An Unwelcome Roommate

The following is a scary first person account:

When I was a sophomore in college my roommates, and I decided to move off campus. Within walking distance of our university was a once affluent neighborhood with large colonial brick homes.

A friend of mine knew the owner of one of these homes. He was looking to rent out the last remaining floor with living room and kitchen privileges.

Feeling excited and grown up, three of my friends and myself moved in. A week later we encountered an elderly women who lived next door. We stood around bored as she reminisced about how grand the neighborhood had once been—without a lot of noisy students in residence.

As we turned to leave, she caught our attention with her last statement. “” Where you live no one seems to stay very long.”

I was the first of the roommates to encounter what was to become a series of creepy incidents. I was standing washing our dinner dishes when I caught sight of a male figure out of the corner of my eye.

I turned around, but I was alone in the kitchen. I then heard heavy footsteps heading down the hallway but when I followed no one was in the living room. Perplexed, I remembered there were no men in the house that evening.

One of my roommates came down one morning to announce that she had not gotten any sleep. She felt a cat jump up on her bed several times during the night. It then wandered around her room.

She never saw this cat. No one in the home owned a pet. We looked around for a couple of hours but never found a stray cat.

The week before Spring Break my sister came to visit. She fell down the stairs as we watched from the living room in horror. She told us someone had pushed her, but we were the only ones in the house at the time.

A month later we were eating popcorn and watching a movie when my roommates’ laptop disappeared. She had placed it on the coffee table in front of where we sat but when the lights came on it was gone. We searched but never found it until several weeks later when it appeared in the exact same spot where we had last seen it.

By this time we were all spooked. We agreed that at the end of the semester we were moving out. But two of my roommates left within two weeks of the laptop incident.

So there were only two of us left during finals week. This is when the creepiest incident occurred. I awoke one morning to find all the boxes I had packed stacked one on top of another all the way to the ceiling and the heavy bedside table was three feet away from where it normally sat.

I ran to my roommate, but before I could describe the chaos in my room, she asked me if I had heard the footsteps during the night. I hadn’t. She told me she had heard me go to bed and an hour later she heard footsteps climb the stairs—they then entered my room. She didn’t hear them leave my room.

No one was in the house but us. The other tenets were away on vacation. Two days later we both moved out.