AND I wrote about it briefly in a previous article from 2001. To recap: We moved to 455a Sackett Street when I was 14, on April 1, 1998. From the moment we moved in, something was wrong. It was an incredibly gloomy apartment… although we should have been thrilled because it was the first apartment we had ever had that had more than one floor. There were three floors (including the basement) and it was nice to ignore the feeling of someone standing right behind you or watching you wherever you went.
Within two weeks of moving in, I was raped in my bedroom by a man next door. An elderly woman who had lived next door for most of our lives informed us that as far as she could remember, no one had lived in our apartment for more than a year…the people in question within just a few weeks of moving in and continued throughout the day that they moved out.
Even though we all had strange feelings in the apartment, we didn't notice anything strange. The apartment was very uninviting, icy and damp. We tried to decorate it, sultry it up a bit, but nothing helped. The other thing was that no matter what we did, we couldn't install the phone. we called the phone company about 4 times to fix the wires but no matter what they did we would get absolutely nothing, not even any disruption. so we were quite isolated.
The entire time we were there, the strange occurrences continued. The ceiling above my brother's bed collapsed. The only reason he wasn't injured was because he got up to utilize the bathroom. A fire broke out in my room, the fire brigade didn't find out why. If my friend hadn't stopped by and called, I would still be sleeping. Within 5 minutes of answering the doorbell, my neighbor came out screaming that my room was on fire. I ran over and the whole back wall was on fire. I tried to put it out with a blanket and (unbeknownst to me) the door closed behind me. In two minutes it became gloomy and I began to lose consciousness. Luckily, my friend ran and opened the door, carrying me down the stairs, otherwise I would have literally been toasted.
Then a neighbor confided in us that “weird things were always happening” in my building. In the 1930s and 1940s, a little boy died in a fire within a month of the family's move, and in the 1960s, a mob “hit” a couple because of some insidious affair. There were no records because the church records were burned in a fire, so we couldn't get any more information than what people said.
Other things happened, my friend came to my apartment and saw a little boy in burnt rags staring at her in the mirror in my bathroom. She ran out crying and refused to set foot in my door again. Another friend who was staying overnight (note: both friends were not told about our experiences) and woke up in the middle of the night swearing that she saw a woman come into my room through the door.
One day my brother and I heard children crying and laughing downstairs, and when we tried to leave my mother's room, we were locked, although there was no lock, for an hour before it finally opened. My mother was downstairs doing laundry when the basement lights went out and she felt a icy, flaky hand grab her shoulder. Needless to say, Dad did the laundry afterwards… strange smells, sounds, and that feeling that something or someone didn't want you there. That something bad happened to you and that you weren't welcome.
We moved out a year later as soon as we found a fresh apartment. We found out more later. The people who moved in after us tried to renovate the basement and found the body of a little boy in the wall. They left suddenly one night shortly thereafter and never returned. Another couple moved in and left just as inexplicably as the last. And so on, and so on, until today.
We have since met a woman who went to my mother's office (she is a nurse working in the doctor's office) because of a nervous condition. My mother noticed that the address on her insurance card did not match what was listed, and the woman explained that she had only been living at 55a Sackett Street for a few months and had to leave because her mother had died along with various others tragedies that occurred in the first week after the move. Mom asked if the woman had ever noticed anything strange… well, she explained to me exactly what we had gone through, maybe the reason for her condition?
Everything is fine now, we are content to be out of here and moving on. We still see our senior neighbor from time to time, and she always says that the best thing we ever did was move out of that godforsaken house. Needless to say, we agree. Since then they no longer haunt us and life is good. If there is one thing we learned, I would say it was to trust our instincts. If you get a terrible feeling from somewhere, don't put it off as madness… it might just save you a lot of trouble.
