The Old Man"s Ghost
This story takes place in the winter of 2012. My wife and I lived in three different apartments in a building that was 133 years old, and our choice to move to the third apartment was quickly deemed a mistake.
During our time in the building, an old man lived downstairs in what would later become the third apartment. He suffered from muscular dystrophy and was wheelchair bound. One day after returning home from work, I saw his brother on the porch crying.
I approached the front door and he quickly shut the old man's door before I reached it. The smell of death filled the building, and I wondered if the man had passed. Then I heard sirens in the distance. They lined up the street and came inside. He had died and was rotting for weeks before being discovered.
After a few weeks, I was curious to know what his apartment was like inside, so I asked my landlord to show me after it was cleaned. He agreed and when he did I fell in love with it. Two days later, we had the keys. This was all during my wife's first pregnancy and we had a cat named Bandit.
We bought a digital camera to take pictures of my wife's belly. That's when hell began. Our cat would look at things that weren't there, and one day I was taking pictures of her, and to my shock and horror, faces appeared above her in the photo!
Intrigued, I began shooting more, and every reflective surface I shot held images of evil-looking faces that were clearly definable! We would see glimpses of things out of the corners of our eyes.
Then one day an old Fisher-Price toy with a bell on it, which was stored in a drawer untouched for months, rang! My heart jumped and I was frozen with fear.
Everything seemed to calm itself until we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Then it took a turn for the worse. Almost immediately she would look at something over our shoulder that wasn't there and follow it intently when we held her. Her swing would move by itself. She spent most of the time fixated on the corner in which they had discovered the old man. When we heard her cooing at nothing from the other room, we packed up and moved.
Before this, I scoffed at the idea of hauntings, until my wife revealed to me that when she was 11 she was in a car accident and declared dead for three minutes.She then told me ever since then she's been followed by "something," but never spoke of it because she didn't want people to think she was crazy. All of the above is true, and once you encounter a haunting, you'd wish you hadn't.
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During our time in the building, an old man lived downstairs in what would later become the third apartment. He suffered from muscular dystrophy and was wheelchair bound. One day after returning home from work, I saw his brother on the porch crying.
I approached the front door and he quickly shut the old man's door before I reached it. The smell of death filled the building, and I wondered if the man had passed. Then I heard sirens in the distance. They lined up the street and came inside. He had died and was rotting for weeks before being discovered.
After a few weeks, I was curious to know what his apartment was like inside, so I asked my landlord to show me after it was cleaned. He agreed and when he did I fell in love with it. Two days later, we had the keys. This was all during my wife's first pregnancy and we had a cat named Bandit.
We bought a digital camera to take pictures of my wife's belly. That's when hell began. Our cat would look at things that weren't there, and one day I was taking pictures of her, and to my shock and horror, faces appeared above her in the photo!
Intrigued, I began shooting more, and every reflective surface I shot held images of evil-looking faces that were clearly definable! We would see glimpses of things out of the corners of our eyes.
Then one day an old Fisher-Price toy with a bell on it, which was stored in a drawer untouched for months, rang! My heart jumped and I was frozen with fear.
Everything seemed to calm itself until we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Then it took a turn for the worse. Almost immediately she would look at something over our shoulder that wasn't there and follow it intently when we held her. Her swing would move by itself. She spent most of the time fixated on the corner in which they had discovered the old man. When we heard her cooing at nothing from the other room, we packed up and moved.
Before this, I scoffed at the idea of hauntings, until my wife revealed to me that when she was 11 she was in a car accident and declared dead for three minutes.She then told me ever since then she's been followed by "something," but never spoke of it because she didn't want people to think she was crazy. All of the above is true, and once you encounter a haunting, you'd wish you hadn't.
Previous story | Next story
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