Listening to the Voices
The apartment my boyfriend Jon and I rented together seemed really nice at first. We were doing the usual nesting when we started noticing odd things. I am a very observant person, and I couldn’t help but notice that one morning, when I walked past our keyboard, there were screws laid on a couple of keys. I wondered why Jon would be leaving screws there of all places, but I wrote it off, picked them up, and put them in a cabinet.
The next morning, the same types of screws were on the keyboard again. This time I asked Jon what he was putting these screws on the keyboard for? He said he didn’t do it either time. I looked where I put the screws from the day before and they were still there. Neither one of us could see where they were coming from. I added them to the collection.
That night, I went to make some simple curtains for the kitchen window. I had the scissors in my hand when I went to stand up, and all of a sudden, I had this very heavy feeling push me back to the floor, making it extremely difficult to regain my balance. When I fell back, the scissors stabbed me. Ouch! (Not too bad though, luckily.)
The next afternoon, after returning home from work, the needle and thread that I put away the night before was found on my bed pillow. Once again, a place where we'd never put something! The nights got harder to sleep as Jon claimed he thought he kept hearing voices from our bedroom doorway. I assured him it must be the other tenants in the building, but shared with him my uneasy feelings about the place as well. We started using a fan to create a distracting white noise so we could sleep at night.
Then I started hearing the voices. We both heard a voice say, "I’m here." By this time, we’d told the landlord that we were no longer interested in renting the apartment and since we had not signed a lease yet, we fortunately were free to leave. The neighbor told us while we were moving out that he had to call the landlord about the last tenant staying there. She apparently had left her door wide open with all her belongings inside for a couple of days. Concerned, they searched for her. only to find her at the local hospital. She had checked herself into the mental ward with claims of hearing voices. I completely empathize with her, because towards the end of our stay, Jon and I were seriously questioning our sanity! So perhaps she wasn’t crazy after all! Maybe the next tenants had better luck—or maybe the voices have continued to claim the sanity of whoever stays in the apartment.
