In January 2001 I rented a studio apartment in an old Victorian style house in Pueblo, CO. When you entered the front door there were 2 one bedroom apartments on the main floor, and a winding staircase that went to 2 studios upstairs. It was cool because I became friends with the couple that lived downstairs. The husband did repairs to the apartment across from him for money off his rent, so it was vacant. The tenant across from me was an old Hispanic man that had lived there for 20 years. He was friendly but he didn't speak that much English. Overall, this was an ideal location since it was close to my college and easy to get to the bike trail on the Arkansas River.
Everything was pretty sweet for me upstairs. If you looked out he window you could see the murals on the river levee, one of which was a yin yang with an angel on one side and a demon on the other. At this time I was taking tai chi classes so this couldn't have been better. The one thing I'd do was a little spin as I was walking up the stairs to my apartment. It felt like energy was flowing down the stairs, (or some kind of resistance) so spinning seemed to make it easier going up.
Looking back there were a few strange things that happened while living up stairs. This one afternoon I was bored so I drank a couple shots of Everclear I had bought to make some herbal tinctures. Those shots knocked me out and apparently I was out all night partying at a bar on Union. My old roommate's girlfriend was there and told everyone about it. I do remember a little bit and it was embarrassing. She didn't say who took me home but I woke up in my apartment. A few weeks later there was a loud knock on my door. When I answered the door there was a man that was drunk out of his mind thinking this was his apartment. So, I helped him on his way thinking about what I had recently gone through.
There was another odd situation. I stopped to talk to the tenant upstairs who was standing by the vacant apartment. The door was open because the other tenant had been working in there. Besides your basic greetings, the old man pointed into the apartment and asked if I could "see the smoke". I didn't get what he was saying and didn't see smoke. It was important to him so I agreed with what he was saying, but it didn't make sense.
A few months after moving in I found a girlfriend and she moved in with me a month later. Thinking that I needed more room, I asked the landlord to move into that vacant apartment below mine. The landlord had no problem with me moving in and paying more rent. So we spent a day moving in, which was easy.
Everything was normal until evening. We started feeling uneasy with each other. She felt like I was going to hurt her while I was thinking she was going to hurt me. We were literally sitting on opposite ends of the couch sizing each other up. While that was going on roaches started crawling in under the front door. I'm talking about a massive amount of roaches. They started climbing the walls and some dropped off the ceiling onto us. We saw a few dead ones earlier while cleaning, but there were no roaches upstairs. How could it be this bad? We were freaked out and started saying prayers and burning incense. It seemed to help for around 20 minutes, then it would feel weird again. We kept going in and out to the side porch where we talked about how we were feeling about each other.
There was a strange mold I noticed on the front window molding. It was like the size of a pack of cigarettes only not as thick. My girlfriend didn't notice it and she was doing a lot of the cleaning. There was also a crazy face in the wood grain of the front door that didn't help the situation.
We decided we should just go to bed and get the day over with. It was hard at first because you could hear the upstairs tenant making noise. He might have been unclogging a drain with a hanger. All we heard were weird sounds in the pipes. After finally falling asleep, I woke to my girlfriend freaking out screaming. When I first looked at her she looked like a different woman. She told me she couldn't see and there was a feeling of pressure on top of her. That was it! We got out of there at like 3-4 AM.
Later that day, we went to pick up our belongings. I asked my teacher come to see what she thought about the place. She agreed something didn't feel right. Even my girlfriend's mother didn't like it and let us move in the empty side of a shop she had. The last thing that freaked us out was when we were moving out. There was a nest and an egg had fallen and cracked on the porch with the baby bird exposed. We didn't notice it all night with us going in and out the side door.
I broke my lease and told the landlord he needed an exorcist. A few years later the whole building burned down and they now have a community garden in its place.
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