Your True Tales
March 2006 – Page 11

Doppelganger from Another Time
by J.F.

I have been living in my three-level duplex on West Bell Street for nearly a year now. About two months ago, I – or should I say others – have been having some weird experiences in the three-floored house (of which I currently reside on the first floor). One Tuesday night at around six or so, I was out with some friends after work when a neighbor, Jeanine (a nice older woman who lives above me with her two kids) claimed that she was taking the garbage out (which is on the side of the house below my living room window at a row of cans) and claimed to have looked up and saw me walking past the window and then look out at her. She looked up, thinking nothing of it, and went back in. She went back up to her apartment and did the dishes or some things around the house. Then at around eight or so, she claimed she heard me pounding on the ceiling at her, hard, she said, like with a hammer it was so loud. So she thought that I was complaining that the kids were making a racket, which they sometimes do, but I never pound the ceiling about it. Usually they are asleep by the time I go to bed, and as of this year it seems I am never home much anyway. So she decided to grab the phone and call me downstairs just to apologize or even ask me what the problem was and there was no answer at all in my apartment.

The next day, I was coming out at around 10 or so to go meet an appointment after locking my apartment door when I saw her in the hall bringing some groceries in with her youngest daughter. Jeanine gave me a bright hello and asked what I was complaining about and I explained that I had no idea what she was talking about and that I wasn't home (not getting in until after nine). She said that I saw her earlier looking out the window at her and she saw me, and I explained again that I absolutely did not come home until at least after nine p.m. My initial thought was that someone was going through my apartment, but there were no signs of it. She swore to me that I was there and it wasn't someone else she saw. She even saw my mustache, she said, recognizing it was me.

Now that's strange enough, but there's more. Up on the third floor lives a young guy and his young wife who's pregnant (she's nice, but he's a little wild, but a good guy nonetheless). His girlfriend claimed that she opened her door and saw me at the end of her hall wearing a gray plaid suit and staring out a window as she came out of her apartment in the middle of the day. She said hello to me, I guess, and I didn't see her or hear her and kept staring blankly out the window facing away from her. So she went on down the stairs. Later that day, when she came back up with her aunt and a friend with her, she went over to the window where I supposedly was and there stuck between the panes of glass and the screen was a very large dead black bat rotting there, which she had her husband cleaned up, being quite squeamish about all of it.

So about a three or four days later I saw her and her husband come in one evening as I was going out to get something out of my car, and she asked me about the bat and if I saw it. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded as to what she was talking about and I don't go up to the third floor anyway. And also she thought that I had gotten a haircut, but my hair was the same length it had always been. She explained she saw a man and said that the man she saw at the window had shaved hair in the back and it was slicked back over the top. She then concluded it must've been someone else then, seeming a little frightened about that as neither of any of us knew at all who that could have been around here.

After a week or more after the bat thing, Jeanine said that she was passing by my door as she knew that I had left for work, being that my car was gone as she had just gotten home from her job at the deli. When through my door she could hear a man whispering with a thick foreign or italian accent at her saying through the door directly to her "Go around woman--go around--go around" and it sent weird chills up her spine as she just speeded to get to the stairs to head up to her floor. She confronted me about it that same night as she heard me taking the garbage out by way of the back hallway and she just came out and asked me if I was home at all today. And undoubtedly I had been at work all day, getting home at 6:30 with sandwich take out. She came down the stairs to where I was and said to me with a little laugh under her voice and a smile that either I had "a room mate that I don't know about that was in my place during the day or this place might be haunted."

She then began asking me if I had any strange experiences or occurrences as I really couldn't think of any to my recollection. Then she with warning not to think she was nuts, told me about the man's voice which sounded like it was right over her shoulder in the hallway as she passed my door. She even mimicked it for which strangely spooked me out. Now I have never had any weird incidents in my small two bedroom apartment to this day accept for one night when I swear someone had bumped the end of my bed when I was half asleep. Then after a few minutes the bed pressed denting down beside me like someone was sitting on it but I chocked it up to it being my imagination and went on to sleep anyway. But other than that there has been no strange events at all that I can think of. Actually now I'm quite curious to see my own slick-haired twin in the 1930s seersucker suit.

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