Our haunted house 1
Foreboding
During the final months of 1975, my fiancée, Louise, and I were looking for an apartment in which we would spend the first stage of our married life. Well, I say looking, even though I was really only thinking about beginning to look. My duties as an Assistant Professor at Pacific Christian College were all-consuming, as were my graduate studies. I really couldn’t be bothered with something as trivial as where we might live after we were married. As the year began to draw to a close, though, Louise became increasingly concerned that we still didn’t have a place to live, and we were to be married on December 27.
Finally, necessity—and Louise—insisted that we do something about our living arrangements. So, sometime in December of that year, she and I actually visited an apartment complex in the area, the Montclair Apartments on Placentia Avenue in Fullerton. It was a fairly nice complex, HUD subsidized as I recall, and very reasonably priced. It also sported a notoriously long waiting list. As we walked into the manager’s office that day we didn’t have much hope that we’d be able to take an apartment. The best we could hope for was to be placed on the waiting list. To our surprise, the manager pleasantly announced that someone might have just left, and she took us to the apartment in which the tenant had lived.
It seemed OK to me, overlooking the 57 freeway as it did. Louise was a bit uneasy about the place, but we agreed to take it.
For the most part, we were happy in our new home after we were married. It was an upstairs, one-bedroom apartment, with a walk-in closet and a single bath. A small living room greeted visitors as they entered through the front (and only) door. The living room joined the kitchen and a little dining area, the main feature of which was a built-in china hutch.
A few odd things did occur, however. Hearing the story now, my reader undoubtedly will put two and two together immediately. However, Louise and I basically were pleased with our living arrangements, and the odd little events I’m about to mention were spaced out by a few months, so it took quite a while for us to figure out what was going on.
Almost immediately after we moved in and returned from our honeymoon, we met some neighbors, a young couple who lived across the courtyard and downstairs in a separate building. They immediately informed us that they were "charismatic Christians." When we replied that we too were Christians (we left out the "charismatic" part) and where we were living, their eyes grew wide and serious, and they asked if we had "dedicated" our home to the Lord. Well, I replied, I suppose you could say that. We’ve been asking God’s guidance, and we’ve certainly been thanking him for our new home. I guessed we had dedicated it. Why? "Oh, I don’t know. It’s just a good idea." I forgot about the encounter until some time later.
We also met our next door neighbor to the south. (California apartment dwellers at this time and particularly in this complex didn’t normally meet one another. They scurried in and out of their front doors like Punxsutawney Phil avoiding his shadow.) We did meet our neighbor to the south, however. He was relieved, he said, that we were living next door to him. (He probably had not spoken with our neighbor to the north; see footnote.) Why, we asked. "Oh, I don’t know," he said. "It was just weird having people coming and going at all hours. And they seemed to burn a lot of candles at night."
Another odd thing happened, two things actually. One day while I was standing in the doorway to our walk-in closet, a gust of wind raced past my head, ruffling my hair (I had more of it in those days). The closet had no openings, and, since Louise was still in bed, no door in our apartment had just opened or closed. Odd, but not frightening. As I recall this only happened once.
The hutch was another source of mystery. On several occasions, when Louise or I would walk past the built-in hutch, it would crackle. The sound was identical to the sound of a house at night when it cools and contracts. These crackling sounds, which did not sound otherworldly in the least, would occur at odd times, during the middle of the day after the room had reached its normal temperature. Curious, certainly, but also not terrifying.
Then the dreams began. Along about the middle of January or February, Louise began to have terrifying dreams of demons haunting her. I would wake up with her next to me shivering in fear. I never found out exactly what all of the dreams were about, except that they were terrifying and involved demons. These dreams continued at intervals for months, and eventually became intolerable.
Footnote: As an aside, I’ll mention that I accidentally and briefly met our neighbor to the north by being a bad neighbor myself. I had just gotten new stereo speakers and I wanted to hear them. I had them placed on the north wall and cranked up Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. At one point in the symphony, a "storm" unleashes its fury with a mighty diminished seventh chord, played by the entire orchestra. The sound in the apartment was mighty indeed, and apparently also next door, because even over the orchestra I heard a "boom" as someone next door hit the wall with his fist and one of our paintings came flying off the wall and onto the sofa below. When I turned down the stereo and gently knocked on his front door, our neighbor opened it. I said, innocently enough, "Too loud?" His reply was to say nothing—he simply placed both of his hands firmly over his ears and looked wild-eyed at me. I apologized and left. As far as I can remember, we never had another conversation.
This story is continued in the next post
