By J. L. Thurston

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This Real Life Ghost Story is actually one of my own. Everything I tell you below has happened to me, and I’m something of a sceptic.

I don’t believe my husband when he says he can sense spirits. I find it annoying when people believe they have special powers over invisible forces. I just don’t think there is such thing. But I won’t claim that unexplainable things don’t happen. Maybe there are ghosts, or demons or something that causes our hauntings. I’m still not a believer of most things, but I will admit that some freaky things happened to me in my old apartment.

I used to live in this tiny two-bedroom. The kitchen was about as big as an airplane bathroom and the bathroom was carpeted and always smelled a little musty. I hated the place, but it was cheap, and it was my first apartment. I ended up living there almost nine years.

My husband (then boyfriend) had a young son who would stay with us. His bedroom was in the back of the apartment and had tiny jailhouse windows that only looked out to the neighbor’s brick wall. He hated that room. We had a very nice, very expensive bed for him, but he never slept in it. He always ended up conking out in the living room. When he did sleep in his room, he’d wake up with nightmares. He never played in there. In fact, I don’t remember him spending any time in there.

When his mother moved him to Oklahoma, we only saw him in the summertime. So, when he was gone, his room became a storage space. No matter how many times I shut that closet door, it would always be open the next time I went in there.

We had a new addition to the family. My brother-in-law had his girlfriend move in and she was often over at my house. We would paint together or do yoga. She has a wild personality, a bit loud and somewhat hyper. At that point we considered the back bedroom haunted and joked around that the ghost didn’t like my brother-in-law’s girlfriend. Our jokes became real the day she began taunting it.

“You’re no ghost,” she teased, looking right into the bedroom. “If you really were real, you’d do something right now!”

All at once, a book slid across the floor and all the kitchen cabinets swung open. I was so freaked I immediately asked her to leave.

When the movie Paranormal Activity came out, we named our ghost Toby. Naming it seemed to give it new energy. That’s what my husband said, anyway. The strange happenings became more frequent. My dresser drawers would slowly slide shut after I’d gone to bed. The sound of them moving would cause me to hide under my covers. The curtains would move, lights would turn on. We began keeping the back bedroom door shut due to the strange noises that came from there almost round the clock. I remember entering the apartment after work and feeling as though many voices had just shushed, like walking into a room where people are talking about you and they suddenly stop.

I began feeling watched in the shower. When it was just me and my husband in the apartment, I’d always shower with the bathroom door open.

The worst of the worst was the night I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamed that I was laying in bed, and I looked over the side of the mattress to see a black, hairy hand with eight bony fingers crawling up the mattress to get me. I screamed and screamed and screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming. I was screaming in real life! I crawled underneath my husband, feeling the worst fear I’d ever experienced, and he began punching blindly into the darkness.

I scrambled to the light switch and flicked it on. Of course, nothing was there. But my husband’s fist was red and swollen. He had made contact. He claims he’d seen the attacker and had landed a few very solid blows. I told him it was just a nightmare about a spider and that it was nothing, but truthfully I can still feel the fear I felt that night. I have never slept without a nightlight since.

We haven’t lived in that apartment for four years. After we got married we bought a house, had a baby, and have been insanely busy with the goings-on of our life. We haven’t really experienced much here. My husband swears to some strange things, but I think he just loves the paranormal so much he anticipates it. The lack of activity in our new house and the abundance of it in our old apartment seems to me evidence that maybe it is possible that old place was haunted. Demon, ghost, whatever it was, I’m glad we put it behind us.