17. [deleted]

I was super excited to get my first apartment. It was in an old antebellum house that was split into four units. Very cool place to live. However, every time I was taking a shower, I would get this overwhelmingly creepy feeling. Like somebody was watching me. Then the dreams started. I kept dreaming about this old lady in a pink nightgown. Sometimes she just looked frail and sweet, and she’d say that I should go with her. She never said where we’d go. Other times, the dreams were terrifying. Her eye sockets were empty. Her hair was greasy, stringy, and falling out. Her mouth was twisted in a tormented scream. And she’d frantically claw the air trying to grab me. The longer I lived there, the more menacing the dreams got. Also, the feeling of unease and the feeling of being watched in the shower increased dramatically. By the time we moved out, I couldn’t close my eyes in the shower. It sounds silly, but I had this overwhelming feeling that I was going to die or lose my soul or something if I had my eyes closed too long. After moving out, I discussed all these weird feelings with a friend of mine who had recently moved into a house across the street from the old apartment. I was trying to laugh it off. He said that another friend of his used to live in the apartment above mine several years ago. An old lady died in what used to be my apartment. Nobody else wanted to live in that unit for more than a couple of months at a time. The building recently burned down. The fire started in my old apartment. They still don’t know what started the fire. Still creeps me out.