FIRST PLACE WINNER!

 

APARTMENT 21

 

In 1997 I was living in Ithaca, New York where my mother and two half-brothers live.

 

I had been living with a good friend in a two bedroom apartment, but our schedules didn't really overlap. I was getting up early to go to work and he would often stay up until 4 or 5am talking to friends on the phone, which kept me awake. In mid-september I decided to find a new place to live.

 

I wasn't making much money at the time, so I decided to move into a very small efficiency studio on the edge of town. It was in a large apartment complex that was probably built in the 1980's-- it was new, pretty shoddy construction-- essentially built as low-income housing. My apartment was on the ground floor-- I still remember the number, apartment 21. It was basically one large room with a small bathroom and small closet-style kitchenette off to one side. At the back of the room was a large closet with sliding mirrored doors on it. It wasn't great, but the price was right. I moved in on October 1st, 1997.

 

At first, I really liked having my own space. I had been living with roommates for so long that I really enjoyed coming home to the solitude, and the fact that there were no messes or dirty dishes, because I am sort of a neat freak. The only downsides to the apartment, which I noticed right away, were that when I came home after work every day and walked in the door, when the room had been shut up all day, there was a faintly sick-sweet odor, like rotting leaves or garbage. Since I am a very clean person, this frustrated me. I knew there was no garbage and that all the surfaces were clean. I would open the windows and burned scented candles, which dispelled the smell temporarily, but whenever I came home after being away for a few hours, it was back again. The other thing about the apartment that became more and more of a problem, as October gave way to November, was that it was very very cold. I chalked this up to the fact that it was a cheaply built building-- poor or no insulation, and the carpet was just a thin indoor/outdoor type which was so hard, it felt as if it were laid right on the concrete foundation of the building. The thing was, even in November, when temperatures were beginning to really fall, it was often warmer outside than it was in my apartment. I decided that this was because a bad designer had placed the electric heating unit along the wall under the only window in the apartment-- which meant all the heat was being sucked right out the uninsulated window and wall.

 

This is where the story gets difficult to tell, and why I have had to work up the courage to tell it. As maybe many of your listeners know, paranormal events seem to happen at times when you are particularly sensitive to them-- maybe you are depressed, or there has been a shock in your life-- maybe that makes us more sensitive, I don't know. But here goes.

 

Between November and December, I began to feel more and more depressed and became more reclusive. This is not like me. I am pretty outgoing. Though I do enjoy my solitude and my time alone-- I like to read and write a lot-- family and friends have always been important to me. But during mid-November of that year I began to feel a crushing depression. The thing is, I had a history of depression. When I was 15 I had tried to take my own life, and had been in therapy for many years after that. When my mood and thoughts began to turn darker and more filled with despair, I really thought I was just experiencing another round in the cycle of depression. I knew that eventually, it would pass, so I just tried to buckle down and endure this round of it.

 

Around the end of November, beginning of December a couple of things happened that did not seem strange at the time, but later made a lot of sense. First of all, I had been getting a lot of junk mail-- but somehow the companies that were sending me the mail had got my name wrong-- the first name and middle initial were correct, and the first part of the last name was right, but the last name was slightly different than mine. I thought that somehow I must have ended up on one of those mass-marketing lists somewhere and they had just typed in my name wrong. The mailboxes for the whole apartment building were on an island in the middle of the parking lot out front. Whenever I walked out there to get my mail, I would wave to the perpetual group of teenagers that hung out in front of the building, gossiping and smoking. I remember thinking what jerks they were, because whenever I came out there they got quiet and seemed to be waiting for me to leave. When I left, I would hear them start whispering to each other. But teenagers are teenagers. I just shrugged it off, but it definitely added to this atmosphere of depression that was weighing more and more heavily on me.

 

A similar thing with the junk mail was happening with telemarketers calling on my phone. This was before the No-Call list, and at least twice a week I was getting calls for someone with my same first name but a slightly different last name. I was really annoyed.

 

The first two weeks of December, things got really bad for me. My mother and I had had a falling out and she wasn't speaking to me. I think it was over some advice I had given my oldest half-brother that she had taken issue with. It was (looking back on it now), a stupid fight. My mother and I are very close, but we both have strong personalities and sometimes we clash. I spent all my free time alone in my apartment, lying in bed and reading. I didn't have a TV. It was so cold that I used an electric blanket for heat-- which worked better, and cost a lot less than the electric heat in the apartment. I was very down over the fight with my mother, but I didn't want to talk to anyone about it. When friends came by I ignored their knocks and pretended I was not at home. I didn't answer the phone or return anyone's calls if they left a message on my machine.

 

That was when I had the first dream-- if you can call it that. Even now, comparing it to all the dreams I've had in my life, it definitely had a different character. I was awake, but in that state between awake and asleep where you are still aware of your surroundings but aren't completely alert. That was when I heard a woman say to me, "I need your help." I thought to myself, "I am dreaming", so I thought back at her, "Why do you need my help?" She answered, "I am stuck here and I can't get out." I remember feeling very very cold, and the most intense kind of black unhappiness I had ever felt in my life. It was the bleakest sensation of being utterly devastated, and utterly alone.

 

Again, I thought in my head to her, "But how can I help you?" She answered, "I need you to carry me. I need to attach myself to you so that you can carry me out of this place. I can't do it on my own."

 

Even in the half-dreaming state I was in, what she said scared the hell out of me. I knew in some part of myself that it would be very bad to say yes to her, but another part of me believed that all of this was just a part of my own depression-- that I was slipping so far down this time that maybe another part of myself was appealing to me for help-- that maybe I was just carrying on a conversation with my own psyche. That was when I decided that I would say yes, because I wanted to help myself. I thought back to the voice, "All right. You can do it. I will help you."

 

I slept through that night. When I woke up the next morning, it was snowing. I felt a strange sense of not being really connected to myself-- like I was watching myself get up and make coffee, wash my face, etc. I think it was a Sunday, I remember I didn't have to go to work that day. And this is when the story gets really strange, and frightens me even now. For some reason, after I drank my morning coffee, I went into my closet and got out a pile of clean white sheets-- I had about 5 or 6 of them. Standing on a chair, I started tacking them to the ceiling with pushpins, so that they hung down around my room sort of like artificial walls, made out of white sheets. I put them up at right angles to each other so that they formed a kind of tunnel that led from my bed to the front door. Even now I have no idea what possessed me to do this. It is so completely weird that it is embarrasing to admit even now.

 

After I had tacked up the sheets, I crawled into my bed with a box of cookies. I knew, then, than I was going to kill myself. The idea just came to me all of the sudden, as if it were the obvious solution, or just a very simple thing that I needed to do. Just then, my phone rang and the answering machine picked up. It was my mother. She said, "Honey, please call me. I'm sorry. I'm worried about you."

 

I sat and looked at the phone for a long time, and then I picked it up, and then I put it down. I got up and got the phone book, and I looked up a suicide prevention hotline and I called. I talked to the woman on the other end for about an hour. I didn't tell her about any of the weird things that had happened-- I really thought that I was losing it-- that I had gone crazy. I just wanted to hear the sound of a voice that was not judging me. After she talked to me for about an hour, she gave me the number of a local, sliding-scale counseling center and made me give her my work that I would call them as soon as I hung up with her. I did. I made an appointment to see someone the next day.

 

The rest of that day was really hellish for me. I tried to distract myself by cleaning the apartment. While doing so, I discovered something that really terrified me-- all along the edges of the windows and on parts of the mirrored closet door, I discovered a kind of black mold that had begun to grow. I thought at first it was just discolorations on the mirror or on the wood that framed the windows, but when I looked closer, I realized they had the circular, spattered pattern of growing mold. (I have a degree in biology, so I could recognize that it was mold, but not a kind I had seen before).

 

I went to the counseling session, and the woman I spoke to told me that she wanted to work with me twice a week for as long as we needed. I began to talk to her about a lot of secrets and deep troubles that I had been carrying around with me for years. I was put on anti-depressant medication. Within a few weeks, I was starting to feel better. The atmosphere of my apartment was still bad. I still noticed the smell, but I took down the weird sheets and I started spending more time with friends. My mom and I patched things up. I began to believe that all of the strange events, my strange behavior, and my experience with the woman who asked me to help her had been symptoms of my depression. I was slowly rising back up out of the paralysis I had felt.

 

In January, I was on my way across the parking lot toward my apartment one afternoon, when the property manager, who was standing on her balcony on the second floor, called out to me and waved me over. We introduced ourselves to each other and when I told her my name, she looked startled. She asked me a few questions about whether or not I was happy with the apartment or not. I told her it was okay-- but cold and a little bit lonely. She said, "Can I ask you a more personal question?" I felt a little strange but I thought, why not? "Yes" I said. She said, "Do you notice anything strange about your apartment? Like a funny smell, or anything like that?"

 

I have to say that at that moment, I felt that strange feeling when the hair on the back of your neck stands up. I knew that she was about to tell me something that I both wanted, and didn't want, to know.

 

I told her yes, that I did sometimes notice a funny smell, but that I kept things very clean and burned candles and that it wasn't too bad-- just when I first got home was when I really noticed it.

 

"That's good" she said. "You just let me know if you need anything." Then she asked me my name again. I told her, and she said something like, "That's what I thought you said, but I thought maybe I didn't hear you right."

 

I knew there was something the woman wasn't telling me. For the next month, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about that interaction. I decided that if I ran into her again I would press her for more details.

 

On valentine's day that year, my Dad and stepmother, who live in California, sent me a flower bouquet. They new I didn't have a boyfriend and were just being sweet. Since it came in the middle of the day when I was at work, it was delivered to my upstairs neighbors, whom I had never met. Shortly after I came home, there was a knock on my front door. When I answered it, there was a man in his 40's standing there, holding the a bouquet of flowers in a vase. "Are you Laura?" he asked. "Yes," I said. He gave me the strangest look and then said, "These came for you today." I took the flowers, but when I went to thank him, he turned away and almost bolted up the stairs. He looked like he had seen a ghost.

 

It was either the next day or a couple of days later that I was leaving my apartment when little girl who lived in the apartment complex was riding by my door on her big wheel. Since my door was open, she stopped and looked inside. She was about 5 or 6 years old. "Hi!" I said, "You can come in if you want." She seemed very curious about the inside of my apartment. But she shook her head and started backing away from the door, pushing her bigwheel backward. I went outside and was locking my door behind me when she said, "Did you know the lady that died?"

 

I said, "What?" She said, "The lady that died." And pointed at my apartment. "A lady died there?" I said. She nodded. I squatted down so that I was at eye level with her. "When did this happen?" I said. But she didn't answer. She looked pretty scared. "That's okay," I said. "Bye bye-- see you later."

 

I went directly upstairs and knocked on the property manager's door. "Look, I said, I'm sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you a question." She looked at me like she knew what I was going to say. "A little girl just told me that a woman died in my apartment-- is that true?" She looked at me for a few seconds, and then she nodded. "I didn't want to say anything to you," she said, "The rental agency said that I should say anything."

 

"What happened?" I said.

 

"She committed suicide." She answered.

 

"When?" I asked.

 

"The day after Princess Diana died. I guess she was a huge fan of Princess Diana, and they think her death had something to do with it. But the thing is, she was a recluse. She almost never came out of her apartment except to go shopping or when she had to. So, the didn't find her body at first. It was your upstairs neighbors that started to notice a bad smell about two weeks later. And that's when we opened it up and found her. It was really bad. She had been decomposing for two weeks-- and it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen-- there was this black mold growing all over everything-- the walls, the mirrors-- they had to throw everything of hers away because it was covered with that black mold."

 

Honestly, I was feeling right then the way you probably feel right now reading this-- there is no way this could really be true. I must be making this up. I'm not. But still, some part of me then, even with everything I had been through, I didn't believe her. So here's what I did. I went to the Tompkins County library and looked up the obituaries on microfiche for September of 1997, and I found her obituary. She was a writer from California (I am from California, and I am a writer). She was twenty years older than me, and her first name, middle and last initials were the same as mine.

 

With a photocopy of the obituary in my hand, I went to the rental agent's office. I asked her if it was true, and she admitted that it was. I asked her why or how she could possibly, in good conscience, have rented an apartment to me when I had almost exactly the same name as the woman who had committed suicide in the apartment only a month before I moved in. She didn't have an answer, but she was very apologetic and offered to let me move into a different, empty unit- right next door. I did, but one month later, I moved out of that apartment complex entirely. I didn't feel like a simple wall between the two apartments was enough to really make any difference.

 

I still don't really understand what happened to me. The circumstances of what happened were so intimately tied up in my own mental state and life, that it is impossible for me to believe that this could have happened to anyone but me-- it was as if I was meant to move into that apartment. But I am a person who does not simply "believe" things-- the facts have to support the feelings. In this case, the facts are what made what I thought was just a severe bout with depression into something that I have no other way to describe than being paranormal.

Submitted by Laura M

SECOND PLACE WINNER!

MR. FLAGG'S GHOSTLY CANDY

A recent talk of old times with my mother brought this story back in the light after 45 years. When I was a child at age 4 my family lived in Rochester NY, a double house on a corner, which everyone seemed to use the back walk as a shortcut. Being so young and confined to stay by the house, I soon became familiar with the people who used it. Mr Flagg, a man in his late 70s was a regular. Usually returning from the local bar, Mr Flagg a tall slender man,well dressed with clothes which may have been a bit outdated, always greeted me with a pat on the head and some Necco candy (round pink candy which taste may remind one of pepto bismol )

I would gladly take the candy and after he left would give them to my mother because I really didn't care for the taste. Suddenly Mr Flagg no longer showed up for quite some time. Being a child I really didn't think about it, then one day here he came with a big smile, a pat on the head and Neccos! When he had gone I once again brought the Neccos in to Mom, and saw a strange look on her face. She asked, "Where did you get these?" I told her from Mr Flagg. "How long have you been keeping them?" She asked. I told her he just gave them to me. With a puzzled look on her face she went back to what she was doing and never spoke a word about it. I never saw Mr Flagg again after that day. Just recently, not knowing what made her think of it, she asked me if I remembered Mr Flagg. I said Yes, and she then asked me about the Last time he gave me candy, and wondered if I was telling the truth. I said "Of course!" She then told me that Mr Flagg had died two weeks before it happened. A very true story.

Submitted by CBUDZFORME

THIRD PLACE WINNER!

DOG AND WOMAN GHOSTS

A few years ago I was working at a private residence on an exterior stone masonry project. The elderly couple who had hired me were, to be polite, a bit eccentric in their tastes, but were paying a good wage, which made up for their sometimes peculiar requests (with ongoing order changes, additions, etc) made regarding the stonework designs. The husband was a retired funeral director with years of experience in embalming (some local famous people included) and due to a back injury due to lifting a too many heavy coffins mostly stayed at home. He was in the company of his various pets, including two cats, two dogs and three chickens who were all allowed to roam freely inside the house amongst an impressive collection of antiques and oriental rugs.

In the back yard there was a concrete statue of a sitting dog, under which, I was told, were remains of a family pet dog. This seemed to me simply to be a quaint example of sentimentality and I didn't pay much attention to it at the time. Anyways, my work mostly was concentrated on the front yard of the house, where I was building a low, curving rock wall capped with a row of antique bricks. As I was concentrating on getting my brick capping to flow along a pleasing curve I thought I saw behind me one of the family dogs. I turned around to say hello (to Chloe, the friendly one) but there wasn't a dog there -- actually there wasn't any living creature in sight. During the next two days this process was repeated several times, with me seeing a dog-like shape behind me out of my peripheral vision, but upon turning to look directly at the pet saw nothing of the sort.

On the third day of sighting a lurking, ghostly dog I also saw quite clearly the standing figure of an older woman. Her body was see-through, smokey gray and she stood in the same place where the 'spirit' dog had been watching me. It was becoming increasingly difficult for me to concentrate on my job, and I decided to ring the proprietor in his office to discuss the matter. Over the speaker, I was given permission to enter the home. Up on the third floor, the proprietor sat at this carved mahogany desk, holding one of the chickens and petting it as though it were a fluffy lapdog. After briefly relating what I thought I had seen, he laughed softly and told me I had simply seen the spirits of his deceased sister and her chocolate Labrador.

The remains of this beloved pet were, I was informed, buried under the concrete statue in the back yard. I went back to work, somewhat relieved to know that there might be a basis for seeing spooky things staring at me from behind. Interestingly, the sightings of the dog and woman ghosts stopped after they had been explained in this manner. I couldn't help but wonder, however, where the remains of the retired funeral director's sister were interred.

Submitted by Drake Bradstone