How a House Spirit Fixed My Love Life

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This story isn’t made up — it really happened exactly two years ago to me and my friend, who is now my other half. Today we tell it to our friends with laughter, feeling gratitude deep down for what happened. But back then, there was absolutely nothing funny about it.

I’ll start by saying that I rented a one-room apartment in the center of Moscow together with my ex-girlfriend. Before us, only the owners had lived there — elderly people who about ten years earlier had locked up the apartment and moved to another country. A few years before the events described here, the owners passed away, and the apartment was inherited by their son, who decided to rent it out. All that time the apartment had stood sealed off; all the furniture and belongings from the time the owners left were still there.

Maybe I’m stretching things, but now it seems strange to me that the owners left for another country, leaving behind so many things, many of which were very expensive for their time. Most people in their place would rent out the apartment and live comfortably abroad on the income. But this little place was simply locked up, everything shut off and sealed.

By the time we moved in, the new owner had restored the electrical wiring, cleaned off the dust, and thrown away about half of the belongings. Unfortunately, most of the old appliances (especially the washing machine — that one really hurt) were beyond repair.

My then-girlfriend, my cat, and I moved in and slowly began to settle down. I never noticed anything strange in the apartment; I felt calm and comfortable there, like at home. But my girlfriend began complaining that she was afraid to stay there alone. She described feeling sudden waves of sadness and fear. Our relationship started to deteriorate, and during arguments she always blamed the apartment for all our problems. She said everything had been fine before we moved there. But we didn’t want to change apartments again, and such a place for that price felt like a gift from fate.

I started paying attention to odd things. But everything I noticed — a stash of my girlfriend’s lost cosmetics under the refrigerator, appliances suddenly turning on at night when I wasn’t home, constant disappearance of things — I blamed on the cat. Maybe it really was the cat.

My girlfriend and I broke up fairly soon — I couldn’t handle the constant arguments and lies. She wasn’t the right match for me, though I realized that much later. I continued living in the apartment alone.

The oddities continued. My cat, it turned out, sometimes played with an invisible friend. In general, that’s pretty normal behavior for cats. I didn’t pay much attention to it, especially since during these games she didn’t seem frightened or aggressive — she played cheerfully. It looked just like two kittens playing together.

A close friend often visited me and admitted that he also felt uncomfortable in my apartment — he wanted to leave as soon as possible. At the same time, he wasn’t superstitious at all and had no interest in anything paranormal.

One day, a woman I knew named Anya came over on business — I urgently needed to recover data from her broken laptop. She was stunningly beautiful. I was used to girls like that rarely paying attention to someone like me, so I didn’t expect anything at all. To be honest, I was embarrassed to invite her into that apartment — it hadn’t been renovated in about forty years and looked the part.

We stayed up late; the laptop stubbornly refused to cooperate, and she had to travel across the entire city to get home. I suggested that instead of calling a taxi, she stay the night — especially since there was not only a bed in the room, but also a couch, where I planned to sleep, like a proper gentleman. At first Anya wanted to go home anyway, but then decided that if she stayed, I’d have time to finish the repair and give her the laptop back.

It was close to two in the morning when we decided to go to sleep. I lay down on the couch in the corner of the room; I made the bed for her at the other end, near the window. We lay down, I turned off the light. We talked a bit more, wished each other good night, and lay in silence for a few minutes.

Suddenly, I heard the sound of paws running across the floor — from the window where she was sleeping, past my couch, and into the hallway. Then came a very loud, sharp creak of the bathroom door (I never quite got around to oiling the hinges), which made both of us jump. It was terrifying, mainly because of how sudden and loud the sound was. Anya was badly frightened.

“Come here, please, I’m really scared!”

“Don’t worry, sleep calmly. It’s just the cat running around — this is her favorite time for nighttime sprints.”

“Come here, I’m telling you! The cat has been sleeping at my feet this whole time!”

I looked more closely and indeed saw the awakened cat, staring wide-eyed into the darkness of the hallway. That’s when I became truly afraid. For a few seconds I was in shock, and then a thought surfaced: *Pull yourself together, you wimp. You can’t show her you’re afraid of some noises. She’s a girl, after all. Go calm her down.*

I’ll be honest — forcing myself to crawl out from under the blanket and walk across the dark room to the bed where Anya was sleeping was not easy. But I did it and held the frightened Anya close. After a while she fell asleep on my shoulder, and soon after that the cat drifted off as well. I shook with fear for another twenty minutes, and then I too fell asleep.

After that, Anya and I began seeing each other often, and a relationship developed. Despite that incident, she frequently came to stay with me. When I asked whether she was afraid to be there after what happened, she said she wasn’t — on the contrary, she felt good and calm there, just like I did. At the same time, some friends continued to complain that they didn’t want to stay at my place for long, as if the apartment itself was driving them away.

Nothing else strange ever happened. My relationship with Anya grew better every day, and a few months later we moved together into a new apartment, where we’ve been living happily for several years now. We still remember that incident and that apartment with gratitude — for the way it “brought us together.”

Looking back, we can’t explain what happened by anything other than a *domovoy* — a house spirit. We both heard the same things. The cat really was sleeping on Anya’s legs; that’s completely in her character — whenever she sees someone new, she has to curl up comfortably on them. She also couldn’t have returned to the bed from the bathroom, whose door creaked loudly, nor could she have opened that door with her paws. And the sound of footsteps was far too loud for a cat — it was more like a small dog or a little child.

We came to the conclusion that the house spirit liked Anya and was hinting: *“Hey, you’re the perfect couple — why are you lying in opposite corners?”*

If he was right, we’ll have something to tell our children about how we met.