Uptown Dallas – the (unfortunately) undisputed center of nightlife in all the Metroplex. This area of town is most certainly known for a lot of things. From the vile and gruesome to the very essence of pretentious evil. Things like the $40,000 millionaire who loves to brag about how his dad got him a job at his rich friend’s dealership without an interview. Dallasite princesses wearing skirts so high you can see the tops of their ass cheeks who decide to cut the unisex bathroom line because “Ladies go first.” Vagrants who shamble towards you at the pace of a zombie begging for chili cheese dogs from 7/11.
This is the place where nightmares are made.
In short, Uptown is known for a lot of unconventionally scary things. It is not known for those more commonly creepy occurrences: crimson-eyed demons, ghastly ghouls, possible poltergeist activity at the first apartment you ever lived in by yourself … you know… the usual. But, unfortunately for me, that last example may have been the case when I moved into an apartment complex called the Trianon in the summer of 2013.
This dwelling, nestled into the northwestern part of Uptown, had none of the familiar signs of being home to paranormal activity. It wasn’t an old building with lots of history. As far as I know, it wasn’t constructed atop an old Indian burial ground. Nobody was savagely mutilated in my unit. I hadn’t played with an Ouija board or offered my soul to the devil for an unlimited supply of chicken fingers from Chicken Express. It seemed to be a pretty ordinary place.
Though I am very interested in the paranormal, I should say that I am pretty levelheaded when it comes to hearing about people’s experiences. I’m not one to jump the gun and cry “Ghost!” when someone hears an eerie noise in the night or finds their leftover Panda Express magically disappeared from the fridge after a night of drinking. Most of the time, creepy occurrences can be explained away with a rational explanation. But that being said, I experienced a few disturbing events that to this day I cannot explain.
The first incident happened almost immediately after moving in. One of my friends was going for a run nearby and decided she’d swing by to see my new place. It was getting close to sunset when she arrived and after giving her a tour of my new digs, we sat in my living room and caught up on all the hottest gossip about our group of friends. She was in mid-sentence when all of the sudden, we both heard a noise coming from my front door. At first, we couldn’t even tell what the noise was. Was it a knock? Was someone trying to open the door? The sound was so low, we couldn’t tell. After looking towards the origin of the noise, we gave each other a puzzled look and went back to our conversation.
RATTLE! RATTLE! RATTLE!
Our conversation was interrupted again, but this time with a violet jiggling of the handle at my front door. We exchanged an even more puzzled look, this time with a hint of fright in our eyes. I stood up and slowly started approaching the front of my apartment.
RATTLE! RATTLE! RATTLE! The door handle rapped again, this time even more aggressively.
My feet paused in place, and I felt my torso retreat after hearing the noise. I loudly said, “Hello!” and the rattling temporarily stopped. I then continued inching may way closer to the door.
RATTLE! RATTLE! RATTLE!
The door handle jiggled again when I was only a few feet away. Not only could I hear the handle, but now I could see it violently shaking like it was possessed. I challenged whoever…or whatever…was on the other side again, “Can I help you!?” The noise stopped again.
I raced to the door and paused for half a second to look through the peephole on the door. After seeing nothing on the other side I yanked the door open and looked left down the long hallway.
Nothing.
To the right of my apartment, the hallway breaks to the left after a dozen steps or so from my door. I immediately exited my unit and went to investigate down that part of the hallway.
Nothing.
Unless someone was sprinting away from my door with blazing 3.40 40-yard-dash speed, there was no way I wouldn’t have seen him or her…or it...given how quickly I went to inspect what was happening after the last rattling of the door. The nearest exit either way was at least 30 or 40 yards away, and at the very least, I would have seen those doors closing upon their exit. But I didn’t see a damn thing.
I reentered the apartment and went back to explain to my friend that I had no idea what had just happened. But as I began walking back towards the living room, I paused, turned around, and went back to double lock my door with a mildly trembling hand.
Talk about a hell of an introduction to a new place.
After that first incident, everything was quiet for awhile. No inanimate objects inexplicably moved on their own. No strange sounds emanated from under the bed. Really the only scary occurrence in my apartment during this stretch of time was what took place in the bathroom after eating a bad batch of convenience store chicken wings. So I chalked that door handle event up to something rational.
But a few months later, the eeriness poked its creepy head above the surface and lurked in my apartment once again.
One weekend, a friend came to visit me from out of town. And after a Friday and Saturday filled with many libations, laughs, and failed attempts to talk to girls, it was time for him to head home. I had somewhere to be that morning, so we said our goodbyes while he was packing, and then I headed to the bathroom to shower and get ready for the day.
My friend shouted out a final “Later dude,” and I heard him open and close the door as he left. I hopped into the shower a few moments later and then heard the door open and aggressively close a second time. I figured perhaps he forgot something and came back in to grab it. At the time I didn’t really think much of it. That is until I spoke with him a few hours later on the phone while I was sitting on my couch.
“Hey man, why did you slam the door so hard when you came back into my apartment earlier?” I asked with a jokingly perturbed tone.
“What do you mean? I didn’t come back in,” he responded.
“You mean you didn’t come back in to get something after you first left? I heard the door open and slam,” I countered.
“Wait, that wasn’t you? I heard the door slam too and figured it was you locking the door or something,” he said.
After hearing that, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and slowly turned my head to look at this ever mysterious door. “This place is starting to scare the bejesus out of me,” I whispered to myself.
That made two unexplainable events in my home. And each of those events had two witnesses, so I knew I wasn’t just imagining things.
Again, months passed before something else happened. But when that something else did happen, it was perhaps the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
It was late one October night. The moon was out and was shining with menacing intensity. The air was cool, and there was a thickness to the evening that made for a perfectly creepy Halloween season night. So perfectly creepy in fact, that a friend and I decided that it was appropriate to watch a scary movie.
As we sat in my living room watching the show and talking about potential upcoming Halloween plans, something interrupted our train of thought.
Rattle. Rattle. Rattle.
We both looked down at my heavy glass coffee table in a state of surprise. The table was vibrating. It was subtle at first, but still noticeable.
Rattle! Rattle! Rattle!
The vibrating changed from a mild clatter to a wickedly violent clanking.
“What in the hell is going on here?” we both thought.
Was it an earthquake? Was a loud truck rumbling in the garage below my unit? Trying to search for a rational explanation, I looked around to other items in my apartment to see if they were moving as well. Nothing else. Not a single item – including bobble heads on my TV stand only a few feet away – was moving. At. All. It just didn’t add up that something would cause the table to tremble like that without making other things to shake as well.
Our eyes returned to the table, which was still viciously vibrating. I was in a mild state of shock seeing this very heavy glass table being rattled by an unseen force. It must have been going for a solid thirty seconds at this point. Unsure of what to do, I knelt down in front of the table and grabbed onto it. I could feel the tremors vibrating through my hands, up my arms, and into my body. My eyes and my one good ear were not playing tricks on me. This was really happening.
I added more force behind my grip and the table temporary halted its animated behavior. I inhaled deeply, slowly exhaled, and then removed my hands from the table.
Rattle. Rattle. Rattle.
Slowly at first.
RATTLE! RATTLE! RATTLE!
The table amplified its assault with maximum force. All we could do was sit there with shocked looks on our faces and watch as this seemingly possessed piece of furniture made a mockery of the laws of physics.
Finally, after seconds that seemed like hours, the table finished making its point. The vibration slowed to a trickle and then abruptly stopped.
There was only one thing left to say at that point.
“Whoa.”
After the night of the living table incident, the unexplainable occurrences sauntered back to the grave. I lived there for several more months, but that was the last time anything truly creepy took place in the apartment.
Perhaps there was a rational explanation for everything that happened. Maybe it was just a wonky set of circumstances that lead to my friends and me perceiving things happening in a certain way. And it’s possible that I was just getting Punk’d by Ashton Kutcher. But I know what I saw, and I know what I experienced.
But if you’re skeptical – if you think that this is all just a load of silly-assed nonsense – then I challenge you to spend a night in room 2015 at 2820 McKinnon Street. You may just experience your own terror at the Trianon!