A Haunted Solstice

Flora shared an apartment with three other students. There was nothing special about the building to separate it from the rest of the off campus housing, just a typical run down 1920’s apartment. It was two storeys high, with large windows looking down on the road, and a rusted fire escape in the back.

Only Flora noticed it was haunted.

Every night, just before midnight, the temperature dropped, followed by the shower turning on. A knock on the bathroom door, then the wet slap of footsteps across the tiles, the sound of muffled voices. The voices always grew louder but remained unintelligible, rising into a climax of slamming doors, screams of pain, and a heavy slam into the wall.

After months of sleepless nights, arguments, and accusations, Flora was done. She had blown any chance of friendship with her roommates, and she could live with that, but she was damned if she was going to let them think she was “faking things for attention” as one had called her. She had a plan to prove herself right.

She planned to conduct the ghost hunt on the longest of the year, the Winter Solstice. With that much time of darkness ahead of her she would be able to capture more evidence observe what she hadn’t before. Her roommates had fled without a goodbye, likely to never to return to her so called “sleep deprived insanity.” She had opted to remain on campus satiate her curiosity rather than go home for the same old Christmas. This was a rare opportunity. Christmas came every year. She had bought all the ghost hunting gear lauded by every paranormal investigator, supernatural enthusiast, and ghost hunter out there. More than half of it would likely turn out to be bullshit but she didn’t have many options as it would. It would be a matter of trial and error. Hopefully the results would outway the budget she had blown.

Flora lay out her inventor on her bed; multiple ballpoint pens, a notepad, infrared thermometer, tape recorder, thermographic camera, emf reader, cotton swabs, sample tubes, motion detectors, caffeine pills, and night vision goggles.

Before sunset she prepped it all, placing the motion detectors in every corner of the apartment to best capture the angles, set the camera in it’s tripod, turned on the recorder, and sat in a beanbag chair in front of the bathroom. She popped in a pill, turned the lights off, pulled on the goggles, and hunkered down behind the camera. She looked at her watch impatiently. Not even 5:00. That gave her extra time to make observations. The events couldn’t be specific to a single hour out of twenty four. There were likely signs she missed while she was sleep.

Time ticked by at an agonizing rate. Flora stayed perfectly still in fear of missing something. She thumbed at the tape recorder. It was supposed to pick up ghostly activity related noises, but in the meantime, she opted to voice her thoughts to it.

She narrated her observations of the wall near the door. There was a large, fist spot that was lighter than rest, indicating where it had been plastered over. She had even previously witnessed blood splattering across it, which always disappeared by the morning. This time she would take samples for proof. Ectoplasm, she assumed. Her hypothesis was that the spot was the result of the slamming noise during the haunting. Something had happened in this apartment decades ago, but it continued to be reenacted after the participants were dead.

Flora’s previous observations hadn’t been this intensive, what with her study schedule and her roommates complaining. Previously she had entered when the shower began. A silhouette stood behind the curtain washing long, wet hair with thin arms. She had opened the curtain and seen nothing but an empty shower running. When she closed it again the figure continued as if she weren’t there.

There had to be pieces of the haunting she hadn’t previously been privy to. With the right equipment she could unravel what exactly was happening. There were worse ways to spend winter break.

By 6:00 Flora’s legs were going numb. She couldn’t feel her glutes. There was still nothing on the camera. Maybe she had gotten ahead of herself. While there was definitely something happening at night starting seven hours before hand was a mistake. She stood up, and found that one foot had fallen asleep, full of pins and needles up to her ankle. She turned her neck one way, then the other, cracking loudly. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to take a break.

Flora grit her teeth. She refused to give up now just like that. This was a serious undertaking that she had put so much planning into. She sat back down and reexamined all her equipment. Nothing on the thermographic camera. Nothing on the infrared. Everything was normal.

7:00. Flora gave up and raided the kitchen for granola bars, chips, and a single tiny apple. She knew her eating patterns weren’t healthy, snacking throughout the day with no real meals, but the weeks leading up to finals had destroyed her near perfect regime. She popped two more caffeine pills.

By 8:00 she was reduced to doodling ghosts in the margins of her notebook. Spooky Halloween blob ghosts, gorey ghosts with their heads caved in, inhuman ghosts, shadow ghosts. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts. What was a ghost? Everyone had their own ideas. Souls trapped in purgatory by unfinished business. Manifestations of grief. Wishful thinking. The sins of the past. Based on her previous observations, Flora hypothesized that these ghosts were trapped in the same nightly cycle, in line with the Stone Tape theory. Traumatic moments imprinted in the space around them, trapped like insects in tree resin, turning to amber over time. They were long dead but their presence remained.

She was taken from her thoughts by the incessant buzzing of her phone.

Mom: Is everything ok?

The phone went back in her pocket. No need to read the other texts.

9:00. Flora’s eyelids were held open by invisible wires. She bounced her legs up and down. A tiny hammer was beating against the inside of her skull. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken three caffeine pills so quickly.

By 10:00 she was pacing back and forth. The hour at hand drew near. She took her goggles on an off, double checked every screen, rewound the tape record. Everything was aggressively normal without a single sign of the paranormal. That didn’t prove or disprove anything.

Flora began writing a bulleted list of observations in her notebook. She turned the tape recorder back on. The lights went on all at once, just for a second, then went out. She jumped up to her feet. Go time. She checked her watch. The screen blinked 11:50.

Minutes passed. There were slight noises, but Flora couldn’t distinguish between her heart beat, the building settling, and the ghosts. The hair on her back prickled as the room grew cold. The thermometer confirmed a distinct temperature drop in two distinct locations. The thermometer picked up a change in temperature. It hadn’t spread throughout the apartment as she initially thought. There were two cold spots, one laying on the bed like a sheet of mist, and an orb by the window. Her attention was torn between the two.

Through the night vision goggles she saw an orb floating by the window in the cold spot. Flora bit her lip until she tasted blood. It bobbed in the air, growing bigger as it approached the window, it’s shape forming into roughly that of a human head. The blob moved as if opening the window, stepping down into a crouch, and closing the window behind. It crept along the floor on long limbs like a human spider. Before going into the bathroom, standing in the shower, and turning it on. The shadow of someone bathing behind the curtain appeared just as it did every night. The intruder ran their fingers through long hair oblivious to her watching. The shape was almost clear enough for her to make out facial features. She imagined what would happen if this person knew they were being watched by someone from the future.

The cold spot on the bed sat up in the rough shape of a human. Flora thought it strange that someone had once put their bed in the same corner she slept in every night. She decided that after this she would push the bed to the other side of the room. The shape walked to the bathroom door, leading to the same knocking she heard every night. The intruder walked towards the door, mimed turning a knob, and approached. The night vision made it appear as if the two shapes mingled together. Their conversation remained inaudible.

The scene before her was dropping in temperature. Flora hugged herself as goosebumps raised along her arms.

The figures merged into a ball of violence, twisting, turning, one over the other, impossible to to tell one from the other. Finally, one got the upper hand, slamming the other’s head into the spot on the wall, staining it with ectoplasmic blood splatters. A body fell out of the tangle of limbs to the ground, neck bent at an odd angle, while the other stood over it.

Flora gasped and removed the goggles. Her heart fluttered far too fast, as her vision hazed in and out, and her head filled with cotton. She forced herself to breath steadily until her heart returned to a steady beat.

She looked at her watch. The screen stuck on 11:50. Dammit, she should have timed herself. Nothing could protect her from the knowledge of what had transpired. The cold spot hadn’t left. The ghosts were still there.

Her hands shook as she put the goggles back on. The figure remained standing, white face inscrutable, pointed towards her. The real questions were, was it the intruder or the tenant, had they committed murder or fought back in self defense?

The ghost took a step forward. It was silly, but it seemed to be looking at her specifically. She reminded herself that it was only a memory.

But…why was it getting closer? Why was it reaching towards her?

Cold, clammy hands touched her shoulders, passing through like mist. It’s dead lips moved like a tear in fabric. It’s voice was a bare whisper. Flora scrambled backwards into the beanbag chair. What had taken her too long to realize was that while she looked back at the past, the past was looking forward to her present.

It couldn’t touch her. It was dead and gone.

“I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have looked!” She squeezed her eyes hurt. “I just wanted to know.”

The long haired ghost turned it’s back to her, crossed the room to the window it had come through, and mimed crawling up and over the side. The room temperature rose.

Flora sighed from deep inside. She struggled to keep her eyes open to continue writing notes and observing the equipment. All the equipment she had bought lay forgotten. Her energy had been spent on the wait, research, and subsequent fear.

It wouldn’t hurt to rest for a minute. She lay her head on the beanbag to doze.

Flora jolted awake after a restless sleep. She woke up to an agonizing headache stabbing into the front of her head. Her watch informed her that it was 5 AM. She reached for the tape recorder to listen to the material. She passed by hours of her sleep deprived rambling until she wondered if it had all been a sleep deprived hallucination. She stopped when she heard the sound of a shower turning on. Footsteps on the carpet. A knock at the door.

“Yes?” Said a distinct voice in crisp, clear audio quality. Someone gasped in fear.

“Who are you?” A second voice. “Get out!”

The audio exploded into screaming, crying, begging. Flora forced herself to keep listening. She wondered if this could qualify as snuff.

Then finally, silence. She strained her ears to listen for anything else.

“Hello Flora.” The first voice of the intruder. She shuddered at the memory of those hands brushing her like a winter wind.

Flora turned off the tape. She concluded that the apartment was, indeed, haunted, and that moving elsewhere was the best option. With her project over and done with she turned on the lights.

The sun would be up soon. Flora look time to look out the window and think of how wonderful it would be to see the apartment in the safety of daylight. There was an odd reflection above her head. She looked closer. It was pale, oblong, almost head shaped with long strands of hair. It almost looked like a face. A silly thought. That would mean it was a reflection of something behind her, looking just over her shoulder.

The back of her neck prickled as something cold touched her back.