Occupied: Life With Uninvited Guests

I look at my friend and I say, I think what wants to hurt us is an outside I think it's in the room with us. Through a lifetime of unexplainable footsteps, vanishing objects, and dark presences, there was something far more terrifying that waited in a room she was warned not to enter. My name is Edwin, and here is Kay's true scary story. There's lots of stories in my family about I'm talking to things that aren't there and not really just like babbling like a normal baby witho like having a little conversation with things. And I kind of just always remember feeling different. In some places we would go, something would feel really negative, and in some places it would just curiosity in the air. And my mom always told me was my imagination until I got older, but growing up it was always no, Mom, I think there's something here. I think there's something bad here. I think there's something good here. And it was always oh, it's your. Imagination, don't worry about it. I was about six when we moved into this house, and it was in Toronto, right near Greek Town, and me and my mom, my brother, and then eventually my grandmother moved in with us too. It was a really creepy house, like it was three stories plus a basement, and it was just really dark, and there was a cemetery a few doors down. We move in and I just sensed something not good. I always sensed something watching me, especially when I was in bed alone at night, or if I was in the basement because my mom turned half of it into the playroom for my brother, and I always a feeling of something's staring at me, something's watching me, and it was really heavy. The second house we moved to, it's like a really nice neighborhood actually in the east end of the city. Almost right away, things started happening. Once we got settled, we'd noticed that things would go missing a lot. We kind of chalked it up to like, well, we just moved in, maybe we're misplacing things. There were still maybe some boxes laying around that we hadn't unpacked. Of course, as we got unpacked, it still kept happening where things would just go missing. I would hear footsteps coming up the stairs every night to the upstairs area, which is my room and my brother's room, and I always thought it was my mom coming to check on us. It was every night around. The same time hear the footsteps coming up the stairs and then going down the hallway towards my brother's room. The basement there also had a. Really, really, really bad feeling, But we had a tenant when we first moved in who was renting our basement from us, so didn't really go down there much. But when I. Did, I remember it just felt really heavy and I just really didn't like being there. I'd also hear my mom calling my name, and when. I would go to see her, she wouldn't be there. She would be there, but she'd be like, I didn't call you, or I'd hear her from the kitchen, but she would be in the living room. The first time it happened, I was in my room. I heard her say my name and I said, yeah, she didn't say anything. I heard her call me again, so I said, what that thing back from her? So I'm obviously annoyed, because like, why aren't you telling me what you want? So I just walked downstairs. I was expecting her to be at the bottom of the stairs. She wasn't there. She was in the living room, which was on the other side of the house. It's like, why are you calling me, what do you need? She's like, I don't need anything. You're going to bed soon. I don't need anything from you. And that was similar to every other time it happened too, right like I would hear her from the bottom of the stairs. Right beside them was the basement stairs, and then right beside the opening to the basement stairs is the kitchen. So if I heard her, usually I think it was coming from the kitchen or the bottom of my stairs, but they were all right near the basement. That happened a lot in that house. It almost always heard her name way. It happened probably once or twice a month where I would just hear her calling me. I had a really good friend tell me, don't respond to something that's just saying your name, Like if they tell you to come, or if they do say your name and they tell you to come, then go and see what they're saying it's, you know, don't just respond and yell at because whatever it is is. Going to keep doing that. I listened to that, and I just would just go see whenever. I heard my name being called, instead of being like what and yelling out, I would just go and see if my mom was just peacefully watching TV or something. I just wouldn't even bother asking her because it happened so much, and from her I always heard, it's just your imagination. When I turned thirteen, I was staying home alone more often and staying up later at night. And my mom's health also started to decline a lot. She had really bad back and knee problems, and she's on the wait list to get knee replacement surgery. Couldn't climb the stairs to check on me and my brother. I thought that that's what she'd been doing every night since we moved in, was climbing up making sure we were asleep. And I remember being thankful she didn't open my door every night, because I was one of those kids who were like read under the covers with my flashlight. I always heard her come, and I always heard her walk down the hall to my brother's room, and then I pretend to be asleep in case she checked on me. Once her health started declining, I continued hearing the footsteps coming up the stairs every. Night and going down the hall to my brother's room. That started really scaring me, and I remember telling her, like, Mamma, I keep hearing footsteps coming upstairs at night, and she so, it's just your imagination. You read too much. There's nothing happening. My brother felt weird in that house too, in the basement, especially at this point, our tenant had moved out and my mom had turned it into a playroom for us, and then half of it was still the laundry room, kind of similar to the basement in. Our first house. Actually, we had our own TV down there, we had our own couch down there, all of our toys and board games and our video games and everything, and we just wouldn't end up staying down there for long. If one of us went down there alone, we'd get really sad, start feeling like we wanted to cry, and just not want to be there. And if we went down together, then we'd start arguing. We wouldn't be able to play together, and it would just turn out bad. One of us would end up storming upstairs, the other one would be frustrated and angry. And it's not normal for me and my brother. We are really close. We've always gotten along really well. Even now in our twenties, we'd get along really well. So it just wasn't normal for us. So I started trying to spend a lot more time out at my friends' houses. And then I brought a couple friends over when I was a teenager and we were hanging out in the base. Just watching a movie. My friend looks over at me and says, there's a ghost down here, and I said, well, I know that there's a ghost upstairs too. Do you think it's a good ghost? He said, not the one down here. I'd moved out young. I moved out at around sixteen. It was just like issues just with. Me and my mom, So I didn't really feel negative. Anywhere in the house except for the basement, so I tried to avoid going down there. If I had to do my laundry, I would go down. I would throw my little laundry, and I would sprint up the stairs as fast as I could. Even at like fifteen sixteen before I moved. Out, I didn't like being down there, But throughout the rest of the house there's definitely some spooky things, but it wasn't like a bad feeling around the rest of the house. But I also found out that the previous owner's family where me and my brother stayed, it wasn't like an in law suite for her parents so one of the bedrooms was actually a kitchen at one point, and we had our own bathroom up there. I think her father passed away up there. That's what my mom tells me now was probably the footsteps going upstairs was probably him just going upstairs and going to his room, and that was it. Maybe a residual energy type of thing, but that doesn't really explain the voices or the negative. Feeling in the basement. I was about eighteen, which would have been twenty fifteen, and me and my friends decided that it would be a good idea to get a cheap hotel room for a night, to kind of do something things that you know, young adults and teens do without their parents around. We ended up choosing a hotel called the Scarborough In. It's kind of tucked in near a little cul de sac right beside the train track. We get there and we check in and they give us a room. It's me and my guy friend and my female friend. Who's also his girlfriend. We're in the room and everything's kind of going good, except we were trying to play music and the WiFi wasn't working well. The way the hotel is set up is all of the doors to go into. The rooms are on the outside, and the office is in the middle of the hotel. The modem I guess for. The Wi Fi was in the office, and being a cheap hotel, I'm sure they don't have Wi Fi extensions everywhere. So I decided we should go and ask to move to another room. They told me no, and I said why, and they said, well, because every room is booked except for one, and we don't like to rent it out. And I got a little bit more insistent and I was like, okay, well, you know I'm paying and part of what I'm paying for should be the Wi Fi and if I'm not getting it here, then I want to go to this closer room. This is what I want. They agreed, but the manager who was there at this point, was like. I'll put you in that room, but if you don't like it, we're not giving you your money back because we told you we don't rent it out. I go back. I get the new key for the new room. It wasn't even like a key card. This is how cheap the hotel is. It's just like a little door key. I go back to the first room and I tell my friends, like we're moving. We got a room closer. We each had like a little duffel bag and my purse not much, right, So you're just planning on staying the night. We move and we go to this other room. I remember going to open the door. That's the way to describe this is it's like a porta potty, right, So there is a lock on the handle, and that's what the key that they give you is for the handle lock. Once you're in the room, I guess for more privacy, there's a dead bolt, and there's no key to open the dead bolt. You can only do it from inside of the room. The dead bolt, when you have it locked in the. Room, it shows occupied on the front of it, and when it's unlocked, it shows vacant. I noticed that the lock the dead bolt said occupied, which is weird because there's nobody in the room. And I remember mentioning it to my friends. I was like, ooh, somebody's already staying in there, and I don't know. We were just stupid teens. So we laughed about it and we tried to open the door, which was a little difficult. It gave us some resistance, not. A lot, but it was just the door felt heavier than the other ones, but. We opened it. We went inside, we turned. On the TV, we put our bags down, and we were just trying to have a good time. Ten minutes into being in that room, we all started feeling really paranoid, like there was something that was going to come to get us, that was going to come. Into the room to hurt us, like from outside of the hotel. We were scared that if we left the hotel room, something was waiting outside to hurt us or it works. We start putting our bags along the windowsill on the inside to cover up all of like the cracks and the curtains, and made sure nobody could look in and see us, and we moved one of the dressers in front of the door. I just remember sitting there and we were so tara, and we're trying to figure out what we did wrong, why somebody would want to follow us to the hotel and hurt us, because we're just yeah, we're like eighteen, but we're still just kids, right, I get eighteen, You're still just a kid, And what did we do wrong? All three of us are so scared that something's going to come in to hurt us, and as we're talking about this, we hear static, static, white noise, as if the TV service cut out and it's just static. The TV. We look at it and it's working fine, like the picture on it that is fine. The show's going and everything seems normal on the TV. But all we could hear was the staticy white noise. So we're covering our ears and we're looking at each other like what the heck is going on? And I go and I. Unplug the TV and the noise stops. We kind of breathe easily a little. Then I go and I sit back down on the bed and as I'm sitting on the bed, I look at the mirror that's outside of the bathroom, which from certain. Spots on the bed you could see into the bathroom. I see this big shadow figure, just a big dark human shape in the bathroom. I look at my friend and I say, I think what wants to hurt us is an outside I think it's in the room with us. As soon as I said that, the bathroom door slammed and the temperature in the room started dropping, like significantly dropping. And I could see the thermostat from where I was sitting, and I could see numbers going down on the thermostat, as if somebody was sitting there clicking the button changing the temperature. I couldn't move to do anything. None of us could move. We were frozen. I don't remember even being able to move my eye. I couldn't talk, I couldn't scream, I couldn't do anything. I was just frozen. I remember sitting there and this feeling. It's like it was. In the air and I was breathing it in, but it was also seeping in through my pores, like a water or an acid. But it was also like I was sitting on it, and it was surrounding and inside of everything, and it was this evil, dark feeling. It felt like it was filling up my body and my soul. It felt like it was consuming everything about me that made me who I am, everything good about me, everything that just makes me myself as a person, and it was filling it with just this dark hopelessness. And at first I was trying to think what do I do? How do I get out of here? But as it kept happening, didn't feel scared anymore. I just felt this hopelessness. I just felt like, well, this is what's going to happen. It's evil and this is what's going to happen. And it was this hopelessness which felt worse than the fear. It just felt like I was just being consumed by something so dark that I could have never imagined that feeling that was inside of me. Now I remember just feeling my. Whole life as since starting to slip away. And then I felt. A hug, and it felt like a hug from my grandma. My grandma passed away when I was nine. It just felt like her arms were around me. And I know it had been a while since she'd passed away, but I was still never forget how her hugs felt. And after the hug, it felt like she touched my chest this ball of warm light which I could feel, but I could see, like in the back of my mind and my mind's eye, I could see it start spreading and replacing all of this dark energy. It took a few minutes, but once it I think it spread enough, I jumped up and I shook my friend closest to me. He wasn't moving, he was just his eyes were wide and his mouth was open, and this was it, and he's frozen, and the only thing I can see when I can move is the room. I can't see what was doing this to us. All I can see is the room. The room looks normal. That's all I can see. But I know what I was feeling, and I know what they were feeling. And I shook him and I dragged him off of the bed. I think I might have even had to slap. And once. Got him kind of out of this trance, out of this daze, and he helped me move the dresser that we had barricaded the door with. So we moved the dresser and we grab our other friend and we run. Out of the room. We go to the office and I tell them we're checking out my friend. He was crying. I was crying. I was bawling my eyes out. My guy friend was crying. His girlfriend was She was just kind of in shocked. She was standing on her own, at least because when we first left the room, we had to carry her to the office. We told the office we were leaving. We wanted to get a taxi. Call us a taxi and we're going home. So they did. We got in the taxi and as a taxi left the property, that's when my female friends she started crying. She's sobbing. Me and my one friend were still really shaken up, but we're not crying anymore. And he looks at me as we're in the taxi and he says, I don't feel like we left. I feel like we're still there. What if we've never left. That's terrifying to me still because I still feel sometimes like, what if. The life I'm living is just a dream? What if I never left that. Room and went home and went to my mom and told her what had happened, and she said, you know, it's a good thing you guard me Angel was there, because you might've been possessed with whatever was in that room, all. Three of you. It was scary, and I am obviously talking about its difficult because of just the feeling, that negative feeling that was in It's so hard to describe, but it's just this evil feeling, and it's the feeling of like hopelessness, like there's no point in trying anymore and there's no point in fighting. And that is the worst feeling out of all of them that was happening, because I was experiencing that, but also anger and sadness and fear, and it's just it was bad. It was like in that story of Pandora's Box when I say she opened the box and you just saw all of the evil and bad things in the world fly out of there. That's what it felt like, was there. But in the end we got help. I thankful every day that my Grandma was watching out for me. My friends weren't as fortunate because I moved on pretty quickly when that happened, and I just continued life as normal. But my friends, I think something stuck with them because they started going down a path in life that isn't so great. And from what I know now, they're still on that path and that's unfortunate. And they had no indication of ever that being their lifestyle until after this happened. A few months after this happened, they both went, you know, in a different direction than I did. I mean, I hope that they're okay, And I don't know if it does have anything to do with that day, but a part of me believes. It does, because they didn't have. Something touch them and bring them their light back like I did. The hotel we ran there to check out. I was like, I'm checking out. I want a taxi. They just had this look on their face, like they knew we wouldn't last long. But it was almost like a shocked look, but a look of knowing, like they didn't question why we were leaving, because they'd warned. Us not to go in the room. But they almost looked surprised. And I don't know if they looked surprised that we were out of the room as quickly as we were, because I don't know how. Many people didn't make it out of that room, Maybe not that. Physically they'd something happened to them, but maybe emotionally. I don't know how many of them made it out of the room in their same mental state that they were when they went in. We didn't even have any of our clothes. We left our bags there. We never went back to that hotel for our bags. And the motel called me to come get myself. I told them I'm not doing it. I'm not starving put on that property again. I mean, I have googled the motel a few times. It's closed down now, and I can't find anything pertaining to, like anything bad happening there. Me and my friend spoke about it a little bit that night, and my female friends, she said, probably something. That wanted us out of the room. That's what it was doing. It was trying to make us run out of the room. I said, that doesn't make any sense, because if something wanted us out of the room, it would have been doing things from the beginning. To kick us out of the room. But it wasn't. From the beginning, it was doing things to keep us in the room. It was making us feel like if we left, something would happen to us. It was making us so. Paranoid of the outside world that we were barricading the door. There's no way that this thing wanted us out of the room. If it wanted us. Out of the room, it would have made us scared of the room. It wasn't until we were trapped in there. We couldn't get out easily until something happened. I you know, some. People say it was just an angry spirit. Some people say it was a demon. So I have no idea. But I don't know what possession feels like. I don't have anything to compare it to. So maybe we weren't about to be possessed. But my theory is that there was something in there trying to possess us, and it was it was not something good. I moved to a small town when I was about twenty twenty one. Originally I moved up with my mom, but I moved out of her house pretty quickly and I got my own place. It was a pretty normal house as far as you know rental properties go. This is a nice place that I lived there for a few years without any spooky incidents happening. So one day I decided that I should probably declutter and get rid of some things, and I gave away just an electric kettle that I got at like an estate sale or somewhere for super cheap. I think I got it for like twenty. Five cents, and I gave it away to my friends. She had just had a baby and she needed an electric kettle to boil water. Right after that happened, a lot of weird stuff started happening again, like things would go missing in the house from time to time. But like, I'm kind of scatterbrained, and I also grew up with things going this thing, so I didn't really think that was weird. But once I gave this kettle away, it was negative. There was negativity in the house that was not there before. I was very. Familiar with the feeling of something negative being around me because of what I'd felt around me for you know, a lot of my life. In almost everywhere I've lived, there's been some form of negative energy there, so I'm just very used to feeling it. My dog would start barking at absolutely nothing. If we were downstairs, he would look up at the top of the stairs to start barking. It was hard to get him to come upstairs. Once we were upstairs, it was hard to get him to go back downstairs, and he would look down the stairs and bark. So always barking at nothing. My closet, the clothes in my closet, which was kind of like an on suite from my bedroom, then my closet, and then my bathroom, and so I usually had the doors open because also the only bathroom in the house and wanted people to be able to go there if they were over. The door was often open, and my clothes in my closet would start swaying. And there was a window in my bedroom, but it wasn't ever open. I live in Canada, and this was like kind of northern Canada. And it's cold most of the year, so I don't open my windows. My clothes would start swaying back and forth pretty aggressively. If I was sitting in my room, the clothes would sway, and the shampoos and everything in my bathroom would start falling. They would fall. I had them lined along the tub, and they would fall either into the bathtub or out of the bathtub and just fall completely off of the ledge where they are. Then that happened a lot. That was happening for about a week. I was scared. I called my friend and I asked my friend to help. He knows a bit more about like the spiritual side of things in the paranormal. And he staged the house and he, you know, he cleansed it, and he put up some protection rooms. And he did, you know, he did some things. And he said, if it's a ghost, it's not going to be bothering you anymore. The next day, I was walking down the stairs to go to work and I felt something push me from behind. It wasn't my dog, because my dog was in front of me. It felt like a push on like the small of my back. It felt like if a kid had pushed me, honestly, but stronger, just where the placement of the hands were I stumbled down a few steps, but I didn't fall down the stairs, thankfully. I was okay. That terrified me. So I called my friend again and I said, look, I don't think it was a ghost or whatever you did didn't work. So he talked to you, a mutual friend that we have who actually. Was the fiance of the woman I gave the kettle to. He said, what if it's not a ghost, What if it's like a member of the fay and the fair folk and you know, the fairy world, which for me sounded absolutely crazy, But my friend pointed out, if you believe in ghosts, what makes it so different to believe that there are other things that you can't see out there. They were looking into things, and their realization was that it was likely something called a boggle, which I guess can be kind of compared to like a house elf. You know, there's just things they live. They might borrow your things sometimes, but they get really attached to the stuff in a home, not really the person or the house itself, but the things inside of it. And there was a chance that. It was really attached to that cattle, because you never really know what it's going to get attached to. We were kind of cohabitating, or I was cohabitating with this thing that I know was there, but it didn't care that I was there, and that's why some things would go missing sometimes. So he said, give it an offering. He said, to give it oats with milk and honey, and to leave them on a shelf where my dog couldn't reach them. So I did die. He said, as you're leaving the offering, say like this is for the fair folk in my home. I'm sorry if I gave away something important to you. Please accept this offering as my apology. So I did that, and I left it on a bookshelf, high up on top of the books, no way my dog could. Have gotten it. I did that in the morning, and I went upstairs with my coffee and I was just in my room and my dog starts going crazy at the top of the stairs again, like barking, worse than he had before. So I go and I see, and I think somebody's coming in the house, because the only time he works like that is when somebody's coming in the house and nobody's there, not that I can see. So I go and he just keeps at it and Then about maybe an hour and a half later, I'm going downstairs, probably getting another. Cup of coffee, and I see the little bowl that I had left. Out, and it has what looks like tiny fingerprints scooped out of the oatmeal. And I was like, oh, hey. Well, something's even the oatmeal. Somebody told me it might have been a mouse, but I really don't think it was. I've never seen a mouse in. The house before, but tiny little fingerprints scooped out of the oatmeal. And after that, I had a pretty good understanding with this thing that lived in my house. If it had borrowed something that I had laying around, I would just be like, hey, I know you borrowed this. Can I have it back please? And I'd walk away, and when i'd come back, it would be sitting in the middle of the coffee table exactly where I had looked already. For it or whatever. So that happened quite a few times, and it would try to help me, but it wouldn't always be helpful, Like some days I would come home and dirty dishes that were in my sink would be in my cupboard on top of clean ones. When I asked my friend about this, he said, well, she's just trying to help. Doesn't know the difference between dirty. And clean dishes. It just knows the dishes going there, so it's trying to help. My dog's food bowl was always full, Like my dog's food bul was never empty unless I was out of food. But for the most part, my dog's food bul was always full and I didn't even. Have to fill it. So there's just some weird things that but it would try to help. After I guess it was happy that I gave a the oatmeal. And when I. Moved I told it like, hey, I am giving away a lot of stuff because I was pregnant with my son and moving in with my kid's dad, and so we like obviously were combining things that we had I didn't need to bring all with my furniture, and I told them, like, you know. I was like, hey, I am going to be giving away some stuff. You're more than welcome to stay with that stuff or to stay with the stuff I bring. It's up to you, but I am giving away some things. And that not everything is going to be in this house anymore. Nothing is going to be in this house once I moved out. That's going to be empty. So it's your decision on where you want to go if it's with one item or with all of them. So I know there were some items that was really attached to, Like I had a lot of bookshelves in my home because I love reading, and I had a mug and it said like reading is my superpower, and it was just sitting on my. Bookshelf in front of some books. So I just use those like decour and I put a couple of id's in it that I don't carry around in my wallet. And I remember pulling an idea out and picking the mug up and putting it on the same shelf, but on the. Other side of the shelf. And I'm not a very good housekeeper, so there was dust on the shelf, and when I lifted up the mug and put it back down in a different spot, I could see the ring of dust from where it was sitting, and then the. Dust across the shelf. And as I walked away, I had to do something with my idea. I had to put it in somewhere for a job interview or something, and I heard the mug sliding, And when I went and looked, the mug had slid and you could see the slide marks and the dust it had slid back to the original place. It was like the first part of the shelf where it was. It's like, okay, I guess you like that mug there. You never knew what it was going to be attached to it. It could have been like a fork that it liked, you know. It just got attached to random little things when I started looking into the bog. So originally they're from Scotland. I guess my family is Scottish, so I don't know if that has any connection. Maybe not. But I read a story about there was a family and some that their neighbor saw them and they were packing up like a caravan, like a pores drawn caravan, and they're. Like, where are you going? Why are you leaving? The dad said, I can't do this anymore. I can't live with this thing in my house. We're leaving, we're moving. And they heard from the back of their caravan, which they packed themselves, which is full of stuff, they heard, good luck, good luck trying to get rid of me because it was following them and their stuff. I read a lot about them after because I was like, well, you know, what is it? That they're all about, and they can be mischievous, but for the most part, they just like things. They think you have nice things. If they choose your house is probably a compliment because it means that they like your stuff and they think you have nice stuff and they want to be around it. And there's been some people that say that if some he steals from you and you have one living in your home, they'll follow that person and they'll drive them crazy until the person returns your stuff. I don't know. I didn't have nice enough stuff with people don't want to steal, so that I never I can't speak on that, but there's a lot of stories about them. And yet the Fay in general is crazy. There's so many the good and the bad, and then there's neutral. Right when you think about the Fay, it's like people. There's good people, bad people, and then like neutral people. And I guess the boggle is a neutral thing until you piss it off and then it's not so neutral anymore. Thank you Kay for sharing your experiences with us. And if you are someone you know has a story that they want to get on a call to share with the rest of us, head on over to True scarystory dot com and fill out the form. This episode was edited and sound designed by Sarah Worhe'zwindel, a VW sound Thank you for supporting this and our other shows on scaryplus dot com. We're forming our really nice community on there, so thank you for that. If you're following this show, we'll be back next week with another story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See us soon.