Chapter 6: Then Why Were You Screaming?
When I was 18, I lived with my (now ex) boyfriend in a basement apartment in a town in Wyoming. It was not a happy time in my life for various reasons (boyfriend was abusive, I was pregnant with his child) but it also didn't help that the apartment was creepy as shit. Even for a basement apartment, it was unusually dark and cold all the time.
As soon as we moved in, weird shit started happening. Scratching noises would seem to be coming from inside the walls. I attributed this to mice, but not a single trap that was set ever caught one. I would be doing dishes in the kitchen and I would hear an enormous crash from the living room. It would sound so much like the TV had fallen over, taking my boyfriend's shelf of Star Wars memorabilia with it, that I would rush into the living room expecting to find a complete mess and not a thing would be out of place. Sometimes I would be coming down the dark, narrow hallway that connected the living room to the rest of the apartment and I would swear that I heard whispering coming from the bathroom at the end of the hall. I would often wake up in the middle of the night after hearing something like a camera shutter clicking right in my ear. As unsettling as these things were, they didn't really disturb or frighten me so much as annoy and puzzle me. When I started finding out the history of the apartment from the locals and I had some context to put them in, that's when it got scary.
A few months after we had moved in, a guy from my hometown came to visit me. He was living in the same city at the time, attending the same college that my boyfriend was. He brought a friend with him who was local. I greeted the two of them outside the apartment, and the friend introduced himself and said that he used to know a guy who lived in these apartments. When I invited them inside and we went down to the basement apartment, the friend got a really weird look on his face.
"This is the apartment that guy I knew lived in," he said. "Have you had any problems here?"
I asked him what he meant, and he told me that the guy he knew who had lived here had been a meth dealer and self-proclaimed Satanist who used to host weird group sex parties in the name of the dark lord or some shit. (In any other town, this would seem far-fetched, but this town was/is a very strange place.) The friend said that the guy was now in prison for beating his girlfriend almost to death and pushing a TV over on top of her.
Well, that spooked me. I told my boyfriend (who hadn't taken me seriously up to that point) and he, being a non-practicing Catholic, decided that calling a Catholic priest over to come bless the place was the best solution. I was/am not religious in the slightest, but I didn't have any better ideas, so we called the local parish and they sent an old priest over. He sprinkled some holy water around, said a few prayers in Latin, and was gone.
Later that night, we were invited to a small gathering at our neighbor's apartment. He lived in the apartment directly above us, and we had told him earlier in the day about the priest coming over to bless the place because of the spooky shit that was going on. When we arrived at his apartment that evening, he asked us how it went. We shrugged and said fine.
"Then why were you screaming?" he asked me. "Were you having devils cast out or something?"
My boyfriend and I exchanged puzzled looks. I told him I hadn't been screaming. Nobody had. The whole thing had been pretty uneventful. The neighbor swore up and down that he had heard a woman screaming coming from our apartment while the priest was there. He had thought it was me being "exorcised" or something. WTF.
I had hoped that was the end of it, but it wasn't. Things actually started to get worse over the next few months. The weird noises came more frequently. The camera-shutter sound woke me up every night instead of just once in a while. My boyfriend began experiencing the phenomena as well. Around this time, the fights we were having started to escalate and my boyfriend became very violent. He had never been a nice guy, exactly, but I had never thought he would actually hit me with closed fists, but he did, and quite often. It was a very bad time.
Early one morning, I woke up suddenly and saw that my boyfriend was still asleep in the bed next to me. I looked away to check the clock, and when I looked back, he was staring at the ceiling with his eyes wide open. It startled me because I had never seen him wake up so suddenly. I said good morning and asked if he was okay.
"I spoke to it," he said. "The thing that lives here. It told me I can't leave. It said it owns me now."
I started to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but he immediately closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Somewhere deep down, I thought I knew what he was talking about, and that freaked me out even more.
One night a few weeks later, I was alone in the apartment. Boyfriend was out drinking with friends. I was watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on the TV in the living room. I decided to go to the kitchen to get a drink. As I was walking down the long, dark hallway to the kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks. I had heard something growl. At first, I thought it must have been the TV, but as I strained to hear, the noise coming from the TV in the living room was Jim Carey doing one of his voices. The growl came again, and it was coming from somewhere much closer, and off to my right. I turned and saw a dark shape crouching in the hallway. I had just enough time to wonder if a stray dog had somehow gotten in when the thing stood up and rushed at me, snarling. I fucking freaked. Bolted down the hallway, up the stairs and out the front door.
The neighbor who lived above us wasn't at home, so I went up another flight of stairs and knocked on a different neighbor's door. The lady named Dawn who lived in the apartment on the top floor came to the door. I had not met her before this, but I immediately started babbling about the shadow thing in my apartment and begged her to come take a look. She and her SO, who lived there with her, accompanied me downstairs. There was nothing to see and nothing out of place, but the hallway was ice cold. I felt stupid and crazy and embarrassed, but Dawn told me she believed me.
"You know, this apartment is messed up," she said. "Lots of crazy shit has gone on down here."
I told her I had already heard about the Satanist dude who tried to murder his girlfriend. She laughed and said that was only one of the people that had lived there. Before that guy, a Mexican lady had lived there. She was a devout Catholic who did not speak a lot of English and had a life-size crucifix on the wall. Dawn had never seen anything like it outside of a church, and when she asked about it, the Mexican lady crossed herself and said that it was to "keep the evil in the apartment at bay". Before that lady, the apartment had been rented by a photographer who used it as his darkroom. He was busted for kiddie porn. My blood froze as I remembered the weird camera-shutter noises that would wake me up. Dawn told me more about the history of the apartment and the people who had lived there, but I can't recall any of the other details- just that each person had either been terrified of the place, been a terrible person, or met a terrible end.
I moved out of the apartment and back in with my parents a few weeks later. I might have stayed longer if not for the fact that my boyfriend had become so violent during one of our fights that he threatened to kill me and then himself. Whether it was him finally showing his true colors or "the evil in the apartment" working on him, I'll probably never know- but I knew that my life and the life of my unborn child was in danger, so I got the fuck out of there and out of that relationship.
Unborn child is 12 now. Abusive boyfriend is out of the picture and has been for over a decade. I am still very good friends with Dawn. Sometimes I still have dreams about that place, though. The dreams are always terrifying, and sometimes I wake up in the dark, totally convinced for a few moments that I am back in that apartment.
