A number of years ago, as a poor student, I was renting the top 2

floors of a house with 7 other school friends. We thought ourselves
lucky to get the house for such a low rent, plus all utilities paid
for. With eleven of us, we each paid about $75.00 a month.

The house had its fair share of windows facing east and west, so it
should be a brightly lit house in the daytime, but, somehow, the house
was always rather dark and dim. We could never figure this out. Often
at night, we'd hear bumps and creaks; we always put it down as the old
100-125 year old Victorian style house settling down until one
night...

It was a Friday night, just around spring, exams were done with, and
winter was almost over. We were all really overjoyed and happy. We
felt that we did well in our exams. That evening, six of us went to
the movies, had dinner. After the dinner, we headed home. The
celebration continued. We were drinking coke; some of the guys were
drinking beer. We were all laughing and joking in the kitchen, when we
heard the door open, and footsteps coming up the stairs. We thought,
Jenny and Sue were home, they had opted to go to a fellowship rather
than join us at our celebration. We called out to the 2 sisters to
join us, when we recieved no answer, Tom poked his head outside the
kitchen, the dim hallway was empty. We figured, incredible as it
sounds, they probably did not hear us, so, Tom went upstairs to the
girls' room. A few minutes later, he came back downstairs looking very
puzzled. The girls weren't home, yet, we heard someone open the front
door and come up those stairs. We shrugged it off as the house
settling down or a streetcar coming by shaking the house.

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.