Scary & Freaky stories: The Paranormal World

Strange Place

I used to live in a house in South Omaha that was built in 1895. Rumor has it, that it was once a mortuary and a funeral home -but I haven't confirmed that yet. I was told that by one of the other tenants and also by a maintenance man. They both claimed in the basement there was still old embalming equipment and in the attic area there was a few caskets and left over's from the funeral home business.

I wasn't aware of all this when I moved in - but it might offer some explanation for why strange things happened in that apartment.

I wondered if anyone else who lived there had bad experiences but I've never met anyone else who lived there after that whom I could ask. I know the apartment directly above us was occupied by people who were really dirty and did drugs and partied all the time. I say dirty because it took a crew of cleaning people several weeks to clean the place after they left and all the flooring upstairs had to be replaced - feces had to be scraped off to the point that it destroyed the flooring beneath it. Another one of the apartments had a prostitute living in it until she split one day. Her "associate" moved in after that and he was shady in his own right. He didn't look like a weirdo - but after I met him for the first time I got a very bad feeling. He knocked on our door one summer day to borrow a light bulb for his section of the shared wraparound porch. It had burned out and he said he needed the light for the evenings when he came home from work.

He was a relatively handsome man; he didn't look out of sorts or out of place but when he introduced himself to me for the first time as my neighbor, something inside me - told me that he was involved in p0rnography and that he had killed a woman. I couldn't shake that knowledge -that knowing of him - even though he never said a crude word to me or looked at me funny or anything. I thought I was nuts I didn't understand why I got this information about him in my mind and what I was supposed to do about it. I chose at that time to disregard it for the moment because what was coming into my mind wasn't jiving with what I was seeing in front of me.

A few months later, I had an occasion to visit him in his apartment for a beer. My boyfriend and myself and this guy found ourselves socializing periodically on the porch we all shared, so I felt like I needed to confirm or deny that information I received in my self when I met him, so I accepted his invitation to come over and shoot the breeze and have a beer. In hindsight I see that was a really stupid and bold move. I chalk it up to youth and gnawing curiosity.

He was slightly intoxicated already and the more he drank the looser his lips became. That's when I discovered that in his recent past and before they cleaned up the area he had managed a nude modeling studio over in Council Bluffs and pimped women out on the side. He also was involved in a second degree homicide of a woman in Des Moines Iowa in the 70's for which he served time in prison for. So there it was - his involvement in p0rnography and his killing of a woman - he actually shot this woman in the face at close range. They couldn't prove he did it on purpose, he claims that she attacked him in the car while he was driving and that he took a gun away from her and when she grabbed the wheel and tried to kill them both- he shot her in self-defense.

I don't know that I believe that - since my intuition warned me about him and after that was all confirmed for me, I kept my respectful distance from him until he moved out. I never felt comfortable with him after he spilled all that information to me while he was drinking. People over the course of my life often find themselves spilling their guts to me on a variety of subjects and I've heard many a confession. I think you should trust your intuition if you're given a clear message about someone you just met - don't doubt yourself. Someone above is looking out for you!

The actual paranormal stuff started one evening when my boyfriend and I came home from a launder mat around 8:30-9:00pm. In one of the large bay windows we both saw a small boy looking out of our living room window toward the street where we were parking our car.

It was a bit shocking since we both clearly saw the child silhouetted in the window. We had left a lamp light on in the living room. He couldn't have been more than 7 and even more strangely he had no discernable facial features. We clearly saw his form however and that he was sitting in the window as though he were waiting for someone to come get him.

When we got into the house there was nothing there. After that for weeks I had a nagging feeling that someone was following me around in the apartment. And just to make sure it's presence was known it began to mess up my dining room table mostly picking the candles out of the holders and throwing them on the table cloth, knocking over salt & pepper shakers that sort of thing; childish behavior. It did this over and over again. No matter how hard I scrunched the tapers in the holders, they would be pulled out and thrown on the table. I found it odd since the candles would be fine as long as we were in the dining room, for hours on end if we were entertaining, never a problem at all. But when I would leave the room and come back, candles would be out of the holders and on the table.

One day I had just put the candles back in their holders really annoyed that this was happening AGAIN and no sooner had I put them in there, right before my eyes, they were pulled out one after the other and literally thrown on the table with the force of a young child having a temper tantrum or something. I finally got upset and yelled out loud - "STOP IT! Don't TOUCH MY STUFF ANYMORE!" Amazingly, it never happened again after that.

I have to believe looking back on this now, that if there was a "ghost" of a young boy in the house, he was attracted to the dining room area because it was where I had my craft supplies stored in one of the hutches and on one wall I had hung up my framed picture of the old dinosaur grandmother from that sitcom DINOSAURS. Inside the dining room was also a huge mahogany circular staircase that led up the second floor apartment, the door at the top was sealed shut but there was all those gorgeous wooden steps and was the perfect place to put interesting stuffed animals; gave it a more family friendly vibe and made you want to climb that staircase. The room was beautiful, spacious and yet it had some whimsy in there that would have appealed to a child, more so than the other rooms in the apartment.

Before we moved out of there, I had a really frightening experience. I was home alone; my boyfriend was at his job. I was laying on the waterbed and I was awakened by something pressing me into the mattress to the point where I was having trouble breathing. It was horrifying. It wouldn't let me up. I was struggling to catch my breath. Some people claim this is a sleep paralysis thing, but I wasn't asleep anymore. I was awake by this time and struggling to get up. Something was holding me down. It eventually let me go. I jumped out of that bed and waited until my guy got home and told him about it. We decided we really needed to move out of there. So we found a house, also in South Omaha, but with a much friendlier vibe to it.

What a creepy place that was!