Broadview Residence
I should first start with a little bit of a background . I have been a sound engineer for over 20 years. The first part of my career was spent living out of suitcases. My old girlfriend at the time, who I had known since high school, lived in a small bachelor apartment while I was out on the road. We will call her "K". One of the musicians I was working with at the time asked myself and "K" if we wanted to share a house with him and a student friend of his. It was a nice attached home in downtown Toronto.
As I stated earlier "K" and myself had been together for a longtime. I have always been interested in the para-normal, UFO's and other strange phenomena. "K" did not have the same interests in these things as I did. In fact she thought it was ridiculous. After living in the house for a few months I started to hear and feel strange things.
One night when I was out to dinner with "K" she asked me if I had noticed anything strange happening around the house. I told her that I had and she said "I think we have a little visitor in the house".
This surprised me. She said she started to notice strange sounds like the front door opening and someone walking up the hardwood floor and proceed up the stairs to the second floor. But on investigation there would be no one upstairs. After dinner when we got home we asked our student roommate "M" if he had experienced anything strange in the house. He said he was a little embarrassed to bring it up, but he had.
He too had heard the front door opening and footsteps into the house, in fact there was a night recently he had heard "K" and myself leave for the evening, shortly thereafter he heard the front door open and someone walking up the hallway. He was in the basement and came upstairs thinking that we had returned . When he got to the top of the basement stairs he tried to open the door but the door would not open. This door does not have the lock on it.
"M" first thought that we were playing at joke on him. He said he called out our names but there was no reply. Then he thought someone had broken into the house not knowing that he was in the basement. Armed with a baseball bat "M" tried the door again. This time the door opened. After walking around the house and finding the front door locked there was no one there.
"K" also told me that when she had come home after visiting me in the Quebec city where I was working for Christmas and New Year's, that she found all of the towels from the upstairs bathroom were piled in the middle of the living room floor and no one had been in the house. This was just the start.
At first I thought it was sounds coming from the house next-door. The person who live next-door was an elderly Chinese gentleman who lived alone. When I heard the noises during the day I would go next-door to see if the old gentleman was home. Most of the time he wasn't there, and his floors and stairs were carpeted. The footsteps seem to come from a younger person walking on hardwood floors. The sounds would happen day or night. It generally never happened late night when you might think something might spook you. In fact nothing would happen for months at a time and then over the course of two or three weeks a bunch of things would happen.
Every once and a while when you are walking upstairs ,you would get the impression that someone was trying to run past you and beat you to the top of the stairs. Then we started to notice that quite often while you are sitting on the main floor, reading or watching television that you would get the impression that someone was peaking around corner at you. When you looked in their direction they would duck away. We never felt threatened. It was almost as if it was playing a game with you.
One afternoon around four or 5 p.m. I was standing in the kitchen talking to "K" who had just got off work. The stereo was on in the next room. From corner of my eye I saw a hand come through the doorway three times. Like someone dancing in the other room. I ignored this thinking it was one of the roommates joking around . Then it happened again. The first gesture caught my attention, the second gesture I turned and looked, the third gesture I focused on a semi transparent hand. The hand looked to be the hand of a young girl. With one step backwards I could see through the kitchen doorway and around the main floor of the house. There was no one there.
After a few years "K" moved out and so did my two other roommates. I then got two new roommates. "J" was a university professor. "R" was a bit of a globe traveler who just needed a place to stay between trips abroad. One afternoon when "R" was in town with his girlfriend "Y", I was walking up the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor to get ready to go to work. When I got to the top of the stairs the hallway was dark because the three bedroom doors were all closed, the only light was coming through the bathroom window into the hallway. I saw the silhouette of a woman or girl walking out of the bathroom. Thinking it was "Y" I asked her if she needed to use the bathroom because I needed it to get ready for work. The image came out of the bathroom turned and walked up the hallway and dissipated. At this point "Y" opened the bedroom door and asked me if I was talking to her.
I did not want to alarm her at what I had just witnessed. So I said to her I just wanted to know if she needed to use the bathroom because I needed to get ready for work. She said no thank you and turned that went back into the bedroom. At this point in time with having three bachelor guys under one roof we did a lot of entertaining. In fact it was "R" who nicknamed the entity or spirit "Margaret". Sometimes when we would have guests over watching television or playing cards Margaret would start acting up. "R" would would basically say to me "Don't say anything".
Guests would ask us what the noise was coming from and we would just say next-door. Then one day we had a Sunday brunch with friends and colleagues that we all worked with. As the evening progressed "R" and myself felt that some of our guests had a little too much to drink so if we knew they were driving we would hide their car keys. Some of the guests slept over. The next morning "R" and myself were up early to head off to work, one of the guests had just woken up. We told her that there was a fresh pot of coffee on and when her boyfriend woke up they could leave at their leisure and just make sure the front door got locked.
The young woman went into the kitchen, got herself a cup of coffee, and started to clean up the dishes from the day before. At this point she noticed the little hand waving at her through the kitchen door. She was absolutely terrified. After backing her way around the kitchen to see through the kitchen doorway she saw no one there. She then ran to the front room to wake-up her boyfriend who was asleep on the sofa. He thought by her reaction that something terrible had happened in the middle of the night.
She wanted to leave the house immediately but her boyfriend said he had to use the bathroom first. She would not let him close the bathroom door. I later saw this woman that evening and she was furious with me that I had not told her about Margaret.
One summer morning I had been sleeping with a new girlfriend in the guest bedroom in the basement where it was nice and cool. My girlfriend got out of bed and went up to the kitchen to get something to drink. She immediately came back downstairs and woke me up, asking me if my other roommate "J" always got up first thing in the morning and smoked in the living room.
This surprise me because I knew "J" did not smoke at all and he was in bed with the flu. I ran upstairs to see who was in the house. There was no one in the living room and I could not smell smoke. I went back downstairs and asked my girlfriend what she had seen. She said she did not get a good look at who ever it was because she was only wearing a T-shirt and she was embarrassed. She said the person was of slender build and had long hair and she could smell smoke.
Things seemed to quiet down for while and then one evening I was standing in the front hallway by the front door talking to a cinematographer friend of mine about a music video that we were about to work together on. Then we both heard a women's voice say "Ian", like someone was trying to get my attention. My friend turned to me and said "I'll let you go, talk to you tomorrow.", and left. I then walked through to the kitchen to where "R" and his girlfriend were at the table working on their taxes. I asked them if they had called me. They said they had not said a word. I then called my friend on his cell phone and asked him if he had heard someone called my name, he said yes.
I had asked the landlord about the history of the house and he told me that he had lived in the house for a longtime before us. I asked him if anything strange had happened to him while he lived in the house. He laughed and said no. He eventually asked me if I wanted to buy the house, because he was going to sell it. "R" and myself discussed the idea but decided the timing was bad because he was going to Australia and I was going on a six-week tour in Europe. I lived in that house for eight years so moving was a real pain. It's surprising how much stuff you can collect. My girlfriend, who is now my wife, and I were moving in together to a new house. Her sister offered to give us a hand in moving.
She had never been in the house and did not know it's history. She was not in the house for more than a minute before she walked into the kitchen, turnaround, looking quite startled and said "Who is the girl I just saw in the kitchen?"
She left the house immediately. My wife also had been temporarily locked in the upstairs bathroom by Margaret for a short time. On the very last night I was in the house moving out the last odds and ends by myself, "Margaret" really started acting up. I was dying to call some of my more skeptical friends to come over and give me at hand. You could hear her banging around upstairs and when I was outside, she'd peak through the windows at me and then duck away. After I had the van all packed up I walked around the house talking out loud to Margaret telling her that I was leaving and she should leave to, because everything must move on.
Does this detailed story sound familiar? Do you have anything to add? Have you experienced something similar?
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