My senior year of college, I had an off-campus apartment because I had lived so seamlessly perfectly with my college roommate and she was a year older than me and had graduated. You can’t follow up that act. I had to either get a roommate (or three) or bug out.
I bugged out.
Might I add, working three jobs and freelancing while going to college did not make me enough money so my parents had to chip in to help me afford rent.
My apartment was a private rental. It was half of the upper floor of a house that had been converted into about four or five apartments. Two on the top, maybe three on the bottom. You know, everyone’s dream.
Get it? It’s sexual.
The top-top floor was the attic. Through a chain of events I will write about later, I knew there was the end of a fireplace up there. I had a doorway in my apartment to this attic, but, it was dead-bolted and padlocked. My first landlord told me to never go into the attic that it wasn't safe. And I was cool with that. He sold the building a couple months later and this other chick took over being the landlord. She was horrible.
The apartment opened to a fairly large kitchen, smaller living then a LONG hall which had the attic door on one side and bathroom on the other side. At the end of the hall, it was the bedroom. It was a very long, one-way type apartment.
At least once a week, but a couple times a week, along the long hallway on the attic door side, there would be all these little dirty hand-print marks. So, I did what anyone would do, I cleaned them off. Then they would reappear. They were about at my knee-to-hip level and I was a college kid. It was like 2002, so, honestly, I didn’t have time for this nonsense.
Hand-prints appear. Hand-prints cleaned off. Hand-prints appeared. Whatever. I left them and dealt with this collection of brown-tan prints.
Now, it was an older building and I often heard my neighbors on the one side and even my downstairs neighbor. They also reported hearing me. And also, if the guy in the lower apartment ordered porn or anything, we ALL got to watch it because there was only one line or something.
See, that's something I would mention. This statement will be important later.
When I graduated, I moved out. Because it was a small town, the people who moved in after me where friends of a girl I was friends with in college. She told me they were moving into my apartment and I told them it was a great little spot.
I told them about the porn thing and that the downstairs neighbor smoked and they don't need to immediately call 911 when the neighbors started fighting - you wait 10 minutes, if you hear sex sounds, everything is AOK. The best pizza specials were on Tuesdays and I left a bunch of these blue trash bags for them to use that you had to put your trash in by town-law.
You know - IMPORTANT stuff.
About a week later or a week after they moved in, I get this exchange.
Alice: OMG, did you know that apartment is HAUNTED?!
Maddie: Haunted? No, it’s not haunted-haunted.
As a fan of horror, I would not say that the place was haunted. Just to be clear.
Alice: OMG, it totally is. There are children’s hand-prints all over the walls that keep coming back.
Maddie: Oh, yeah. That happens. You just clean it off.
Alice: They hear the children running around in the attic!
Maddie: Yeah, that’s annoying, but, I mean, there is a lot of noise from the street and stuff.
Alice: ...and there is the sound of scratching and crying during the night. They hear crying.
Maddie: To to fair, it could be the neighbors...do you hear sex-sounds after?
Alice: It is not the neighbors. They moved out. And then they found all this weird sh** in the attic, too.
Maddie: Oh yeah, you never go into the attic. The previous owner told me that. He said, don't ever go into the attic.
Alice: THE APARTMENT IS HAUNTED!
Maddie: Oh. Yeah. I mean, in review, yeah, I guess you have some strong evidence there.
And that’s pretty much that story. No real conclusion. The people who lived there moved out a hot second later. I don't know who moved in after. I can't help think maybe they shouldn't have gone into the attic.
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