheeze, moan, or both, and he walked with a kind of shuffle mixed with a shimmy that was arduous and looked painful. Lucy and I knew shortly after we moved in that he probably didn’t have much time left.
Around late June, peak Summer in Louisiana, things started to get weird around the place. Our two cats became extremely high strung, and started meowing at corners and running frenetically around the house. We brushed it off, because not only are cats cats, but also because New Orleans is a super spiritually charged city. We figured it was probably like something before, where we had some kind of negative energy in a different house. That, or one of the cats was just horny.
We were incorrect.
It started with the depression. I struggled pretty often with depression, but this was debilitating, that kind of depression that keeps you glued to the couch and completely unable to do anything but breathe. I hadn’t dealt with it for over half a decade, and I’d had a lot of therapy since, so this was like a slap in the face with a freight train. Due to the fact that I’m stay at home, I handle most of the chores, so the depression kept the housework from getting done, which made things worse.
About half-way through this week and half long bout of depression, Lucy had a vision. She had been having regular nightmares for the last few nights, describing her sleep as “violent” and “agressive”. She was in and out of sleep, in that place where you’re not quite awake, but not quite asleep either. She told me that that’s a strange thing for her, because she usually sleeps like a rock. At a certain point in the night, Lucy half opened her eyes and saw a 6ft figure standing next to her side of the bed. It was bulbous and grotesque, with strange patterns running over its body similar to that of a leopard gecko. Its face was obscured. Its gut in particular was horribly distended, and its flesh was saggy and palid. Lucy said she didn’t feel any fear, or any symblance of sleep paralysis, that she just closed her eyes and rolled back over to go to sleep. At the time she thought it was just your average spirit or a dream.
Three days later we finally started to get the house back in order after I took some crucial steps to drag myself out of the depression pit. We were working on the kitchen while the various pets were meandering about the house. Out of nowhere I began to feel what I can only describe as a separation. It was similar to a disassociation, but was external, like I was being pulled out of my body and experiencing both the physical and spiritual senation of that in tandem. In exactly the same moment, Lucy got a piercing headache, like she had “been hit in the back of the head with a frying pan”, simultaneously getting violently nauseous. She had to sit down, and I couldn’t be sure what I was processing. After almost exactly 3 minutes both she and I came to. We looked around and saw that all three of the animals had gathered in a circle around us in the kitchen. I maintain that they had somehow protected us, but there’s no way of knowing for sure.
It ended last night. I walked our dog pretty late at night so as to avoid the heat. The second I stepped out of my apartment, I was hit with a noxious wave of a stench like rotting chicken. My dog immediately started tugging hard at the leash to get out of the building, something I specifically trained him not to do. I knew immediately that something was wrong, and, after our walk, went back in to ask Lucy if she had smelled the smell in the lobby. When she said she had, I then asked her if she had seen Jeb in awhile. She started clenching and shaking, and the image of her vision immediately flashed in her head, but it was somehow more clear. In that moment, Lucy realized: that thing was Jeb, and the patterns weren’t patterns. They were pustules. She immediately called the NOPD for a wellness check, and we went out onto the front steps to wait.
A few minutes later, an officer came and asked us the standard questions: How long had it been since we’d seen him? Did he have any known health issues? Next of kin? etc. We and our neighbor Leslie did our best to answer the questions, as well as to get in touch with The Slumlord. According to the police officer, she asked if it could wait until the morning so she could get her sleep, as well as who would be liable for the door if it had to get broken down. This was par for the course, but nonetheless very frustrating given the circumstance.
After a short wait, the LT called the fire department to have the door knocked down. Even though the three of us were waiting outside we could still smell the foulness that was released when the door broke. Leslie almost gagged. We knew almost immediately in our guts what had happened, but it was still shocking when the first officer who had arrived came out to tell us that unfortunately Jeb had passed away, and that he couldn’t disclose any information because they were opening an active investigation. When we asked him if he could at least tell us how long he had been dead, he said at least a week. This correlated with when my depression hit, and when Lucy had her vision. We went back up into our apartments and watched as the coroner’s van showed up and carted the black bag out on a gurney.
All that’s left of Jeb is a splintered door and a smell of days old corpse.