An old Portland haunt

Anyway, this may take a while, so get comfortable. I found this apartment totally by accident, but I needed to find one quick. When I walked in I loved it instantly. The place was built in 1910 on the site of an old brick company. I found this out from a "know-it-all" neighbor.

I moved in and really liked the place. The only thing I couldn't figure out was why I was having a hard time sleeping in the bedroom. I finally chalked it up to poor sleeping habits or restlessness. At the time, I had a cat named "Kitty". Original, huh? She started doing things that spooked me a little.

One time I was in the bedroom reading and she was at the end of the bed doing her "personal grooming", you know...the one leg up in the air thing...and she stopped, leg up, and looked right at the wall. There was nothing hanging on the wall where she was looking.

I looked to see if it was a spider or something, but there was nothing there. She watched slowly, her head following this thing toward the door in a straight line. I was getting a bit worried by now. Then, when it got to the corner by the door, she started watching it go up and when it got to the ceiling, she stopped and went back to her bath as if nothing had happened.

Another time, my boyfriend (at the time) was over, and we were in my room (oh my!) and the cat was, as usual, at the end of the bed. We were just talking, the light was on, and all of a sudden we heard a sound that I can only describe as a small child's voice say "OOH!", as if it saw something interesting.

Needless to say, we all three (cat included) looked at the direction the sound came from, which was about 4 feet up the middle if the doorway. We looked at each other because it was quite loud, as if someone were actually standing there.

After that, other friends would drop by and I never mentioned it to them, but once in a while they would hear it. They usually would leave shortly after. One friend left immediately.

It wasn't a scary thing to me, but more playful. Sometimes when I was alone I would hear it and mimmick the sound with a whistle because my voice doesn't go that high.

I should explain about the place where the sound came from. There is like a small place where four doors come together. A sort of crossroads, if you will.

There was enough space there for me to put a small table for the phone. There was a large mirror on the wall that connected with the apartment nextdoor, and a light switch.

The light switch was scary to me. Sometimes I would switch it on and it would take 2 or 3 seconds to come on. Probably bad and unsafe wiring. Still....spooky at night. :)

When Kitty died, it wasn't long until I got my wonderful cat Merlin. He was so funny and the perfect pal. I had to leave him behind when I moved here. Anyway, he used to look at the wall the same way Kitty did, in the same place.

He seemed to see things I couldn't, and he would watch them for long periods of time, following their movement. I thought it was interesting that he picked up on the same stuff.

Still not being able to sleep well in that room three years later (I slept on the couch a lot), I moved my room into the small room that was just big enough for my bed and a bookshelf.

I really liked that room, but I could hear too much noise from other neighbours and eventually moved back. I should add here that before I moved to the UK, I had had enough and moved my bed into the living room.

The sound was still heard from time to time, also heard by Merlin.

A friend of mine moved in nextdoor with his girlfriend and one day while she and I were talking, she mentioned that they were having a hard time sleeping at night and they didn't know why. (Note that our bedrooms were next to each other.)

They tried moving the furniture around (as did I) and nothing helped. They were also having more arguments than usual. Then a really odd thing started to happen.

A small white light, about the size of a marble, would pass from one side of that crossroads to the other, about the same height as the sound. It scared me a little at first, but what could I do?

It really scared me when the neighbours told me they saw the same thing! (They brought it up.) They said sometimes it was going toward my apartment, and sometimes the other way, as if coming from my apartment. This was the wall with the big mirror on it.

Another friend thought she would "get to the bottom of this" and came over with her Ouija board. Now I'm not easily scared, but I just didn't feel like egging someone or something on in my house. I had to live there!

We invited the people next door. The woman wouldn't come over. My friend and the guy did the Ouija board and I took notes. Now my friend is notorious for making up stories and lying about stuff (she's not my friend anymore) so I was prepared to take this all with a grain of salt.

Soon, things started happening. We got two letters. S and A. (maybe the other way around.) To try to make this short, the information we finally got was from a small boy who was 6 years old. He used to live in the place where the apartments are now. This wasn't word for word, but fragments that started to fall into place.

My lying friend was truly spooked by now, so I don't think she was doing it on purpose. The guy was pretty much stunned by now.

The boy went on to give us clues about a black woman who was killed near there in a field. When asked why he was there, he said "fun" and he said "whistle".

Neither of my friends knew I whistled back at the sound I heard. After that, I told them I had been whistling. Anyway, he said he liked it there. We tried for more info, but that was it.

My friends left a bit shaken, and I was pretty shaken myself.

The sounds continued and I checked out every possible reason for it. An open window, anything but there was simply no explanation.

About a year later, I was having a terrible dream where I was being held down by nothing I could see. In the dream, I looked at the side of my bed to see a black woman wearing a black dress with a small white pattern on it. She looked very angry.

I felt I couldn't breathe and I was making movements as a person would who was underwater trying to reach the surface. At that time, I felt and saw my body slowly start to go up. I sensed my mother was in the other room but I couldn't get to her.

I thought to myself in the dream "This is a dream, just wake up." So I sat up on the side of the bed, but still couldn't breathe because I was STILL ASLEEP! That happened four more times, with me sitting up, thinking I was awake when I was just dreaming it.

Finally, the very last time, I ran out of the room, turned on every light I could find and went to splash my face with cold water. That was when I realized I was really awake. That scared me to death. Needless to say, I didn't go back to bed.

I don't know who the black woman was supposed to be and it was some time after the Ouija board incident. I don't know anyone who looks like that, so that has me puzzled.

Thanks for reading.

skeptika's note:

This was originally posted to alt.folklore.ghost-stories newsgroup but I received it on the ghost-stories mailing list. It has been modified to fit the page and edited in a minor way to help the flow.

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