A growing list of strange things have been happening around my apartment lately. I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I’m also not not saying that.

I don’t believe in ghosts. I really really want them to be real, similar to how I hope Bigfoot and aliens exist, but I just can’t get there. I’ve listened to stories told by close friends who claim to have had contact with someone or something from the other side, and I can see in their eyes that they truly believe what they’re saying, but almost every time it can be explained using logic. Or the story is so ridiculous I’m forced to believe they’re flat out lying for attention.

That carries over to the internet, too. With the look-at-me culture of social media you can’t even trust a good ol’ fashioned ghost-captured-on-a-security-camera video on YouTube anymore (not that you ever could) because there’s a built in motive to fake it: attention. I could capture a high res video of an actual ghost on camera explaining who they used to be, how they died, and what it’s like to be dead and people would still doubt the video’s validity. And I wouldn’t blame them.

All that being said, I think my apartment building might be haunted. I’ve lived in the EBT building in downtown Kansas City since January of 2016, and weird shit has been happening ever since. The building was built in 1890 and was originally a department store for travelers heading west called Emery, Bird, Thayer & Company before eventually being converted into lofts in the mid-2000’s. While there’s no official report of any strange deaths or murders happening in the building that might lend itself to a haunting, I think we can all agree that whenever you’re talking about a building from the 1800’s there’s like a 75% chance something fucked up happened there at some point.

I realize most people will be skeptical about what I say, as they should be, so what I did is detailed every weird thing that’s happened since I moved into the building and did my best to explain it using objective logic.

A couple relevant notes before we get started:

When I moved into my apartment, my girlfriend (Lauren) moved into the apartment directly below mine at the same time. I was in #607, she was in #507.
In February of 2017 Lauren and I moved into an apartment on the first floor of the same building together.
The activity has amplified since we moved in together, particularly in the past several months.
Everything here is 100% true as I remember it happening.

Alright, let’s break this down.

The Thing
A few months after moving into my new apartment I began consistently waking up in the middle of the night. But I wasn’t just waking up in the middle of the night: I was waking up at the exact same time. 3:18. Everytime I woke up and checked my phone it was 3:18. There were even times when I’d wake up and lay there several minutes before checking the time on my phone, trying to trick it into being a different time. But no matter when I decided to look at my phone it was always 3:18.

I didn’t think anything of this until a Google search showed that waking up at the same time every night might indicate the spirit world is trying to tell you something. I also learned that between 3–4 am is what’s known as the “Devil’s Hour” when spirits and demons are the most active. And we’re off.

The (Possible) Explanation
Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe my neighbor was knocking on my wall at the exact same time every night as some sort of lame prank. Or maybe it had to do with *sleep timing, circadian rhythms, and sleep cycles. I’ll let you decide.

*They “debunk” the idea of waking up at the same time each night being connected to the spiritual world in this article by saying “The role of spirits and spells cannot be proven with scientific method.” But it also can’t NOT be proven with the scientific method. You know?

The Thing
The very first night Lauren spent the night at my apartment, she rolled over to go to sleep as I stayed up and looked at Twitter or Instagram or something equally useless on my phone for a little while longer. About 20 minutes later, she abruptly sat up in bed gasping for breath. When she regained her ability to speak (and after I wiped myself) I asked her what was wrong and she said it felt like someone had been choking her in her sleep.

The (Possible) Explanation
My running theory on this is that Lauren was so nervous about the idea of being in a committed relationship with me that she had a panic attack in her sleep. In the event that I am haunted by a demon, my guess is it was threatened by her presence and was trying to take her out. Which if we’re being honest is kind of cute. If I do in fact have a demon haunting me, I find the idea of it being territorial of me charming.

The Thing
In April of 2016 I travelled to L.A. for a work trip that lasted 5 days. A couple days into the trip I was out to dinner late one night (about 11 pm pst, 1 am cst) when I got a text from Lauren saying it sounded like someone was in my apartment directly above her. She said she heard loud thumps from what would be my bedroom, as if someone were moving furniture (or dead bodies?).

The (Possible) Explanation
While Lauren claimed the noises were coming from my apartment directly above her, it’s possible they were actually coming from an apartment either diagonal or next to hers. I know that sounds strange, but there were times we thought a couple was arguing above us and it turned out they were directly next door. Maybe our directional hearing sucks. Or maybe Lauren was being paranoid and/or was/is crazy. Everything’s on the table here.

The Thing
Not long after Lauren and I moved in together a weird thing began happening. And by weird I mean terrifying. Semi-regularly since the move, Lauren will sit up in the middle of the night and stare at the wall in horror for about 10 seconds before snapping out of it and going back to sleep. Whenever this happens she always stares at the same thing: this decorative necklace hanger thing her brother made for her.

I’m a very light sleeper so whenever this happens it wakes me up, and the first few times it scared the shit out of me. I tried asking her what she was looking at in the moment, but she would always just go back to sleep without saying a word.

The morning after one of these occurrences I asked if she could remember anything about them. She casually told me that whenever that happens she’s in a dreamlike state and that for a few moments it looks like there’s a dark hole opening up in the wall sucking everything in. Had I known this would happen I may have reconsidered moving in with her. And have considered leaving ever since.

**The decorative necklace hanger thing where portals into the underworld apparently form.**

The (Possible) Explanation
Lauren is so nervous about the idea of being in a committed relationship with me that she’s now gone from having panic attacks in her sleep to envisioning her escape from me via creepy black holes in the wall.

Or Lauren suffers from parasomnia which can be brought on with stress and anxiety. But that’s boring, so allow me to entertain the idea that’s not the case for a minute:

The decorative necklace hanger that her brother made is haunted, which seems plausible upon learning that its made out of an old portrait he found at Goodwill. I didn’t see the portrait before he painted over it, but if I had to guess it was probably of a little boy wearing a sailor outfit riding a rocking horse staring deadpan at the camera stoically. Or something like this.

I would further speculate that the portrait contains the spirit of its previous owner who, in order to escape the painting’s grasp, has to find someone else’s soul to lure in and trap in the painting to take their place. Now that I type that I’m considering maybe this has already happened, and Lauren’s soul is currently in the painting while the demon’s soul is in what used to be Lauren’s body.

*Looks at Lauren sitting on the couch*
*She half-smiles and waves slowly*
*Moves to Montana*

The Thing
I was in my bathroom brushing my teeth before bed one night when I saw one of the hangers in my closet begin to swing back and forth in the reflection of my mirror. Not only did it swing, but it seemed to swing forever like it was a Newton’s Cradle before I finally went over and stopped it.

The (Possible) Explanation
At the time this happened we were dealing with a mice problem in our apartment. My guess is a mouse saw all the traps I had set, figured death was inevitable, and decided to take its fate into its own tiny hands by jumping off the shelf in my closet, knocking the hanger on its way down. Did I find a mouse in my closet after this happened? No. But it’s what I tell myself to help me sleep at night.

The Thing
The night of my birthday a group of friends and I went out and got very very drunk. Like, go-home-and-play-Mr-Brightside-by-The-Killers-and-sing-along drunk. I say that in an attempt to make you believe I have a social life and am a fun person, but also to be upfront about the fact that I was super drunk when this next thing happened.

A group of six of us end up at our place late that night and we’re very drunk and singing early 2000’s pop songs together very poorly until about 3 am (Devil’s Hour!?!?). Our friends leave so then it’s just Lauren and I sitting on the couch, hangovers on the horizon. I stand up to go to bed and as I do, the bluetooth speaker we were using to listen to music flies off the top of our entertainment stand and onto the floor. An important thing to mention here is I didn’t actually see this happen myself, but I did hear it happen. Lauren, however, did see it happen and claims it looked as if someone hit the speaker off the top of the entertainment stand.

**We took this photo immediately after it happened. The bluetooth speaker landed a good two feet from the entertainment stand (left).**

The (Possible) Explanation
So I know I was very drunk when this happened, but it still has me shook. It’s the thing that took me from joking about having a demon in our apartment to actually thinking we have a demon in our apartment.

We considered the possibility that the speaker was playing so loudly it vibrated itself off the entertainment stand, but we tested it the next day by playing it as loud as possible and it didn’t budge. Even so, the speaker landed so far from the entertainment stand there’s no way it could have just fallen off.

My one regret is not taking note of what song was playing when this happened because clearly the demon hates that song.

The Thing
I woke up one night to what I thought was the sound of our bedroom door slamming. Lauren didn’t wake up, but I was so convinced by what I heard that I got up to investigate if someone was in the apartment. Something that, if true, I was incredibly ill-prepared to handle in nothing but my boxers and weaponless. Thankfully no one was there and I went back to sleep.

The next day I told Lauren what had happened. She got a worried look on her face and asked me if the bedroom door had been locked when I went to take a shower that morning. (My bathroom is outside our bedroom). I thought the question was weird but told her that no, the door had not been locked. Apparently she had felt the urge to lock our bedroom door the night before for some reason without telling me. The same door that I thought I heard slam in the middle of the night and was no longer locked the previous morning.

The (Possible) Explanation
I really hope I’m a sleepwalker.

The Thing
Lauren and I were talking in the kitchen after work one night when a lime rolled out of our fruit bowl and across the counter untouched. By this point I had become so immune to all the weird shit going on that I simply picked the lime up and put it back as if nothing had happened. But it further established my deep down panic.

The (Possible) Explanation
It wasn’t as if our fruit bowl was overflowing and this lime had been clinging on for dear life before finally losing its grip. I saw this lime with my own two eyes just roll out of the bowl across the counter. I can’t explain that. If this were the first and only thing that had happened I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, but we’re to the point where any sound I hear I assume is the demon plotting to possess me.

Okay, I feel like I’m losing my ability to be objective. Let me take a second to clear my mind and think about this rationally.

….

It was definitely just the wind.

(or the demon was in the mood for a margarita)

The Thing
Lauren burnt her neck with her hair straightener one morning. No big deal, right? (Other than the fact that she burnt her neck and was in semi to moderate pain for a few days). Well, after she left for work that morning I was in our bedroom making the bed when all of a sudden that SAME hair straightener that burnt her neck fell off her makeup table out of nowhere. Under normal circumstances this would have freaked me out, but I felt particularly vulnerable because *I was naked when this happened. A disclosure here is that I didn’t see the hair straightener fall; I was facing the other way. But I heard it fall and sure enough when I turned around it was there on the floor.

*I don’t normally make the bed naked. That isn’t a thing I do. I had worked out that morning and just taken a shower but was still a little sweaty because the shower didn’t take so I was trying to cool off a bit longer before putting on clothes.

The (Possible) Explanation
Lauren left the hair straightener dangling off the edge of her make-up table and I stepped just right that I shook the entire floor causing it to teeter onto the floor.

Or the demon possessed Lauren that morning, forcing her to burn herself with the now haunted hair straightener in an attempt to get rid of her so it can have me to itself.

—

I was forced to leave out a lot of other incidents that have happened for the sake of brevity, but those are the highlights to date. I don’t expect you to believe in ghosts now that you’ve read this. I’m still not sure I do and I’m the one who experienced all this first-hand. But I have Googled how to sage an apartment, so maybe I believe in this more than I’m willing to admit.

And before you suggest it, no, I have not ruled out that Lauren is the demon.

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