.I have a ghost story to tell...It's a real one, and it's a Looooooooong one, so grab your cigs if ya smoke, and get something to drink. It's gonna be a novel.
Anyone who knows me should know that I like weird stuff. Some of my more strange fascinations are ghosts, hauntings, exorcism and demonology, and other general occult stuff. I can read tarot cards with pretty decent accuracy, and fancy myself an amateur herbalist when I have the mindset. These things became interests after I experienced a series of odd recurring incidents that culminated into a violent and rather scary situation while living in an apartment in Las Vegas, NV. More or less, I guess you would say that it's a ghost story...at least that's what I believe.
I was about nineteen at the time, and I was living with my best friend, Ida, in her rather bland but homey apartment on the East side of town on a street called Vegas Drive. I had been living with her for about a month and had settled in quite nicely. I remember it being April when I moved in. The strange things started happening about two months later, just as the Memorial Day weekend was starting. We had some friends that lived two doors down from us...I'll call them "E" and "D" to protect their anonymity (I've always wanted to say that...LOL!), and they had invited us down to their apartment on Sunday night for dinner and a little holiday weekend type get together thingy. I remember that "D", the lady of the house, was often lonely, as "E" worked a lot. She always liked to entertain if she could. Now you have the necessary background, and here's the rest of the story.
It was a Thursday night when an odd tapping sound started up inside the house. I remember that Ida and I were sitting on the couch watching Madonna roll around on the floor as VH-1 introduced her newest video "Lucky Star". We both heard it, the tapping, and that first day we more or less just laughed it off as bad pipes...the place was a dive after all, and we figured that it was just something that might be finally going bad. That night we didn't give it any further thought and we didn't really even notice when it stopped. We went to bed in our respective bedrooms, and all was forgotten. The next day, Friday, we left for work, and having both just taken showers we laughed about the pipes behaving themselves that morning. There was no longer any tapping.
We arrived home after work around 5 pm that night and all was fine. We did our usual routine of dinner and sitting down to watch TV and videos. At about 7pm, the tapping started up again...this time, it was just a bit louder than it had been the night before--almost loud enough to distract us, but considering we were drinking our Friday night away together it wasn't too hard to tune out. In fact, we kind of got used to it as it droned on for at least an hour of continuous "tap...tap...tap...tap. I don't remember the exact time now, but I do remember that we about crawled out of our skins when the tapping finally stopped abruptly with what sounded like a much louder "Bang!"--it sounded like someone had slapped the wall. There was a feeling of discomfort in the room when tapping ended that way, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was the first time in my life that I'd ever felt that shiver of eerieness take me. We laughed about it uneasily, and that was the first time that we pondered it being ghostly and strange. Little did we know just how strange things would get, and how fast they would get that way.
Saturday morning, same routine. Showers and off to work with us. We were still pretty young, and still had to work on Saturdays and Sundays if needed. Ida always dropped me off at work when she could, but I usually found my own ride home. We got home at about the same time too, usually within fifteen minutes of each other. That particular Saturday night we had a surprise when we got home. There was an ambulance sitting in the parking lot by our stairway, and "D" was being taken to the hospital. We were able to talk to her as they took her off. Her foot had been cut pretty bad, and she was bleeding pretty good. I felt bad that no one had been there to take her to the hospital other than by ambulance, and that she had needed to spend that extra money to get help. My first question to her was of course, "What happened?" She wouldn't tell us right then, but said she would tell us all about it when she got home. About then, the ambulance took her off and we headed on up to the apartment.
The blasted tapping was already going on the moment we entered the apartment. Again, it was louder. Not thunderously loud or anything, but just about like the sound of a pen tapping on the wall...constantly. This third day I remember that it was getting on my nerves and at one point I got mad enough to slap the wall to see if it would stop. To my surprise it did--but only momentarily, as if something had stopped long enough to listen to it, and then the tapping resumed again. Another uneasy laugh toward Ida, "Maybe we should start tapping and slapping it back?" Right when I said that, the tapping stopped, and the phone rang. Weird.
"D" had returned from the hospital and with only a couple of stitches in her foot. We were worried that something much worse would come of the cut, so it was kind of a relief. Once again we asked what happened, and she told us that she wanted us to come over--she would show us. We left immediately, but not without first noticing the return of the incessant "tap...tap...tap" as we closed the door behind us.
"E" and "D"s apartment was so close that we were there within a matter of seconds. What we saw in the poor girl wasn't what we had expected at all. She answered her door with a 32 oz tumbler of Southern Comfort on ice in her hands, and told us to sit down. She hesitated frequently as she told us her story of the days events, which started with a series of what she thought were prank phone calls. Every time she answered the phone, all she would hear was "tap...tap...tap...". She had tried talking on the phone to who was calling, but to no avail--just "tap...tap...tap..." (please note...this was in 1984, and there was no such thing as *69 back then.) It seems that right before the accident she was hanging up the phone from the last prank call she had received, when the butcher knife that was on the counter "flew off of the counter and stabbed her in the foot". She had just been using it to cut up stuff for salad for her and "E"s dinner that night. Both Ida and I looked at the counter, and the butcher knife, which was a heavy one with a sturdy wooden handle. There was a lip on the formica counter top, which should have prevented the butcher knife from doing exactly what she claimed that it had done. I remember the phone ringing in the apartment, and "D" moaning, visibly shaken before finally picking it up. It was "E", who claimed that he had been trying to call her all day. He never got through to her though, as all he could hear when the phone picked up on her end was this "tap...tap...tap" sound. We left her alone to explain her very rough day to her husband, and headed back to the apartment again, where thankfully the tapping had stopped. But not for long...
Sunday morning it woke us up. It was louder than ever, and you could hear it all over the apartment. I slapped at the walls several times that morning to try to make it stop, but I would only get a moments silence before it would start up again. At about ten o'clock, very loud pounding began on the door to the next door apartment and there was someone outside screaming for "YOU SON OF A BITCH" to "LET HIM THE F*CK IN!" Peeking out the window, I saw that it was "E". He was out there bellowing that he knew "YOU TWO ARE IN THERE AND YOU BETTER LET ME IN!" The apartment was vacant, and had been for months. I'd never seen such a look of rage on "E"s face before, and quite frankly it scared the hell out of me. He could stand out there and pound all he wanted to, I was going to try to stay the hell out of the way!
Surreal is the only word that can explain what happened next, it was such an unreal blur of horrifying events. Ida and I went and hid in the kitchen out of view of the windows and the door, trying to figure out what to do. I remember the tapping becoming faster and faster, and getting louder and louder while this bizarre scene was unfolding right outside of our apartment door. The tapping got faster and faster again--almost like a snare drum--a "tatatatatatatatatatat" on the wall of our apartment, increasing in intensity as "E" continued his tirade, howling and wailing on the door of the vacant apartment next door. The whole scene crescendoed after what seemed an eternity, with a tremendous "SMACK!!" on OUR front door.
Then, nothing but silence--on odd, final feeling silence that once again made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The tapping had stopped--at the exact same moment of the impact on the door.
We took "D" back to the hospital about an hour later, after receiving a phone call from her tell us that "E" had beaten her up pretty bad. She told us that she had been sound asleep when he sat bolt upright, waking her, and demanding "WHERE THE F*CK IS HE?" and "I KNOW YOUR SLEEPING WITH HIM YOU SLUT"! before proceeding to beat the hell out of her. When we asked her where "E" was at that time, she told us that he was back upstairs in bed. "D" stayed at the hospital.
Early in the afternoon, "E" knocked on our door wondering where "D" was. Standing at the door wringing his scabbed over and bruised hands, he looked like a very confused, whipped puppy. He claims that he didn't remember a thing, and wanted to see her right away. He didn't understand why she was in the hospital, and he didn't understand what happened to his hands or face either, which had been scratched. They broke up that day, and we never saw "E" again. We saw "D" briefly as she started moving her stuff out of the apartment about a week later. By then, we had a story to tell her.
After the strange incidents of that afternoon, Ida and I decided to give a call to the apartment manager, just to tell him what all was going on. He was a strange, older man who we never actually saw very much. We told him about what had happened, and he kind of laughed it off. Three days later he brought us a ten-year-old newspaper clipping from the "Las Vegas Review Journal" newspaper, which told us a nasty tale of a married couple who used to live in "E" and "D"s apartment, and how the man who had lived there at the time had beaten and stabbed his wife in their own bed, leaving the apartment with a gun and going down the way to the apartment next to mine and Ida's place, breaking into that apartment and killing the guy in there, and then finally shooting himself in the head at the doorstep of our apartment. The speculation was that the wife was having an affair with the guy in the apartment next to ours, and the husband found out about it and decided on getting some kind of justice. It was a very tragic story, and as Ida read it out loud to me I once again felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. All the pieces fit together.
We never did have any more tappings. "E" and "D" never did get back together, and I moved out of that apartment complex the following December to persue a new love interest. I've never since viewed a ghostly historical reinactment the likes of that one, and I never hope to again.
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