You know you may be living in a Stephen King story, if...
There is a family of two living on the first floor directly under your apartment: a middle-aged mother with a nineteen-year-old daughter. They seem reasonably nice, but most of your interactions with them have been tense. The day you moved in, they "welcomed" you with complaints that your child is making too much noise. Indeed, your child has been running all around the apartment, like she got used to at your old place (which is now her dad's). That was a single-family house where she could run to her heart's content. You realized the problem, apologized, and told the child there will be no running or jumping here. You keep reminding her of the new rules every moment she's about to launch into a run, or even a brisk walk. Being just 5 at the time, she sometimes forgets. The neighbors promptly remind you of her transgressions. They don't tolerate noise at any time of the day. "My mom has to get up for work at 4 a.m., so she goes to sleep very early," says the teenager, coming to your door at 7 p.m. on a sunny spring evening.
Other times they just bang on the ceiling. Usually it's three loud, distinct knocks. Sometimes they come to you to complain a few minutes later. Other times they don't, and you sit there waiting for "the other shoe to drop". Increasingly, though, you notice that you can't correlate those knocks with anything your child (or you) did, at least not above the ordinary. Did they knock because they heard you yell at the child for refusing to brush her teeth? But other times there's not even a remote possibility of that. Sometimes they come and complain after your daughter has been sitting in bed, reading or playing board games for half an hour. Other times they knock in the middle of the day when the child is not even here.
After a few run-ins with the neighbor, your mom (who's staying here for the time being) concludes that those noises are all in the neighbor's head. But she also starts to doubt whether the knocks we're are hearing really come from the downstairs neighbors. But where could they be coming from? Definitely not from the apartment on our left, the only other apartment bordering ours. Your mom, though, hears other noises coming from places where "there can't be anything". Maybe it's maintenance people doing something on the outside of the building, she says. Or in some cases, pigeons. That would explain the cooing in the morning.
Oh, and did the neighbor say she heard your child's footsteps, or did she only infer? That last time she said her dog was barking wildly. She found this fact to be relevant to her complaint. Did she actually conclude that the child was running because her dog started to bark?
You start to wonder if the neighbor is crazy, or if she's hearing the same mysterious knocks that you attribute to her. And the dog... Dogs are supposed to be able to hear and feel things humans can't perceive, right? In urban fantasy and horror, they do. So there may be something the dog is responding to, and it's not your little girl. In a Stephen King tale, it would be something you would never want your little girl to come face to face to. But it would happen precisely because I'm a skeptic. :-)
Other times they just bang on the ceiling. Usually it's three loud, distinct knocks. Sometimes they come to you to complain a few minutes later. Other times they don't, and you sit there waiting for "the other shoe to drop". Increasingly, though, you notice that you can't correlate those knocks with anything your child (or you) did, at least not above the ordinary. Did they knock because they heard you yell at the child for refusing to brush her teeth? But other times there's not even a remote possibility of that. Sometimes they come and complain after your daughter has been sitting in bed, reading or playing board games for half an hour. Other times they knock in the middle of the day when the child is not even here.
After a few run-ins with the neighbor, your mom (who's staying here for the time being) concludes that those noises are all in the neighbor's head. But she also starts to doubt whether the knocks we're are hearing really come from the downstairs neighbors. But where could they be coming from? Definitely not from the apartment on our left, the only other apartment bordering ours. Your mom, though, hears other noises coming from places where "there can't be anything". Maybe it's maintenance people doing something on the outside of the building, she says. Or in some cases, pigeons. That would explain the cooing in the morning.
Oh, and did the neighbor say she heard your child's footsteps, or did she only infer? That last time she said her dog was barking wildly. She found this fact to be relevant to her complaint. Did she actually conclude that the child was running because her dog started to bark?
You start to wonder if the neighbor is crazy, or if she's hearing the same mysterious knocks that you attribute to her. And the dog... Dogs are supposed to be able to hear and feel things humans can't perceive, right? In urban fantasy and horror, they do. So there may be something the dog is responding to, and it's not your little girl. In a Stephen King tale, it would be something you would never want your little girl to come face to face to. But it would happen precisely because I'm a skeptic. :-)