For a very long time now my family and I have wondered exactly what happened to us in our apartment we shared for roughly a year and a half. We can’t decide between haunting, phrogging or just an unfortunate series of events.
If you have any ideas let us know! We have only ever spoken about this so it will be the first post regarding everything.
My mom, my sister and I moved into an apartment in a Houston suburb in 2016. In each building there are 8 units. Four on bottom and four on top, they were sliced in half (think long ways they were 3 beds) so that on each side the entrance opened to the bottom two and top two apartments.
We were in the top right apartment. The maintenance man lived on the same half as us but he was the bottom unit on the left side (diagonal from ours)
The following are two occurrences that happened while we were living at the apartment complex. I would love some ideas on something normal to explain all of this away!
The banging
The first thing was just annoying really. We started to randomly hear a knocking sound. Even like a metronome. Sounded like someone was hitting a fist onto the wall at regular intervals. We took countless videos of this sound and were told many things..
“There is no one in the unit where you claim the sound is coming from”
“The maintenance man has not noted any noise”
“Without anyone coming forward or without more information there is nothing we can do”
Fair enough honestly. It may be driving us insane figuring it out but it was only noise at first nothing crazy. Each time a tennant was in the next door apartment (did not share the door front but we shared a main wall in our units) the banging would stop.
I think about three times the banging was very obviously coming from the master bedroom from the unit next to us (the units were mirrors of each other). My mom would wake to someone banging on that shared wall in the bedroom, loudly enough to wake my sister in the next room as well. She would get angry and bang on the wall back but nothing seemed to work. The sound would continue regardless of what we did until it eventually just stopped. We were just told there was nothing to be done as the unit was empty!
We have considered:
The neighbors getting freaky (it was too consistent and only happened when unit was empty)
Dogs running (it didn’t get louder and softer like a dog running down the hallway, also empty)
Some kind of device that maybe moves on it’s own and gets caught hitting on something? (if the unit was empty and this is what happened then why did maintenance never hear if they are in the same building? It would have to be really loud if it didn’t come from the shared wall?)
Something to note:
There was a 30 day policy at the apartment, if you moved in you could break the lease within the first 30 days and there wasn’t a penalty.
Until we moved out (and even those people to our knowledge) not a single tenant made it past the 30 days. We were always VERY curious as to why we always had new neighbors.
The attic
As I mentioned before the 4 top units have an attic space. The entrance is in the master bedroom closet. It does not have a pull down string and staircase, the set up was a little different. When you open the door to the closet directly in front of you (like 3 feet deep) is a built-in shelf that doubles as a makeshift staircase to the attic (more like crawlspace). You can use the shelf as steps and then there are shelves on each side of the closet (above the hanging bar) that you could use to steady yourself as you went up.
That attic entrance was a square hole in the ceiling with a larger square board placed over it to cover the hole. To get in you simply push the board up and move it over.
On the outside of the master bedroom closet the landlord had the trim and the door itself repainted white (landlord special you all know it). It was done poorly and you could very easily see the old outlines/screw holes where on 3 different occasions (or 3 at one time whatever you think is more plausible) a padlock was installed on the closet door. We’re talking a square indention on the door frame with four screw holes in it and a matching square indention and holes a couple inches over on the door too. I would LOVE to know what could be kept in or out of that closet with those locks. Our guess is keeping something or someone from coming down from that craw lspace.
The best part? All four attic spaces are connected. This was confirmed by the front office that you can crawl up through the closet of one unit and down through any of the four top units in that building. No, we have no idea how this was legal or allowed!
One night my sister and mom were up talking in the living room at roughly 3am in the morning. They both wait tables and work nights so this is the equivalent of roughly 11pm for them. We had been having weird occurrences but when they heard footsteps overhead it was one of the final things that really made us leave. Who could possibly be walking around in the attic space at 3am?
I can go on and on about weird stuff with the attic and the apartment! If i get any traction maybe i’ll keep going! This is the tip of the iceberg honestly with crazy shit that happened there.