Your
True Tales
May 2006 – Page
10
Spooked
Apartment
by Lynn Brown
It was an amazing little apartment. A dream come true for three college girls who’d wanted nothing more than a cool place in the French Quarter of New Orleans to spend the summer. It had huge open living room space, full kitchen and an open, cast iron, spiral staircase that let up to the two bedrooms. The price seemed amazingly cheap for the space and location, so we jumped on it with all the enthusiasm of youth.
It was only about a month later that we began to notice there were more than just little things wrong with our amazing deal. First it was the strange words and pictures showing faintly through the new coat of paint on the walls. Pictures, that all of us swear we hadn’t seen when we’d looked at the place the first few times. They reminded me, the anthropology major, of cave dwelling pictures or veves – repetitive designs sometimes used in rituals. Then there were the strange unexplained noises. Footsteps up and down the halls and knocking on the doors and walls were a common occurrence late at night. These we explained away as the neighbors, despite the fact that we were renting the entire back side of the building and didn’t share a wall with any of the other tenants. Then there was the second bedroom. It had no windows, and was always freezing cold even in the height of New Orleans sultry summer days. Both of my roommates opted to sleep downstairs on the living room floor, rather than sleep in their. In fact I don’t think any of us ever even went in their after we first moved in. Even our adventurous new kitten stayed out of there.
For the most part we were able to explain away, or just ignore the strange occurrences in the apartment. It wasn’t until mid summer that things really started to get bad. My boyfriend at the time seemed to be the key that kicked the whole thing off. He found out sometime in July that he couldn’t stay in the university dorms for the rest of the summer and so he moved in with us. The noises intensified within a week of his arrival, this time clearly coming from the hallway between the two upstairs bedrooms, or echoing on the iron stairway. Frequently while watching TV in the living room we would hear someone coming down the stairs and turn to find no one there. Once I saw what looked like the shadow of a man descending the stairs, but it paused halfway down and when I stood to go investigate, calling my boyfriend’s name, again there was no one there.
New words and pictures seemed to pop out of nowhere on the walls. The one that scared us most was "Monster Food"; it became something of a name for whatever was haunting our house. It appeared over the kitchen stove in red to each of us in turn. Each of us only saw it once, while we were cooking and in the kitchen alone. My roommate Carmen saw it once, after we each had described it to her separately. She called frantically for me to come look at it, but it disappeared in the moments it took me to get to the kitchen from the living room. Even my boyfriend had started to act strangely. He became reclusive and seemed in a perpetual bad mood, flying into a rage at the smallest thing.
Comparatively, whatever it was in our house just seemed to be playing, although its games were not always very amusing. It took to locking people in the upstairs bathroom, holding the outer door shut until someone else came to the rescue. Once, a friend was trapped in that bathroom for almost an hour, when the rest of us went out to get some food. He spent the whole time trying to open a door that he said, bounced as though someone was pushing against it from the other side. When the rest of us finally returned from the store we rushed up the stairs at the sound of his calls for help. As soon as someone was on the top step, he all but fell out of the bathroom in a heap. Whatever had been ‘holding’ the door from the other side abruptly let go as soon as someone walked up the stairs.
The final straw, for me at least was the cat. She was a kitten actually and had always been inquisitive and full of life. She feared nothing, save the second bedroom, and we were constantly pulling her from window ledges and off the kitchen counters. One day she was bounding up the spiral staircase with her usual enthusiasm, as my boyfriend and I were sitting in the living room watching TV. She got about halfway up before letting out a pained yelp and flying sideways off the steps. We had turned when she’d made the noise and got to see her flight off the steps. It looked for all the world as though someone had kicked her, although at the time there was no one else in the house, not that anyone else would ever have kicked her anyway. I had had it. “Don’t you ever kick my cat again!” I yelled into the empty air “Why don’t you just leave us alone!”
Apparently it took my advice. Although some of the strange noises continued, I never heard the footsteps or got stuck in the bathroom again. A few months after we had moved in, a short time after the incident with the cat, it was my turn to pay the rent. I went downstairs with the check in my hand to deliver it to our landlord, who owned the civil war shop that sat below us on the first floor. “How is everything in your new place?” the secretary asked me. “Actually," I said, "there’s been some weird stuff going on.” I said, a little wary to say to much, for fear of sounding off my rocker, “Strange noises and stuff.” “Oh that’s just the house settling,” he’d said, which was pretty much what’d I’d expected to hear. I turned to leave the office when the secretary finally looked at my check. “Oh wait,” he said. “You’re in 212?” “Yeah,” I answered. “The two bedroom.” “Yeah,” he said, almost to himself. “That’s the apartment where the guy flipped out and killed himself.”
Great! I thought, thanks for telling us that before we moved in. I should mention that New Orleans is one of the few cities in the world where you can’t break a lease because of unexplainable happenings in your apartment. Now I know why.
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