29. When I sat up, he also sat up. Then he vanished.
“TL,DR: Rented a townhouse, escalating series of events led wife and I to sleep on a mattress in the living room for 2 months, before abandoning the lease with 4 months to go and paying double rent, just to get out of there.
Wife and I were dating, and decided to move in together. We were excited to get our own apartment in South Florida, and rented a suburban townhouse with our two dogs.
Things were awesome at first. The place was sunny and breezy, with a fenced yard, and for the first part of the year the doors and windows were almost always open.
Summer started to roll in, with hot, heavy days and thunderstorms. We had to retreat inside to the comfort of a/c, and things started to go south.
We could feel it. The house started to feel oppressive. (Side note: this is the single hardest part to describe, and it’s the reason we haven’t spoken with anyone about it, so stick with me). We started talking to each other less. Most of our conversations were single word exchanges. We weren’t mad exactly, we just both felt exhausted as soon as we would walk through the door. Then the dogs stopped going upstairs. Until this point, they’d slept in our room without issue. One day, they just refused. There hadn’t been any event or trauma; they both flatly would not go upstairs. Ok, whatever.
Shortly after that point, I was doing something upstairs and noticed the door frame to the bedroom was nailed together with finishing nails. As in, it had been previously shattered, and the pieces nailed back together. I looked at the guest room, and found the same thing. Both doors had been kicked in from the hallway at some point, and put back together.
From here, things got…angry. The wife and I went from sort of smothered in a wet blanket, to actively fighting. All the time, over nothing. We were still sleeping upstairs, and the dogs downstairs, but neither of us were sleeping well. This was also a new development.
We both began to wake up in the night. Sometimes at the same time as each other, but frequently one at a time, and never for any specific reason (like a sound or whatever). Neither of us would want to get out of the bed, and the result was a lot of still, muffled nights of uneasy feelings, which started to bleed into the day.
The anger continued, but now with dread of nightfall. With the sun down, there was a constant feeling of being watched, or of something in the back of your mind that you know is horrible but can’t quite put your finger on, so instead you just have a pit in your stomach. When we would leave the house, we’d feel better, but coming home was always bad. We tried to find excuses to stay somewhere else as much as possible, but that was tough with the dogs. Several times, we had weekends out that were wonderful and cheerful, only to return to the townhouse and immediately start fighting. Still, over nothing.
The fighting started to get violent. Not with each other, but with the house. Dishes were broken on the floor; glasses thrown against walls; doors slammed hard enough to knock pictures free from frames. It was from both sides. Both of us were the aggressor. It was bananas.
I woke up one night to find a young black boy (as in African American, though I don’t know his actual heritage) in the bed. He was probably 6 or 7, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, and when I sat up, he also sat up. Then he vanished. At this point, neither the wife or I were sleeping much, so I chalked it up to that. However, it was the impetus to sit down and talk about whatever was happening to us.
It was the first time either of us acknowledged that something may be up with the townhouse. We agreed to try sleeping downstairs that night, and both managed to get a bit more sleep. The sense of dread was still there, but less on the floor of the living room. It may just have been that the doors were in sight, so an easy exit was possible. I honestly don’t know.
We stayed on the floor of the living room for a few nights, on an inflatable bed, and then tried moving back upstairs. We lasted maybe 45 minutes before we both agreed something was up. We moved the actual mattress downstairs, and started looking for a new apartment. We still had 6 months on the lease, and no money in the bank. It took us 2 months to find a new place, at which point the old house was so unbearable, we moved immediately and paid double rent, maxing out the credit cards.
It is so hard to explain the foregoing without sounding campy or melodramatic. A lot of creepy stories and haunted houses revolve around “perception” events: seeing something; hearing noises; funny smells. This was something that was so quiet and creeping, and built so slowly, that I’m still not sure what happened, other than there was an actual emotional effect from being in that house, and it was terrible.
After moving out, we did get a call from the people who moved in after us. They got our number from the neighbor. They asked some vague questions about the house, and we were pretty candid that we didn’t like the ‘vibes,’ but sort of left it at that. A few months later we heard from that same neighbor that the new tenants had also moved out, with no notice, and the landlord was looking for them.”
