My best friend and I moved out of the house we are staying in and into a shitty little apartment in downtown Long Beach in 2011. We stayed there from February to May before breaking our lease and moving out because we were fucking terrified. I posted about it on /r/nosleep years ago and its too late to type it all out and I hate telling the story anyway so i'd rather just copy and paste part of that post:
Mid January 2011, my best friend Ryan (fraternity pledge brother) and I looked to move out of the fraternity house. We were on winter break at seperate ends of the state but found an apartment for rent in our price range online..., $1200 for a two bedroom in downtown Long Beach so we followed up and made it happen. Shitty little place on the corner of 2nd and Orange...not a great little neighborhood.
A few weeks after we moved in, I came home from my crappy job at the CSULB Bookstore to find my roommate locked out on our second story balcony. He knocks on the glass door and I let him in. I think it's hilarious and ask him how long he was locked out for. Apparently he was out there for 6 or so hours without his phone, which I thought was hilarious. His right arm was in a splint from shoulder surgery so he couldn't really climb down or do anything besides smoke a whole pack of cigarettes and piss off the balcony. He told me that he swore the door was unlocked when he went our for a cigarette and that he heard it latch on him a few seconds after he closed it. It was a heavy glass sliding door, the kind that you have to push up the handle with a couple of pounds of force to latch. We tried to replicate it to see if it was just an accident, or something the door would just do if slammed too hard or something but it would just bounce open if you tried to close or slam it with the lock already engaged. We were both pretty creeped about it but kinda just filed under shit happens.
A few night later I wake up in my bed feeling this indescribable sense of negativity .. I started hearing some weird shit, foot steps on my carpet, thoughts that didnt seem like they weren't mine... pretty unpleasant stuff. I started hearing my closed door shake back and forth in the frame pretty violent so I sat up and closed my window. The shaking It continued... frantically grab my phone from the window seal and texted my buddy in the other room about being scared shit-less. Text message conversation HERE
A few weeks later, I'm at work and get ANOTHER text from Ryan saying that he's locked out So I leave work early to get home and let him in. I got to the glass balcony door in his room and opened it for him.. he was pretty freaked out this time. He told me that he had left the door cracked open a few inches and that it slammed shut on it's own and latched right after. We were both pretty fucking disturbed at this point and didn't really know what to do besides keep going to class and try not to spend much time at home.
A days later, on March 15, 2011 I went home after my classes and discovered Ryan's room completely torn apart. It looked like the place had been ransacked. There were clothes everywhere, items knocked over...His heavy wooden desk had been completely knocked over and the pencil tray had been pulled all the way out and dumped. It looked like a fuckin tornado came through. I look through the glass door and see Ryan locked out on the balcony, and he starts banging on the glass... "Chris let me in man....hurry up let me the fuck in....." I open the door for him, he's crying and the first thing he says to me is "bro all of this shit happened while I was out there....I FUCKING WATCHED as my room completely tore itself apart for half an hour."
He swears that he went out for a smoke, and that this time he left the door half way open....he hears the door begin sliding shut on its own...so he grabs it as quick as he can and catches it before it closes.. the force closing the door was too strong and actually pulled him in his shitty little balcony office chair he would sit in. Ryan swears that as he smoked his way through a full pack of cigarettes, he watched as his room was ransacked by something he couldn't see...like whatever it was took its time as it went through his closet, his drawers, his desk...his bed pretty much everything he had ended up fucked up on the floor.
I was absolutely terrified..freaked thee fuck out. I wanted to leave all my stuff in my room, run out of that place and never go back. We were both scared, but he was pissed off too. He wanted to stay and put his room back together before bailing... I couldn't hang. I ended up driving a few miles up the road to the fraternity house, where I decided I would be staying for the next week or so...Here's our text conversation from that day.
The weeks and months that followed were among the worst of my life. Any peace of mind that I had in my own bedroom was gone. I felt uncomfortable all the time...scared all the time. When I wanted to fall asleep, strange things would start happening. My closed door would start shaking back and forth, and occasionally I would hear a violent bang on the door. It got to the point where I would put my shoes up against the door to stop it from banging back and forth...then one morning I woke up and found that one of those shoes had been moved to the other side of the room, so that was cool.
Ryan would go home to be with his family and girlfriend in Carlsbad on the weekends, meaning that I was often there alone. I remember hearing footsteps on my carpet next to me one night right after feeling this overwhelming negative energy. My sleeping habits deteriorated and my grades began to drop like stones. We didn't know how to deal with it so we started trying to ignore it. I remember opening the bible my mom gave me as a kid, for the first time in years and leaving it opened on the ground next to my bed... woke up and found it had slid completely under the bed one morning.
One of the worst things we started hearing were the growling sounds..usually around 2 or 3 am when I was trying to sleep... very low pitched, and extremely extremely creepy. It gave me goosebumps every time.
I'm having trouble piecing the rest of the events in order so I will just list some of the creepy shit that happened:
During the day in mid April, Ryans girlfriend came over for the Long Beach Grand Prix....it was about 11am and the power went out in both of our bed rooms but not the rest of the apartment... circuits, surge, paranormal... doesn't matter. Strange.
We ended up just trying to kill some time by playing uno on the carpet in the main room. While playing, we all 3 heard the sound of something sliding across our tile counter top in the kitchen ... I go to investigate and find that it was their bottle of cheap champagne that had slid from one end of the counter to the other.
One of the last weeks I was there...probably right before finals I was home alone again and in my room trying to study for a political science test... It's like 2 in the morning and I'm sitting at my desk when I hear something bang three times on my bedroom door. I open it and nothings there... apartment door is still closed and locked... I snapped. I grabbed my duffle and started throwing whatever I thought I would need to survive away from there for a few days...Clothes, computer, wallet... I look across the room at my macbook charge cord and notice see it move back and forth, up and down on its own... like a water hose or something. I run out of the room and into the kitchen...open the cupboard and discovered that my unopened box of cereal that I bought a day before had been torn open... the bag had been pulled out of the front of the box in what looked like three claw marks. I grabbed a couple of cans of soup and took off for the fraternity house.. don't remember if I even locked the place.
We ended up both moving home for the summer at the end of may that year... Really tough summer. A few days after moving out of there, one of our best friends and fraternity brothers passed from meningitis... So that did not make it any easier to transition to a safer sort of environment, being at home with family.
Feel free to ask questions, I'll try and remember what else I can.
