Thursday, August 11, 2011

Haunted Apartment, Bloomington, Indiana

An ex-girlfriend once contacted me to let me know that she believed her apartment to be haunted. She was, at the time, a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington, and lived in an apartment complex near, but not on, the university campus (I believe it was the Regency Court Apartments, but I can not remember with any certainty). Knowing my interest in ghost stories, she sent me an email describing her experience (which I no longer have, this was nearly ten years ago, so I can't directly quote from it).

She stated that the events started one night when she was in bed, and the door to the bedroom slammed shut. Over the next few days doors left open would shut violently on their own, and she heard a shouting voice in the room with her on a few occasions, a voice that seemed to be berating her, though she never told me what it said. As quickly as it began, it apparently ended, as she did not ever mention it again, even though we corresponded by email occasionally over the next several years. A few months after this experience, she left that apartment and moved in with her boyfriend in another part of town, never finding out what caused her experience.

Commentary: I have little to say about the alleged haunting itself - I could provide all manner of explanations for what was described to me, but I have no way of knowing if any of my explanations are valid. What is a bit more interesting to me is the conditions under which I learned of the story.

This ex-girlfriend and I broke up in a way that was not particularly good for either of us, but was especially bad for me. Although I did not know it at the time, she later told me that she felt guilty over the matter. We had been friends for years before anything romantic happened between us, and we both tried, with varying amounts of effort at different times, to maintain a friendship post-breakup. It is in this context that I received the email telling me about the ghost story. I didn't know what to make of it - did she actually have a weird experience that she couldn't explain, and knowing my interest in such things decide that I should know of it? Was she trying to find a way to relate to me post-breakup and, from what she later told me, feeling some guilt, and decide to make up a story that she thought I would enjoy? The way she told the story dropped hints without ever saying that she was seeing someone new, so was she telling me this story as a way of stealthily telling me about her new relationship status without flat-out saying it? I don't know, and that information is in the dust of the past now.

Still, if nothing else, it's a good short ghost story for anyone now living in Bloomington.


Source: Personal Account

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