The Window

A theme of this season's archive has been the memory inherit to a place. Suzen JueL is a talented singer, artist and a dear friend. She shares us with us another example of paranormal memory.

  
The Window
Submitted by Suzen JueL
About 1994. Minneapolis.

I was excited to move. It was a huge house with 11 people living there, all musicians. I was given the attic . . .the floor was busted in several places, so I threw heavy Victorian rugs over them. There were four windows, each one had busted-out glass in the four pieces and the wind blew right thru day and night. It was April and there was no insulation. It was quite cold at night and pretty hot during the day. A small ladder came out of roof, onto my bedroom floor.

I decided to start organizing the broken down attic that was now to be my new home and some friends and I drove to pick up a few more of my things. It was several hours later before we returned. Lance, the owner, had a guard dog, a retired police dog who would bark at anyone that was a stranger. As we were driving up the road towards the house, we were looking in that attic and noticed a light was on. I hadn't left it on. It was swinging back and forth and a taller man with a black hat and coat on swooped under the light as it swished back and forth, his shadow being cast in shard like shadows on the angled bare wood ceiling. There were three of us, Lance and I and "kid.” Kid was a young boy in his late teens. We all wondered what we just saw, since no one else was in the house but the three of us at this point. We unlocked the doors. We all took a different entrance and the dog was sound asleep on the stairs. I run the three flights of stairs into the skinny steps into the attic. The light is off. It's perfectly still.

Several days had gone by and I had finally unpacked my guitar and sat on the edge of my bed and began to play. My right side became slightly chilled. I heard whispering of sorts in my ear, but nothing I could make out. It wasn't a feeling of fear at all but actually rather peaceful. Not like I would have expected for not being able to SEE anything in broad daylight.

My bed was in the North Window, or no reason other than I liked it there. When I would sleep, I would have the constant feeling of being pushed out the window. Several weeks later a new guy moved into the other half of the attic in the lower part. The next morning we were having coffee and I asked if he had slept ok. He said 'I slept fine, except all night I kept feeling like something was trying to push me out the window. He had also set his bed in the north window on the lower side. That's when I told him how it had happened to me as well. This is when the dialog started happening between various roommates.

Another time, I was sitting in the attic, reading when I large creature hopped thru the attic and went right thru the wall. I didn't know what it was. It kind of looked like a large calico rabbit or a cat. One of my roommates and her boyfriend, who lived on the 2nd level, had a cat that never left the room but I thought I'd ask anyway. I ran down the skinny flight of stairs and knocked on their door where they were sitting with their cat, watching TV. I mentioned to them what I had seen and more conversation started.

A few months later, the previous tenants came to visit and had told us of their experiences and the smoke that came down from attic in to their room, from under the door. There had been a fire there over 80 years prior and a man had jumped from the north window.

The attic ceilings were charred from the scorch, something we never paid much attention to, because it was an old house and we knew it. Stories confirmed, although some felt it differently than others and some felt nothing at all.