Recently I was house-sitting for a friend of mine on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was an old
tenement walkup, and the apartment was an unrenovated railroad walk-thru, made up of 5 rooms leading into
each other, the kitchen in the back and the parlor in the front facing the street. By unrenovated I mean the
walls and floors were still the original cracked plaster and wooden moldings covered with decades'
worth of paint layers.
I am not superstitious at all and never had any paranormal experiences, and in fact I grew up in an
apartment very similar to the one I was sitting, in the same area of the UES, and never encountered any
ghostly phenomena. But after a week sitting my friend's railroad apt., I was convinced there was some
sort of haunting going on. I heard voices talking to me in my sleep, esp. the voice of what sounded like an
angry old woman. I mean I felt as if someone was trying to communicate with me while I was sleeping.
Sometimes a noise would sound through the apartment that would bring me fully awake, and this occurred
around the same time early every morning around 2:30 or 3 a.m. I can't describe the sound, except it was
like wood hitting wood, or a door slamming. I never was able to find the source of the sound.
While awake I experienced different sensations, some of them similar to others who have had hauntings. I
would be concentrating on some task and become aware gradually that a presence had entered the room but
when I looked up, there was no one there. I asked a neighbor to bring their pet dog into the apartment one
evening and the animal sat in the middle of the kitchen and peered up into one specific corner where
the ceiling met the wall above the bathroom door. Very smart dog and usually excited and curious, but all she
would do in that apartment was sit and stare at something as though she were watching and listening to something.
Another time when I was sitting in the kitchen, there was a light on in the kitchen and the parlor 4 rooms
away...the 3 smaller bedrooms between the two rooms were dark, and I briefly saw a silhouette or shadow
appear to move across one of the rooms. After this the occurrences stopped for a while, and then when I was
sleeping I began to hear the old woman again, along with old Christmas carol music (sounded like Pat
Boone) and also I constantly visualized a dog passing through the rooms, as if the dog was trying to let me
know he/she was there. The image would appear in my in at odd times repetitively.
After my friend returned I asked him if the rooms were haunted and he made me tell him the whole thing, and
he corroborated most of my experiences. Neither of us were frightened, we were just interested and curious.
A mutual pal of ours had a friend who was supposedly psychic (i was always skeptical about this) and we
asked her to being the psychic man to check the apartment out. He walked through the roms a few times
and announced that there was an elderly tenant's spirit still in the rooms, that she had died there around 1970 and had lived there most of her life and loved it there, and that she did not llike me or my friend being there in her apartment. He also said there was the dog's spirit in the rooms, a big black dog's ghost, and the dog had lived there sometime after the old woman (1970s 0r 80s) and that the woman from the eearlier time did not like the dog either.
WHEW anyway just wanted to share the tale...I wonder if the fact that the apartment is unrenovated (very
old original walls) had anything to do with the hauntings as if they were maintaining energy from other times. Just a thought. I found the experience not in the least chilling or terrifying, in fact I wish I could spend more time there and get to know the elderly lady! I bet she has some stories to tell.
By:
davebazooka@yahoo.com
Wed Mar 05, 2008 3:44 pm
