The Story of My Ghost
Note: This is the story of the ghost in my apartment in Houston, TX. I moved in late spring 2023 to Minneapolis, MN and no longer live in this apartment…but Ghostie Girl, aka GG, will never be forgotten. This post was last updated March 2024.
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 ghostie 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.
Switching Sides
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? After I moved, things were pretty quiet. I felt a presence every so often. My clock 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 was 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 the time being? I was content trusting my intuition…and occasionally considered busting out the Ouija board again and see what might happen...
Goodbye Ghostie Girl
In the late spring of 2023, I left this apartment and moved out of Texas to Minnesota…and I left Ghostie Girl behind in Houston. But not without a final incident.
My final night in the apartment building, I woke up about 1/1:30 a.m. to use the restroom…and noticed a light flashing outside.
As I stood up and walked across the empty rooms to the front living room windows, I was met with the view at the end of this highlight reel: the front light flashing on and off at an intermittent pace. As a general rule, we always left the light on for anyone coming and going after dark.
Never in my nine years in the building had I seen it flash like this.
And then it occurred to me: it was GG saying goodbye, playing one last little trick on me the only way she could.
Before leaving, I wished her well…and told her to have fun with the next resident in the building.
Remember the coffee clock from earlier? The start-and-stop issues persisted after switching sides of the apartment building. But in Minneapolis? Nothing.
More proof, to me, that Ghostie Girl was letting me know she was around.
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.
