Roommate

The typical quiet night is happening in my apartment today. It is a nice apartment too, at least for the cheap price. I have a small kitchen but a large living room that I added an extra counter too for meal preparation. The apartment has one bathroom and four bedrooms, only two of these are occupied. Mine is right off from the kitchen and my bed shares the same wall as the stove and sink does. Two more rooms are attached to the shared kitchen and living area, but these remain empty besides the abandoned furniture gathering dust behind the locked doors. The final room is down the only hallway in the apartment, directly across from the bathroom. This is where it lives, my only roommate. I say it because I do not know anything about it.

My landlord informed me that the other tenants had backed out of the lease for the year and that I would be living alone once I was moved in. I should have questioned why they had backed out and moved out after living in the apartment for only a year. If I had known the damned place was haunted, I would not have moved in either. However, after six months of living in this haunted apartment, I think this ghost and I have come to an understanding. I was initially terrified of the footsteps I heard walking through the apartment as I hid inside my bedroom, the coughing I heard from the bedroom down the hallway, and the singing from the dripping shower stall. It stole food from the fridge and replaced it with others. I once found a liver where I left extra spaghetti from the night before. I started to call it my ghost roommate to my friends, even chatting about it over the phone as I lounged around the living room with my girlfriend. I think this is how we made a connection.

Treating it like a roommate made the ghost far less terrifying but also changed its behaviour. It respected rules that I established, after some negotiation anyways. For example, I left on a note that singing in the shower stall could not be done after midnight as I needed to sleep but that first night, I heard it sing till one in the morning before immediately cut off. I changed the note the following morning to match this time and I no longer heard singing between one and eight in the morning. The food replacement also started to get better, steaks and banana bread were the most common to be traded for whatever it stole of mine. I never asked where it got them from, but they always tasted amazing. I began to also hear laughter throughout the house instead of just the regular coughing.

Six months into my lease and I have never stepped into that locked room down the hallway. It is the source of most of the noise and so I believe it to be the ghosts bedroom. I respect its privacy in the hopes that it will respect mine. I do not believe the previous tenants respected the ghost and so it scared them away. Because of this, I now live in an apartment by myself with a ghost as a roommate.