O'Neill's Ghostories This Week: Ghost Tease

Ghost Tease
from Kiri
Hailing From: Owego, New York
Where it Happened: Ayer, Mass.

When I was single, I shared an apartment for a time with two single men, Mike and Eric. The apartment was in the top floor of an old house (built in 1920's or 1930's). When I moved in, Mike had lived there alone for a few months and the place was a total mess.

The kitchen floor was peeling up, the bathroom was filthy, all those wonderful things. Eric and I moved in to the apartment around the same time and we decided to clean it and fix it up. I worked second shift so I was often alone in the apartment during the day. While I was tearing down the paneling in the kitchen, repainting, and putting new linoleum tiles over the old ones in the kitchen and bathroom, I often felt that someone was watching over my shoulder. It wasn't a bad feeling, it was more like a friend was saying to me, "Hey, thanks for cleaning up!"

One day, very shortly after I had moved in, Mike and I walked to the convenience store right down the street from the house. As we were walking back toward the house, I had a clear view of our apartment windows. I saw a young woman in one of our windows! She passed from one window to the next and seemed to be looking at us!! She seemed to be wearing an old-fashioned blouse and had her hands folded primly in front of her.

Now, before I go any further, let me say that first of all that no one was home (or supposed to be "home") at our house. Secondly, the windows that she appeared in did not correspond to windows in any actual room in our apartment. They were the windows to the storage area. This storage area used to be a hallway to the second set of stairs in the house, but was now completely blocked off except for one door into it. Finally, there was no way any living person could walk from one window to the other, because the storage room was completely packed from floor to ceiling with boxes of all of our stuff. You couldn't even see the floor, much less walk around in there!

I turned to Mike and asked him if the house had ever had a ghost. He replied, sheepishly, "As a matter of fact, yes it does. I didn't want to tell you because I thought you would be afraid to move in."

He went on to tell me of some experiences he and his previous roommate had had with the spirit. Apparently she liked to tease them by coming into their bedrooms at night and sitting on the edge of their beds. Mike said he could feel the edge of the bed sink down just like someone came and sat on it. It happened a couple of times to him and he ended up sleeping with the lights on!

Another time Mike wanted to play a joke on his former roommate, who worked third shift. He unscrewed all of the light bulbs in the apartment so the place would remain dark no matter what light his roommate turned on when he got home. Mike then sat in the dark apartment watching TV, intending to jump out of the darkness and scare the bejeebers out of his roommate when he got home. But something strange started happening. Mike suddenly felt as if someone else was in the room with him. Also, the TV turned off by itself. Mike got up and turned the TV back on. As soon as he sat back down on the sofa, the TV turned off by itself again.

Mike began to get spooked, and in a panic, started running around the apartment screwing the light bulbs back in and turning the lights on! He even got rattled enough to call his roommate at work and tell him what happened. By the time his roommate got home, Mike was wide awake in the living room, watching TV, with every single light in the house on!

From what I know of the spirit, she was friendly and playful and had a good sense of humor.

O'Neill's

As a young boy I used to make kind of a game out of standing in front of the old homes I would visit with my parents -- places like Newton, Ontario, Canada where my aunt and uncle lived. I used to look up at the windows in that small town while I kicked the pebbles around with me old Ked's tennis shoes, and even in some of the towns like Monkton that surrounded it, and pretend the windows I saw from the street didn't really exist on the inside, and that only I could see them from the outside. I thought that if you really did walk inside those houses, and climb their staircases, you would NEVER find those windows because, after all, they never existed.

That, to me, was spooky.

This story is spooky, for sure, for that very reason. And I want to say, thanks very much Kiri for sending this story in.

:-) Keno