I loved my new apartment and immediately felt at home. If it hadn’t been for a strange recurring nightmare I started to have right after moving in there, everything would have been perfect.
But the dreams were really frightening, and I couldn’t understand what was causing them, because I had never had nightmares like that before in my life (or since).
The dream always began with me climbing the stairs to my apartment as I returned home from work at the end of the day, and felt more lifelike than dreams normally do. As I approached the apartment I could hear a young woman crying uncontrollably, and would frantically fumble for my keys, trying to get the door open to see who was inside my apartment and why they were crying like that. But every time the door was opened the sobbing would immediately stop and an eerie silence hung in the air.
At first that was all I would dream. I would wake up and think I could almost still hear the crying in the darkness around me. But eventually, after a few weeks, the action in the dream would continue. After entering the apartment I would realize the woman’s crying was coming from a closet in the living room. I would open the closet door and search frantically through it trying to find her to help.
One night, in my dream, I started to rip out the shelves and pry the drywall off of the back of the closet, as the woman’s cries behind the wall started to become a high-pitched scream. Just as I was about to pull out a part of the wall and peer through the opening, I woke up in bed.
For whatever reason, after recurring all those weeks, the nightmares suddenly stopped and I never had that dream again. But the closet in my living room made me feel really uncomfortable, even after the dreams had ended, and the only thing I used it for was to store my winter clothing.
My friends all liked my new home, but several of them pointed out that the size of the apartment’s interior did not seem to compare to the dimensions of the building’s third-storey exterior. In fact, it seemed like an area about the size of a bedroom was not accounted for, and again I realized that closet seemed to be the cause.
There was a large unaccounted-for area between the living room and my bedroom. The door to the closet seemed to have led into a much larger space at one time, but now it was an area of only a few square feet. This reminded me of the dream, of course, and it did seem obvious that there really was some kind of space, if not a specific room, boarded up behind that closet.
Once I came home from the beach with two of my friends on a really hot summer day. We had planned to meet another friend at my apartment. When we entered the house’s front foyer I saw, through the railing, someone sitting near the bottom of the stairway, which faced the other direction. I assumed it was our friend and called out a greeting to her and told her that we would be there in a minute as soon as we unloaded the car. There was no reply. So while my other two friends brought in the cooler and blankets I went toward the stairway and the person sitting there. As I walked down the hallway toward the foot of the stairs, I passed the profile of the female figure sitting on the third or fourth step from the bottom. Through the railing’s spindles I saw, and even brushed against, her abundance of heavy clothing. I could see the woman was wearing layer upon layer of long woollen skirts and petticoats. And this fact alone, on such a sweltering day, bewildered me. With my hand on the railing and my eye looking in the direction of where the woman was sitting only a few feet away, I pivoted myself around the large newel post, so that I was then facing the stairway. As I did that, I asked my friend why she was wearing so many clothes on such a hot summer afternoon. But within the second or two that it took for me to spin myself around that post to face the stairway, the woman sitting there had completely vanished.
I couldn’t stop staring at the empty stairway, and it took a few minutes for the reality of what had just happened to make an impact. I had just assumed it was my friend waiting for us on the stairs. But, obviously it had not been. She arrived a few minutes later, and was wearing shorts and a tank top.
The woman I saw, I realized, was dressed in fashions from the previous century. But it wasn’t her clothing that was even so startling as the fact that she simply disappeared into thin air. She had looked completely solid, like a normal person, which is why I had mistaken her for my friend. The coarse fabric of her woollen skirt protruded through the railing spindles, and I had even felt it scratch against my sensitive sunburned arms as I walked past the stairwell.
There were only two exits from that particular stairway: one was my locked apartment at the top of the stairs, and the other was out the front door of the house. But my friends and I knew that no one rushed past us in the hallway that day. Whoever had been sitting on those stairs simply disappeared.
I never saw her again, but I know I felt her a few months later. My relationship with my boyfriend had just ended, and I was very upset one day and lay crying on my bed shortly after he had left. I was sobbing, with my face buried into my pillows, when I suddenly felt the bed sag beside me, as though someone had just sat down. Then a hand very gently began to pat the top of one of my hands, as if to console me. I froze. I understood, even through my fear, that whoever it was didn’t mean to scare me, only comfort me as I cried. But it did terrify me. I was afraid to look up from the pillow, where my face was still buried, but I wanted to flee. I grabbed my hand away from the patting and shoved it under the pillow out of reach, and said, as calmly as I could make myself sound, “I’m okay now, please leave me alone”… and she did.
At the end of the year I learned that the Victorian house was being sold. The new owner wanted to convert the building back to its original state, as a single family home, and live in it himself. The tenants were all given notice that we would have to move. This was very upsetting news to me; I really loved living in that old house.
The day before I moved, I returned home from work to discover that the new owner had been in my apartment while I had been gone that day. He had mentioned to me that he needed to take some measurements for the renovation, but I thought he meant for the windows. Now I saw that the heavy wooden shelves from the closet in the living room had been removed and were leaning up against the wall beside it.
I slowly approached the closet and nervously opened the door. A large hole had been cut into the back wall, and a string, from a ceiling light in the area beyond, hung through the opening. Even before I pulled the string to turn on the light I could see into the darkness well enough to make out that there was a large room hidden behind the closet: just like in my dream when I was trying to get to the crying woman behind the wall.
The light bulb must have been very old, but still dimly lit the room. I peered through the hole in the wall and saw that it had once been a bedroom. The hole was not large enough for me to see the whole area, but I could clearly see that the furniture had all been left in place when the room had been sealed up as it was.
I couldn’t understand why anyone would board up a furnished bedroom like that. But in that recurring nightmare that haunted me for so many weeks, there was a woman crying behind the wall of that closet. And the woman sitting on the stairs was dressed in clothing from the same era in which I would estimate the bedroom had last been used.
There must have been an explanation for all of this, but I had to move out of the apartment the following day and was never able to learn any more about it.
Her Friend Elgin
When our daughter was about two years old, she would talk about her friend “Elgin,” who played with her and came to see her at night before she went to sleep. She had begun to talk at a very early age and was very fluent and articulate by that point.
She said he had white hair and a white beard and his clothes were black. We had no idea what or who she was talking about and had never even heard of anyone with that name before (so she hadn’t overheard us ever discussing