67 True scary stories to tell in the dark

65.Haunted apartment

"Lived in an old two bedroom, three storey walkup for a time in my early 20s in Toronto. A few days after moving in my roommate Mike chides me in the morning for banging on the wall that separated our bedrooms and pacing back and forth across the apartment at night. We just agreed he must have been dreaming or it was sounds from other apartments as I had done no such thing. We agreed that it must have been nothing and left it at that but this became a regular nightly occurrence.

Shortly thereafter I started noticing at certain times in my own bedroom the cloying smell of cheap women's perfurm mixed with a damp musty smell. Imagine an old person's clothes left on a damp musty basement floor near a litterbox that wasn't being changed often enough and you get the idea. What made it even weirder is that I would be filled with a sudden horrible sense of foreboding a few moments before the smell would begin.

Mike flaked out and left only 4 months into our 1 year lease which meant I was left footing the rent for the entire place until I could find another roommate. I had decided to try and sleep in his bedroom shortly after he moved to see if things would get better. The very first night I slept in his former room I had an incredibly detailed and realistic nightmare of myself standing in the dimly-lit bathroom of the apartment and cutting my own face with a large shard of glass while staring into the broken bathroom mirror (it was only broken in the dream).

Soon after that I started to hear the loud bangs at night and the flushing of the toilet in the bathroom. Several times the hot water in the bathtub turned on full blast in the middle of the night.

One of the freakier things that happened not too long before I moved is the time I was woken up by the TV blaring Poltergeist on CityTV at about 2 in the morning. At the time that channel would always play movies late at night but the fact that the one time my analog TV (turn a knob to change the channel or the volume, pull a knob to turn it on) turned on by itself at full blast was the time a movie like Poltergeist was playing." — dicknass