The Haunted Apartment

When I was five years old, we lived in a ground floor apartment in Bloomington, Indiana. The apartment building was quite small compared to the conglomo-ville complexes built today. There were about twenty apartments, ten upstairs, and ten downstairs, in a long row. It was a red brick building, on Pine Wood Drive; it's still there today. At least it was in 2003.

Our apartment was two small bedrooms, a tiny bathroom, a living room and a kitchen. The kitchen had accordion-style doors on one wall, that hid the washer and dryer from view. There was a back door in the kitchen, but it led to nowhere since the apartments did not have patios or back yards.

It's the kitchen that was haunted.

My mom is a borderline neat freak. Everything had to be just-so before going to bed, everything straightened and tidied up. This included pushing all the chairs under the kitchen table.

One morning, mom was surprised to find all the chairs pulled out when she went in to make her morning tea. She asked my dad and me if we had been up during the night. Nope, we hadn't.

After that, the chairs were never under the table in the morning. She'd push them in at night, go to bed, and upon waking find them pulled all the way out, as far as they could get before coming up against a wall or the refrigerator.

I remember my parents joking about the haunted kitchen. Of course, when your five years old, discussion of any kind about haunted anything is a little alarming. I remember asking my dad nervously if the kitchen was really haunted.  He laughed and said no, that big trucks driving by on road were probably causing vibrations that pushed the chairs across the floor.

I wondered why the trucks didn't move the chairs when the sun was out.

One night I awoke in the wee smalls of the morning, I don't know why. I've always been a little afraid of the dark, and when I was small, I was super afraid of the dark. I had a night light (it was a large ceramic grinning clown whose eyes, nose and smile lit up, I shit you not) that my grandmother had made for me, and I could see the darkened shapes of my toys and shelves in my room. 

It was quiet...and then I heard it: the unmistakable sound of chairs being slowly dragged across the linoleum floor of the kitchen.

Skrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek...

Sure enough, in the morning, all the chairs were against the walls, the fridge, the cabinets.

I think we only lived there for a year. Nothing else spooky ever happened there, just the creepy kitchen incidents.

Years later, I saw the movie "Poltergeist" in the theater. There's a scene where the mom knows she pushed all the table chairs in, and a few minutes later, they're all out again. She pushes them all back in, exasperated, scolding her kids.  She turns her back for a few seconds, and suddenly all the chairs are balanced atop the table in a pyramid. That never happened to us, thank heavens...but that scene in the movie always gives me the heebie jeebies, and reminds me of our haunted apartment.