Your True Tales
March 2008 - Page 17
Handsome, Angry Ghost
by Xtina
For five years I lived with a roommate in an apartment on the north side of Chicago. The apartment building was very old, huge, drafty, and in desperate need of repairs. It still had gas jets in the walls. Since the owners didn't want to make the repairs, for a phenomenally low rent we put up with a few inconveniences for a very roomy apartment, and we were very happy with the situation. The apartment was on the first floor, half a story up from the basement.
No matter what we did, the place was always very shadowy and dark. A lot of peculiar things used to happen to us in that apartment. I would be sitting in the living room, the roommate would be out of the apartment, the cat sitting on my lap, and I would hear the kachink of silverware being sorted into a drawer in the kitchen, or a chair scraping against the linoleum. At other times, lying in bed or on the couch, I would hear the boards creaking as someone walked from the kitchen into the dining room and into the living room or the bathroom, which would have been fine if someone other than myself had been at home! We had neighbors, and the whole place was creaky and rickety, and friends pointed out to me that I could be hearing the people above me walking around, but at times I either knew the neighbors were out of the apartment, sometimes on vacation, or the sounds were being made just feet from me - there was no mistaking where the noise was coming from!
Out of the corner of my eye, I used to watch little black shadows move around very quickly and usually very close to the floor. The roommate used to say it was probably insects or dust bunnies, and I would say, sure, that's what they are. Her kitty used to play with people and things that were not there, and we looked the other way about that, too. What can I say, she was a chicken and I was a chicken - we didn't want to know!
What I'm about to relate to you took place in 1997, summertime. One day I was lying in bed totally engrossed in reading a book. All of a sudden I could not move -- I was paralyzed on the bed. I looked up to the foot of my bed and a man was standing there, and radiating from him was a terrible, deep negativity and anger. He was very handsome, about 27 years old. He didn't have a shirt on and had a muscular body and a very nice face. The anger and the negativity projecting from him was so fierce and strong, it hurt my body. We stared at each other for what must have been several seconds, but felt to me like an eternity. Then the body started to dematerialize; it didn't go away at once, more like a molecule at a time. When it finally disappeared, the pain left my body and I was able to move again.
I immediately jumped up, my heart pounding, grabbed a coat, put on some shoes and got the heck out of there. I did not tell my roommate about it because she was scared of ghosts and I did not want to make her uncomfortable. We had to stay there for as long as we could, and I figured it might as well be a pleasant stay, so not a word was said.
Maybe two years later, the landlord, Suzette, sold the building from under us and we had 30 days to find a new place to live. A few days before we were entirely out of the place, she dropped around to chat. I asked her a lot of questions about the place, and it turned out her family had owned it and she inherited it, and it had been in the family for close to 30 years. She took a deep breath, and told me that there was something she would like to tell me about now that we were moving out of the building. Years before my roommate rented the place from her, Suzette had rented it to a gay male couple. The neighborhood has always been pretty heavily gay, with a gay bar scene, and these men were a part of it. They were into drugs and they were into the S&M scene. They also fought a lot. The other tenants would sometimes hear the truth of these facts through the walls, as they were at times so loud and it sometimes sounded so scary, like one of the partners was being murdered, that either the tenants or the next-door neighbors called the police on them - this happened many times.
One day, it really got out of hand. They had been partying and were very intoxicated and things got violent; the younger man was stabbed to death by the older man. Suzette being the owner of the property had to clean up after the body was removed and the partner who did the stabbing went to prison; she said it was a terrible nightmare that she would never want to live through again. The young man died in my bedroom of stab wounds. She told me he was a beautiful young man, beautiful torso, beautiful face. I asked her, a little trembly at this point, what color was his hair, and a few other little questions like that, and I found out just who that apparition was who had shown himself to me a few years earlier. I felt so bad for this young man and I guess he just wanted me to know he was still there - maybe he wanted me to know who was rattling the silverware, I don't know. But I certainly hope he has found peace by now, and I should probably wish the same for his murderer.
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