It was the summer of 1992, about a year after my first paranormal experience. I was dating my girlfriend and eventual wife Terry, for several months. We decided that since I spent most of my time at her apartment, that it was time for me to move in. The house was a large, 1860's Federal-style brick residence. It was built by a pair of brothers who were leaving for the Civil War, and was created to provide a place for their sisters to live while they were away. Although the building was now split into four apartments, other than one small bedroom in the back of the building, three of the apartments were exclusively on the first floor. The original front door was converted to a private entrance, with a spiral staircase which now led to our spacious, second floor apartment.
I had been living there approximately a week, when one evening while searching for something on TV, Terry decided that she would go relax in a warm bath. The apartment from front to back, consisted of a living room separated by glass French doors from a dining room which led to the kitchen. As you entered the apartment from the staircase, the living room was on the right and a hallway extended left around the stair opening to two attached bedrooms, a bath, and also had a doorway into the dining room.
As Terry ran her bath, I laid down on the couch, which was positioned against the wall adjacent to the hallway and stairwell. She finished running the bath and went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I continued watching TV for approximately ten minutes, when from the hallway, I heard a door open. Presuming it was the bathroom door, I thought, "that was a shorter bath than normal for her". Shortly after I heard the door open, I heard footsteps in the hallway. Hearing the footsteps, I thought it strange that she had taken her shoes into the bathroom with her. The footsteps went the length of the hall and then could be heard on the stairs. When the sound reached the bottom of the stairs, the front door opened and then closed. "She must be checking the mail or getting something out of her car", I presumed. Ten minutes passed, then twenty minutes, and Terry did not return. Thinking she bumped into one of the neighbors and was talking, I went down the stairs to see what she was up to. She was not on the front porch and her car had not been moved. I called for her but she did not answer. I went up the stairs and upon reaching the top, noticed the bathroom door was closed. I walked to the door and opened it. Terry was laying in the tub listening to her walkman, oblivious to anything I had just experienced.
When she got out of the bath, we discussed what transpired and were somewhat unnerved. We went to bed shortly after and were lying in bed still talking about it when I started to feel a vibration in the bed. "Why is the bed moving?" I asked. The next thing I knew, the comforter we were under was thrown over my head. When I pulled it back, Terry was standing in the hallway peeking around the corner into the bedroom. "You can feel that?" she said, "I thought it was just me... It does it all the time".
"...all the time..." a whispered voice from the attached bedroom responded. I sat up and turned toward the adjacent room and then turned to Terry who was standing open mouthed in the doorway. Although her reaction already revealed the answer, "Did you hear that?" I gasped; her reply was interrupted by a loud hiss and me leaping from the bed in response to our panicked cat jumping on me and off the bed as it scrambled through the doorway Terry was standing in.
We lived in the apartment for seven more years after that night. We had several unexplainable experiences. A three foot long, antique bugle-like horn that we had hanging on the wall over the French doors in the dining room was found standing on end on the hardwood floor when we arrived home one day, a sharpening steel hanging on a peg in the kitchen would begin swinging and would not stop until you placed your hand on it, and our cat who had lived in the apartment for five years went missing one day. It had somehow knocked a screen out of one of the six-foot tall windows and had fallen two stories to the ground in a rain storm. The cat always slept on the foot-wide window sills so it was familiar with its surroundings. The screens had custom made wooden frames and would have taken all of the cat's strength, or the strength of some unknown force to dislodge the frame. The entire screen and frame fell outward to the ground. We found her the next day, disoriented but unharmed under a neighbor's porch.
I mentioned to Terry one day, many times I had sensed or seen out of the corner of my eye, a small child standing behind a rocking chair in the corner of the spare bedroom. I told her that whenever I would turn to look, it would be gone. She sat down and described the little boy in Amish-style clothing perfectly.
I began working at a restaurant when I started college in 1995. I met a girl at the restaurant who lived on the same street about a block from our home. When I told her where we lived, she replied, "Oh, you live in the haunted house". As it turns out, a friend of hers was one of the many downstairs tenants who had lived there during our stay. As she related it to me; her friend was in her apartment one evening, which was right below our living room and dining room, when she heard a baby begin to cry in our apartment overhead. The crying soon changed to the screaming of what she presumed was an inconsolable, sick child. She knew us well enough to know that we had no children. The wailing went on for the better part of an hour, until the girl got so upset at hearing the child cry, she decided to see if she could help us in some way. She exited her apartment and walked around to the front porch and knocked on our door. The crying immediately stopped. She knocked repeatedly and no one came to the door and no lights were on in our upstairs windows. She returned to her apartment and later witnessed us arriving home shortly after. Two hours later, she moved out of the building.
In 2000, I was chosen for a job I had applied for in Maine. We packed our belongings that we intended to take in our personal cars, and a moving company that my new employer had provided packed the rest for delivery to Maine. We lived amongst boxes and crates for a week leading up to moving day. I came home one afternoon and discovered broken glass all over the spare bedroom. The bedroom had a closet which was an abbreviated/converted staircase, which was two steps lower than the floor to the spare room. A few years before, we had set a mirror we had replaced from a large antique dresser in the back of the closet just to keep it out of the way until we could dispose of it. It weighed about eighty pounds and was leaning against the back wall with the bottom of the glass about eight inches from the wall. Something had pushed the four foot by three foot piece of glass away from the brick wall and shattered it against the spare room landing.
Regardless of this protest from our unseen roommates, we bid the house farewell two days later and never went back.
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