A week later, as I was sleeping, I woke up quite suddenly. Unsure what woke me up, I switched on the light. Looked around, peeked outside the door, nothing. I went to the kitchen to get myself a glass of water, on the way; I met Francis who had just as suddenly woken up. We made some cups of soup and talked for about half an hour and then headed back to our respective rooms. Frank shared a room with Alex. As I couldn't sleep, I sat in bed reading when suddenly, I heard a loud, high pitched cackle. I froze, my eyes quickly scanning my small bedroom...nothing. When I heard movement in the next room, I ran to the door, swung it open, just as Francis and Alex were about to crash into my room. The guys' looked rather angry; they thought I'd given that laugh. I swore that it wasn't me when Dave and Rich joined us, while John, Sue and Jenny came running down the stairs from their rooms. We'd all heard that cackle. Alex and Francis, the oldest of us, calmed us down and gave a very logical explanation about what happened. We figured that the tenants renting the basement and first floor of the house were partying and the sound carried through the vents to our rooms. Sounds reasonable right. The next day, we called in on our neighbours; no one came to their door. Puzzled, we went to the house next door, our landlord lives there. Our landlady told us in a rather cold voice that the other tenants had gone home for the summer vacation; we were the only ones in the house.
Things went fine for a couple weeks. Then one night, while we were having dinner, a sudden cold air came from nowhere and the lights got dim. We stared at each other, we all looked very nervous. The already dim hallway was black as night. Suddenly, a low, very evil sounding laugh started, it's volume got higher and higher...and that evil cackle joined it. Just as suddenly, Rich gave a loud yell. The lights went back to the way they were before. There was no one but us in the kitchen. After that point, the conversation on the dinner table was "Why did Rich yell out?" and "How soon do we move out?” Rich swore that he felt someone grab his throat, squeezing it etc... Eventually, we decided to stay on, the rent was very cheap, and we couldn't afford anything higher. Besides, we were good friends who didn't really want to Part Company. Most of us were from the same town, etc....
The next day, we had to call an ambulance for Rich who had suddenly developed a dangerously high fever overnight. At the hospital, Rich was diagnosed with throat cancer. A very strange thing as he didn't smoke and there was no history of cancer in his family. The fever was not explained, the doctors did not know what caused it as it went away soon after he was admitted. Rich was hospitalized for about 2 weeks. Sometime after the first 3 days, Rich decided that he didn't want us to visit anymore and had arranged for his things to be packed and moved to a storage facility until he gets out of the hospital.
A few days after Rich had moved out, Alex and I were on Dinner duty. When we heard the front door open and slam shut, we figured the others were home. We hollered out at them that Dinner isn't ready yet. Our announcement was greeted with silence. Immediately, Alex and I froze and stared at each other, our eyes, mirroring the horror we felt. We heard footsteps coming up the stairs...we both peeked out at the hallway...nothing. NO ONE was coming up those stairs...the footsteps reached the top of the stairs, the carpet depressed as the footsteps came closer and closer...Alex yelled at the "nothing", "Stop! Go away, leave us alone!” the footsteps just continued. We both felt a sense of foreboding, danger, as though whatever it was that was approaching us was evil. The footsteps got to the middle of the hallway when Alex, said in a hoarse whisper, "Get out of here kid!", grabbed me very hard by my arm shoved me away from the kitchen door, ran toward the large kitchen window, grabbed a chair, smashed the window and practically half dragged and half threw me out the window. We were on the second floor, but we were past caring, all we knew was we had to get away from that thing. The jump gave us some bruised limbs and a couple sprains. We looked up at the window...a shadow was at the window, and then the whole kitchen slowly grew darker and darker until the window looked like a black gaping hole in the house. Suddenly, the lights came back on in the kitchen again. In spite of the fact that all we had on were T-shirt and Jeans, Alex would NOT let me go back into the house, it was late spring, and the temperature was still very cold. Alex made us wait on the porch until the others came home. An hour or so later, when the other guys got home, Alex made me wait outside as they trooped into the house, got me a jacket, packed our things, called a cab and we all headed for a motel on the lakeshore. We rented a room and stayed there for about a week until we found other accommodations.
The next day we went back to the house to talk to the landlord and pay for the window. The landlord was not thrilled with us. His wife started cursing and swearing at us. We'd told them, take the last month's rent and here's extra for the window, she called the cops on us! Luckily for us, the cops were quite understanding and polite. The landlady insisted that we did more damage than the window. We entered the house to look. What a change! The whole place smelled dank and the walls...the paint looked like someone ran something sharp over it. It really gave us the creeps. The landlord took one look at the walls, turned pale and refused to come into the house. His wife ranted and raved all the way through the house though. She wanted the police to charge us with destruction of property, etc. Her husband, normally a quiet man, glared at her and told her in a rather loud voice to shut up. Surprisingly she did...for a while. As the landlord, with his wife yelling and nagging at him all the way into their house, the older police officer gave us a weak smile and mentioned that many years ago once, in the late 1800s a man and his wife who drank rather heavily lived in the house we rented. One night, they got a call, the couple, in a drunken fit, had killed their children and the husband's mother, after which, the husband killed the wife as they were fighting, stuffed the bodies into the closets, and hung himself. Apparently, the police frequently got calls from people who had lived in that house about intruders that weren't there. The police officer had grown up a few blocks away, and he mentioned that he has never known the house to be occupied by any family for more than a year at a time, or less. We were in the house for about 2 months.
Tasneem Moledeena
11GO