Fear Files

Can I Use Your Computer?

Years ago I rented a small studio apartment in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The building went back to 1900 and had served a number of purposes before being made into apartments. In the laundry room in the basement you could still see where an indoor pool had been filled in with concrete.

Essentially, my apartment was three rooms: the main room, a small kitchenette, and a small bathroom. The bathroom and kitchenette were back to back. The bathroom window looked out over the street and the kitchenette faced the hallway. There was another apartment on the corner, but it was empty.

I put in an over-the-toilet shelf and right away I noticed that things fell off of that shelf a lot. At first I just assumed the shelf was settling or simply not even. It was only that shelf that stuff fell off of. What was odd was the timing. I never came home to find stuff on the floor. Usually when stuff fell off, it was late at night when there was next to no traffic on the street. Next door was a church with a bell tower. Sunday mornings I was woken by the bells and vibration, but never lost any shampoo bottles then.

I would also come home to find the messenger program started on my computer. The desktop was set up to bring up messenger when the computer came out of sleep mode. I thought maybe heavy trucks were coming through during the day, but the computer was very difficult to wake up. It usually took me banging the mouse on the desk and hitting the space bar multiple times. The church bells didn't wake it up.

I mentioned where I lived to a coworker and she stated firmly that the building was 'so haunted!' According to her, the son of the original owner was a shiftless failure that ended up living in his mother's apartment building because he couldn't hold down a job to pay rent. When his parents died, he blew his brains out in a first floor apartment. I never saw them, but my friend claimed there were some bloodstains on the ceiling of that apartment that refused to be painted over.

On New Year's Eve I gave myself a Tarot reading to see what the new year would bring. Then I placed the cards back in their box and put them into a shelf in the closet. The shelves in the closet came right up to the door, so there was no way for something on a top shelf to fall to a lower shelf. A few days later I opened up the closet to see the Tarot cards on the bottom shelf. Instead of neatly folded like I had left them, they were fanned open in a 'pick a card, any card' formation next to the open box. They appeared to be in the same order as when I last used them. I put them back in their box and put them back on the proper shelf.

A few weeks later I stayed up late watching a movie. After it was done I tried to go to bed but a fire alarm on the first floor went off (common occurrence). I put on a bathrobe and schlepped outside to wait for the fire department. They came and cleared the building and I went back inside. At this point I was *very* tired so I flopped into bed. No sooner had my head hit the pillow then I hear a bottle fall off of the bathroom shelf, bounce off of the sink and clatter to the floor.

I yell, "I know you're here and that's fine! But I really want to sleep!" I don't hear anything, so I go to sleep. In the morning there was no bottle on the bathroom floor. Nothing ever fell off of that shelf for the rest of the time I lived there.

I continued to find my messenger window open when I came home. When friends questioned how I was checking in when I was supposed to be at work, I said, "Oh, it's just the ghost. Don't mind him!" One friend asked if I wasn't freaked out that a ghost was in my apartment. I said, "I gotta pay for 24/7 internet anyway; he might as well use it when I'm not here." After that, I came home to find the messenger window open nearly every day. My friends have cottoned on and actually teased the ghost in the messenger window even though they never got an answer. One day I got off of work early. When I opened my door I felt someone rush past me out into the hall. My computer was awake and the messenger window up.

Occasionally I would feel the ghost pass me in the hallway, but my main interaction was seeing my computer in use when no one was home. I really wish I had thought to check my internet history.

I wonder what I would have found...