Growling In The Apartment

I've posted this before. I have to turn on my lights so I can type this.

In December 2011 I moved into a small two bedroom apartment with my boyfriend. I was seven months pregnant. The apartment was one of five in what use to be a general store over a century ago.

A few weeks before my daughter was born, my child's father and I were up late at night and talking in bed. As we talked, a horrible feeling crept over me. The air was growing... heavy? It felt like something dangerous was inside the apartment, just outside our bedroom door.

Mid-sentence, my child's father asked, "Do you feel like something horrible is about to happen?" He was feeling it as well. He grabbed his gun and we walked around the apartment, barricaded our front door, and we fell asleep on the living room floor.

Nothing happened again for a long while. At one point I noticed a man standing in the doorway to my daughter's nursery while I was watching tv, but he disappeared as soon as we made eye contact. It wasn't very scary. At another point, I opened the door to my daughter's nursery to grab a diaper one night (our kid ended up sleeping in our room a lot), and felt like there was something in there that I couldn't see. And a few different times, all of my daughter's electronic toys in her nursery would activate and make noise at the same time when no one was in there. I remember her rocking horse start to move one day while I sitting on the couch.

A month after my daughter's first birthday, my cat Kevin passed. I'd still feel him come and curl up on my feet at night. It was relieving, knowing that he'd still come visit me. I loved him so much.

Then the growling started.

The closet in our bedroom always made me uncomfortable, like something was looking at me from inside. It was at night, and the familiar weight of Kevin had just settled down on my feet. I put down the book I was reading and turned off the lamp.

About a minute later, a dog-like growl came from the direction of the closet. It lasted for a few seconds. I turned back on the light, and saw nothing.

I woke up my child's father, but he was annoyed.

The next afternoon, he went into the bedroom to get headphones. He returned to the living room, sat down, and told me that he had just opened the door to our room when something growled at him.

From that point on, I heard the growling at least three times.

One time my daughter was standing on the bed while I was getting changed. She pointed to the open closet and said, "Purple face man." I thought she was talking about Barney (her favorite show at the time) and brushed it off for a while.

At one point, I remember seeing the shadow of a large dog with a fluffy tail walk into the bedroom while I was down the hallway.

There were a handful of times that both my child's father and I would separately experience something pushing us out of the bedroom if we were trying to enter it. It was a disgusting feeling, because it didn't feel like it was pushing against are skin, but our veins. It would always make my stomach feel prickly and put the taste of blood in my mouth while giving me goosebumps.

One night, I was awakened to the growling. It was louder than it had ever been before. I stared out from under the covers (I pulled them over me and my child's head in fear) and could see some sort of movement, but I stopped peaking the louder it got. It was accompanied by a cat's growling, hissing, and caterwauling. There was a final wail from the cat, and then a moment of silence. The silence was broken by a wet, gross sound, like a dog chewing and gnawing on a bone. Something shifted on top of the covers near my feet, and then it was over.

I laid there under the blankets, silently crying in terror until morning. I peed myself; too afraid to emerge from the covers. Kevin never came to visit me again. I think that his spirit was eaten by whatever else was in that room that night.

The paranormal activity in the apartment went up tenfold for the three weeks we remained there afterwards.

Doors slammed and the chairs would roll across the carpeted floor. One picture of my daughter would keep falling off the wall. Once I entered the room and the picture was on the other side from where it had hung; now sitting perfectly posed on the couch.

We eventually moved into our new home, but there was a period of a week where we didn't have any internet there. My child's father would return to the apartment to use his computer for his data entry job. On his last night there, he was sitting at his desk in the living room when he heard something loud sliding on the floor in our old bedroom. Then there was a loud bang that shook the wall. All of the power in the apartment went out immediately, followed by the unmistakable sound of an animal growling. He had to walk in complete darkness past the bedroom to get to the circuit breaker just outside our front door while the growling came from the open-doored bedroom.

On the last day of our lease, I went over by myself to do a bit of cleaning. I invited our downstairs neighbor inside to talk. While we stood in my daughter's nursery, I asked her if her apartment was haunted. She had a story about a man screaming at her and her boyfriend to wake up.

Then she told me, "But I bet your apartment is a lot more haunted than mine. That guy killed himself in the closet in the other bedroom."

As she spoke, the computer chair sitting behind her in the living room swiveled to face us. I pointed it out to her, and she said that the same thing happened in her apartment too (the moving furniture).

After she left, my child's father brought our child over. We let her (almost two at the time) run around while we talk about how we're going to take the crib apart. Suddenly we hear our daughter scream. She ran out of her nursery. I picked her up, and we asked her what was wrong. She responded, "Shadow man."

Her father and I exchanged a look, then left.

Later that night, we come back to pick up the last few things left in that apartment. We didn't want to take our daughter back inside, so one of us would stay with her in the car while the other ran to grab a box.

He made the last trip. While he was leaving, the bedroom and bathroom doors were being slammed repeatedly. The lights were turning on and off. He heard the sound of footsteps running behind him as he walked down the hallway and out the door. As he turned to lock up, the front door slammed shut in his face. The lock clicked.

We don't like talking about the apartment in the red building at all. It's come up a few times over the past few years, and one of us will reluctantly tell a story that we never wanted to tell or remember.

I couldn't be paid enough money to ever step foot inside that place again. There's something evil inside.

#Unexplained/Paranormal #Animal/Cat #Sounds/Growling