A strange apartment

We once lived in an apartment we'd swapped our old one for—back then, there was no such thing as "buying and selling." What surprised me was that the people from that apartment had moved to a much worse house in a village. They said they all had relatives living there, and it was too far for them to travel (and it was only five kilometers).

So, we swapped apartments and started renovating. The first thing we had to do was tear off the old wallpaper, but it wasn't hung very well—if you peeled off a corner, you could pull it off, and the whole thing would peel off. We started tearing it off, and then my little sister, who was four years old at the time, started crying for no reason. She hardly cried even as a child. And then, out of nowhere, she started crying. We calmed her down and asked what was wrong, and she said, "I don't know, I'm scared." We started peeling off the wallpaper, and she started crying again. There were some other drawings underneath, but I can't remember what exactly.

 Later, I'd witness something uncanny many times in the apartment as I was falling asleep—a shadow would suddenly appear not far from the bed, like a person, but very tall, and slowly begin walking toward me. To this day, when I think about it, my skin crawls. I'd pull the covers over my head, curl up, and think to myself, "This can't be, this can't be." It happened seven or eight times, then it went away...

And then I had the same dream over and over again—a window in the bedroom would break and my cousin would jump in (the apartment, by the way, was on the seventh floor), followed by some other people, all running quickly past, as if they didn't notice me. Behind them, a strong wind would start blowing through the window, bringing in papers, dust, and small debris... And I'd feel a terrible sense of anxiety and fear. I had that dream constantly in that apartment, and nowhere else. That's when I became a sleepwalker—I'd walk around with my eyes open, but I was asleep. I'd wander around the apartment, move furniture and curtains, and then go back to sleep. It got to the point where my mother once pulled me off the balcony with my leg already dangling over the railing.

When we moved to a new apartment, where no one had lived before, everything ended abruptly: both the nightmares and the sleepwalking. I don't know what force lived in that apartment, but it was against us.