Ghosts In My Apartment

Hi my name is Jen and I have lived in my current apartment in Brooklyn for about 30 years now along with my mom and my brother. We knew the first day we moved in here that it was haunted.

To give a little history on the building its over a hundred years old. It was built around the time our part of brooklyn was officially becoming part of NYC.
The first night we moved in my mom, myself and my two older brothers had to share one whole bed because our own was not delivered yet. While we were waiting my mom started to unpack some boxes and clean up a bit. She also hung up some blue curtains in our large room (thats where we all slept) so the sun would not bother us in the morning. When we got up for school the next morning and turned on the lights, my mother went to look out the window and noticed a big gash down the middle of the panel on the left. We had a cat but the rip did not indicate five claw marks had been made; it looked as though someone took a knife or some other sharp object and made one large rip right down the middle. My mom asked which one of us did it and we all said we didn't. She got scared, took the curtains down and threw them out.
After that there have been many strange happenings but my mother experienced most of it. She told us as well as my Godmother, who lived across the hall at the time, that she would feel someone jumping on her bed in the middle of the night. When she turned to see who it was no one was there. She would also hear footsteps in the hallway (which I actually heard once) and see things walking around out of the corner of her eye.
Fast forward about 6 years. My mother ran a daycare center in the apartment for 11 years (she was a nurse by profession but she wanted to stay home with us). She took care of about 15 kids during the day and I remember every one of them not wanting to go to the bathroom by themselves during nap time (during nap time my mom turned out the lights and it was pretty dark). They would always ask mom to walk with them and stay with them in the bathroom until they were finished. My mom figured it was the spirits but she was not really sure.
She finally found out one day when one of the parents told her that her daughter saw a strange dark man lying in our bathtub. Now at the time there were no men living in our apartment and my oldest brother was only a teenager and was at school at the time, and with the history of ghosts in here we could not say she was lying.
My Godmother's Experience:
About 10 years after we moved in, the Super and the painters were scheduled to come in to paint and fix the pipes in our kitchen. My mom and us had to keep our doctors appointments so she asked our godmother if she could stay in the apartment until they came (this was in the 80's where crime in NYC was really bad and my mother was not trusting anyone with our keys). When my mother came back she found the place had not been painted nor the pipes fixed. When she called the office to find out why nothing had been done, the people at the office said that the workers told them that no one was there to let them in. My mother denied it and in her anger she hung up the phone. She called my Godmother and asked her what happened and she said, and I remember it to this day "Don't ever ask me to stay alone in your apartment again. I will do anything else for you but not that". When my mother asked what had happened she said she saw a tall dark figure of a man standing in the corner of our living room and that she got so scared she ran out.
The day after my mother walked around the house with frankincense and her bible to try and burn out whatever was here.
It worked. But only for a while.
I remember while watching my mother walking from room to room I felt a cold gust of wind fly right past me. I remember being scared and asking mom if that was the ghost and she said it probably was.
Other Experiences
We do not know who the black shadow man is but there are other spirits in the apartment and I think they are family members. My family and I do not feel threatened by them and they like to let us know they are around by swooping in and out at the corner of our eyes and scaring our cat.
The two weirdest experiences I have had with the ghost that I think are our family occurred around my fathers birthday this September. My moms step dad and uncle came to accompany us to our cousins wedding. On a weekend in mid-September I was in the kitchen washing dishes when I suddenly heard two footsteps walk past me accompanied by a sudden chill. I turned around and started to tell the ghost to let me finish doing what I was doing but then I stopped. I went on washing the dishes and said to myself "what's the sense?" with my moms step dad we were all going to my cousins wedding that day and my uncle and his father (step dad) where due to arrive. When they came I saw my uncle in the dinning area but not his father. I asked him where he was and he said he was standing in the hallway and that for some reason he would not come in. I thought this was strange because despite how my mother felt about him (we all believe he killed our grandmother, my mothers mother) he was never shunned from the apartment. I went to the hallway to see what was wrong and I found him standing by the staircase, holding onto the banister of the first floor staircase for dear life. As he was holding on he was staring at our apartment door scared to death. I asked him what was wrong and he did not answer. He just stood there staring.
He eventually came in but all the time he was there I saw that he was scared. When I told my mother about it she said he may have seen her mother or her grandmother and they may have been trying to keep him out. I have a lot of stories but they wont all fit here, so this will have to be it for now.
Thanks for reading.