The Others

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

STRANGER THAN FICTION
by Jeneen R. Garcia
published in 2002


And here's the story about my former housemates on Acacia St. that I promised to post. Told you I have a lot of strange-funny stories in my life :P I try to forget most of them so I don't feel I'm so weird.

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I love old houses. They remind me of the home I grew up in, complete with leaky ceilings and cockroaches in the most sacred places. So maybe it’s no surprise I tend to attract ghosts.

At first I thought it was just a doppelganger, my “other” self. Two of my college roommates saw “her” in the room on separate occasions, once wearing all white, another time wearing all black. I am sure neither one was me, because I was either out of the room at that time or fast asleep in my bed.

This year, when I moved to a new boarding house, I couldn’t help going back to an old house that I had already looked at two years before but couldn’t afford then. The room felt like my room at home, with its yellow walls and high ceiling and star apple trees outside the window.

The smell of burning leaves also reminds me of childhood, so I didn’t really mind when the smell would suddenly waft into the room at 3 a.m. Nor did I mind too much when my roommate told me about the tall man in cream-colored pants and shirt (apparitions do tend to be color-coordinated) sitting at the head of my bed, watching me tenderly as I slept.

And then there were The Others. Eerily enough, despite the many rooms, I had never bumped into anyone in the bathroom. I began to seriously wonder if anyone else lived in the house.

Then one night, three strangely white, long-haired girls moved into the room across ours. They brought in three-foot tall statues of various saints and hung a Chinese good luck charm over their door. They never went out except at night and took their showers late in the afternoon, like I did. That was when the real haunting began.

It seemed I couldn’t use the bathroom without voices outside griping that I was taking too long. They complained to our caretaker that our room was dirty, though we always locked our door when we went out. And in the middle of the night, we would hear footsteps, then someone trying to turn our doorknob.

My roommate, Cora, came home at 1 a.m. one time and saw people walking quickly towards the gate in a circle, completely surrounding one of the girls. Nobody spoke. Cora was left standing at the gate, not sure if it was a dream.

Then just as suddenly as the girls arrived, they disappeared. One day, I came home from work and the room was empty. I learned later that some cops had come with a search warrant, and they had hastily escaped. Money trouble, the caretaker said.

Evil spirit or evil boarder—can’t wait who’s coming next.