bookpublishing

I’d like to take a small break from the book publishing biz–and what better day to do it than on Halloween, when clearly nobody in my office is getting much work done in anticipation of the annual Halloween parade of costumed children?

So here’s a little background to my story. I live in a building that contains three units–a deli/market on the first floor (which my landlord manages), a lawyer’s office on the second floor, and my studio apartment on the top floor. It’s a very old building; I’ve even been told it was once the home of the Guilford Silversmith. The entrance to my apartment is through a side door that has no access to the deli/market, but does lead up to the lawyer’s office. I had gone out after work and was returning home at about 8pm. The place was dark, as it usually is when I come home at that hour. I unlocked the door on the ground level to enter the stairwell up to my apartment when I heard a woman’s voice. It seemed to be coming from the floor above me, and it was loud enough that I thought someone was in the stairwell. This didn’t frighten me but was a little surprising. The lawyers who work on that floor are a married couple and I had heard the female lawyer in the office that morning and seen her car in the parking lot when I went to work. But what was she doing working there so late? I tried to make enough noise to alert the woman that I was coming in when I realized the stairwell light was not on. What was the woman doing on the stairs in the dark? As soon as I switched the light on, the voice stopped. I wasn’t able to make out what the voice had said, but it was casual and conversational, and it sounded like she was either on the phone or speaking to someone else nearby (perhaps someone in the office). As I climbed the stairs, I expected to meet someone on the second floor landing but when I turned the corner, there was no one there. Again, I wasn’t frightened by this–just confused. I stopped when I was next to the lawyer’s office door but I didn’t hear any noise coming from inside. I climbed up to my apartment and flicked off the light. I waited… still no noise. I entered the apartment and thought about what just happened.

If the lawyer was there, where was her car? There were no cars in the lot except for mine.

Then I remembered something that had happened the night I first moved in. My mom had come to help me move and stayed with me overnight. When I awoke in the morning, the first thing she asked me was if I had heard the voices downstairs. I had not heard anything that night and was very surprised that she would bring it up. I had grown up thinking my mother was a real skeptic and didn’t believe in ghosts. When I mentioned my surprise, she insisted she had always believed in ghosts (and UFOs, claiming she had seen one before!). This was such a shock to me, but after weeks passed and I heard no evidence of the voices and had debunked all the other odd sounds I heard at night (including a clucking chicken, which ended up being my refrigerator), I wrote it off as a vivid dream my mother must have had or noises from the road where I lived, which happens to be a busy area with a gas station across the street that is open fairly late.

But the voice I heard last night made me think twice about her experience. At the time, we had considered the possibility that one of the lawyers was having an affair. It would explain why she heard two voices–a man’s and a woman’s–and why she heard them so late at night (around 1am). It would also explain, in my recent case, why there was no car; it makes some sense that they would choose to park across the street at the gas station or at Walgreens next door. I’m certainly not ruling that out. There is a chance that the voice I heard was coming from the street; but because the door is so close to the street, you’d think I would have seen someone approaching before I entered. Futhermore, none of the windows in the stairwell were open, so there wasn’t a good chance that a noise from the street would sound like it was coming from above me and was actually coming from a window.

So I’m not about to say that my apartment is haunted. I’m not even sure I believe that ghosts exist, although this is the closest I’ve come to considering it. Because only 3, maybe 4, people have a key to that stairwell (which was locked when I entered), that narrows down the suspects: either of the two lawyers or my landlord (whose truck was not in the parking lot so I feel safe ruling him out, also because he doesn’t have a feminine voice). It does seem strange though, and I hope to hear these elusive voices again to obtain more clues!