Unwelcome Neighbor - Carsyn Gallegos

When I was growing up I heard a variety of ghost stories from many different sources. I read them in books, I heard them from friends, and I even heard them from family. More often than not I could tell the stories were not real. I could tell by the exaggerated way they were told and how they often had a moral. The stories with morals were meant to scare kids into thinking before they do and taking the advice of their parents. The stories that always seemed to have lasting impact were the stories I heard from family. The first time I heard a ghost story told by my father that truly seemed to frighten him was the first time I was ever truly frightened by a ghost story.

The first encounter with a ghost my father experienced that he told me about occurred in the mid 1980’s. He and the woman who would one day become my mother moved into an apartment downtown together. It was the first places they lived together and as unassuming newlyweds they were happy and excited about the place. They moved in and soon became settled in their new home. They loved the places. It was a great place for them to live while my father finished up school. Until strange things starting occurring, at first they were little things such as belongings around the house would go missing without reason. All the odd events were easy to ignore. Though they felt there was a presence in the house but it was easy blame it on their new surroundings being unfamiliar.

One night in early October, a few months after they had moved into the apartment my parents were getting ready to go to bed. In the middle of the night my father was awoken by the figure of a young brunette woman standing in the corner of the bedroom. The apparition did not utter a word she just stared at him and him at her. Neither of them broke eye contact from one another. In that moment my dad was unsure of what to do. He decided to try and wake up my mother; while he still kept an eye on the young woman. Try as he might he could not wake my mother up. It felt as though the spirit was preventing it as if for some reason she did not want her awake. The figure then walked over to the foot of the bed and did not stop there. She walk right through him like she was strolling through an open field and nothing stood in her way. The cold sensation my father experienced when she walked through was something he described as, “like nothing I’ve ever felt, it was like I was out of my body for that brief moment.”

My father did not get much sleep that night and in the morning he explained the events to my mother. She was unsure if she believed him concluding that maybe he was just stressed out from school and the apparition was just part of a dream. A couple of weeks later it was near Halloween and the Denver Post ran an article about the most haunted places in Denver. My mother was flipping through the article during breakfast and saw the story as she was reading through one specific place caught her attention. It was the address to the apartment right behind theirs and the article told the story of this young woman about twenty-three who was murder in the apartment. The article went on to describe accounts of other people who lived in the area that claimed to have seen the apparition of a young brunette woman haunting the area. After reading the story my mom believed what my dad had told her and told him about the article. They moved out of that apartment a year later and the young woman had never paid them another visit.