I LOVE HALLOWEEN!
There is no expectation to give a lavish gift, eat Turkey and Cranberry sauce (ugh), get home cheaply AND find someone to look after the cat, and of course play ‘catch-up’ with the fam. “So any dark horses in the running?” Ooooh God, please I’m just trying to get through existing, let’s drop the notion that I’ll ever get married!
Halloween on the other hand requires none of these things! AND it encompasses dressing up, chocolate, dead things, darkness, pumpkins, crispy leaves, ghosts and more! Um, hello! Playing ‘dress-up’ and eating chocolate alone is reason enough to adore this holiday!
But yet it is pretty much the only Americanized holiday that basically celebrates ‘evil.’ NOT that I’m an advocate of evil, hell no! Hi Jesus I love you. I do however enjoy the essence of playful ghosts, vampire legends, true accounts of the occult, strange murders, resulting, of course, in deliciously vibrant hauntings and so forth. Also it is a reminder to us good people why we are good and why we should always remain so!
Okay even if you don’t get into this holiday, can’t you just feel that delicious eeriness flowing through the evening air in late October? And what is great is even the most ‘normal,’ God-fearing-folk get into it. At least here in my ‘Boystown’ neighborhood of Chicago… houses, apartments and condos have dressed-up their lawns with Jack-O-Lanterns, spider webs, skeletons and some damn creepy scenes. Some, I have to admit, even shock me, i.e. dolls strung-up with rope by their necks and hung from trees. Note to those neighbors: If I’m walking alone at night and you’re the only other people awake, please don’t say hello.
So with this season, now in full swing I want to hear ghosts stories, hauntings and frightening tales! This week I am asking friends and co-workers if they believe in the paranormal and if they have had any encounters. Since I have yet to really have a true encounter myself and Damn if I don’t try….. picture me in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I’m standing in the seedy bathroom of a local bar. The door is locked, I am surrounded by broken mirrors, “Um Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah it’s okay come on and show yourself.” Apparently this bathroom was haunted. I never saw a damn ghost, BUT I did get fairly loopy on the establishments lovely ale.
Wait I was saying something else! Oh yes… so I’m all-ears for creepy tales, and ask you, my two faithful readers, to please add your own chilling stories in the comments section of my blog! I would love to hear of any ghostly encounters!
So with that, I will share with you my closest encounter with something freaky. Um be prepared to so not be scared….but everything is 100% true! And I believe probably freaky because of my own imagination playing tricks on me at the time.
The Basement of 3534 Grand Avenue
Back in Minneapolis, I used to live in a brownstone consisting of 13 apartments, I don’t think they have those here in Chicago, here it’s either some new-agey rebuilt piece of junk that encompasses a ‘fancy condo’, or you’re living way up high in the sky. Well my place in Minneapolis was a charming and lovely corner apartment, complete with the old cupboards, china cabinets and moldings. I was attached. Too attached.
I actually think that it owned me. There were a few times that I had these intense dreams that I had moved out and I couldn’t believe it! Why would I leave my perfect apartment? But then I’d wake and be so relieved to see that I was still in the apartment. I swear it would be at that point that in the distance, in some sort of weird realmy world, I could hear a low, wickedly evil laugh, coming from the building itself.
I believed that this building knew me, and enticed me with its charm, but didn’t wish me the best. Upon moving in I was healthy, mentally and physically. Five years later, when moving out I can honestly say I understood depression, anxiety, extreme self-doubt and intense allergies. Okay I know, probably all a coincidence, but I’m telling you I was ‘normal’ before living there and I had a very healthy self-esteem. I was a very messy person moving out and sick all the time. And, ironically many of my allergies have cleared up since moving.
But enough about my health, back to the building: So this brownstone had two levels with six apartments on each level and one apartment in the basement. That apartment, I was told by the landlord, was the site of a suicide, a hanging that had taken place in the back bedroom, I believe to have happened10 years before I moved in. Everyone that lived there was out within a year. These were nice apartments, people stayed, but that particular apartment had a high turnover rate.
Aside from this apartment, the basement also encompasses the laundry room, the fuse box room (what are those called?), the boiler room (insert scary), the landlord’s workroom and two storage rooms---basically there is one long hallway with eight doorways, all with closed doors.
So one breezy, cool summer night…I go down to the basement to retrieve my laundry, and I’m pretty certain that the couple that lives in the basement apartment are not home. No lights were on and I had seen them leave early that evening. While I am folding my clothes I hear this weird noise, as if something has fallen or slid down. A noise that is usually accompanied by a guilty cat. So of course I'm thinking OMIGAWD did Xena find her way home!!!????
OH YEAH I forgot to mention, because I didn’t think it was pertinent to the story, but while living in this apartment I lost my precious cat, Xena.
Okay so, the noise, I’m thinking that Xena found her way home and into the basement. You see under the stairs is the opening to this underground tunnelly-thing that leads to other basements of buildings in the neighborhood and so forth. My other cat went under there once, freaked me out.
So I leave the laundry to look for Xena, because I’m praying that the noise came from her! Well of course I see nothing and then I realize that I'm going to have to start opening doors to search in rooms. And knowing my cat could be in one of the rooms starving, I decide I must do it. Mind you it's 11pm, the building is VERY quiet, I’m in a basement and, of course, it's just begun thundering and lightening out! Yeah. So I'm already freaked...
But I tell myself it’s silly to be scared because the absolutely only thing that could be behind these doors is Xena. I'm pretty calm and I open the door that leads to the fuse boxes for the whole building…hmmmm nothing, but it reaks like gas. Deciding not to get myself worked up over a little gas fumes, I close that door and go to the next: a storage closet that is complete with six separate little closets. Many of these have locks on them so I can't look in them all, but of course I start looking in the open ones, (in my mind I'm getting freaked out, but I'm breathing keeping it together) So then I leave that room and I have three more rooms to check out.
Boom, rustle, tap, tap! And another noise…it's coming from the fuse-box room…UGH I was just in there! The noise is still happening and is sounding similar to a tapping and I'm getting wigged out now for sure.
Well there is this little window in the fuse-box room and of course I'm thinking someone was on the other side! I cannot physically open the door. But then I remember that I noticed my landlord's workroom wasn't locked, like it normally is, so I think “Oh! Of course super hot landlord Ben is working late, hence the noise and the tapping!”
So I mosey onto down to the workroom, and I hear the tapping still and I think oh it must be coming from the room next to the fuse-box room, connected to Ben's workroom, and Ben's in there working away…so I knock on the door. "Hello" I say. I knock again. Nothing…hmm that's not like Ben. He's usually so receptive to my meddling and apartment needs….OH GOD BIG THUNDER ROAR, side note: Poor Kitty. Oh I wish I had found kitty, no instead I'm just scared as hell….
So I open the door. “Hello?” No one. The noise is now more intense. “Hello?” I’m actually in the workroom that has drills, wood saw-things, man-tools, etc. I peer into the connected room, no one, nothing, the noise is more faint now. It’s time to get out of there, but damn that is so not like Ben to leave that room unlocked. I close the door behind me and the lights flicker a bit, I look at the door adjacent to the workroom door, it’s the door for the boiler oom and the padlock is open. “Um Hello?” Nothing, the noise is NOT stopping, and it’s coming from the fuse-box room. I walk back down there. Stupid girl, oh but I do love the drama of it all!
And yet I am genuinly freaked. I open the fuse-box room and I see shadows and freakyness darting from the lighting and window. AAAAAAH!!!!! I run down a hallway, up four flights of stairs, down another hall and into my apartment, I lock all three locks. I stand there, I breath. I think ‘Dam! Xena could be there!!! And I did forget my laundry…..”
Okay so I creep down the back stairs, real slow. I am on the last step of the final stairs the leads into the basement and wooooosh, I hear soemthing, I feel cold, I swear there is a presence, now I run faster than before. Back to my apartment, breathing, freaking, scared. I feel safe, until, I kid you not, within three minutes the building goes black.
There is no power. I’m now in the pitch dark, there is lightening and thundering. I wasn’t happy. Eventually I fumbled for candles and I awaited for more freakiness, but to my chagrin there was none. And all I can think is damn, why couldn’t I have seen a ghost!!!!???
And reflecting on everything I just wrote I have to say prior to moving in to that apartment I really hated Halloween...... hmmmmmmmmm.
Good bye. I love you.
