the most haunted places I have ever been in my life, part 1!

Turns out I am a total baby when the temp reaches triple digits. Even though my only ordeal in life this week is to figure out who's going to the river with me and when we're going, I spend my nights thrashing around hot sheets and having crazy nightmares about an apartment I looked at over five years ago.

This place was upstairs from a vintage store and had some insane energy I can only describe as "mind-bending". Not only was it haunted, but the ghosts had mental illness. The second I walked in my brain felt like a videotape with a magnet stuck to it and I had a hard time looking at things. It was a mostly windowless labyrinthine apartment advertised as a one bedroom, even though it had seemingly endless cave-like black rooms branching off from too-low doorways that the tiny Eastern European woman showing the apartment wryly referred to as "extra rooms". One of them had nothing but grimy walls and a cracked yellow chair (oh yeah, there was half-busted furniture piled everywhere) and I couldn't even cross the doorway without feeling like I was going to throw up. Each room had a differently psychedelic patterned 70's carpet in just plain wrong colors.

I think there was a trapdoor in the bedroom floor but I might have imagined that. It was so dark in there anyway.

The worst was the bathroom, a long narrow yellow room that seemed like it was meant for another purpose, and the far wall had what I recall to be about three extra doors, each featuring at least four locks of the chain/deadbolt variety. I asked the woman where these doors went and she just looked at me, shook her head and said "no," then walked out of the room.

I've had so many dreams about this apartment that I might be remembering it as way freakier than it actually was, but it made me feel like I had been plopped into a Jodorowsky film against my will.

There is no way in hell I'd even spend the night in this place, let alone live there, and I can't imagine what kind of person ended up taking it. Did they say "yessir, this is exactly where I would like to live for three months before I finally lose my shit and slaughter a bunch of people at Ikea then the police bust in and find wall-sized collage diagrams of my broken mind," or "I need someplace to make furniture out dead bodies, this is perfect!"

I've been poring over the classifieds trying to see if this place ever becomes available again so I can go back and video the whole tour. I tried looking up the crime records online for the neighborhood to see if anything really went down there, but that sort of info isn't as available as you'd think. Sex offenders, yeah, mass murder not so much. I had a good talk with my friend Megan about this stuff recently and she said, "seriously, that is one of the few things you still really have to go to the library for."
UGH!! Will I finally have to pay my huge library fine?? That's what REALLY scares me!