In The Apartment
For the first half of my life, I was a skeptic. I was interested in ghost stories but I didn’t believe in them. To me, it was strange that something that seemed so common (ghost sightings) had never happened to me. Nor did I know anyone that had seen a ghost. (But more on that later.)
So that this post doesn’t look like a wall of text, I’m breaking it up into parts.
The Move
In September 2003, I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment on Melrose Street in the Lakeview/Boystown neighborhood of Chicago. The four-plus-one building was fairly clean and modern. Once the stress of moving had dissipated, I realized that something about the apartment seemed off. The vibe there skirted the edge of the eerie without touching upon it. No matter how much I rearranged furniture and added decor, I couldn’t get it to feel comfortable. By contrast, my previous apartment was a sparsely-furnished studio with an air mattress bed that I had felt at home in.
I also often felt like someone was watching me. But my apartment windows overlooked the open parking garage, and across from my windows were the windows of another apartment, so I attributed the feeling to the other set of windows and kept my blinds and windows shut. It didn’t help, but I continued to tell myself that the windows were the problem.
The following month, my boyfriend (now husband–I’ll call him my husband from here on) and his cat moved in with me. The next month, we adopted a second cat. Between my husband and the cats and my senior year of college, I kept myself occupied.
But the cats often stared intently at random spots by the ceiling or upper walls. At places with no spiders or insects, in a way that indicated focused interest, not play or curiosity. I’d grown up with multiple cats and knew they didn’t stare at random spots for no reason. “They must hear the neighbors upstairs,” I told myself every time.
In the summer of 2004, with college behind me, I often stayed up late reading or surfing the internet. My husband worked so he always went to bed at 11 pm; but as a night owl, I was often up until 1 or 2 am. At this hour, sometimes the feeling of being watched intensified until it hung over me. I always looked around but never saw anything. The cats were always asleep and my husband, a heavy sleeper, didn’t leave the bedroom.
First Encounter
One night in early autumn 2004, I went to bed after staying up late again. I laid awake for a while and waited for the cats to join me. One of them always did, and until I had a cat to cuddle with, I couldn’t fall asleep. I waited and waited. Nothing. Finally, I sat up in bed and looked out the open doorway, hoping I’d see one of the cats. From my place in bed, I could see the short hallway and part of the small dining room area. My eyes were well-adjusted to the gloom by then, and the ambient city lights filtering through the windows lit the apartment enough for me to see everything. When I focused on the furniture in the dining area, I realized there was something strange out there. It was a large black mass. It was about seven feet tall and it had a vague featureless head, shoulders, and torso shape, with the rest kind of trailing off. It hovered about a foot or so off the floor. It was the deepest black I had ever seen – blacker than black – and the darkness of it stunned me. I could not believe what I was seeing. I wanted to get a better look at whatever this thing was so I leaned forward in bed and peered hard at it. When I did this, it somehow seemed to know that I was looking at it. It turned towards me, and when it did, I noticed two things: it had been looking towards the living room windows before I leaned forward, and it had red eyes, which came into view as it turned to look at me. They were shaped like large almonds and were a vivid red; they did not glow but they were easily visible in the dark.
When the black mass turned towards me, my confusion turned into a primal fear. Suddenly, I felt like I was an exposed prey animal and a nightmarish predator had just set its sights on me. I froze. Then it rushed through the bedroom doorway towards me. My instincts took over and I ducked under the covers and cowered next to my sleeping husband. I half expected something with sharp claws to slash through the blankets and rip into me, but nothing happened. I remained there as long as I could. Eventually, I couldn’t breathe anymore so I put my elbow into my husband’s side and leaned into it until he shifted. I figured that if he didn’t start freaking out then it was safe to breathe.
The next day, I was dismayed and shocked by what had happened. I couldn’t stop replaying the incident in my mind. I wrote it all down so I wouldn’t forget any details, but I knew that this was something that would stay with me for the rest of my life. Yet I was also in denial. I kept thinking, “There’s no way that could have happened.”
I began to wonder if I was losing my mind. Was the post-college stress getting to me? I was looking for a job, but I wasn’t super stressed about it. If anything, I was kind of enjoying the break after four years of college. But still...stress can be sneaky like that, right?
I briefly considered that I had seen a ghost then dismissed the thought. All the ghost stories I’d read described ghosts as wispy white things, women in Victorian dresses, or Civil War soldiers. The black mass looked nothing like any of those things. And I couldn’t even begin to understand the red eyes. If this thing was a ghost, it had none of the charms of the old spirits I had read about. It was straight out of a nightmare, a nightmare that no one had ever written of. I was a prolific reader of horror stories and anthologies and I had never read anything that featured a ghost or monster remotely like this before. I was terrified and confused.
Second Encounter
[I posted this as a comment in another thread; I’m going to copy and paste and add a bit more information for clarity from a skeptic’s perspective.]
A couple of months went by and I didn’t encounter the black mass again. I had compartmentalized the experience and dismissed it as a one-off byproduct of delayed college stress. I was on my computer late one night when I had the feeling that someone was staring at me from behind. My computer faced one corner of the living room, kitty corner from it was the short hallway that led to the bedroom and bathroom. I turned around and caught my husband peeking around the corner at me. He had both hands on the edge of the corner and his head was completely sideways so I only saw the top of his head and his eyes. It was so bizarre and surprising, especially since he had gone to bed hours before. I thought he was playing a weird prank so I jumped up and sprinted over to the corner. It was empty. The bedroom door was right by it, and it was shut. We had a small apartment so there's no way he could have ducked back into the bedroom so quickly without slamming the door closed. I flung the door open and turned on the hall light, ready to catch the end of him jumping back into bed. But he was stone still beneath the covers. "Hello?" I said. Nothing. I walked over to him and his face was slack; he was clearly in deep sleep.
I stood there for a moment, completely baffled. I knew what I had seen. And it dawned upon me that my husband, who was a heavy sleeper that took his sleep seriously, would never get out of bed and peek at me like that. On the rare occasions he got up to pee while I was still up, I either didn’t see him or he was sleepy and in a hurry to get back to bed. The man didn’t play around with bedtime.
It took a long time for me to connect this incident with the black mass.
Third Encounter
It was the winter of 2004-2005. One night I went to bed and my cats didn’t join me. I lay in bed and waited for a while then sat up. As in the first incident, the apartment was dark but I could see well enough thanks to the city light filtering through the blinds. I saw a small shape low to the ground enter my bedroom. It was cat-sized and vaguely cat-shaped. But instead of walking towards the head of the bed like my cats usually did, it went to the foot of the bed. I didn’t think twice – I crawled on my hands and knees atop the bed until I was at the foot of the bed. I reached for the cat.
“I’ll pet the kitty and he will realize it’s time to stop playing and join me up here,” I thought. But as I reached down, I realized that the cat was very black – blacker than black. And despite the light being strong enough for me to see the carpet fibers, this cat had no features and no gloss to its fur. It was a deep, dark matte black and its shape was cloudy, as if a fog had tried to pull itself into cat form. Of my two cats, one was a light orange tabby and the other was a mostly white calico. Both were shorthaired. This was not a cat! I jerked my hand back and slowly crept back to the head of the bed and went under the covers. I tucked myself in tight next to my husband. My racing mind kept me awake for hours. I hadn’t been afraid, just shocked. Again, I was confused by what I had seen.
Final Encounter
One night in the spring of 2005, I was sitting on my bed as I talked to my husband. I'd started a full-time job so I went to bed with him every night. Our bedroom lamps were on but the rest of the apartment was dark. My husband faced me – and the bedroom doorway – as he talked to me. He abruptly stopped mid-sentence and began staring intently at something behind me. He appeared amazed and baffled. I followed his line of sight and saw nothing. I could see the short hallway and dining area, but they appeared empty. I turned back to him.
“What did you see?!” I said. I hadn’t forgotten my earlier encounters, and although I’d told my husband about them, I knew he was a hardened skeptic – much more so than I. He had listened to my experiences but had nothing to say about them, and I could only imagine what he thought of them.
“Nothing,” he said. I knew he had seen something. I asked him again, then begged him to tell me. Finally, he said he thought he saw a shadow move through the dining room area. He said it went from the kitchen area towards the living room, and that it blocked out a large black and white poster on the dining room wall. I went into the dining area and didn’t see anything, but I knew that my husband had finally seen the entity.
Afterward
We didn’t have any other encounters, but I continued to feel watched on and off. In the summer of 2005, we moved out of that apartment and into an 1870 (pre-great Chicago fire) coach house. Despite the age of the new place, it felt fantastic and very comfortable compared to the apartment we had just left. It was like an unseen weight was lifted from me.
It wasn’t until around 2010 that I began to come to terms with the fact I had lived in a haunted apartment. Once I accepted it, it was like a light switch was flipped. I learned as much as I could about the paranormal. I contacted a Chicago paranormal investigation team and asked the lead investigator numerous questions about my experiences. I contacted the Chicago Historical Society and, with their help, was able to research the history of the property the apartment building was on. Nothing noteworthy stood out to me, but the process of researching the property was very satisfying. I also contacted the large company that owned the apartment building and asked them if anyone else had reported or complained about anything related to the paranormal. I figured that at worst, they’d not answer me. But they said they’d check with the main office and get back to me. A couple of days later they replied again: "Actually, I've been told that they were aware of the situation, but haven't had any reports of strange activity in a few years. Hope this helps." (I requested specifics but they didn’t respond.)
I purposely put myself in situations to experience the paranormal. A part of me hoped to recreate what I’d experienced. Despite knowing more and more about the other realms, the logical part of me is insatiable and my quest for knowledge continues. Although that first encounter scared me half to death, now I am thankful for it. It opened my mind to new worlds.
Human history is a parallel interest of mine, and I’ve come to realize that the colonial and capitalist urges to overpower and control nature has parallels with skepticism of the supernatural, or paranormal. For millennia, the supernatural and paranormal were very much “normal” for much of the world.
Many people have experienced the paranormal. Most don’t discuss it or mention it. When it is mentioned, it’s whitewashed so the spirits appear charming (and are often of white people; e.g., antebellum ladies and white Civil War soldiers). I’ve seen spirits dozens of times by now, and only four times (including the second encounter noted in this post) has an entity appeared as something besides a shadow or black mass. It’s simply taboo to discuss spirits, and oftentimes this is something we learn as children from our parents.
When I was a child, I experienced the sensation of a phantom cat jumping onto my bed and grooming herself before curling up by my legs. One of my family’s cats had just passed away, so a part of me knew and accepted that it was her. Her phantom presence wasn’t scary or puzzling. It was a fact of life for me, and it was sweet. But my parents were WASP-y types and never talked about spirituality, emotions, or the shadow aspects of this multifaceted world we live in, despite my obvious interest in ghost stories, the regular nightmares I had at that age, and my deep love for the family cats. They were emotionally distant, and I instinctively knew it was bad to bring up the idea of a cat spirit to them. Instead, I modeled myself after them and labeled myself a skeptic.
I could go on about the nuances of how centuries of colonialism and its relatively recent cousin, capitalism, have disconnected countless threads that we humans once had with the natural world, but that’s the gist of it. In becoming a certified “believer”, I also spent a lot of time pondering skepticism of the paranormal.
TL;DR: Former skeptic encounters a nasty entity that changes her worldview.
http://reddit.com/r/Paranormal/comments/xzd2xh