A Strange Apartment

It happened quite recently—about a year or two ago. I was living with my parents in a three-room apartment at the time. I've always loved animals, but for some reason they never stayed with me for long—they either died or disappeared for unknown reasons. Many times, an animal would fall ill, and we'd give it away in such a sorry state to good owners, only to have it revived literally a week later, become healthy, and live for many more years. At first, I blamed it on my carelessness and inability to care for it, but one day, when I got a dog, I saw it differently. My dog was constantly staring at something, as if she saw something we couldn't see. She'd bark at something in the doorway and growl. I explained this to myself by saying she could probably hear the neighbors through the wall.

 One night, I was sleeping in my room and heard the laptop cables, which were scattered throughout the apartment, start to move—it usually happens when someone in the house gets their feet caught in them. So I called out to my mom, but no one answered. Then I called out to my brother. The only answer I heard was breathing that didn't sound human. I thought my brother was playing a joke on me and yelled at him to stop. There was no answer, so I decided to go over there and see who was messing around.

When I went out into the hallway, I saw no one. I went into my mom's room—she was asleep. I followed her into my brother's room, and he was already fast asleep. And that's when I started to feel uneasy. The dog, in turn, was howling in the room, which wasn't like her...

Some time later, I spent the night at home alone. I watched a movie and went to bed. I had barely had time to turn off all the lights and get comfortable under the covers when someone knocked three times on the bathroom door (I'm sure everyone knows what a knock on every door in their apartment sounds like). I went quiet—there was a deathly silence. I started to reassure myself that I'd imagined it, but then there were three more knocks on the front door. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my phone, called my boyfriend, and started explaining what had happened. He told me not to panic and to calm down, reminding me that I'd definitely locked the door when he left that evening. He advised me to go and look through the peephole. I did just that—I walked down the hallway to the front door, turning on all the lights as I went. When I got to the door, the lights in the entire apartment went out. I was simply stunned with shock. Through the peephole, I could see that the lights were on downstairs. I started crying into the phone and begging my boyfriend to come over. He said he was on his way out, but before he could finish the last sentence, my phone died. There was no way it could have died, as it had been charging all day. I pulled myself together and walked resolutely to the pantry for some candles.

I lit a candle, held it in my hand, and went to my room, praying for it all to stop. Then I heard footsteps in the apartment, right down the hallway—slowly at first, and then it seemed like someone ran into my room and stopped next to me. I was overcome with fear—I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Then I heard the intercom ring. I was very surprised, as I thought that if there was no power in the house, the intercom shouldn't work either. Before I could even reach the door, there was another knock on the front door. I froze, but then I heard my boyfriend's voice on the other side. With a sigh of relief, I opened the door. At that very moment, the lights turned on throughout the apartment, and I heard the phone ringing in the room. My boyfriend also saw the lights turn on throughout the apartment and looked at my face, pale as whitewash. We sat in the kitchen all night.

After that incident, everyone in the family constantly heard someone moving around the apartment. Dishes were breaking, wires were flying through the air... Relationships in the family became strained—we were constantly arguing. Soon, we decided to move out of the apartment. We sold it, and new tenants moved in.

Literally a month later, the tenants called us early in the morning and tearfully asked if we had noticed anything unusual in the apartment. We shuddered and replied in the negative, and they told us that they had heard their infant daughter screaming and crying during the night. We ran into the room—and there the child was hanging in the air, as if someone invisible were holding her by the throat. When the adults entered, the "hand" abruptly released its grip, and the girl fell to the floor and suffered a concussion...

What happened, and how these people are doing now, I don't know. But I'm very glad we left that apartment in time.