The Velvet Painting

This happened to my husband and I about 20 years ago. (1981). We lived in an old apartment building in Wisconsin. My mother had told me that the building used to be a very large boarding house that was started in the late 1800s. I don't know when it was converted into apartments but if I had to guess it would have been in the early 1950s.

Many strange things happened in our 1st floor 2 bedroom apartment. We were situated in an inside corner of what you might call a square. There was a living room window and in a separate room a bedroom window that both faced the building at the back of the square. We were completely away from the street lights and passing cars. Our cat would wake out of nap, sit up straight and follow something across the room just below ceiling level. We could never really see what she was looking at. The small blob or shadowed ball would always be just seen out of the corner of our eyes. It happened all the time and we eventually became used to the cat's bizarre behavior.

We didn't start thinking of the place being haunted until one afternoon. My husband was standing at the end of the kitchen counter talking to me as I was doing the dishes. We both smelled the mild scent of perfume, as we started to make a statement about the perfume, my husband's eyes got as big as saucers and he said that there was an old woman in the room with us and she just walked around him and brushed up against him going into the living room. The scent of the perfume was gone and that was the first and last time we had an encounter with the old lady.

I had at one time purchased a velvet paint by number painting that I completed and proudly displayed about 71/2 feet above on the upper ledge of the window in the bedroom. I wasn't a very large painting so I didn't need to hang it, resting on the ledge was fine and it had been there for months. One night as we were getting ready to go to bed for the night, I happened to look up at the painting just as my husband was turning off the ceiling light. At a glance I could see that something just was not right, I asked him to turn the light back on. To our amazement we saw the picture resting on the window ledge, however it was "UPSIDE DOWN".

Not the scariest of stories and maybe boring to some, but we definitely looked at that apartment in different sort of way from then on.