Phone calls and knocking in a rented apartment in Lipetsk Oblast

There wasn't any kind of wild creepy stuff that would take your breath away. While I was reading old threads, I remembered.

Anyway, at my previous job, one of the ways to earn money was a business trip — they paid well for it and gave you rented housing. The only bad thing was that when you go there, you go for a long time (you open a new branch, hire staff), so you start missing your family, and since you don't know the area, you sit and fuck around at home after work.

But this was a different case: I didn't come there alone, they foisted a guy on me so we'd go and open a store together, because our shifts categorically always had 2 people, and things go faster if you're together. So we arrived in this village in Lipetsk Oblast. A settlement like any other, small as hell, zero entertainment, a village of a village, worse than the one I'm from. Let me explain: the company had a principle of opening in some ass-end of the world under the pretext that there's no competition, residents would have to travel far to the city for electronics, so sales would be good.

They put us up in a two-room apartment, and it was just straight back to the USSR — carpets on the wall in every room and on the floor, crystal standing proudly for decoration. I remember one of the rooms had a huge number of icons (they'd even allocated a decent, not small spot for them on the sideboard), but overall nothing unusual, just a flat like any other. We'd been working there for God knows how long, and finally we managed to find a local girl, with whom I later became very close.

And so it was Groundhog Day: we'd sit through our shift and go home, to different rooms, nothing unusual, strange, or scary. But after I became friends with that girl, I sometimes hung out with her and her friends around the village, just to have some kind of leisure, because sitting at home was boring.

Then the management decided that since at least 1 local had been hired, we didn't need the guy anymore, and they took him away to do great deeds on other business trips, and I was left alone in that apartment. For three or four days after he left, everything was as usual, it just became a bit creepy — like, it's not a studio apartment, it's a fairly big flat, and I'm alone. And the only thing that saved me was Tanya (the local girl) taking me along on her walks, but one day it didn't work out, and I stayed home. I'm lying on the bed, watching a movie — I still remember which one — and I feel in my gut that something's wrong. I'm wearing headphones and can't hear anything, but I feel really uneasy mentally. I take one off and listen, and I realize that in the hallway opposite the front door, the phone is ringing. An old rotary phone. And the time is 2-3 a.m. And my head starts spinning with dissonance: it's night, the phone is a relic, it's not a mobile, so by my logic only neighbors and relatives call that one, and who would need to call here at this hour, given that everyone knows each other in a small settlement and the owners either moved out or have already passed away? You can tell the apartment used to belong to elderly people — are their friends calling or what? If so, why so late? Anyway, I got really scared then, I felt really bad. I pretended it was none of my damn business, but actually I was afraid to pick up the receiver, to find out, to hear what I didn't want to hear, and that was the first bell, literally and figuratively.

I decided I'd worked myself up because of the movie, maybe it was a wrong number or something, then there was a long lull, that was it. But then that phone started ringing almost every day at completely random times. At 5 a.m., at 3 a.m., at 7 a.m., at 11 p.m. I didn't understand who, why, or what for, and for the reasons listed above, I didn't pick up. But I also didn't blab to anyone, to rule out the interference (jokes) of those who knew where I was temporarily living. In the end I decided to turn the phone off, because I was sick of this surreal crap.

After a while I realized that the ringing phone was the lesser of two evils. Suddenly someone started knocking on my door. Fine, if it were just a modest knock, but someone was literally pounding on it with a fist, then yanking the handle.

I'm a fearful, superstitious person by nature, and here I barely knew anyone except that girl and a couple of her friends. I was scared to open the door, even to give away that I was home and hearing all this. I just froze and waited for that annoying thing to calm down. I'd read so much that you shouldn't even look through the peephole, just in case. And you know, I can't imagine what would have happened to me if, with those sounds, I'd seen an empty stairwell.

Of course, I comforted myself with the thought that, say, some drunk mixed up the door and was pounding, but you can mix up a door once, twice, but not on a regular basis (it repeated exclusively at night, but again randomly — sometimes two weeks or a month with nothing, sometimes every other day). As for neighbors, there was some old lady who rarely went out and you could hear her when she did; in any case, you could hear the neighbors' commotion in the stairwell, but with these knocks I couldn't catch a single word or footstep.

At some point I even came to terms with it. But the last straw was this incident: I'm walking home after a walk with my friend, it's almost dawn but still dark, and the street is quiet, I only hear my own footsteps. I'm walking from the center of the village to the house, there's no car, no people behind me, nothing and no one. I enter the stairwell, go up to my second floor — I repeat, no one behind me — I just clicked the lock shut, put the keys on the table in the hallway, and less than a minute passed, I hadn't even really moved away from the door, I would have heard noise behind it (at least the slam of the building's entrance door) if someone had followed me or if the neighbor had come out, and then someone starts knocking on the door again, and my mind understands that there physically can't be anyone there — well, this someone isn't walking on tiptoes at an unreal speed. This time they knocked more frantically than before. That realization didn't make it easier; I just stood there frozen, just wanting it all to stop. I kept thinking, what if I hadn't managed to lock the door, because they weren't just knocking, they were yanking the handle again.

I confess, after that I started winding myself up like crazy. I started filming myself locking the door, just in case, constantly turning around and listening. I told my friend, but obviously it all started long before we met, so she definitely had nothing to do with it.

I had a dream once — you know, where you're asleep and you know you're asleep. And you can't wake up. Or rather, you wake up, but it's a dream again. And that went on for half the night. I dreamed of this apartment, some secret doors in it where there are none in reality. And I dreamed that there was knocking again, and in the dream I decided to look, and I saw a woman there, poking some newspaper with news through the peephole. And I woke up for real, again toward morning, but again still dark.

I got out of bed to come to my senses. I don't remember why, but either to the toilet or for water, I headed toward the bathroom and kitchen, and on my way back I feel something in my gut, but I can't see it yet because it's dark. I notice the door, and it's open — not wide open, but ajar. Given that I definitely closed it, and even if by some miracle I hadn't, I would have slammed it shut (I have a habit of checking at night), the point is that it had never opened by itself before.

Somehow I found the strength to go around the whole apartment looking for intruders, and of course I found no one. Until morning everything was calm, but in such a state of tension I couldn't sleep or work. And I left, without explaining the reasons to management, saying I had personal matters at home.

Nothing strange ever happened again. At first, of course, even in my own apartment I was panically afraid I'd forget to lock the door. Phone calls and knocking still scare me, they give me the shivers, and it's been about 5 years, roughly.