The Mirror

So, it was 1970, I was living in a flat in Buffalo, New York. I had been there in Buffalo singing for the winter season with a group I was with that had traveled from Florida to New York and I decided to stay awhile after the group headed back home. I found other singing gigs and enjoyed my singing as a contemporary and rock artist singer and I loved all the people I had met while the bands. It was a wonderful time in my life. So, I decided to find a place to live there in Buffalo.

 

My flat was across the street from Mercy Hospital in Buffalo and on top of an old Dry Cleaners business. It was a huge, lovely old place with lots of charm. The back yard for me was the extended roof top. So cool. It was so much fun up there and the flat included a very strange old attic as well. Kind of creepy, but very cool.

I had been troubled a bit from odd dreams while I was there. Every night it was the same dream. I kept seeing this old man floating over me in dreams while I slept. It was very scary and  I had shared it with my boyfriend as it had happened a few times since we moved into the flat.

I had no idea why this recurring dream was happening to me. The man was old and frightening looking. Seemed like a lonely man. I didn't know who he was. He never spoke to me, only hovered over me. Very creepy! Then I would wake up and he was gone.

 

I had come home from being down town shopping one evening, it was bitter cold outside. I climbed the long steps upstairs to the flats entrance. I had so many bags to lay down to just open the door, the stairs entrance was freezing cold with the wind whipping me, I was in a hurry to get inside. The flat felt so odd when I entered it tonight, I threw my bags on the couch and tried to shake the weird feeling.  It was a scarcely furnished place, I didn't have a lot of home type comforts there. A table and chairs, a small couch and a rocking chair were the only furnishings in the living room, the dining room area of the house only had a small table and two chairs. It was a lonely looking kind of place but for now, it was home. It was just different some how tonight when I came in. I thought maybe I needed a bit more heat on to warm the place up, maybe that would help? It was just freezing outside, I wasn't used to the cold weather being from Florida. So I lit the furnace and turned up the heat. That didn't seem to help however. I still felt odd. I turned the oven on and propped opened the door to heat the kitchen and the bathroom area of the house so I could warm the place up and take my shower.

That didn't really do it either, but that was all I could do to make the flat "feel" better. Nothing I did seemed to take away the weird feeling from the place tonight. I checked all the apartment door locks, they were secure, what was I feeling? I was very aware of something, but it wasn't clear to me, what. It just felt creepy.  I was hoping warming the place up might make a difference.
 

So, thinking this would all pass, I jumped in the shower and hurried through washing my hair as I just couldn't shake this odd feeling I was having. As I threw the shower liner back, I stood their for a moment, wondering why I couldn't shake this strange feeling.

I got out of the shower grabbed my towel, dried off quickly and threw my big white rob on. It was then I noticed the bathroom mirror! To my absolute horror, their was a name written on the mirror from the mist of the warm room! Like someone had written it with their finger. It scarred me so, as I was sure I was the only one in the house all evening.
I called out my boyfriends name, he wasn't home yet. I was really freaked out!

The name on the mirror spelled out "Joe".

I knew people named Joe but why would that be on my mirror?
I hadn't put it there!

 

About an hour passed and my boyfriend came home from work. I said to him immediately when he came into the flat completely  accusing him, "hey thanks for scarring the crap out of me with the name on the mirror in the bathroom"!

He looked at me very puzzled, and a bit annoyed and replied, "what are you talking about"? I continued, the name you wrote on the mirror? Was that suppose to be funny? He said he didn't know what I was talking about! He sounded upset with me. I was assuming he had written that there to scare me. He assured me he had no reason to want to scare me or to write a man's name on the mirror in the bathroom! That did after all make sense. Why would he do that?
That made perfect sense to me, so how did it get there?

He had a point! That would be weird, I thought, so who did write it there? Now I was freaked out a bit more. He went into the bathroom and breathed on the mirror to see the name appear. He said he was confused, he had no idea how that would have gotten there. He asked me if anyone was there that day visiting? I told him I left early to go downtown all day shopping. I had come home only an hour or so before him, taken my shower and there it was!

 

That night as I sleeping, I heard noises in the house. I got up and walked through the flat. I saw nothing. It felt so cold and strange in the flat. I knew I heard those noises, they woke me up! What was going on here?

 

The next day, I saw the young girl from the cleaners  next door sitting outside. She was about seven years old. She was sitting on the front chair near the door downstairs that led to my flat. I went down to say hi to her. She was a beautiful, kind, little red head, blue eyed Irish girl. She told me she knocked on my door yesterday while I was out. She said she peeked through the keyhole into my flat from the stairway door and saw that old man again sitting in my rocking chair. She continued to tell me, "he had seen her looking in at him through the flat keyhole. She asked if I was home? He said only "NO", she asked him if he was my father? He replied again "NO". She told me she had seen this same man in my flat before? She asked me who he was?

I couldn't speak. I was shaking as she told me this! I couldn't believe my ears. I knew she was too young to tell a lie. There was no way she knew what had happened to me last night, she could not possibly know of my dreams!  "She didn't know about my dreams"! This was so beyond creepy to me. I was truly frightened by this. Did she know she was seeing a ghost?

I stayed out of the flat all day. I decided I would move immediately. The moment my boyfriend came home I had the young girl tell him what she told me.

We went and stayed at his mothers home that night.

I moved within a week of the happening.

I was never so glad to be leaving a place in my life.

After I moved away from that flat across the street from the hospital, I remembered something that happened to me in Florida when I was 16. Visiting a friend who lived across the street from a hospital! I now make it known, I stay away from apartments near hospitals! There is some portal, some kind of link there

I don't want to be involved with.  It was one of the worst experiences of my life then, and this one was very close second!
Truth is so much stranger than fiction.