...I see dead people...

(I'm going to have to get back on schedule with the nightly updates. There's been lots of stuff going on. I'll start with last night and work backward as I find time.)

So, last night I'm sitting here working away at the computer on a few odds and ends. And Sammy is napping on the twin bed that's now in my study. (I moved it in here when my parents visited and the new queen-size bed went into my existent bedroom.) Well, he starts growling. Just that low growl that he sometimes does when he's having a dream. Only he keeps going.

Now I'm figuring he hears something outside the apartment. (He barks when the neighborhood kids get a bit loud or someone comes in late, etc.) I tell him to be quiet and instead of stopping like he usually does, he jumps off the end of the bed and stands in the doorway of the study looking into the bedroom. (The doors are directly opposite one another.) Normally if he hears a neighbor, he runs to the bedroom, jumps on the bed and barks at them through the window near the foot of the bed. The growling gets a bit more fierce and he finally breaks into a furious fit of barking, hackles raised but he's crouched on the ground in the doorway. I turn around and yell at him to stop, but he won't. I'm just about to get up and the light flips on in the bedroom. I mean, I actually hear the lightswitch click and see the light go on through the open doorway. He jumps back about three feet. I nearly fall out of my chair trying to jump back three feet. And when we both recover some presence of mind (about 0.4 seconds later), we race downstairs to Eric's room.

"Eric?"

A muffled response from his room, "Yeah?"

"Are you still up?"

Again muffled "Yeah?"

Me, very quietly, "Could you come upstairs for a minute?"

He comes out of his room and looks at me kind of strangely, "What's up?"

"Well, I need you to look at something upstairs."

So we both walk up to my bedroom (Sammypug refused to come any further than halfway up for about an hour.) and I ask him if he sees anything odd. He says no. So I explain what happened. And he gets this very odd tight smile and kind of leans against a wall with his forehead against his upraised arm. You see, Eric knows the apartment is haunted too. This is only the second incident in a year and a half and obviously benign, but it's just plain creepy.

The people who lived in the apartment before we did, passed away here. Eric didn't tell me until after the first incident, about three weeks after I'd moved in. I'd gone out back to put the trash in the dumpster and when I got to the stairwell, the water was running in the bathroom sink. So I'm figuring either a) Eric came in without me knowing it and needed to check the plumbing upstairs, b) the landlord was fixing something, or c) it's a new apartment for me and I'm mishearing the acoustics from the apartment next door. I call out, "Hello?" No answer. I get halfway up the stairs and the water turns off. So I slowly walk the rest of the way up the stairs and I can hear the water trickling in the bathroom. No one there. No one in the bedroom, no one in the study, all closet doors closed. The sink in the bathroom drains very slowly and is still about a third full of water. Skin crawl fest.

So what do I make of all this? Not much except that first, I'm certain there's something out of the ordinary in this apartment and second, I'm not going to yell at Sammy anymore about barking unless I'm sure he's trying to protect me from the neighbors. (I'd just as soon know if I've got company in the room that I can't see.) I had some trouble getting to sleep although I did finally go sleep in the bedroom. (The couch was looking really comfy about 2 AM.) I guess if it's a once a year thing I can live with it. But if it picks up in frequency any, we are going to look for another living space, benign or not.

Anyhow, rest well. I'll try to catch up with some more news tomorrow.