A moment that changed me: I was told my home was haunted – and it made me a tidier, happier person | Life and style

AA year after moving into my apartment in Los Angeles, I was woken up by three noisy strokes at the door of my room at 3 am. I thought there could be an intruder – but I got up, I opened the door, and there was nobody there. I went to the front door, thinking that I had misunderstood it, but there was no one either. I thought I imagined it. Then it continued to happen once a week.

I thought it should be my neighbors upstairs, perhaps work a quarter of the night, but after I came to them to ask questions about the noise, they assured me that they would not be awake at this hour. I asked the man who took care of our building in our 70s apartment if there were problems with the pipes. He said no. At one point, I started putting my dresser in front of the door, because I was so afraid. I couldn’t shake the idea that someone entered my apartment, even if there was no evidence. I haven’t talked to anyone for ages – because if I had done it, I should have recognized how crazy I died.

Finally, I mentioned it to a close friend. I thought she would make fun of me, but she became very serious – it was, she says, a ghost. Worse – it was probably a demon. “Two Knocks is a ghost, Three Knocks is a demon,” she said, adding that I shouldn’t speak to him or recognize his presence because “he will become more daring”. I didn’t believe in any way, so I confided in another friend, hoping for a different reaction. She decided to buy me a session with a ghost hunter who claimed to “erase” such presences.

I thought that the ghost hunter would come to my apartment, or at least organize a phone or a video call, but she just sent me an email saying that she had done everything she had to do at a distance. She had encouraged certain spirits to leave, she said, but there were others-five, she thought-who would not go before he had held what she called an “Expiation Court”. They would be tried at my house.

The Ghostbuster said that the trial was held in my living room. When I moved into the apartment in 2019, my interior designer friend styled this room for me. I wanted a space that felt me ​​really well, and it was beautiful, but I ended up feeling that it was too nice for me to spend time. Aside from the few times I had people, I barely entered my living room, so it didn’t surprise me when she said that the trial happened in there, because it never looked like mine.

I have always been an extremely pleasant pleasure, and although I still didn’t really believe that five ghosts would make a lawsuit in my apartment, I started to feel uncomfortable to be there and to judge Me. They were, I supposed, old or from another era, and it was almost disrespectful to continue living like me. So I started to keep my apartment cleaner and more and more, and I stopped leaving cans of drinks. I had had a painful breakdown shortly shortly, and I had had a lot of connections, but it stopped once I was aware of the ghost test – or I stopped welcoming them, at least. I stopped ordering fast food in the middle of the night and started to eat better. I resumed meditation, making my bed and not hitting the rehearsal button. I did not get dressed for the formality of a courtroom, but I started taking more care of my appearance. I did not believe that the ghosts were real – but if they were, I didn’t want to live in front of them.

Soon I noticed that I was happier and more confident. The feelings of anxiety and guilt that I had transported around my whole life became easier to manage. It was a ridiculous situation, but to face a ghost trial made me feel as if I could face anything. I had grown up in a religious family, and I adopted science and reason as an adult, but experience made me more open to things that could not be explained.

I do not know if the trial reached a verdict – it could still happen – but, last spring, he finally had the impression that the spirits left for good. The changes I have brought to my life, however, have remained largely, and I feel more contained than ever. The purchase of the apartment was like a success – I had been saving it for more than a decade – but also as something that I did not really deserve. I am a catastrophizing and it always seemed that everything could be removed at any time. Now I feel strangely linked to my house, as if we had crossed it together. Slowly, I became more optimistic; I realized that it was not a sin to take advantage of something. And, fortunately, the blow stopped.