A reader shared this creepy story of strange events in his Anchorage apartment. The tale originally appeared on an Alaskan website, but perhaps you’ll enjoy it as well…

“I wrote this after I first moved into my apartment in Anchorage, AK (where I still currently live with my lady fair and our two sons, ages 2 and 5) and updated it after. Since we’ve lived in this apartment, two 15-year-old girls were killed by a drunk driver less than a block away, a teenaged Asian girl died down our hall and her mother was arrested (though the father seems very pleasant and raises the younger siblings), and two elder residents on our floor have also died, each in separate apartments, one two doors down. It took them weeks to find out that the woman died in the apartment two doors over.

Anyway, all of this weirdness has started to make sense, and my family has grown accustomed to living in the apartment for now. Strange things are happening all the time, but they’ve lost a lot of the weighted ominousness that I describe.

May 2012

The Closet Incident
“I’d always thought of a haunted place as being away from other people, away from noise and lights, but this building is starting to change my mind. The other night (5-13-2012) it was late and my girlfriend was putting the kids to bed with our pet bunny, our only pet, in the bedroom.

She had just finished showing my older brother out and had locked the door behind him. The door was definitely locked before and after this and my girlfriend, being definitely adverse to cold, had also made sure that all of our windows were closed and locked (also, we’re on an upper floor).

I was in the bathroom showering when I heard the sliding closet door across the wall from me open quickly and casually and the contents of the closet shifting around. I thought nothing of it, but as soon as I came out of the bathroom I ran into my girlfriend coming out of the bedroom across the hall.

We both gave each other a confused look and she asked ‘how long have you been in there?’ I said I’d been in there a few minutes, and she said that she had been reading the kids a bedtime story for the last ten minutes or so but thought I was getting in the closet. So neither of us opened the closet…?

The Shadow Man
Tonight (05-15-2012) around the same time (10 p.m.), as we were deciding which of us was going to run across the street to Fred Meyer to grab tonight’s Redbox movie, my girlfriend saw a shadow the size of a man move across our small hallway in broad daylight (remember we’re in Alaska) from my children’s bedroom to our bedroom at the speed of a brisk walk. She screamed and freaked out pretty good.
Neither of these events was in any way aggressive or even directed at us; it’s more as if an old tenant had forgotten something in our apartment and was looking for it. And through the process of writing this, I actually remember another event.

Sound in the Night
In April, maybe around the 23rd, we both heard from our bedroom at the back of the hall the sound of a door opening, maybe the first door down the hallway (this hallway is only about 15 feet long). This was in the middle of the night, but not long after we had gone to sleep, maybe around 1 a.m., and we were both fast asleep but the sound was definite enough to awaken both of us. I immediately grabbed my pistol and began to check the apartment, but nothing was moved, no lights were on, and the front door was still locked. Also, the suspect door was closed like we’d left it, and on inspection the windows were closed and nothing had been moved.

It’s taken me around 15 minutes to write this which is to say it’s been about 40 minutes since my girlfriend saw the shadow cross the hall. Hopefully, I’ll never have to update this thread, but if anything else happens I’ll be posting it here.

January 2013

Fear and Doubts
Nine months have passed since the original submission in May of 2012. Several more eerie things have happened in this apartment since then. I haven’t personally seen any of the apparitions that my family claims to have seen, but if I’m honest with myself, I have felt and seen and heard things that I can’t seem to explain away.

I’m not one to believe in any of this corny stuff. Honestly, if you saw me in person or came over and asked, I’d deny it up and down. In fact, it is against my entire belief of human existence to believe anything about ghosts or unseen spirits or whatever. But my family continues to feel and see and hear the same things that I do, things that I deny to them.

The logical me says that these things are explainable, and that the perception of these experiences is mostly due to the perpetuation of the stuff itself. The more we hear, the more we’re listening, and the more we see, the more we look. As I type this alone, I’m hearing a strange, rhythmic metallic tapping behind me. Logical me says it’s the radiator, calm down, but paranoid-Polly-pattern-finder here thinks radiators don’t make rhythm, that they expand quickly as the water flows through them and then stop clicking as the metal heats up to the proper temperature. And yet away it clicks, pausing and skipping a beat here or there, and then picking right back up. It makes me feel crazy. In fact, a lot of this stuff does.

The White Man
I had a conversation with my son tonight about the white thing that came into his room recently. I told him to chill, that it was just street lights and headlights shining in through the holes in his window shade. He started to get frustrated, but calmly explained to me how it wasn’t car lights and it wasn’t his imagination. He said it was a white looking person standing in his room, ignoring him and looking around at everything, and how he wasn’t as afraid as he thought he should be and instead kept hearing (I kid you not, at four years old my son just said this to me) that he should just stay a little kid and be a ghost like the man forever and live with him.

Sounds like some ridiculous The Shining kind of stuff, right? I would swear to a judge he said that not 15 minutes ago to me as I was laying him down. He said this a week ago to my girlfriend, and I don’t know what your experience is with four-year-olds, but they don’t remember specific freaky stuff like that to say, especially since he’s never seen a ghost movie or heard ghost stories. All he knows about ghosts is Halloween, sheets over the head, classic ghost stuff. So where the hell did he pull that out? And it wasn’t so much that he was telling me this stuff, it was the calm and rational way he was explaining it to me, and like, asking advice about it, like ‘Hey check this out, isn’t this weird? Did this ever happen to you? What should I do?’ I feel like if that happened to me I would freak the hell out, and I guess he did. He came out of his room crying and screaming for his mom when it first happened. Bu when he looked back on it, it was just something that happened to him, he was very matter-of-fact.

Terror in the Night
And that’s not the only thing. My friends say that when they stay the night over here they can hear doors slamming and loud aggressive footsteps around the house. I’ve seen shadows move, darken like someone staying out of the light, but not so clearly opaque and distinct that I think it’s a burglar and try to bust out. And not out of the corner of my vision, just right in front of me or down the hall, but fleeting. And huge, overwhelming feelings of dread and defensive anger in the middle of the night, palpable, heavy so that you can feel the weight of the room. Has anyone ever seen and heard and felt stuff like this? I don’t want cutesy little stories about old miners and dignified lady ghosts. I want to know what’s really going on here.

Living with Ghosts
I did find out what might be the cause of it, but now having known the sort of people that lived and died here, if this stuff is connected at all, it isn’t scary anymore. My son doesn’t talk about the thing that wanted to keep him anymore, but I do hear him and his brother talking to themselves in separate rooms sometimes. I don’t know, I guess you get used to anything if you’re around it a lot. And we’re all happy and well-adjusted.

Every so often, though, I do feel that tight, heavy feeling, like a cold sweat and everything in the room is super quiet. I’m wide awake and I can feel the heat and heavy air of the room, and I feel panicked. I can move around, but I don’t want to. I just watch to catch my closet door or hall door move. I swear I’ve seen it move sometimes, but it is really infrequent. I’d get all that ghost detecting crap just for kicks, but if I had the money for that I’d just use it to move.”

What do you think? Have you experienced something similar? Share your story here!