The Ghouls Next Door

People are strange. This is not a controversial statement - but there are some stories which contain descriptions of people who seem to take this strangeness to a whole new level. There are social recluses, paranoiacs, perverts, religious obsessives and pyramid scheme pushers - but if some of the tales told by certain individuals are to be believed then there may be a far stranger group of people out there walking among us day to day. It might even be something of a stretch to call these people humans at all. They seem somehow otherworldly...

## Thin Walls

Paranormal investigator and author David Weatherly was speaking at the *Sacramento UFO/Paranormal Summit* in June of 2012 when a man named Marcel came up to him in order to relate the story of a bizarre experience he had had in the Autumn of 2010 while living in a New York City apartment building. A strange couple moved into the flat across the hall from him. He was on the third floor of a downtown apartment at the time, having moved in at the beginning of the year. The place was '*old and run-down*', but it was all that he could afford at the time. He had a roommate who travelled a lot - meaning that despite the fact that he technically shared his apartment he was alone most of the time. There was a fairly high turnover rate among the tenants of the apartment block, anyways. It was Autumn when a man named Jeff moved into the apartment across the hall from him.

Jeff seemed to be something of a recluse - never wanting to talk when Marcel ran into him in the hallways. The only real interactions he had with him were when Jeff briefly mumbled '*hello*'. Marcel guessed that Jeff was probably working from home '*or something*' because he hardly ever left his apartment, and kept his television on day and night. It was bascally never turned off. Suddenly, another strange individual joined Jeff. She looked Asian, and seemed to be in her twenties like Jeff. Marcel saw her in the corridor and said hello to her - whereupon she looked at him strangely and pointed to her apartment door before saying '*I stay here*'. This was obviously odd, but Marcel assumed that it might've been due to her not speaking much English. Strangely, however, after this she didn't leave the scene and instead just watched Marcel walk down the hallway. When he reached the steps, he turned to see if she had been following him but simply found her staring at him. As if she'd only just realised that Marcel was looking at her, she suddenly went back into the apartment and slammed the door. Marcel wondered if he'd somehow frightened her. Marcel didn't see either of them for a few weeks after that, but he was aware of them constantly having takeout meals being delivered. Pizza, Chinese, and seemingly everything else. He guessed that the strange couple didn't cook at all - but he wondered where they could be getting all the money to constantly afford takeout food.

It was now November, and Marcel had lost his job at the company he was working for due to the aforementioned company having completely shut down. He had known this was coming, and so he had saved up enough money to be able to keep paying his rent for a few months - but after this, his lease would expire and he was thus planning to move to Boston to find another job. His well-travelled roommate returned for a couple of weeks - and one night the pair were sitting in the apartment sharing some drinks when the conversation drifted towards the odd couple in the apartment across the hall. The roommate asked Marcel about them - showing that he also thought that they were weird, and so Marcel asked him to explain why he had asked the question so that he could garner more details about them. The roommate said that a college friend of his had delivered pizza to their apartment a day previously, and that they had apparently made a noticeable effort to make sure that the delivery man couldn't see into their apartment. Marcel's roommate had also had a run-in with them in which he said hello and the couple '*practically ran away*'. This sparked the pair to talk about the different possibilities which could maybe explain their exceptionally bizarre neighbours. They acted paranoid, but they didn't seem like drug dealers because nobody else ever came to their apartments except for people delivering food - many of whom Marcel and his roommate knew personally.

The roommate left again, this time to be with his family for Thanksgiving, and Marcel was left on his own again in the apartment. It was the 25th of November - two days before Thanksgiving - and Marcel had just come home after meeting up with some friends at a nearby coffee shop. It was cold outside, and he was moving as briskly as he could - scurrying up his stairs so that he could get inside and retreat to somewhere warmer. When he reached his floor, he quickly rounded the corner onto his home corridor - and Jeff and his girlfriend were stood there by their door. They seemed shocked to see him, and the woman dropped one of the two grocery bags she had been carrying, meaning that some of its contents fell out into the hallway. She glared at him, as if it was somehow his fault. Jeff fumbled around with his keys to try and get into their apartment. Marcel smiled and apologised - reaching down to pick up some of the spilt items on the floor. The only items in the bag had seemingly been canned meats. There was no bread, no household items, no toiletries - just a myriad of preserved meat. Spam, deviled ham, potted meat and canned fish now littered the corridor.

Marcel was grovelling around on the floor trying to gather the spilt items when Jeff turned away from the door to look down at him. He commanded him to '*just leave it!*' in a highly irritable tone - and as Marcel looked up at him, he was horrified to see that his eyes had turned '*solid black*'. In that moment of what I can only assume was bafflement and mild panic, Marcel quickly realised that the unnamed woman was also staring at him with the same terrifying black eyes. He clarified to Weatherly that there was '*no way it was a trick of the light*' because of how close he was to the strange woman. Dumbfounded, he just stared into her dark eyes as they changed back into the brown-irised eyes that she had previously displayed. The whole incident must've lasted just a few seconds. Jeff had gotten the door open at this point, and the couple rushed through the doorway and vanished into the apartment in such a hurry that they left some of their canned meat on the floor.

Terrified, Marcel shut himself back up in his apartment and called the friends who he had previously been planning to see for Thanksgiving. They offered to let him stay over at theirs - and he quickly took them up on their offer, packing his bags and leaving promptly. As he was leaving the apartment, he realised that the canned meat in the corridor had vanished. He ended up staying with his friends longer than he had expected - still being '*too disturbed*' to venture back to his apartment. Eventually he decided to face his fears, and returned to the accursed apartment block on the 29th of November - the Monday after Thanksgiving.

The first thing he noticed was that the television wasn't on in Jeff's apartment. It was quite jarring to have something which had previously been chattering away all hours of the day and night sitting silent. Marcel resumed his normal routine, but after a couple of days he realised that there were no more delivery people coming to the malevolent apartment opposite him. When he went to drop off his rent check, he asked his landlord if he knew anything about what had happened to Jeff and his girlfriend. The landlord seemed to become slightly irritated at this question, and quickly dismissed it by saying that they had ditched out on their lease and moved out during the middle of the night - leaving him with no idea as to where they had gone.

## The Aftermath

Despite the fact that the mysterious couple had vanished, their effects on Marcel's life wouldn't be so quick to leave him. First, he started to develop claustrophobia. He had never previously been afraid of small spaces - he remembers often hiding in a closet under his stairs when he was growing up. He would spend hours in there, pretending that it was a '*secret cave*' - but now he found himself not only claustrophobic, but afflicted with panic after even just a moment spent in a confined space. However, this wasn't the only bizarre effect. He would become an unwilling vegetarian - he had previously had a diet quite heavy in meat, but after his run-in with the weird pair, he found that he could no longer stomach it.

In fact, some chicken he ate shortly after being caught in the black-eyed gaze of the devilish duo triggered a tough bout of sickness which stayed with him all throughout the holidays. At first he attributed it to a case of food poisoning - and he hardly ate anything else for the rest of the holidays because he would continually vomit. Eventually, he started feeling normal again - but this wouldn't last, and his sickness would come back immediately after he ate some sausage and eggs for breakfast one morning. His sickness lasted for the rest of the day after that, and so he took himself to the doctor to see if they could identify the problem - which they duly failed to do. He attempted to keep going as normal - but he would continually get sick. Instead of just eating nothing until the period of sickness passed, a friend of his suggested that he add one item of food into his diet each day until he hit the thing that was making him sick. He added toast, then bananas - and then eventually chicken, which quickly triggered a vomiting episode. Since then, he has been forced into vegetarianism, seeing as any and all meat will seemingly immediately make him sick.

In conclusion, Marcel stated that he doesn't think that the couple were human. He reckons that they were just '*hiding in human form*' and that their anger made them temporarily drop their guard and show him their black eyes. This case is particularly intriguing to me because I have never heard of such an odd physical reaction to a brush with the unknown. I've dealt with cases in which people have grown taller, grown shorter, lost weight and even developed cancer - but never a case of unwilling vegetarianism!