The Room Upstairs

From: Bert Somers (acidday@hotmail.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Belgium - ghent
Source: Form Submission

This is something that happened to me four years ago, to this very day i lack any explanation for the events that occured.

My girlfriend and I used to rent a house in the city of Ghent in Belgium, it was an old house, really big, but surprisingly cheap, which was good because at the time we didn't have that much to spend and we were happy just having a place of our own.

Of course, we were extremly pleased with the situation, we had found a big house for little money without even looking that hard, we never even bothered asking the landlord why it was that cheap. We had lived there for about two weeks, working around the house, cleaning it, trying to get everything to work properly, when one night, as we were lying in bed, we heard a very creepy sound coming from the room just above ours, the sound at first was hard to describe, but we kept hearing it every night, we thought we had a leak in the drainage-system or something, but it grew bigger every time we heard it, at first it was a light thump, after a week or so it became more like a hard violent slam on the floor, as if something was thrown or fell down on the floor.

In the daytime i used to work up in that room above ours, trying to figure out where the sound came from, but i never found anything that seemed to be out of the ordinary. Meanwhile the sound became louder every night, my girlfriend & I were terrified, neither one of us had the guts to go up to that room to see what it was. We would just lie in bed, breathing very quietly, listening.

The sound became so enormously creepy, that i didn't even have the guts during the daytime to see what it was. Untill one night we heard the shuffling of feet, somebody was walking around in the room above ours, immediately followed by the sound we had been hearing for weeks, now louder than ever before. We were so scared, we decided to spend the night at a friend's house, we got up, got dressed and literally ran out of the house, all in a matter of seconds.

The next day, I called our landlord from my friend's place, i told him what was going on, he was very surprised but he kind of laughed it away, I remember his exact words; "My wife and I are Ghent this afternoon, we'll drop by and clear this whole ghostthing". So i went to the house, by myself, awaiting the arrival of my landlord. He came around at two in the afternoon, without his wife, i remember him looking at me and saying; 'boy, you like terrible, having bad dreams lately?' I was obviously not in the mood for this and i told him to go upstairs & find out where that horrible noise was coming from. And so he did.

He went upstairs, I heard him open the door, he then went inside, and suddenly this fear came over me, i was hearing the same shuffling of feet as we had heard the night before, it was exactly the same sound, then after that followed an enormous sound, somewhat like a crash. I totally freaked out, I couldn't breathe, i was glued to the floor. After a few minutes, i started calling his name up the stairs, he didn't answer. It took me some time but i finally managed to get myself up the stairs, i went to the room and saw my landlord lying on the floor, in the dark. My heart must've skipped several beats. I didn't know what to do, i ran back downstairs & called 911. They arrived a few minutes later, they went upstairs only to come back down to tell me that he was dead, he had suffered a severe stroke. I was astonished and remained baffled for days.

My girlfriend and I decided to move out, even though we had came to love the house, despite its freaky allure, we never set foot in it again.

It took me a very long time to get rid of the fear i felt that day and the weeks before that. This is by far the strangest thing that has ever happened to me. I believe i will only feel better about the situation if i could come up with a reasonable/sensible explanation for it, but i just can't. If anyone wants to talk to me about it or maybe try to explain these events i would be very grateful.