Someone Died in my Home and I think They're Still Here
I've been reading creepy stories on NoSleep for three years, but I never thought I'd end up being in one. The last few months have been the strangest and most frightening of my life. Most of my friends think I've gone a bit mad, or I’m making it up. So where else was I supposed to vent but on this subreddit?
It seems ridiculous typing this, but I’m sure my new flat is haunted, and believe me when I say: I wish it was all in my mind. It's not the most spacious of flats, I didn't buy it because I loved it, but it was all I could afford in an area close to work. The building isn't all that old, maybe twenty years or so, and the flat itself, which is three stories up, is quite modern inside, with wooden flooring and white walls. There are two bedrooms, one of which has been the focal point for everything that’s occurred.
When I moved in I threw everything I couldn't find a place for into the second bedroom; I’ve never been the most organised and I do tend to hoard things if I’m honest. The spare room was filled with rolled up posters, tools, DVDs, boxes of clothes and even some old bedroom furniture I still had left over from my last place. There wasn't much room to move around in there, so you can imagine my surprise when I heard something unthinkable coming from inside.
It all started about two weeks after I moved in. I was cooking dinner in the kitchen one evening and I had zoned out while stirring some pasta, listening to a podcast as I often do to get through the boredom of cooking. That was when I heard it.
The boiling water faded into the background as I realised that the sound of bubbles forming and bursting had been joined by a very distinct noise. I could hear the sound of footsteps walking slowly down the hall towards where I was. My nerves began to rattle; someone had broken into my flat and was making their way to where I stood. I grabbed a kitchen knife - for those who think this is extreme I've been burgled once before - and slowly made my way into the living room and then towards the hall. Just as I reached the hall doorway, the footsteps sped up to running pace, followed by a door slamming violently.
The hall was dark at first, as it has no windows, and as I entered it I felt like a child terrified of his own shadow, quickly reaching for the light. The front door lay at the end of the hallway, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that I thought about running to it and leaving the flat and any unseen intruder behind.
My imagination started to run riot and as my mind played with images of an attacker lurking behind one of the other three doors present, I nervously smiled to myself. I began to suspect that the footsteps had come from somewhere else, perhaps the flat above me. Still, I couldn't shake the unsettling feeling that I was not alone.
First, I peeked nervously into the hall cupboard. Nothing there but bedsheets and towels. Then I checked my bedroom - the only crime being committed in there the mess of the place.
Finally, I stood in front of the door to the second bedroom; the spare room. Swinging it open I let out a sigh of relief that the room was still filled with junk, but otherwise empty. At the time I put it down to my imagination, but now I know that it was the earliest indicator that something was wrong, that something was in the flat with me.
I'd say about a week or so passed before anything happened again, and by then I’d put the footsteps out of my mind. It was a Sunday afternoon. I’d had a bad cold that week and work had been difficult to get through, so I just stayed in the flat over the weekend hoping I’d feel better by the morning.
I was sitting on the living room couch binge watching a TV show. The light was streaming through the windows, and my mind was as far away as possible from anything frightening or supernatural. Suddenly, and with no warning, someone walked into the living room behind me and marched straight through into the kitchen. I was startled, and when I turned around I only caught the last moments of the kitchen door being slammed shut with a bang.
For some reason my first reaction was to start shouting and swearing that I was going to cause whoever was in the kitchen real bodily harm. I wanted to frighten them away, but really it was I who was terrified.
I ran into my bedroom and grabbed a golf club from my set, which had been languishing in a cupboard since I’d moved in. As I wandered into the hall, the fear got the better of me. I unlocked the front door, opened it, and ran out into the hallway, which I share with the other residents, and then out into the street. After a minute or so I was around the corner out of sight, phoning for the police.
30 Minutes later, the police arrived. I only entered the flat once they had searched it thoroughly for the intruder. Nothing seemed to have been stolen, but the kitchen door had been shut as I thought. The police entered the room, but found no one and told me that if someone had been in the flat, that they had already left.
The kitchen itself was intact, but bizarrely the intruder had turned on the lights, opened the oven and left it running on a high heat. The police seemed satisfied that no one was there, and while they told me to phone the local police station if I saw anyone suspicious, it seemed clear to me that they thought I had imagined the entire thing. Even I began to question it myself, wondering if I’d left the oven on from the night before and forgotten about it, dosed up on cough medicine.
The following night I knew there was more than just my imagination at play. I tried to put the previous day out of my mind, but the sounds of footsteps and banging doors stayed with me. I’ve always thought the best remedy for a weary mind is sleep, so that’s what I intended to do.
I went through my nightly routine before going to bed:
Front door locked - check.
Windows closed - check.
TV and other appliances switched off - check.
I shuffled off to bed, curled up and put the TV on so I had something to fall asleep to, the noise keeping me company and any paranoid thoughts at bay. Then, about five minutes later, I heard an unmistakable noise. A click. It was the light switch in the hall and was accompanied by light trickling underneath my door into my room.
I’m sure I must have taken in a sharp inhalation of air, but I remained silent; still and frozen. Someone was standing at my bedroom door. I could hear the floorboards creak under the weight. Before I had time to react, the intruder walked slowly down the hall away from my room, stopped for a moment, and then - I was sure of it - entered the spare room.
It took me a few seconds to piece together what had just happened. For a moment I hesitated again, wondering if I should phone the police or whether this was just another flight of fancy. Suddenly I heard a loud clattering noise. My things being thrown around violently.
I called the police quickly and then frantically moved a wardrobe up against my bedroom door, hoping that I would be left alone. Then I heard the intruder again. A door creaked open quietly, almost inaudibly, and slowly, surely, the footsteps began walking towards my bedroom door. They then stopped right outside my room, as if the person were about to enter. That was the most terrifying thing, having to wait to see what the intruder would do next. Suddenly, I heard a banging sound - the police were knocking on my outside door. The footsteps then turned, marched down the hall into the living room and then kitchen, before ending the entire ordeal abruptly with a loud bang of a slammed door.
By the time I let the police into my flat, I was visibly shaken. And yet they found very little: at first. The kitchen was as it had been before. The oven door lying open, spewing out heat into the night.
The spare room, however, was another story entirely. Everything in there had been violently thrown around, much of it broken and torn. An old mirror smashed, and most of the boxes and furniture upturned. I swore to the police that the intruder had never left, that they couldn’t have, and that they must still have been in the flat somewhere, hiding. But that suggestion was greeted with an unhealthy amount of incredulity.
I won’t bore you with the details, but these strange events continued for over two months. Sometimes it would be something small, a piece of furniture out of place, a light switching on by itself. But on three separate occasions the same exact occurrences which had left me barricaded in my room took place. Footsteps in the hall, the spare room left in disarray, and then the slamming of the kitchen door and the oven lying open.
Eventually, even on the quiet nights, the fear of something happening became too much for me. The anticipation took a heavy toll. Most nights nothing would occur, but then on others the same ghostly footsteps would wander through my home. I just couldn’t sleep there any longer. Finally, I couldn’t bear it any longer and so I spent several nights at my brother’s just to get a good night’s sleep. I told him the truth, but he just seemed more worried about my state of mind than anything else. I don’t blame him, I can imagine how it all must have appeared.
After a few days, he offered a solution of sorts - he would house sit with me. He wanted to see these occurrences for himself. I didn’t enter back into the flat lightly, but if someone else experienced what I had, it at least would confirm to me that I wasn’t going mad.
I slept on an airbed on my bedroom floor while my brother slept in my bed for three nights in a row, with nothing strange occurring. Then, finally, on the fourth night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard it: click. The light in the hall came on. My brother sat up startled and looked down at me on the floor, his expression one of disbelief.
He whispered for me to get up, which I did. We then listened. The footsteps gradually appeared, as if starting from somewhere far off. They continued, growing louder as they walked slowly towards my bedroom door. I think that’s the first time in my life when I’ve seen my brother genuinely scared. As the footsteps neared, he jumped out of bed and dragged my wardrobe in front of the door.
It was then that he made himself quite clear, whispering in a low voice. He hadn’t thought that anything would happen, in fact he just came and stayed with me to set my nerves at ease or to prove that I was sleep walking and causing the issues myself.
He didn’t believe, but as the footsteps stopped outside the bedroom door, he swore under his breath and stood by the window. I think it was a natural reaction, to look for a possible exit, but being three stories up, there wasn’t anywhere to go.
Then it played out as before. The footsteps turned and walked away from us down the hall. They entered the spare room, which was followed by the noise of my things in there being thrown around. Finally, the footsteps walked to my door again, stood, and then marched down to the kitchen, slamming the door behind.
Neither of us slept the rest of the night, and in the morning my brother recommended that I leave that place behind, and find a new home - easier said than done. As a condition of my mortgage I couldn’t sell the place until I had officially been living there for 2 years.
He offered for me to sleep at his until I could find somewhere else to rent in order to wait the two years out, but I just couldn’t afford it. My brother and his wife had two kids, and were trying for a third, in a 2 bedroom house. Staying there was no long term solution for any of us.
Later that day he phoned me, overly excited by the idea that he had found a solution. He had been doing some research online to see if other people had experienced similar strange goings on in their homes, and what they had done, if anything, to stop them from happening.
He told me that he’d read a couple of similar accounts - footsteps, lights being switched on and off, furniture being thrown around violently. One family from Arizona in the U.S. had supposedly ‘got rid’ of a similar unwelcome house-mate by simply confronting it. Several ‘experts’ - and I use that term lightly - believed that poltergeists and other ‘noisy ghosts’ behaved in such a way because they were confused and reacted violently to this disorientation.
I was sceptical, but as my brother continued it began to seem less ridiculous and worth a try at least, especially if it meant I didn’t have to sleep on someone’s floor for the next two years until I could sell the flat.
He then told me that one of these experts believed that such disturbances occur when the spirit of someone who has passed doesn’t realise it is dead. When it wanders around a place which it used to call home, it sees objects, belongings etc. which are unfamiliar, and simply cannot understand why. In this utter confusion, it lashes out, mostly at possessions, but occasionally at people who it sees as invaders of its home. One particular instance was reported in a family home. A bedroom would be thrown into disarray because it used to be the deceased’s. By confronting the spirit while it was manifest and telling it that it no longer lived their, and that it had passed on, the entity ‘dissipated’ and moved on.
It all seemed like mumbo jumbo to me, but then so too did the very idea of a ghost - and by this point I was convinced one was living, or unliving, in my flat.
We agreed then that we would at least try to confront it. I have to say I was curious, but part of me wanted to just leave it all behind. My brother had the idea that we should clear the spare room out completely, and sleep in there each night until the footsteps appeared. It made sense, as that was a focal point for the disturbances, but the entire wait filled me with apprehension.
On the second night, it happened.
There we were, sleeping on the floor like we did when we had sleepovers as kids, waiting in the spare room for something we didn’t understand to appear. With everything removed, the room seemed bare, and I felt a strange sadness for the place, an emptiness.
At around 1AM, I first heard it. Somehow I knew it would appear that night; I felt it in the atmosphere, like the tension before a storm.
Click.
The hall light came on. My brother looked at me with a mixture of fright and excitement. Silence. Then, the footsteps began. They walked slowly down the hall to my bedroom door. And there they waited, while we waited also, in the place where my belongings had been bashed and broken over and over. Finally, they turned and began their slow shuffling walk towards the spare room - where we now lay.
By the time the footsteps reached the door, my brother and I were both on our feet. I’ve never been so scared, and I could hear the terror in my brother’s shaking breath. Then, the handle turned slowly. The door opened.
Nothing.
There was nothing there, just an empty doorway. My brother had taken out his phone and was recording video, but he couldn’t see anything but thin air. I can’t remember the exact words we used, but between the two of us we hesitated, finally conveying that if anyone was there, they were dead, and that they no longer lived in the flat and needed to accept it and ‘move on’.
Nothing, again.
We waited for a moment. And as I turned to my brother to smile and suggest that perhaps it had worked. The door slammed shut and the light in the spare room went out. Utter darkness.
I panicked, and I’m a little ashamed to say I screamed for help, the fear of being trapped welling up inside me. I could hear my brother fumbling around. He told me to be calm. I wasn’t. He told me to look for the door. I couldn’t find it, disorientated by the dark as if the room had changed somehow. It felt smaller, cramped and stifled.
Then, in the darkness, I heard it. My brother clearly did too, as he swore under his breath asking if the sound was coming from me. My voice wavered and I simply said ‘no’. Behind us, in the gloom of that little room, we could hear breathing. The breaths were long and somehow carried threat with them. And then, a horrible inhaled gasp, followed by the deafening scream of a man right behind me.
Terror overcame me, and as I finally found the door, my brother knocked into me in the pitch black and headed out into the hallway, with me quickly behind. In the fevered escape I lost my footing and managed to fall onto my side, on the floor directly in front of the open door to the blackness of the spare room.
The wind had been knocked out of me, but if I could have I would have cried out in horror at what I saw. The light in the spare room flicked back on, revealing a figure standing in the room, facing the wall. It began to turn slowly, and as it did I could see what I can only describe as a face, its skin bloated and tinged with a bruised blue, and its hair oily and straggled.
I kicked the door shut, and as my brother helped me to my feet we ran out of the flat, only to hear the spare room door open behind us, and running footsteps heading once more into the kitchen. We did not look back.
I haven’t slept in the flat since then, in fact I could only step foot in it to retrieve some of my things when accompanied by my brother and two of my friends; during the day. I refuse to sleep there, and between my family and myself have managed to find the money needed to rent elsewhere while I wait to sell the place. It’s further from work and the area isn’t as nice, but I really don’t care.
After speaking to the couple who lived there before me, you might already suspect what they told me in way of an explanation. They too heard footsteps occasionally in the hall at night, but nothing else of consequence, and happily lived there with their young son for a few years. What they could tell me was that they had bought the flat from an estate agent and knew fine well the history, but not being superstitious, they knew they had a bargain on their hands if they ignored what had happened.
The original owner had lived there by himself. By all accounts he was a very private person, and so no one in the building knew him very well. One night a terrible scream was heard from the man’s flat (and believe me, it is his). When neighbours went to his door he did not answer, and soon afterwards the smell of gas filled the hallway outside. The emergency services were called and the building evacuated. When they entered the flat they found the man’s bedroom in disarray, his belongings torn and broken up. In the kitchen they discovered his dead body, kneeling on the floor, half sticking out of the oven, his skin blue due to asphyxiation.
I’ve thought about the entire events often, wondered why the man’s ghost still lingers there. I’ve wondered why he made his presence felt more strongly to me than those who lived there before me. Most of all there is one question, for some unknown reason, which never seems to leave me. What made him scream in the first place?