When I first saw the listing, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. 

It was early April, and the student housing market had dried up quicker than the last snowbanks littering Traill campus. My freshman year in residence was coming to a swift end, and while all of my dorm-mates had been finding places to live next year, I had been busy doing more important things, like honing my natural talent for procrastination. 

Before I knew it, everything decent left on the market was outside my budget.

But then I saw it, hidden deep on the fifth page of places4students.com. There, tucked between a studio apartment with rent high enough to raise my blood pressure and a room being sublet by some guy named Jett who claimed I’d have to share it with his pet ferrets, lay the listing for my perfect house. 

Or so I thought… 

It was old, but beautiful. A spacious living room, lots of natural light, a good location on Water Street with easy access to the bus network, and just over 650 dollars a month for each of the two rooms! This was too good an opportunity to pass up, so I alerted my only other friend who had yet to sign a lease and booked a showing as soon as I could.

The house was just as impressive in person. Apparently, it was about a century old, but the architect had been inspired by the Gothic style, hence the arch windows and ornate trim. 

The bedrooms were cozy, the living room beautiful, the kitchen pristine, and the basement… 

Well, sure, the basement was a bit scary. The staircase groaned as we descended. It was a dusty cave with rough hewn rock walls and only one tiny lightbulb. The cavernous darkness seemed to go on forever. But it’s not like we had to go down there anyways, and the rest of the house was amazing! So we put the basement out of our minds and signed the lease. 

The following September, after we finished moving in, I sat in the living room with my roommate. As we lounged on our new couch, I remarked on how lucky we had been. She smirked. “I dunno, there’s always a catch, right? What if the place is haunted?” 

I laughed along with her and moved on, but as I lay in bed that night, her words kept rattling around my head. What if our house was haunted? 

Then I heard it. 

The tap-tap-tapping in my walls.

It started out quiet, a faint whisper in the night that I dismissed as a product of my overactive imagination. Then one night I was roused from my peaceful slumber by the sound of a hundred tiny fingers drumming on my wall. I cowered in fear and covered my face with a pillow, waiting for the noise to stop. Eventually it did, but every now and then in the dead of night, I still hear rhythmic tapping.

A week after the tapping started, my roommate found the face. It was subtle, but there was definitely a mark in the wallpaper that hadn’t been there before. It looked like a pair of eyes and a mouth twisted into a knowing smile. I could’ve sworn it looked familiar. I decided to pry my landlord for information.

By the beginning of October, I was fully convinced that we had an unwanted third roommate living rent-free. And not the typical “roommate’s boyfriend who swears he’s gonna get a job soon and keeps eating your groceries” kind. 

According to an online forum for paranormal investigators I had joined, we almost certainly had a poltergeist infestation. The noises in the night, the growing face in the wallpaper, and the recent trend of lights flickering off and on whenever I entered a room. It all made sense! 

That was why the rent had been so low, nobody wanted to live in a haunted house!

Near the end of October, I decided that something had to be done. The paranormal forum said there were two types of poltergeists, malicious and benign. Ours was definitely malicious. I had started waking up with chills down my spine each morning, and every moment I spent in the house, visions of spirits, demons, and monsters danced around the edge of my vision.

I was dizzy and confused, barely able to keep track of what day of the week it was—even more than during last year’s midterms! I could’ve sworn the face in the wall was starting to resemble Michael Eamon. I knew something had to be done.

On the night of October 31st, when the line between our world and the world of spirits was most blurry, I descended into the basement to conduct an exorcism. I lit the candles, drew the glyphs, and chanted “spirit, begone!” A translucent figure materialized before me and spoke in a raspy whisper:

“Shit, seriously? You’re evicting me? I’ve been, like, a perfect tenant!”

After the shock wore off, I explained to the ghost that I wasn’t evicting her, I was exorcising her because of all the havoc she’d wreaked on my home. She seemed confused, claiming that she never even left the basement.

“But what about all the noises in the walls? The face trapped in the wallpaper? The flickering lights??”

“Oh, did the landlord not tell you? Figures. An old building like this, squirrels can get inside the walls pretty easily. And I’d reckon that face is just water damage from a leaking pipe. As for the lights, have you seen the wiring here??” She gestured to a bundle of exposed copper wire dangling below the basement ceiling. “I don’t think it’s been repaired since before I died!”

“But my hallucinations!! I wake up in a chill every morning plagued by demonic visions!!”

At this, she looked confused, and floated up through the ceiling before descending again with a concerned grimace on her face. “I hate to break it to you, but there’s a ton of black mold in your room, which would explain the hallucinations. As for the chills, it looks like the furnace isn’t working. These are pretty serious problems, you’ve gotta talk to your landlord and get them fixed.”

When I explained how difficult it was to communicate with my landlord, the phantom imparted me with arcane knowledge beyond the bounds of the world I had known before. “If your landlord won’t keep your house in a livable state, you should contact the Landlord-Tenant Board. Ontario actually has pretty robust protections for renters, but you need to advocate for yourself to take advantage of them. I can help you out, I’ve picked up some knowledge over the years. Just please don’t try to exorcise me again, the housing market is even worse on the other side…”

My house isn’t perfect, but ever since that day, things have been getting better. I just needed a bit of supernatural aid to teach me how to advocate for my rights as a tenant. 

The only catch is that I promised to help my phantasmal friend hunt down her killer, but that’s a problem for another day.