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The original was posted on /r/ghoststories by /u/ObviousWombat623 on 2025-10-06 04:44:33+00:00.
This is my one and only first-hand experience with what I can only describe as a poltergeist. This happened in the late 90’s. I was young (21) and living with my boyfriend at the time. Neither of us made a lot of money, so we got a cheap apartment in the grey area between the “good” part of town and the “bad” part. I worked days, he worked nights. I came home from work one day, said goodbye to my boyfriend as he headed to work, changed, and then went grocery shopping. When I came back home, I walked into chaos. A few things hit me right away - every single light was on and the stereo was up as loud as it would go, tuned to some talk radio station. I knew I had turned off the lights when I left for the store, because it was habit to keep the power bill affordable. Not only was the stereo not on when I left (nor did I have it on before I left), the station it was tuned to was nothing that either my boyfriend or I would listen to. It was one of those stereos with station presets, and press buttons to tune it. The station was nowhere near to one of the presets, so it wasn’t like it was bad reception that was causing it to fade into a neighbouring station (those who know, know….).
As I walked through the apartment to go turn off the stereo, I noticed the cat was nowhere in sight. After turning off the stereo, I went looking for her. I noticed that every sink was completely full to the brim, but the faucets were off. All the hairs on my arms and back of my neck were standing up. I finally heard the cat meow and I found her in the top cabinet of the in-wall pantry. There’s absolutely no way she could have gotten in there on her own - the door was above my head, and it was a door with a small groove on the side that you used to open it, no handles or knobs. There was nothing nearby - no table, no countertop, no ledge - that the cat could have used to even jump up in there, let alone open the door on her own.
I freaked out and called my boyfriend. He listened to me babble about what had happened, and stayed on the phone with me while I did a tour of the apartment to make sure no one had broken in and was hiding in a closet or something. Nobody there. He had me confirm that nothing was missing, so we decided it wasn’t a robbery break-in. As I was still pretty freaked and on the verge of hyperventilating, he called the front desk of the apartment complex to see if there had been any issues around our apartment, to see if maybe someone started to break in and ran off before they finished or something. Turns out, there had been an altercation at the apartment next door to us. We had long suspected that our neighbours were dealing drugs, and thought maybe it was related to that. They said security had to escort some very angry men away, but that nothing had happened to our apartment directly.
BF said jokingly that it must have been a ghost trying to make it look like someone was home by turning on the lights and putting the stereo on a talk station, so that the altercation next door didn’t end with one of the guys trying to break in and steal our things. He then said something like “the ghost had better do some housework to pay for the higher utility bills we’re going to get”, and said we’d talk about it the next day when we were both off of work.
He didn’t want to talk about it much in the apartment, but when we left to go for a walk, he said he wasn’t sure if it was a ghost, but if it was, he believed that the last thing you wanted to do was get scared. By treating it lightly, he felt like it wouldn’t “feed” the ghost fear. Since it hadn’t done anything destructive, and the worst thing it had done was put the cat in a cabinet, we should just let it be.
A few days later, I got a call at work from him where it was his turn to sound a little freaked out. He asked if I had vacuumed and put the dishes away before I left for work. I told him no, and he said he came back from an errand to find the entire apartment completely vacuumed, perfect lines, but no footprints leading to the closet the vacuum was stored in. Also, all the dishes were put away in the proper places. He said that maybe the ghost heard his joke about doing housework and took it seriously.
Nothing else really happened after that, though the cat was obsessed with sitting on the edge of the tub and staring into it from that point on, something she had never done before. My own guess was that our polite poltergeist was a former resident who maybe died in the bathtub, and who was trying to protect their apartment from a potential threat. Who knows?