One Halloween in New York, I was the monster

How was I supposed to explain to the 911 operator what my emergency actually was?

Sometimes you're scared, but then you find out you're the scariest thing in the room (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

“This is 911, what’s your emergency?” My fingers tightened around the phone. I didn’t know where to begin.

Hours earlier, my roommates and some college classmates had been huddled on the carpet in my New York apartment telling ghost stories. Between sips of wine, I shared the weird things that had been taking place over the three years I’d been living in my old East Village apartment. It was built in the early 1900s it had its quirks. One of the cupboards used to be a dumbwaiter, five of the six bedrooms led into each other, and there was one tiny bathroom for the entire 2200 feet.

I told the group about a few scares. How one night two men wandered up the five flight walk-up to our front door, banging to get in, leaving blood and vomit all over the hallway. A different time, a random drunken frat boy type stormed one of the bedrooms, causing high-pitched screams from my five roommates (met by even louder screams by him).

I never told my Midwestern mom about all the times people on East 14th Street tried to follow me into the building; the thought of her making me move to a different building and leave my friends behind seemed scarier than getting robbed. For around $1300 a month, rent was still almost half as expensive as sharing a dorm room. Getting to be a student living just 15 minutes from class, I tried not to overthink it. A few weird events build character, right?

“This place must be haunted,” one of my friends, Sarah, said from her spot on the rug. “How’d you even find this?” She’d earlier mentioned looking for a new apartment.

“There’s actually this exact same layout downstairs. It’s for rent right now if you want me to take you down to see it. It’s totally vacant,” I offered. She agreed.

I walked down first; everyone lined up behind me. Slowly I reached for the front door handle of the vacant apartment. I turned the knob. It was open. Success. I opened the door and strained my eyes to search for a light. Crack. Crack. A noise rang out from inside the dark apartment, loud enough that everyone heard it. We sprinted back up the stairs, into our apartment, screaming.

“What was that?” I asked, leaning against our front door.

"Do you think it was…. a ghost?” Sarah asked.

“Are you kidding me? It was just the pipes.”

We all agreed it was probably nothing, even though we all had heard something. Just an old building settling, something I’d heard my parents say at home in Chicago when there was a noise and we were unsure what it really meant.

“I left the door open, I need to go shut it,” I said. Everyone agreed it was fine. The place was old. But we all grabbed objects for self-defense, just in case. A phone charger. A hairbrush. Most sinister, a metallic rainbow butter knife.

I headed down the stairs first again, this time an empty rosé bottle tight in my grip. I looked down at the front door that I’d left open. Now, it was closed. No one lived above me — there were no other apartments on the floor. Something, someone, closed the door to an apartment that was supposed to be empty.

“This is 911, what’s your emergency?”

I explained the situation to the dispatcher, unsure what was going on, but with my building’s previous record of weird situations, I thought this was probably the best move. The woman on the phone agreed to send a car and hung up.

Minutes later, I buzzed up two police officers. I peered over the railing as they quietly climbed the stairs to the fourth floor apartment. Without knocking, they entered through the same door we had opened. At first, silence. Then, commotion. A dozen more cops came darting up the stairs and into the apartment. They had found something in there.

Three of the policeman came up to our floor shortly after. They had found a man living in the vacant apartment.

“Seemed like you scared him more than he scared you,” one of the cops said, in an effort to defuse the situation. They explained that he seemed to be someone working on fixing up the apartment downstairs while it was for rent. The man they found had made himself a bed on the wooden floor before getting back to painting in the morning. He wasn’t harming anyone. He was just existing in a space no one was using. We’d bothered him. It no longer mattered if ghost stories were scary — suddenly, I felt like I was.

“Do you want us to make him leave?” the officer asked.

“No, no, it’s fine,” my roommates and I agreed.

That night, we all huddled together in one of the bedrooms. None of us could sleep. It wasn’t because of the scary stories we were telling earlier. It was because, without realizing it, and in a city where so many invisible workers have no place to lay their head, we were the thing causing someone else's fear.