Amber

A spooky thing, for the upcoming season:

Ever since we moved in, I have heard noises at night. I told Blair about it the first time, and many times after, but she never hears it. They are the unmistakable sounds of someone running back and forth down the hall of our floor, and every so often I will hear banging too, like someone is pounding on a door somewhere. Whenever I hear it, I'll hurry over to the front door and look through the peephole. Then when I can't see anyone through that, I'll crack the door and look out into the hall. There's never anyone there.

Pause.

Yesterday, lots of things happened in our building.

When I opened the door to take the dog out, there was a tall woman standing there in the hall, looking completely off her face. She wore a tiny tank top and short short boxer briefs. They were inside-out. I muttered the thing I always mutter when I encounter someone unexpectedly: "Oh, sorry." She stared at me. Grunted. Turned and staggered toward the door to the stairwell.

Once we were outside and I was trying to let the dog pee, I noticed a man come out one of the doors. A very sketchy man, carrying a beat up plastic yellow bag. He walked across the street to a half-built garage, did something over there. Then he crossed back diagonally toward the dumpsters in our parking lot, and did something over there, too. I steered the dog back over toward the grass. I heard footsteps, and thought he was following me, but he disappeared back into the building. All the people I have told are pretty certain his sketchy behavior was drug-related. La Crosse is famous for alcoholism being a religion, and its impressive number of meth users. Drug use is so bad in this area that there is Narcan on the wall in businesses next to the fire extinguisher and the AED.

Anyway. Later, when Blair and I took the dog out again, as we were coming in, we encounter a woman screaming in the lobby. She's getting in the elevator, and one of our neighbors is trying to talk to her. "I do NOT need your help!" she's screaming. "You didn't want to help me before! Your help is worthless to me!" The floor? Covered in blood. I didn't immediately know where she was bleeding from, but apparently she had a massive gash on her foot/lower leg. Like the elevator looked like someone was murdered in it. There were trails of blood all over the floor, tracked across the lobby.

We, and several other neighbors we have gotten to know, all gathered for a huddle there in the lobby. One of the ladies knew who that woman was. We had the story from the neighbor she had screamed at. We wondered what we should do: we couldn't just leave blood everywhere like that. What an incredible biohazard! It was decided that one of us would call the non-emergency police number, so one of the guys did, while someone else tried to get ahold of the building manager and the maintenance guy, and the rest of us talked about it and also stood guard by the garage to warn everyone who came in that there was blood everywhere and to be careful.

A police officer showed up. He spoke to me, to Blair. He spoke to the guy who called, and to the woman who knew the woman we called out. The trail of blood led straight to her unit, but the woman would not open her door for the police officer. I was up there on our floor (of course this spazz of a woman lives on our floor) because I was bringing the dog back up.

Back downstairs, we were discussing what we knew about the woman. Apparently she has been spotted around the building high as shit, and had just gotten out of prison recently. Conversation turned toward the building itself. It's brand new. It opened in May of this year, just a few months before we moved in. Like, it's brand new. But apparently, someone has already died here. That wasn't enough to bother me, really, but the rest of the story really had me intrigued.

Resume.

This person died on our floor, of an overdose. Before he died, he was heard for some time running back and forth down the hall, looking for help. He would pound on random doors, except no one would open up for him.

A very eerie coincidence, I'm sure.

Still, every night I listen for the running and the knocking noises, and every night I hurry to the door and try to catch whoever it is, but I never spot anybody.