The Story of My Ghost

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I live with a ghost. 👻

Seems like kind of an obvious thing to happen to a girl who writes about Halloween all year long, right? Also seems kind of inevitable when you live in a building that’s been around for more than 100 years.

I’ve talked about my ghost on and off since my haunting experiences happened shortly before starting the blog.

Today, I’m finally sharing the FULL story. (This is definitely not one for you TLDR types.)

So grab a cup of coffee if it’s morning as you’re reading this or your favorite adult beverage if it’s evening, settle in and get ready to meet the ghost who lives in the Spooky Little Apartment building.

 

How I Met My Ghost

It was early 2015, and I lived in apartment #3 in my building. I’d been there almost a full year with zero incidents. Ghosts weren’t on my mind, and Spooky Little Halloween was still a good six months away from being created. My building and apartment were mostly quiet, no strange happenings. I was happy to be settled back in my own space after five years of living with other people.

It started at the same time a string of friends began spending the night occasionally. One would pop into town from Austin for a night or two. Another from Beaumont. A third spent a few nights on my couch while between apartments. It was innocent – and innocuous – enough that I didn’t give most of the early incidents a second thought.

The first was my bedroom door slowly opening one night. Because I live alone, I don’t typically close my bedroom door while sleeping, but with various friends staying with me – and the bathroom door directly across from the bedroom door – I began closing it during my friend’s stays for the sake of everyone’s privacy.

On this particular night, I had done just that.

In a building more than 100 years old and a city like Houston, you’re bound to have foundation problems sooner or later. (The ground shifted enough after Hurricane Harvey that I couldn’t properly lock my front door for two months.)

So when my door slowly swung open shortly after closing it to give my house guest privacy, I chalked it up to those factors. Rather than closing the door so it was barely cracked the second time, I partially latched the knob to keep gravity from swinging the door open again.

Instead, as soon as I sat back down on the bed, I watched as the door slowly opened a second time with enough force to indicate someone was pushing it from the outside.

But no one was there.

It was a little unnerving, and I briefly wondered…is there something in here with me? But I shrugged it off as I fully closed the door and laid down to go to sleep.

 

Early Hauntings

Shortly after the door incident, things began happening in my bathroom. I have two floating shelves on my wall to break up the blandness. On one is a yarn-covered letter M a friend made for me which fits in with my teal and goldenrod bathroom decor perfectly.

About once a month, I do a deep clean of my apartment, meaning I do all the little extra things I don’t do on a weekly basis. Living in an older building means I deal with a lot of dust, and dusting those bathroom shelves is a chore on the deep clean list.

On my cleaning Saturday, I picked up the M to dust under it and had a little trouble getting the letter set back at the right angle. Later in the afternoon, I walked back into the bathroom to discover the M had fallen off the shelf and onto the honeycomb-tiled floor.

Guess I hadn’t gotten it right. I shrugged, picked it up and placed it back on the shelf.

Less than 48 hours later – Monday evening around 8 p.m. – I was sitting at my desk in the living room when all of a sudden I heard a thump. I jumped slightly, looked down the hallway and there, lying in the middle of it, was the M. It hadn’t slid off the shelf and fallen onto the floor this time. It looked like it had been deliberately knocked off the shelf and thrown 5-6 feet from the wall. Baffled, I got up slowly, picked up the letter and once again placed it on the shelf.

Before I was back to my desk, it had fallen again. It was clear this was way more than my inability to properly balance and place decor – something, or rather someone was messing with me.

Remembering the door incident from a month earlier, I began to wonder if that passing thought about a ghost might be more than a passing thought.

 

Intuition Takes Over

Over the next two years, things like this would happen around the apartment. A cooler bag that was secured on a shelf was knocked over in the kitchen. A plant on a windowsill in a pot entirely too heavy to be moved by wind alone was knocked over, dirt spilling all over the floor. Items on the top shelf in my closet would shift and fall at the most random times. And I always, always felt like someone was watching me when I had my back to the kitchen as I was filling a cup with ice at the freezer, esp. in the middle of the night.

These occurrences began to seem anything but random.

After the bathroom incident, my intuition began to kick in. Each time something happened, I tried to take notice of what time of day it was, whether I heard any other noises and what was happening.

Timing varied, incidents were fairly spaced out and I rarely heard other noises…but it was always items being knocked over. It seemed like I had a playful ghost visiting my apartment. Realizing this led me to the conclusion it was likely a child, and my gut told me it was a girl somewhere between the ages of 8 – 12. I also surmised that my apartment wasn’t her home – it seemed like she belonged to the apartment on the other side of the building from me, and she was just visiting.

Somehow landing on those details made each occurrence seem less threatening. My ghosty girl was just stopping by to say hello, and let me know she was hanging around. She never hung around for more than 3-4 days at a time.

 

The Ghost Gets Bold

Then everything changed. One evening last June I has my iPad lying on my bed charging when it suddenly turned on and this happened:

 

 

That was a little unnerving, but then THIS happened immediately after:

 

 

I finally managed to regain control of the iPad, and this hasn’t happened to me since. I wasn’t scared, but witnessing this was definitely unsettling. I wondered if my ghost was trying to communicate something important to me. Maybe she needed my help – but was I willing to delve into that world?

I believe in ghosts, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to encourage a dialogue and welcome that into my life.

The summer of 2018 changed things. My ghost got bolder. In addition to the iPad incident, she started messing with the coffee clock in my kitchen. You can see the full saga over in my Instagram story highlights, but the short version is…I would go to bed with the clock properly working and by morning it would have stopped. I wouldn’t touch it but by the time I got home from work that evening…the clock would be running again.

😳😳😳

I also had a small incident in the kitchen one night last fall where I was using my mom’s 1960s Ouija board for a photo prop for this post…and the planchette moved ever so slightly on its own without me touching it. That was enough for me – I packed the board back up and haven’t touched the board since.

 

The Move

I wasn’t actively looking to move when my neighbor in apartment #4 – the home of my ghost – announced she was leaving. I hate moving but had been casually looking at what was available in my area because I wanted just a little more space – a writing space.

It felt like happenstance, and 12 hours later I was asking my landlord to consider letting me move to the other side of the building. It didn’t occur to me until nearly a month later, days away from the actual move, that I was about to gain a spooky roommate.

The funny thing? Since I moved, things have been pretty quiet. I feel a presence every so often. My clock has still started and stopped on its own a few times, and one night just a few weeks after moving in I was sitting on my bed and the entire thing suddenly shook like someone had walked into the side of it.

But that’s been it.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the ghost didn’t live in #4 – maybe it lived in #3. And, since most of the incidents seemed to take place in the kitchen, maybe that’s where she died.

 

House History

But how to figure that out? I started by digging into the background of my neighborhood, Montrose. It is the artsy, eclectic epicenter of Houston and is even cited as the birthplace of counterculture in Texas.

Well, depending on who you ask, anyway. These days local businesses keep giving way to high-rise apartment buildings which led Texas Monthly to declare that Montrose is dead back in 2017. (Fantastic read, by the way.)

Fair enough.

While Montrose truly became the coolest neighborhood in Houston in the late 60s and early 70s, its beginnings stretch back to the early 20th century when J.W. Link commissioned a mansion to be built on Montrose Blvd. in 1912 – one that still stands and I currently live less than half a mile away from.

Montrose grew and essentially became one of the first suburbs of Houston. But as the city grew, families moved further and further out (I grew up in Copperfield, a suburb in northwest Houston along the 290-corridor, a good 24 miles from the Spooky Little Apartment), and the residents of Montrose changed. You can read more about it over here.

That short history lesson is to say…Montrose, and my building, have seen a LOT of changes over the past 100+ years.

According to property records, my own building was completed in 1910 and many similar multi-family homes still stand in the Montrose area to this day. (Most of my immediate neighborhood has given way to million-dollar builds or single-family homes from the 40s and 50s.) I know from my landlord that the building was utilized as office space back in the 60s when his father owned it.

But prior to that? I haven’t been able to dig up much. I used a few tips in this Architectural Digest article, and the website diedinhouse.com sparked my interest. But I decided to keep researching to see if I might be able to find that information for free.

Nada. If a death occurred in the house, I’d likely have to track it down on microfiche at a local library to find out my ghost’s origin story.

For now? I’m content trusting my intuition and maybe, if I’m brave, I’ll bust out the Ouija board again and see what happens…

 

 

Have you ever lived with a ghost?

I’d love to hear about your experiences or how you discovered the history of your home! Share it in the comments, and let me know what you think about my ghost too.

 

Happy haunting,

 

 

Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

Miranda is the Houston-based writer, blogger, and Halloween lover behind Spooky Little Halloween, the blog celebrating October 31st all year long. Her favorite Halloween things include pumpkin guts, chocolate bars in her trick-or-treat pail, real haunted houses (including the one she lives in!), and historic cemeteries.

29 Comments

  1. Reply

    Candace

    March 26, 2019

    Great ghost encounter! My hub’s family sees ghosts. I only see things out of the corner of my eye. I’m grateful for that!
    My oldest brother died Dec. 14th when I was 16. He was 23. On the anniversary of his death, when I was 23, He walked through our house. We had friends over for dinner and they saw him, too. I have to figure he was just checking up on us.
    My husband often feels our dogs sitting next to him as they did in life. I’ve actually heard their collars jingle!

    • Reply

      Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

      March 26, 2019

      I’m so sorry to hear about your brother, Candace – but wow! That is incredible so many of you saw him stop by. I’m sure it was unsettling but also comforting to know someone you loved is still there in some way. <3

  2. Reply

    LeeAnn

    March 26, 2019

    Thanks for sharing your ghost story! Good thing you put the ouija away! I don’t have any ghosts in our house, but over the years my mom, dad, and best friend who died in 2013 will sometimes make themselves known. Once I was at a friend’s house and he had a ghost that would walk up and down the stairs. I was sitting in the family room next to the stairway and heard the walking—no one was there! Also after my mom passed away my dad saw her walk down our stairs. I heard footsteps going down the stairs. He thought he saw me, I thought I heard him, but when I got up to check—we both saw each other and realized, it wasn’t each other, but my mom. She had a blanket wrapped over her shoulders.

    • Reply

      Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

      March 26, 2019

      Thanks for sharing, LeeAnn. I love to story about you and your dad. It’s kind of nice to know our loved ones are still around, keeping watch over us. <3

  3. Reply

    Lellani

    March 27, 2019

    I believe we had a visitor several times in a house we rented back in 2014-2016. I saw a young man standing in the hall while I was cleaning the kitchen/dining room one late night. I called out to my son because at a glance he looked like a teen and my son at the time was 14. My son was sound asleep! My husband and I spoke to the neighbors and told them what we’ve seen and they said a few doors down from us was an 18 year old who committed suicide because his girlfriend broke up with him. Guess where she lived, in the house we were renting! There were several times my daughter would see floating white lights and she swears she saw them. I never told the kids about what we found out so they wouldn’t freak out. When we lived there I had sleep paralysis several times a month! My husband would hear me trying to yell out for him then he’d shake me so hard that I’d finally get up. It was horrible! I could feel the person sit at the foot of my bed and I could hear everything that was going on. I felt my blanket being tugged and one night the light to my closet was on. We NEVER left any lights on.

  4. Reply

    Arachne

    March 27, 2019

    Wow, thank you so much for sharing that! Do you miss your little ghost, after living with her for so long?

    Things like this really make a person think.

    I used to be a big believer, but had so many experiences that I decided it was too much, so as an experiment I quit believing, and they mostly went away, so I thought I had an overactive imagination maybe. I’ve had weird experiences more rarely since then, but I always do my darnedest to come up with some rational explanation… although occasionally the best explanation I can come up with is “I guess I imagined that.”

    There was at least one time a few months ago when I couldn’t even claim I imagined it… since I was in the room with two other people. The three of us were sitting in the “front room,” and there was a tremendous BANG on our metal front door. All three of us jumped. The window curtains were wide open so we could see that nobody and nothing was on the porch. I looked down the hall and into the room on the other side of the wall to see if something had fallen down (maybe the noise just traveled?), but everything looked normal.

    • Reply

      Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

      March 27, 2019

      I think we definitely have a tendency to want an explanation as human beings. As a writer, I definitely have an overactive imagination…and maybe that’s all this collection of occurrences is – my imagination.

      I don’t mind when she visits, but I also don’t miss her when she’s gone. I’m content co-existing as we need to. :)

  5. Reply

    Tracey

    March 27, 2019

    Very creepy! I’m a scaredy-cat so I don’t really want to believe in ghosts – but there are too many stories out there to deny! My husband told me that at his great grandmother’s old house every night a little girl (age 3 or so) would WALK OUT of the fireplace (fire or not) and go stand behind the door. Apparently a small girl fell into that same fireplace back in the 50s…and her coming out of the fireplace at night had been an every night occurrence since. My husbands grandparents had seen it so often that after a while they didn’t even give it a second thought 😂 but it gives me chills to think about!!! I’m not sure who lives in that house now but I wonder if it still happens every night, and if the owners wave it off and go about their business!

    • Reply

      Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

      March 27, 2019

      Okay, now THAT’s disconcerting! I don’t mind the knocked over items or clock stopping and starting…but seeing a little girl walk out of a fireplace is something else altogether. How creepy!

  6. Reply

    Laura

    March 27, 2019

    I’m so glad you’ve shared this!
    I have so many stories I could tell about experiences I’ve had since I was a kid.

    I’ve lived in my current house for over 10 years now, and I know I have some ghostly visitors. I do believe they’re kids. I live on the 2nd story of my home as my parents aren’t able to walk upstairs, and the first Christmas spent here, I got a tiny tree for a table in my upstairs living room. Every night I’d plug it in and before leaving for work I’d unplug it. One day I came home to find it plugged in. I shrugged it off as me forgetting to unplug it. But after a few days of it happening, I knew I wasn’t forgetting. I even took pics after I unplugged it so I know I did. I’ve also heard voices, seen shadows, seen things move or be thrown. I could honestly go on all day about my experiences!

    • Reply

      Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

      March 29, 2019

      That’s how the incidents with my clock have gone! How crazy. I’m glad I’m not the only one who has experienced something like that.

  7. Reply

    Nicole

    March 28, 2019

    Very interesting story! Now I’m curious as to what’s going on!

    I had a few encounters when I lived with a friend. There were 3 of us in the house at the time and no one called me Nicole. She called me Nic and he called me Nikki.
    I woke up one night to a loud crashing sound and someone yelling “Nicole!” right over me.
    There was also a night she had gone out. We kept my dog and a dog we were watching in a guest room and I could hear them start to move around. I also heard a girls laugh so I thought she was home.
    When I opened my door, the whole house was still dark. I walked to her room and opened the garage and her car wasn’t even there. I then text her JUST to make sure and she wasn’t home yet.
    We had a friend stay the night once and she slept on the couch and swears she heard someone say “Hey.”
    Since I’ve left the house, I haven’t had any other issues.
    I used the website deathinhouse to see if anyone had died there, but didn’t find anything.
    We named the ghosts Charlie and Lucy to make it less creepy for us.

    • Reply

      Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

      March 29, 2019

      I love that you named them! That first incident would have scared the crap out of me.

      I’m sure there will be more to this story soon. :)

  8. Reply

    Lauren

    April 8, 2019

    Very interesting read! I’ve always believed in ghosts too!

  9. Reply

    Chelsea

    May 10, 2019

    Wow! What an amazing span of occurrences! I remember the iPad incident! That was so freaky. I even showed it to my sister who works for Apple and she was like…yeah, that’s haunted.

    I’m not sure if I’ve ever lived with a ghost, but I’m pretty convinced our house in Fremont had a demon. It could have been haunted prior to that too, I don’t know. All the women in the household always had weird feelings in that house from very early on after we moved in. Footsteps up and down the stairs or in the corner upstairs bedroom when you were the only person home, lights flickering on when the light switch was off, intense banging at random intervals, even though we couldn’t figure out from where they were coming. The freakiest part was that these things usually happened in the afternoon.

    My sister two years younger than me has loved Supernatural from day one. She is also the gore queen in our house, obsessed with murder cases and serial killers and the like. One night she thought it’d be fun to do a demon summoning ritual. I don’t really know what happened that night, but we heard her scream and then was crying hysterically when she ran from her room. My room was downstairs and directly under her’s. Shortly after this, I started experiencing very severe sleep paralysis (at least that’s what my dad said it was because apparently he has a history of it and never shared until we were talking about these experiences at dinner one night) which I’d never experienced before. A few years later, my sister and switched rooms and I was upstairs and it got worse. There’s other things, especially regarding my sister, but I don’t think I should share.

    Either way, I love that your ghost overall seems to be harmless (unless your a potted plant). Please keep us up to date with all your future encounters too!

  10. Reply

    Diane

    September 20, 2020

    Hi Miranda, very interesting ghost story not to sure how I would feel about sharing my space with a ghost yikes! Well I have many ghost stories so here is one. My sister and I we were visiting my grandma at the hospital we were to meet up with other family members so we sat in a waiting area to visit our grandma my sister tells me there is a lady that likes your hair and she wants to touch it I replied what lady who? She said the ghost lady and I said WHAT???? Your kidding me right I did not believe in ghost or any supernatural thing total non believer my sister said ok! She is going to stroke the side of your hair I said alright! Whatever well few minutes later I felt a hand stroking the side of my hair it was so shocking for me I couldn’t believe it but it happened and from then on I became a true believer with abilities to see ghost and hear them. Hope you enjoy my spooky little tale.

  11. Reply

    SarahRoze

    August 22, 2021

    I thought I would add my Ghost Story .. About 9 yrs ago, My house was about 5 years old when this happened, not old at all, but one night when I couldn’t get comfortable temp wise, I got up for what must have been the 3rd time to go in my Dining Room where the thermostat is.

    The third time I got up was about 3 to 4 am., and as I walked into the room to touch the thermostat just to my right, I saw a flash, almost like a camera flash.

    When this happened, I saw what looked like a Colonial dressed girl of no more than 11 to 12 yrs old. She had the bonnet, large collar and it was a very simple style. The image did not go all the way to the floor.

    I wasn’t afraid, because I believe I was in part disbelief and part shock. I went back to bed wide awake, and wanting to tell my husband what I saw. I waited till the next day, because I needed to play it out in my own head first.

    To this day, I can still remember the image. After that, I was looking at the App store one day on my Reader, and saw an App called Ghost Radar. As a joke, I told my husband that I needed to download it and see if it says anything in our DR.

    Well, Its been at least 9 yrs of me using the App occassionally.. I once had it on my phone when I went to the cemetery to visit my Fathers grave. I stood by the grave and said “I love you Daddy”.. I heard the phone say something as I had actually forgotten I had turned the App on, when I looked down at my phone.. The words on the GR was “Love”..

    That was one of several words it spoke on my phone in that cemetery, over a years time, and after that day, I knew for a fact that I no longer needed it.. I no longer had to wonder whether I was alone there that day..

    It had said other things to me, such as my name .. I once asked it how long I was married, it said the number.. but after hearing and seeing the word “love”, I decided to not use it as much if at all..

    I’ve had some other things happen in my house, had covers pulled, blowing in my face, and about a month ago, I told my husband that I didn’t want to wake up at 2 am to turn off the TV, and asked him to, but he kept watching till he fell asleep.

    I also dozed off, but had 3 taps on my big toe, and that woke me to see that it was time for me to turn off the TV.. 3 distinct taps..

    I am not someone that would live in a house where it was an uneasy prescence, as that happened once when I was only about 19 and a new Mom, many years ago.. But this house doesn’t make me feel that way.. I have had some pretty unexplainable things happen in my life, my instincts are sometimes way too alert and sensitive to things around me.. as I believe the older we get, the more of an Empath we become if we are prone to that in younger years.. sorry this is so long, but I had to add my experience. I hope my only time ever seeing that camera flash. I live within 10 min of Colonial Williamsburg, and a lot of long ago history, so maybe that explains the outfit.. Sarah

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