30 August 2011

There's a Woman in my Living Area

 The events described take place for the most part in a land-marked building in lower Manhattan, New York City. The building is in disrepair compared to the shiny, luxury condos it borders. The rustic, industrial feel probably make the spirits who dwell within it's walls quite comfortable.
I live in a loft space. It's one big room with three windows and a kitchen on one side and two rooms taking up the back three windows. We have a big white couch in the living area (we have more "areas" than we have rooms). It folds out into a big, queen sized bed.
My friend, Isa, came to stay with me for the weekend. She was here three nights waiting for New York to get over it's media crazed hurricane fear and restart the MTA subway system. On the first night, Friday, we both slept soundly. I in my room listening to the rain through the open window, and she in the living area on the big pull-out bed. By Saturday evening the storm was blowing in and it wasn't safe to sleep so near a window so I relocated to the pull-out bed with Isa.
I didn't sleep well. Isa had passed out by midnight but I was up, drinking tea and turning out lights. When I finally went to sleep it was only to toss fretfully around. I woke up every couple of hours after some bad dream and then lay awake, listening to the hurricane with my eyes closed for fear of seeing one of the ghosts from my dreams.
I drempt I was laying on that pull-out bed in the middle of my apartment. Out of nowhere this huge woman's face appeared above me and started yelling angrily. What she was saying I cannot recall. Her face was huge, it would have been half the size of her body (if I could see her body). She had a hooked nose, pointed chin, bristly eyebrows and a loose neat bun on the top of her head. I remember being able to see the pores in her nose and the malice in her dark eyes. When I dared open my eyes and look around the apartment there was nothing there. I closed them again and five or six statuesque women in long, working dresses appeared. They were all brunettes with hair parted down the middle and held in a tight bun in the back. They all looked to be in sepia. Just standing there with their hinds politely folded, watching me. When I timidly opened my eyes again they were gone.
I spent the rest of the night curled up in terror waiting for the light to come back so I could move.
The next night the hurricane had past with minimal damage and I was back in my own bed. Without me there to take the brute of the paranormal force within my apartment the ghost of the old woman's face presented itself to my friend. She awoke in the middle of the night because she heard screaming above her. I asked her if it was angry, she said yes. I asked her if it was yelling, she said no, screaming. She couldn't remember the face after long. Just the angry screaming and uneasy feeling it left her with for the rest of the night.
The following night she was gone and I slept more soundly than I had in weeks.

29 August 2011

The Ghost Cat

As anyone who's ever been to my apartment can tell you, the place feels like it should have a cat in it. It's not just the large amount of empty floor space or the occasional pest that warrants the need for the cat, but rather, a cat would ease some of the tension that creeps up your spine like cold fear when you hear the floorboards creak and groan in the dark of the night. If there were a cat in the loft to explain that thud you just heard emanating from the kitchen, maybe the hairs wouldn't stand up on the back of our neck every time you heard it.
But it's more than that. My brother's girlfriend says sometimes, when she's sitting in the living area, she expects a cat to jump into her lap, then remembers that both of my family's cats died before they reached their sixth birthdays.
There is a cat, though, living down with us on Franklin Street. Her name is Sugar. She fell out the front window tragically in 2005. She fell five stories, rolled off the loading dock, and, as she lay awating death on the sidewalk she dragged her broken and bloody body over to where I was crouching in tears and laid her head on my knee. She died two hours later in the 15th st animal hospital.
Four people have since confessed to seeing Sugar around the apartment. The first was a girlfriend I had over for tea one day. She said, quite calmly, "V, do you have a cat?"
"Not anymore," I said, "Why?"
"Because I just saw one jump onto your bed," she said. She was sitting on the couch at the front of the loft, looking back with a clear view of my room and bed past the dinning table. I took her into my room and showed her the portrait of Sugar I had hanging on the wall.
"Is this the cat you saw?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "It was long haired and calico, just like this one."
The second was a student at City College over for a curry. We sat in the middle of the floor, eating, when he said, "V, I think your cat just came to join us," and looked to his left at the desk and the front windows, but I saw nothing.
The third sighting was at a dinner party. All my friends knew I had a "Ghost Cat" by this point. Id seen her recently, and they'd all heard about the two previous sightings by outsiders. The young man who saw her this time, however, had never heard about her before. He looked over at my couch as everyone was settling down for dinner and saw a long haired, calico cat jump onto it. He though he was going crazy but chose to confide in his friend who shouted "You've seen the Ghost Cat!" The young man then identified the cat in the portrait as the one he had seen jumping onto the couch.
I myself saw her just the other night. I was sitting upright in my bed, which is pushed lengthwise up against my window. The room got suddenly colder so I decided to turn off my light and lay down under the covers. I couldn't believe it at first. Surely, I thought, it must be a trick of the light or some film in my eye. So I blinked a couple of times. She was still there. Sitting in the corner of the window, staring out at the night, the moonlight casting a blue, shadowy hue over her face. Her little turned up nose silhouetted under her small, unmoving eyes. Her head was turned out the window and she sat, unmoving until the cold left the room, I resumed the TV show I was watching on my iPhone and she faded off into the background gloom.

28 August 2011

DISCLAIMER

You don't have to believe anything I write in this blog to enjoy it; but you should. I assure you now, dear reader, that everything I write in this blog is TRUE. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, know deep down in your souls that the events of fantastic nature described in the following posts will be 85% GENUINE TRUTH, 10% Organic Speculation, and 5% Imagination.