The Haunted Apartment

Witness: (Name Withheld)
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Date of Encounter: July 1999 – May 2001

In the summer of 1999, my roommate and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn. We had the entire garden level (you enter under the stoop), plus the basement. The evening before we moved in I was painting my bedroom and out of the blue I just felt really cold (this during a July heat wave). A creepy cold ran down my spine and I turned around and I just felt the cold coming from a corner of the room. I wasn't scared so much as sad, it was a very lonely feeling.

When we moved in I bought some sage and burned it through the house and it seemed to work for a few weeks. Then I felt it again, so I took to burning sage quite a lot. Then the laundry list of things started happening:

1. The door to my bedroom came off its hinges and fell on me when I was closing it.
2. The microwave broke.
3. The TV broke.
4. The CD player broke.
4. The ceiling collapsed in my bedroom.
5. The sewage pipe burst in the basement and it was flooded with six inches of raw sewage.
6. The electricity went on the fritz constantly.
7. No matter how we set it, the refrigerator froze and the freezer refrigerated.
8. My bedroom window broke while I was away.
9. If you stood in a certain spot in my bedroom, you could smell this rotten smell that I can only liken to a dead mouse rotting (it could have been a dead mouse, but they decompose in less than two months – this went on for nearly two years).

Some of this is clearly to do with an old house, but so much in such a quick succession made us question what was happening. Also, appliances working one day and then just not turning on the next didn't make sense.

I would be sleeping and more than once suddenly in my dream there would be a screaming in my ear and I would wake up with a start. It's never happened anywhere else before or since, just when I slept there. Other times, I would awake to the sensation that someone was bouncing on my bed.

After the door fell off its hinges, I hung a curtain for privacy. When I would awake in the night from the screaming, the curtains would be blowing about like crazy.

Towards the end, I was sleeping in the living room. We found another apartment and paid two rents for the last two months. The only experience my roommate had was overly large mosquitoes that seemed to come from no place and every place – they kept themselves to her room and at night they drove her crazy.

One night I was at my neighbors upstairs and they sheepishly told me that they thought the building was haunted and they related to me similar experiences to my own. Someone previously had installed the doorknob backwards with the lock on the outside of one of the bedroom doors. The girl kept getting locked in and then mysteriously the door would unlock and she could get out.