In the spirit of prequels—much like the franchise this title references—and with Halloween approaching, I’d like to share a ghost story from my first haunted home. In true sequel fashion, the stakes are higher this time, making it possibly the scariest experience of my life (so far).
Before my kids were born and before my wife, now ex-wife, got married, I experienced some of the most frightening moments of my life.
When I moved into her two-bedroom apartment, everything seemed normal at first. Until something started interacting with me.
In my twenties, I struggled with sleeplessness and often stayed up much too late, sometimes even all night. Even when I tried to go to bed, I would lie awake for hours, staring into the dark of the night.
I liked to sleep with the door open, and after a while, I started to feel like someone was standing in the hall, just outside the doorway.
If I stared at the entrance, the darkness seemed to deepen even more. The hall would become so dark that I couldn’t make out any of the faint outlines of the apartment around me.
And the sensation of a presence intensified. It filled me with unease and felt malicious, making it more difficult to fall asleep.
However, I dismissed it. The skeptic in me believed it was my overactive imagination at work.
Finding sleep remained difficult, so I stayed up late playing video games, writing, or composing music on my computer.
One night, I had some friends over, and we were all out on the balcony smoking like fools. Somehow, we ended up getting locked out of the apartment.
The building was old and had one of those sliding doors that required you to pull it over and lift it before you could flip the lever to lock it. Yet, despite all of this, we managed to lock ourselves out with no one left inside the apartment.
Some months later, my ex-wife, who was my wife at the time, woke me up in the middle of the night. She said she felt someone sit at the foot of the bed, and upon sitting up, she saw a man sitting at the end of the bed at her side. He turned to look at her, and when their eyes met, he faded away.
When our firstborn was still an infant, I still struggled with sleep. One night, I was in the second bedroom, sitting at my desk on my computer with music blasting in my headphones, drowning out the quiet of the night. The light in the room was the only illumination in the entire apartment.
Suddenly, a shadow moved across the wall in front of me.
Startled, I spun around, expecting to see my son’s mother, but no one was there. She was sound asleep in our room with our son. I ignored the incident and went back to my computer and loud music.
I was again interrupted, but this time by a poke in the center of my back. Once more, I spun around to find no one there. I froze as goosebumps spread across my skin.
The dark figure in the doorway at night persisted, along with several other minor occurrences.
During our first Thanksgiving, while I was in the kitchen, a wall socket erupted in flames like a burst from a flamethrower. The fire department suggested that the building’s old wiring could have been the cause.
However, given the strange activity I had experienced and my interaction with whatever was present, I was reluctant to accept their rational explanation.
We moved out shortly after that.
I spent many late nights in that apartment. And it always felt unsettling. I was happy to leave it behind, a feeling I never experienced again.