Ghost Story

When I was a freshman in college, I lived in a very old dorm building on campus. Everyone said it was haunted, but the rooms that were said to be haunted were the attic on the fourth floor and the basement rooms. Since I was inhabiting a room on the third floor, I felt secure and didn't worry too much about any spooky occurences. 

That was the wrong move. 

That first semester, I had a roommate named Hannah. We got along really well and enjoyed each other's company, but her parents lived in town and she visited them a lot, so there were many nights where I was alone in our room. It was a well-populated dorm though, with a very active social scene always happening in the lobby of the building, so I never felt lonely.

Not too long after I'd settled into life in the dorms, strange things started happening to me in my room. I'd always believed in ghosts, but I'd never personally experienced anything significant, so I was caught very much off guard when I started hearing loud bumps on the walls in the middle of the night. They would often come from the wall above my bed, but sometimes also from the outer wall which faced the courtyard outside, and sometimes from inside one of the closets. I easily brushed these occurrences off as neighbors being obnoxious or clumsy and moved on. I conferred with Hannah who said she'd heard them too, but at that point it was just a fun little weirdness we laughed at as if it were an inside joke.

Then things started happening that I could not explain away.

One night I was studying on my bed, and in an area of space in the corner of my room, a corner of walls which were not shared with any neighbors, I heard faint, feminine whispers. It sounded as if someone were talking to themselves, though I couldn't hear what was being said. I sat bolt upright in my bed and stared into the area from which the sound emanated, unable to move and unwilling on a subconscious level to do anything that might attract attention to myself. 

While that incident certainly scared me, I didn't feel like I was in danger. The voice I heard gave me no feelings of malicious intent or anger. But soon after that first incident, other more terrifying things began to happen that gave me the intuitive impression that I was not safe.

My iPod charging station/boombox began to periodically turn itself on at full blast with no warning, causing me to jump out of my skin with terror. I'd rush to turn it off and then find some excuse to leave and not come back to my room until I absolutely had to. 

One day while I was at my desk, I heard a loud bang and the noise of heavy objects clattering. I assumed it was someone barrelling down the hallway as they sometimes did, but then I noticed my closet door swing open and all of my shampoo, soap, and conditioner come rolling across the floor. Something had violently swept my shower caddy off the deep shelf in the otherwise empty closet.

Hannah had moved out after the first semester to live with her parents, and for whatever reason I was never matched with another roommate, so that entire Spring semester I was alone in the room. Lots of disturbing, unexplainable things continued to happen with such frequency that I bought a cheap tv and sometimes kept it on at all hours just to keep me company and hopefully drown out any frightening noises or disembodied voices. 

The final and most terrifying thing that happened to me in that room occurred very late at night as I was fast asleep. I dreamed that I was hearing a low, sly voice in my ear that made my skin crawl. It kept asking me who I was and why I was there. I started to swim back up from the depths of the dream and began to mentally answer the voice when I suddenly popped fully awake. All of my hairs stood on end as I realized that although I was fully awake, alert, and capable of moving and speaking, I was still hearing the voice. I remember vividly covering as much of my face as I could with my blanket without hiding my eyes, praying the only prayer I knew (my family was not religious) over an over again, and watching my alarm clock as each excruciating minute passed until the sun came up. 

When the semester ended and I was able to move out, I was relieved. I continued to go to college, attending summer and fall classes, making new friends, joining groups, etc. 

About a year later, I was talking to some new friends I'd met that semester and began to tell them about my experiences in the dorm room the previous year. When I finished my story, one of my friends asked me, "was this room C309?," and I answered him that yes it was, and asked him how he knew, since I hadn't mentioned it. This friend is an atheist and has no belief in the paranormal whatsoever, but his response floored me. 

He said he had had a roommate who had previously lived in the same room and had had similar terrifying experiences, including seeing footsteps/puddles of water coming out of the closet, having their blinds come shooting up, and hearing loud music blast out randomly in the wee hours. He said at the end of his friend's stay in the dorm, as he was moving out, he talked to the RA and asked the RA about the neighbors next door whose music had always kept him up, though he'd never seen them face to face. The RA informed him that no one lived in the dorm next to his, so no one could have been playing music. The RA told him that the room he (and later, I) stayed in used to not be assigned to people because there had been so many complaints about distrubing things happening.

I was stunned. After all this time had passed, a person I didn't even know at the time, who was not a believer and had no personal stake in my experiences, confirmed that some of the exact same details of what I had gone through had happened to someone else. 

I have no mental illnesses. Nothing disturbing (other than the aformentioned) or traumatic had happened to me up to that point. I'm not paranoid, and I don't jump to the supernatural as an explanation for all strange experiences I have. I'd never had any paranormal experiences before my time in the dorm, and I've only had a smattering of other ghostly encounters since then. I won't tell you to believe that what I've said is true, nor will I try to define it beyond what I heard, saw, felt, and inuited. I can't prove anything, but I have never been the same since. All I can say is that when someone tells me that they've been haunted, I believe them because I have, too.