15 years ago, I was fresh out of high school. I was working at a grocery store part time while contemplating my next move (I eventually ended up deciding to go to college). When I was a freshman in college I lived off campus in an older, affordable, apartment complex. This was on the outskirts of town closer to the highway. Most of my neighbors were older, retired, folks. But there also several college students in similar situations to myself. That situation being, working just to make rent, and depending on that sweet sweet financial aide. The apartment complex was built in the late 1970s, this was evidenced by the dated decorations and cheesy wallpaper on the inside.
The first couple months of me living in this complex was fairly normal. Nothing odd happened, the lone exception being the cops being called one evening due to a heated domestic dispute on the ground level of the building across from mine. As time progressed I started noticing odd things around my apartment. Keys or small items would be moved from where I placed them. More than once I would come home to the fridge door wide open. These things at first didn’t register as something really strange, just wrote it off as me being forgetful. I should also state that I didn’t have a roommate at this time. As that first fall turned in winter, the activity really picked up. One evening in early November, I was getting ready to out and eat, when I heard a huge crash come from my bedroom (now up until this point nothing weird had ever happened there) I walked into the room and my computer monitor had fallen off the desk an a drawer on the same desk was open.
This freaked me a bit, so I turned on all the lights in the bedroom on and left the little hall light on before I left. I came back later that night and walked inside at first nothing registered as off or weird, but then I remembered I had left the lights on, and it was now dark except for the spare bedroom light, which I had not cut on. The layout of the apartment was as follows: Walk into the living room, small wall divides that into a kitchen area on the right, straight ahead from the living room is a small hall way with a small spare room on the left and bathroom on right with the master bedroom at the end of the hallway. I quickly turned on the living room light (and the TV for noise) and walked over to the guest room and went inside. The light was on, and except for a small desk on side of the room, it was empty. I realized as I walked into the room the closet door was slid back (it was empty) but on the desk was a bunch of spare change that was arranged in a sort of wavy line pattern.
I was thoroughly spooked by this but I was locked into rent until May so I had to make due. Nothing else happened until the week after exams and week before I went home for Christmas. One night I had a lady friend spending the night, a girl I had met in one of my design classes, as we were chilling in bed. I remember she got up to use the bathroom and I had turned around to face the wall. I heard her walk back into room and get back into bed, I turned around to talk to her, but there was no one there, just the indentation where it looked like someone was laying. I was utterly stunned and I could fell the hair on my arms stand up. Then after what felt like an eternity, indentation slowly popped back up and the room felt “normal” again. My friend returned to bed and never mentioned anything out the ordinary, and I never said a word to her about it.
After this last experience I was thoroughly spooked. I closed up my apartment or the winter break and went home for two weeks. When I came back there was nothing out of the ordinary, everything was how I left it. This lasted for about three weeks. Then in mid January shit started up again. I had started dating the girl that was mentioned above. She would stay over with me a few nights a week and I would stay with her a few nights. One evening I was working and she was at my apartment, when she called me and told me that as she was pulling into the parking lot and saw an older lady staring out of my guest room window. She asked if I had a relative visiting or if my mom was in town. I assured her neither was the case. She got freaked out and went back to her place and after work I drove to her apartment and we went back to my place together. The door was locked and when we entered nothing at all was out of place.
To say we were both frightened at this point was an understatement. My girlfriend refused to stay over for a solid month. She was convinced the place was haunted, and I was starting to think she might be right. I decided to ask around some of the older neighbors to see if anyone had maybe died in the house. The lady that had lived here the longest had been there roughly thirteen years. In that time she stated that to her knowledge nothing odd had happened or no one had died in that apartment since she lived there. The property owners got wind I was asking around about deaths in their complex, and spoke to me about not doing those things as it could be considered defamation and legal action could be taken. I cooled it out of fear of getting into trouble.
Things happened on a regular basis. These included objects still moving, lights turning on and off, one other nightly visitor to my bed (this happened in the summer of my first year) and friend who had come to visit saying someone knocked on the bathroom door while he was showering and I was out. Finally the spring of my sophomore year shed some light on my mystery! One of the maintenance men who managed the properties, caught me coming back from class one day and asked if he could talk to me. He told me that in 1987 a lady who lived alone in my apartment had died of natural causes. This was was the middle of the month so the rent was paid, he stated that the reason it was kept hush hush is because it her body hadn’t been discovered for about 7 or 8 days, and the only reason anyone took the time check on her was because the smell of “rotting meat” that started to faintly drift out of apartment. (I want to mention that this took place in Georgia, in the American south, where it stays warm and gets incredibly hot in the summers. I can only imagine how quickly a body could decompose and how STANKY that finding this lady had to be!).
He told me he was 15 at the time and it was a huge deal. He suspected the owners didn’t mention it because they were afraid it would scare people off. He told me that while he was working there that he had never encountered anything odd, but rarely had to go to that apartment. He had been working on the property for about 8 years at this point. He did mention that apartment (apartment I) did seem to only keep tenants for one contract term at a time. I stayed in that apartment until he fall of 2012, my last semester, when I finally moved into a smaller efficiency apartment. The whole time I lived in apartment I, with the exception of the first two months my freshman year, odd things happened. Although I never saw the ghost I had several interactions with it. This has made me a firm believer in the supernatural.