Your
True Tales
June 2004 – Page
2
Deposit
Returned
by Jon
Back in the summer of 1998, I rented a second floor apartment on a beachfront in Revere, Mass. The price was perfect, Two bedrooms, a large porch overlooking the water, a nice backyard that I could imagine throwing a monster barbecue or a party in (later to learn that there was a senior couple living on the first floor). The place was really nice. But only after moving in did I realize something wasn't right about this house - namely, there were other people living there in my apartment and certainly weren't paying rent to be there.
I can remember when I first went to see it. It had almost a smell about it or a feeling about it that should have tipped me off, but at the price who could resist such a deal.
The first day I moved in, my girlfriend found a creepy display on the top shelf of the closet way in the back. There was a dirty little gremlin doll, you know the kind with the big green eyes and stubby little body and feet sold circa 1976. And with it a bone from some animal black melted candle wax and an earring. She was sort of startled by the weird display and wouldn't touch it, like it was a bug on a counter she wanted me to smash. I eventually cleaned it off and threw away the doll and the other stuff, but I agree with her it was strange but I blew it off as it could have been a child's room and kids do weird stuff.
About three days later one night, as I began to make that room into my study, I had a weird thing happen. I was moving my desk from one wall to the other when the phone rang. Well, you might say, what's weird about that? I don't have a phone. I use my cell phone. What I heard from the next room was an old-style phone ringer like the phones we had when I was a kid. It was a "dllllling," not the "beedeedeedeedee" types of today. I thought maybe it was from the elderly couple downstairs echoing up, but it was definitely coming from my living room. When I turned around, the sound had suddenly vanished like it was not even there at all and I was hearing it all in my head. Just like you think you hear the phone in the shower, but this sound was very audible and rang nearly four times.
A few hours later, my girlfriend came over to my place freaked out, claiming that the phone rang and when she answered it there was an eerie silence on the other end of the phone then the sound of a wolf or a man or something howling wildly. So she quickly called me and got someone on the phone that she says "wasn't me" and sounded like a sick old man wheezing and coughing and slurring his speech. At first she just hung up, then called again to get first the sound of someone answering the phone, then the phone went dead. She then said she raced over here to see me. I didn't tell her about my imaginary phone ringing away; we just had a late dinner and fell asleep at my place.
At about 3:00 in the morning, she shook me awake by practically shoving me over the edge of the bed saying, "Honey, honey, wake up." She was cowered up on the bed with the covers up to her chin and telling me we had to get out of there. I was half awake and trying to get the gist of what she was saying, thinking she was having a dream. I turned on the light and I could see she was lucid, so I threw on my pants as she got dressed, at first thinking there was perhaps a prowler, but she was definitely freaked out. I agreed to go over to her place to spend the rest of the night and drove over to her place as she told me what happened to her.
She said she got up to go to the bathroom and opened the bedroom door to go out into the hall when she said she saw a little old woman crouched up on the floor as if listening through the door and shut the door quickly. She said she was wearing a white sleeping cap like from the victorian era. I have to confess the story spooked me enough to be paranoid about staying there.
A few days later, I talked to the landlady, Dawn, about the history of the place and she told us that her father got it at auction, but the house does have a history. She said in a "don't mean to freak you out" sort of a way that the house was a low-income hospice where people would come to die.
I also later heard from a neighbor that she claimed to have a friend who supposedly saw a silhouette of a woman in an bonnet in an old high-backed wheelchair in the second floor apartment window a month or so before I moved in.
I stayed in that place a total of four days.
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