Our Screaming Neighbor- A Scary Story

Scary Hallway- Will Hartl

A couple years ago, I got engaged to an amazing woman. My fiancé and I decided to move into a small studio apartment in her city. I had been working in a small town a few hours south of her when we first met and since we couldn’t see much of a future for us in my area I jumped at the chance to try on life in the big city. We found our studio in our second week of apartment hunting. We were looking for a small place to live in for a few months since we were just starting out and didn’t have much saved. It was a little cramped for two people but clean and in a convenient area close to her job and her parent’s home. The room was also remarkably cheap, especially because the surrounding neighborhood was home to a lot of doctors and medical schools. We jumped on the place and about a month after putting down the deposit we started moving in.

***

I was the first one who spent a night in our new place. I commuted to and from the city from the small town I had been working in every weekend for about two months before the wedding. My goal was to gradually move my stuff into our new place before my contract with my small-town job ended. The second or third weekend our new queen-sized bed arrived at the studio and I decided I’d spend Saturday night there rather than driving to my soon to be ex home in my small town on the same day.

My fiancé joined me for home cooked pasta (my specialty) at our new place before leaving to finish some work at her office. I felt bad that she had to work on the weekend and that we couldn’t spend a full night together, but I understood. After she left, I cleaned up, read a book and played a game on my laptop before I started to get drowsy. I tucked myself into the fresh, crisp sheets of our queen-sized bed, stretched out and within a couple minutes I was drifting off.

I was almost fully asleep when I was startled awake by a woman’s terrifying shriek. It was so startling that I sat fully up in the middle of the bed, eyes wide. I scanned desperately for the source of the noise. Yet there was no one. I wondered if I had experienced a lucid nightmare but some part of me knew that what I had heard was real.

Slowly, I got out of bed and after putting a jumper over my night-ware I decided to step out into the hall. In my mind, I was wondering if the scream had come from someone in another apartment. Was one of the neighbors in some kind of danger? I opened the door and stepped out into the white fluorescent light of the hallway. The doors to all the other studios on the floor were shut tight; the hall was empty. I stood alone for a few moments waiting to see if something would happen. It did. Another scream split the quiet. I flinched and tried to determine where the sound had come from. It sounded close but I just couldn’t tell what the source was.

Another minute or two passed as I waited to see if anything else happened, but nothing did. No one came out of their apartments and there were no other sounds. More confused at that point than fearful, I ducked back inside my studio. I tried to go back to sleep but all I could think about were those two random screams. The next day, I called my fiancé and explained to her what had happened. She thought the situation was strange too. She didn’t have any explanation apart from a neighbor having nightmares. I drove home late on Sunday and when I stayed in the apartment the next weekend all was silent at night.

***

At the end of October, I fully moved into the studio. I barely spent any time there over the next three weeks as I had to help my future wife move her stuff in and get ready for our wedding. We tied the knot in the middle of November and spent about a week on our honeymoon before we returned to our new home. While we had stayed in the studio off and on since I had heard those two screams, neither of us had experienced anything out of the ordinary during our nights there. We had completely erased the incident from our minds by the time we returned from our honeymoon.

Apart from our bed, the single room that made up our studio had one small table with two wooden chairs and a small shelf next to the kitchenette. Since my wife and I were both still young we hadn’t accumulated a mass of stuff yet to put in our place. Even so, we were squeezed together, but it didn’t bother us too much. We had started looking for bigger places to move into the next year.

A couple days after we got back from the honeymoon, I was at our table searching for apartments on my laptop. It was about midday on a Sunday and my wife was watching a program on our TV while lying on the bed. I had my headphones in, listening to Queen, when my wife suddenly sat abruptly up and turned off the TV.

‘What?’ I asked, as I took off the headphones.

My wife had barely opened her mouth when I heard it. A quick but heart skipping scream followed by a hard slam. We waited a few seconds in shocked silence before another scream split the air.

This time, we could tell that it was coming from the wall behind our TV. I got up and pressed my ear against the wall. No other noises or sounds came.

Since we assumed the noise was coming from the apartment next to us, we decided to check and see if our neighbor was ok. We went out into the hall and rang her bell a few times but there was no reply.

 

‘She’s probably going through some personal issues.’ My wife surmised. ‘Let’s just try and ring her later.’

We went back in and a few hours later we left to meetup with some friends for dinner.

***

Over the next three months, the screams continued. At first they came at random times but eventually they started happening mostly at midnight and at around three or four in the morning. They were always the same; loud, shrill and quick. They usually happened in clusters of three or four within ten minutes to half an hour of each other. We knew that our next-door neighbor was the source. Yet despite repeated attempts to contact the lady inside she never opened her door. She also didn’t respond when we started yelling back at her through our shared wall either.

We got so fed up that we went to our building manager to complain about the noise. He told us that none of the other people on our floor had complained about any screaming from that apartment and that the lady who lived there had, mostly, been a great tenant. He did admit that the lady had some severe mental issues that kept her from working and that she almost never received visitors. Her bills were paid by her grandmother who, though she was well enough off to care for her financially, didn’t have the heart to come and see her very often.

While we certainly felt bad for the girl, my wife and I were losing a lot of sleep. Unable to get our building manager to take any action we decided to ask some of the tenants on our floor if they would agree to help us force his hand. When we talked to three of our other neighbors though, they all said that they had never heard any screams from the room. They genuinely had no idea what we were talking about.

That baffled us but we guessed maybe since we were the only ones directly next to the screaming lady’s room that maybe we were the only ones that actually heard her. We decided the only thing we could do was speed up our search for a new home.

***

One night around the beginning of December, my wife went on a business. I was left on my own in the apartment for almost a week. I went to my day job and returned to the apartment only in the early evening. It was during those nights when I was home alone that I started hearing new sounds from next door. The screams continued but they were sometimes followed or preceded by the most maniacal cackles I’d ever heard. The woman’s laughter was as loud as the screams, but it lasted longer. Sometimes it stretched into almost half an hour of incessant, maddening laughs that rose and fell like some rumbling storm of insanity.

I became more frightened of the laughter than the screams. I lost more sleep and my condition got so bad that I seriously contemplated renting a hotel room until my wife returned. In the end, I opted for another solution. I started drinking more at night and it seemed to numb my sense enough to wear I was no longer bothered by the laughs or screams.

Then, the night before my wife was due to come home I drank almost half a bottle of whiskey and passed out early. I was and still am someone who doesn’t handle hard liquor well. I woke up around three am to vomit up everything I had swallowed earlier.

Our bathroom was close to the hallway, so as I clung to the toilet bowl like a dear friend, my ears picked up a sound coming from outside. The sound must have distracted me because my stomach immediately calmed. I listened intently from the bathroom floor. The sound I was hearing was a door opening. The creaking and squeaking were so slow but so loud that I could pinpoint whose door it was; our screaming, laughing neighbor’s.

As soon as I figured this out, I got up and softly went over to our table to get my phone. I had gotten a doorbell camera installed at our studio a few days before my wife left on her trip. I could turn it on using an app from my phone whenever I wanted. I switched it on and watched the feed as the camera turned on.

I waited, but all the feed showed was the empty hallway and the door of the studio directly across from ours. As I kept my eyes glued on the small screen in my hand I kept listening for new sounds. One minute passed and then another. The empty hallway looked back at me from my palm. It was like some invisible presence was daring me to make a move.

I was almost about to open the door when suddenly, the doorbell rang. I still couldn’t see anyone on the camera feed. I took a few paces back from the door watching the empty space in front of my door in shock as the bell rang a second time. I didn’t want to open the door.

Instead, I yelled in my angriest voice ‘What do you want?!’  

The feed abruptly went into static and I heard the screaming neighbor’s door slam shut. That was followed by the sound of two feet madly rushing back and forth across the floor of the next-door apartment.

I stood in frozen fear watching my empty wall as the pounding of the feet went on and on back and forth like an insane marathon. Then the screaming started again but this time it was different. Instead of the quick frequent bursts that had come before, this scream was one long continues shriek. I could follow it moving back and forth on the other side of my wall in rhythm with the feet.

I decided then and there that I’d had enough and called the police. I told them what had been going on for the last few months and told them that I needed someone there immediately. Of course, as soon as I had finished explaining the situation to the operator the running and the screaming stopped.

Two officers came to my door first along with the building manager. I opened the door for them. While the officers were initially skeptical of my claims because of the smell of alcohol in the apartment, when I explained that the neighbor had a history of mental illness they agreed to try and speak to her. They rang the woman’s door several times and identified themselves as officers. When there was no answer the building manager agreed to open the door for them. After it was unlocked the officers went inside, followed by the manager. I stayed in the hall.

Even though I was about an arm’s length away from the open door, the terrible, rancid smell that emerged from the room overwhelmed me and I nearly vomited again. The building manager emerged just a few seconds later. He stumbled into the hall and fell on his back against one other studio doors.

He fainted as I tried to attend to him. I heard the officers inside the woman’s room radio for a corner and an EMT. The manager had just come too when one of them stepped out and said that I would need to be questioned more and that officially, the woman’s room was a crime scene.

I spent the next couple hours in my apartment talking to detectives and investigators as forensics people and other officials entered the neighbors’ room. I told my story again and again to the detectives and while they didn’t suspect me of foul play, I knew they didn’t really believe me. Still, they eventually let me go saying that they would be in touch if they needed anymore information from me.

My wife arrived back home from her trip as soon as the investigators had finished talking to me and I hugged her tenderly for a while as I tried not to cry.

I wouldn’t find out the full story until the next week when I talked to the building manager who was still shaken from, he had seen and read some more details in the local news.

So, apparently when the officers and manager had entered the studio they had immediately found the young woman who had been renting the apartment dead in her bed. All around her were a series of manic suicide notes which she had scattered all over. Yet when the coroner was able to do an autopsy on the badly decomposed body he said he couldn’t find any proof that the woman had died from anything other than natural causes. To make it even more strange, he had determined that the woman had been dead since at least the beginning of October; meaning she had been lying dead in the flat for the entire time we had been living there.