My Haunted Flat

3 years ago, while I was studying at university, I flatted in a house which was unmistakably haunted, for 18 months. This is not so much a story, as it is an account of some of the strange things my flat mates and I experienced.

The house in question didn't look like your typical haunted house. It was a apricot coloured, four bedroom, art deco house situated in a nice suburb, handy to Uni. It was one story, but the owner had converted half the basement into two bedrooms and a bathroom.

The top floor consisted of two bedrooms, a bathroom, a toilet, the dinning room and the kitchen. The activity was centered in the upstairs rooms.

The ghost (I'm not sure of its gender but most people believed the presence to be male) was very active, and at times terrifying. He loved noise and chaos: windows and doors would be slammed shut by invisible forces, lights would turn off and on, new light bulbs would blow out and 'cold spots', where the temperature was up to 8 degrees C lower than the rest of the house would appear. Once one of my flatmates and I were trying to watch TV, however an unseen force kept turning the volume up so loud that we gave up.

Often I would come home from class to find all the taps in the house on, or all the doors in the house, including the front door, wide open, despite having been locked when everyone had left that morning.

One evening one of my flatmates came back to find every light on in the house, but the moment he opened the front door, they all mysteriously turned off.

The ghost had a thing for silver. Silver coloured cutlery, jewelry, keys etc., would go missing, only to be found in a little pile in some weird place, like under the stairs, or at the back of the hall closet.

The ghost seemed to single some people out, although I, thankfully, was never a direct target. It particularly disliked one of my male friends, Mark, and would slam the door on his face every time he tried to enter the kitchen. Once Mark came to dinner with us, when suddenly, halfway through the meal, he got up and bolted out of the house. He later claimed that the entire time he was sitting at the table, the ghost was staring at him from the doorway, telling him to get out (no one else saw this). It's no surprise Mark never came back after that.

About seven months after I moved in, a young medical student moved into one of the upstairs bedroom. The ghost seemed to have an intense disliking for this girl, and it's activity increased dramatically in the 3 weeks she stayed there. It would slam doors in her face, pull her hair, pinch her and throw things at her. She was covered in bruises. Many times she would come back home, when nobody else had been there and find her bedroom in a total mess, with books and clothes everywhere, and all her draws and closets would be wide open. I once witnessed this when she and I went down to the corner shop for five minutes, leaving the room in perfect order, and coming back to find her room freezing cold and in a complete mess. Nobody had been home and there was no sign of breaking and entering.

The last straw for her was when the ghost seemed to magically lock her in her room for three hours when she was home alone. When she finally opened the door, an unseen force punched her in the face, giving her a black eye. She never set foot in the house again, and the other flatmates and I had to pack up her things and take them over to her.

Since I moved out of the house, I have heard of many people moving in and moving out very quickly. I never found out who the ghost was, and was unable to find out anything about the history of the street. It remains a mystery. But I must admit, the experience definitely made a believer out of me.