A couple of years ago, I lived in a house on Pendrith Street in the Christie Pits area (Bloor & Christie).

When my younger brother first walked into the house, he took three steps in and vomited in the front hall. He claimed to have been suddenly overcome with a very powerful smell of flowers. (I believe this is also a common claim of priests who perform exorcisms).

Within the first few weeks, one of my roommates complained about "feeling a presence" in her bedroom. The room was a small converted kitchen, with a sunroom out back.

The very next day, during casual conversation with an acquaintance, I discovered that she had at one time rented the very same house. The next sentence out of her mouth after making this connection was "So, have you seen the ghost yet"? The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

Apparently, when they lived there, two years prior, they had many strange experiences. The converted kitchen room was of particular interest. When they moved in, the weather was warm, so her roommate slept with her bed in the sunroom. This girl would wake up in the middle of the night with terrible fits. They would feel like there was someone or something in the room with them. To calm themselves, they would draw on the windows and walls with their art supplies. The images where slightly Aboriginal in their nature - animals, plants, symbols. When the weather got cold, the girl moved out and another moved in. That person slept with their bed in the main part of the room and never reported an incident. When the summer came again, a third occupant moved into the room, with their bed in the sunroom. This person complained of the same strange nighttime presence and also began drawing on the walls and windows. No mention had been made of the previous roommate's behaviour, but it was identical.

As it turns out, one of my roommates was at the Pendrith house for a party, the year before we moved in. At that time the bed was in the main part of the room and the sunroom was free of any such drawings.

When we moved in, we had an agreement with one of the previous tenants, that we could come in a few weeks early to clean up and paint, providing that he could leave some of his belongings in his room. He had his bed in the sunroom, and there were drawings on the walls and windows. The drawings that he had left were not particularly spooky, until we heard about the ghost. The drawings were of trees and birds. There was a human figure on the main window, which had shaggy hair and dark skin. Directly beside him, in three shades of light blue was a silhouette of a figure, with a large question mark in the middle of it. After hearing this story, we did not touch the drawings, or ever put a bed in the sunroom.

During the three years that I lived at the house, we had our own fair share of strange happenings.

On a few occasions there were loud crashes heard coming other rooms that seemed to have no source. Once, while sitting downstairs with some friends discussing the "ghost", there was a loud crash from upstairs. When we cautiously investigated, we found that a large, wall-mounted mirror had fallen, unbroken, onto the floor of the bathroom, beside the sunroom.

One roommate claims to have woken up in the middle of the night to find the figure of a lightly clad woman, oddly elongated and stretched around the frame of the long window above her bed. The apparition's hair hung down over the blind. The roommate said that she got an "overwhelming feeling of sadness" upon seeing this figure, closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

During a party, an incense burner (shaped like a First Nations chief) "fell" off a shelf in such a way that it landed on the other side of the room, without rolling or having been propelled. Many people were witness to this and were all immediately taken aback.

Strange singing or light music was heard on many occasions, particularly in one of the upstairs bedrooms and by couch crashers directly below this room. One such occurrence had my roommate frozen in terror inside her room, as it seemed to be coming from the hallway outside her door. When she heard the rest of us come into the house, she burst downstairs in hysterics. We all fell silent and heard the music for ourselves, as it faded away.

Something seemed to be playing games with my lights and radio in the basement. For the longest time I thought the power plug for my radio was broken. In more than one room in the house the signal would cut out and I would have to tape it up in order to get it to work. On one such occasion, as soon as the music came back on the light at the far end of the room went off. I went over and tapped the bulb to bring it back on. Then the light at the other side of the room went off. I fixed that and the first light went off again. When I had fixed that the radio cut out again. Out of frustration, I decided to talk to the "ghost". I told it that I was having a really bad year and that I just wanted to listen to some music and sulk in my room. I said that it could stay and hang out, but to please stop messing with my stuff. After I said this, the radio worked for the rest of my stay in the house. Despite the fact that it had been troublesome in every room of the Pendrith house, when I moved to my new place, I found that my radio worked just fine.

I have since talked with one of the people who rented after us and he also reported odd happenings. These included: A tape deck coming on as soon as someone left a room, A burner on the stove doing the same, a bottle "flying" off the refrigerator and other assorted spooky feelings and sounds. They never tested out the sunroom as sleeping quarters because "it seemed too creepy".

There is a special independent researcher working on this story and would love to hear more information from anyone with information about this or any home on Pendrith.