My boyfriend, Dan, and I moved into our apartment in November 2007. It's our first apartment together, and for the first few months we didn't really notice anything strange about the place. We had previously lived with Dan's brother, and it was enough of an adjustment getting used to living on our own.
Our cats, Edgar and Zelda, did seem to take a while to get used to the place, but we attributed that to the fact that they had never lived anywhere else. Besides, who can really explain cat behavior most of the time? Edgar, in particular, seemed to change the most. He used to be a very sweet, outgoing cat, but for the first six months in our apartment he showed a bit of nervousness in general, and aggression towards me, scratching, biting, etc, and to this day, about ten months later, is still extremely jumpy.
About four months ago, in May, was about the time when we started noticing strange occurrences. For example, one night I got up to use the bathroom, locking the bathroom door behind me. When I tried to leave the bathroom, I unlocked the door, turned the knob. It still felt like the door was locked. I jiggled the knob, tried locking and unlocking the door again, and still nothing. I am a bit claustrophobic, so I did panic a little. I pounded on the door and Dan had to come and let me out of the bathroom. He was able to do so just fine from the other side and thought that the situation was a riot. We figured it was something wrong with the knob since the apartments haven't really been renovated since the 70's.
Back in our bedroom, about an hour or two later, I noticed Edgar staring intently at the wall above our headboard. I kept looking to see what he was looking at with such concentration (this is a cat who normally has the attention span of a goldfish) but I couldn't see anything. He continued to do so and at one point even crawled up between Dan and I to bat at the wall. Dan thought maybe he saw a shadow or a bug and we didn't think anything more of it that night.
Our problems with the bathroom door continued off and on. Dan even took of the knob to see if he could figure out what was making it stick, but it appeared to be working fine. Finally one night, Dan's co-worker, Lyndsey, got stuck in the bathroom, and the door didn't want to open, even from the outside. After a little more jiggling, and about 10 minutes later, Dan got Lyndsey out. She immediately left our apartment, saying that she was "totally creeped out." The next night, I got stuck in the apartment and Dan had to forcibly remove the doorknob to let me out. Dan replaced the doorknob the next morning and our problems with the bathroom door stopped.
While all the doorknob shenanigans were going on, I noticed something else about our apartment. We keep our alcohol on top of the fridge, and when you pass by or walk on certain parts of the floor, it moves the fridge and the bottles clink. Dan and I experimented and found out the parts of the floor that we can step on to make this happen, in order to avoid them if we are walking around at night and the other person is sleeping.
One day, while home alone, I was on the computer and heard the bottles clinking. I had never heard them do that unless someone was walking around in the apartment. My first thought was that Zelda had jumped up on the refrigerator, so I went out to the kitchen with the spray bottle. On my way to the kitchen, I saw Zelda curled up asleep on her cat tree. I walked over to the fridge and stopped, looking up over the fridge to see if there was anything there. Nothing. I looked around the kitchen, and saw nothing. Then the bottles started clanking again, and I hadn't moved yet. I waited for them to stop before I moved, and I experimented walking around different parts of the kitchen to try to make the bottles make noises, and couldn't figure out how they had started when I hadn't been moving.
I gave up, and started to walk back to the bedroom. As I did, the bedroom door swung shut, and I heard a click. When I got to the door, the knob wouldn't turn. I jiggled the knob and gave the door a push, like Dan had instructed me to do when the bathroom door had been sticking. Unfortunately, I pushed a little too hard, and the door came open, with the knob coming through part of the door. I was relieved to have the door open, even if it was broken. I examined the doorknob, and realized that the door had been locked from inside the bedroom, and that it hadn't been stuck at all.
I immediately called Dan to let him know what happened, and he laughed it off again. Later that night, I noticed Edgar staring at the wall behind our headboard again. We purposely have not replaced the doorknob on our bedroom door, just to see if anything else happens.
A few days later, I came home to find the front door unlocked. Dan and I are both religious about locking the door. Dan's childhood home was burglarized, and he has a huge fear of intruders. I ran downstairs and got one of the neighbors downstairs to come in and check the apartment with me, just in case. We found nothing, and nothing seemed to be out of place. This has happened several times in the past few months, even when I leave the house and I know for a fact that I have locked the door, I come home an hour later and it will be unlocked.
We also keep our closet door closed to keep the cats from getting hair all over our clean clothes (I have to wear black and white at work, the two worst colors for cat owners to wear), and we keep finding the closet door open as well. Once, while I was inside the closet (we have a walk-in), the door shut on me as well.
Things have seemed to escalate in the past two months or so. Dan has claimed to have lost his keys and torn the whole apartment apart looking for them, only to find them half an hour later neatly placed on the end of the bed. I thought perhaps he just hadn't checked that spot, until the same thing happened to me. We keep a white blanket folded on the end of the bed, and after fifteen minutes of frantic searching, I remembered what happened to Dan and checked the bedroom again. Sure enough, there were my keys, neatly placed on the white blanket at the end of the bed.
Edgar still has a fascination with the wall behind our headboard. I have examined it up close, and cannot figure out what the heck he is looking at. He doesn't seem to do that with any other spots in our apartment.
During the past week or so, I keep thinking that Dan is talking to me when I am getting ready in the bathroom and he is in the bedroom. But, when I go into the bedroom and ask him what he said, he tells me he hasn't said anything.
I have tried to be thorough and would welcome any thoughts or suggestions on this subject. Are we going crazy or is there possible activity in our apartment? It seems that the activity is primarily focused on the doors in our apartment, but I am not aware of the history of the complex or our specific apartment, and at this point I have not been able to find any.
Loading comments....
