Inexplicable Occurrences At An Apartment In Drumcondra

Glad I found this forum as I previously had already sent mails to http://praofi.org/ and http://leinsterparanormal.com/v1/ but neither got back to me. I’d really like to ascertain whether anyone has come across or heard of any occurrences in the Drumcondra area, specifically the Chapelgate complex.

Just for the record, I am neither a skeptic nor a believer in ghosts/paranormal activity. I do believe there are things we don’t understand but think they are more to do with the physics and energies of the universe than anything else. I am a qualified solicitor so am very methodological, data orientated and not prone to hyperbole. Below I am simply recounting my experience…nothing more, nothing less.

So on to the story, well first of all let me tell you what happened on my visit there, I wrote it all down the day after it occurred so that the facts wouldn’t be blurred by memories…

The evening of the 24th September 2008 I was visiting a friend of mine from university who had moved to Dublin the previous month and was living with her sister. Their apartment was in the Chapelgate complex on St Alphonsus road in Drumcondra. While most of the development is new, there has been a building that was previously something else (I'm guessing a convent?) that was refurbished and is now apartments as well and it was in this building my friend lived. ( Link to Google maps: http://maps.google.ie/?ll=53.36536,-6.259283&spn=0.000906,0.00284&t=h&z=19 )

Upon entering the apartment the front door opened out onto a long carpeted hall that ran down almost the full length of the apartment, with two bedrooms and a bathroom off the left of it and at the end a door leading into a sitting room-cum-dining area. This room ran the width of the apartment and then the kitchen was off this again to the left at the far end from the door from the hall.

I was chatting with them in the sitting room for a while and after a while I said I’d grab a cuppa. So my friend and I were in the small kitchen area and I threw the kettle on. I was standing in the middle of the kitchen but started to have a huge urge just to have my back up against a wall. This feeling was incredibly strong and I could feel my hairs prick up. At this point my friend’s sister had joined us in the kitchen. Still standing with my back firmly against the wall and as a result of this strong feeling of having something behind me I just said out of the blue “Has anything weird ever happened here?”. At this my friend’s sister turned to her and said “You so told him to say that” to which she replied, “I swear I never said anything to him about it”.

Needless to say at this stage I was thinking WTF!

They proceeded to tell me that since they first moved in (about a month before I had visited) peculiar things had been happening in the apartment. It started off initially with innocuous enough stuff like them being in the kitchen drinking a glass of water, leaving it down and coming back a while later and it would be half gone, or presses they could have sworn they’d close being open on their return. They both individually thought it was their own absent-mindedness until they had a chat about it one evening.

Gradually they said the occurrences seemed to increase. One evening they were watching TV and they heard a thud from the table that was in their sitting-cum-dining room. One of the candles on their candelabra had fallen. As they were looking all the other candles fell off it onto the table in sequence.

They were in the kitchen one evening cooking dinner and were having a have a disagreement about who was meant to be putting out the bins. My friend got upset as she thought her sister had told her to “F*ck Off” in the middle of it and went and sat in the sitting room. Her sister then came out and asked why she was upset as she was the one who had told her to “F Off”, turns out neither of them said it.

Another time my friend was alone in the apartment. The walls are all set back about 1 foot from the old stone walls, to do with dry lining it I suppose. This means that the gas meter is behind a tiny little door half way up the wall beside the kitchen, on the exterior wall. As I mentioned she was sitting alone in the apartment when there were three loud knocks from the inside of this door. She jumped up and ran down to her room until she calmed down.

While they were telling me all this I was still in the kitchen, my hair was standing on end and my eyes were watering up I was so freaked. To be honest all I wanted to do was get out of there. They had said one of their friends had called over before and the minute she walked in the door she had to go straight back out because she couldn’t go into the apartment due to the discomfort she felt.

In a way I was fascinated, but to be honest I really wanted to just say bye to them and head off. But once I got back into the sitting room my uneasy feeling subsided and I was just thinking that it must just be in their heads or co-incidental. It was very much that feeling of when you are younger and you are alone in the dark you are petrified and then the light is turned on and you’re thinking, “Sure what the hell is there to be scared about”.

So I had started to relax again and was trying to talk about other stuff just so my mind wouldn’t have to be thinking about it. My friend got up to light a cigarette and I got up to grab another tea. When she smoked in the apartment, she sat on the deep shelved window in the kitchen, pulled up the big old window and smoked there so that the smell wouldn’t go into the rest of the apartment. I found an image of a similar window type on Daft so have a look here: http://c2.dmlimg.com/abeafefb1775bcdec36d9c59ed895122299f735c7c97f318bf78cf5750313912.jpg

On this window to the left was a small cd system with a few CD’s on top and she was sitting to the right of it. She polished off one cigarette and went to the toilet as I was making the tea. When she came back she went “Ahh come on, where did you hide them” referring to her cigarettes. I of course hadn’t touched them and she was convinced I was hiding them as part of a ‘ghosty joke’. For my part I thought she had forgotten them in the bathroom and as her sister was going down there she said she’d check. So I was chatting with my friend, she was back sitting on the window, and I distinctly remember I had picked up the CD’s that were sitting on top of the CD player and had jokingly remarked that I liked her taste in music as they were Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. I still had the two CD’s in my hand and was in the process of putting them down when her sister came back into the sitting room and asked my friend had she been smoking in her room as there was a smell of smoke coming from it. As she was speaking we had both turned our heads and looked around at her. I had also left the CD’s down as I was turning my head. My friend said “No” and as she turned back around she just said to me “Haha very funny”. I asked her what she meant and she pointed to the CD’s I had just left down a split second earlier. Sitting on top of them were her packet of cigarettes. She had assumed I had put them there as part of the trick. I had never seen them from the time she went to the toilet until then.

I was speechless. I swore blind that I hadn’t touched them, initially she was saying “Yeah yeah sure” but when she saw how white I went and my pure state of confusion she relented. I felt so freaked, I literally had water streaming out of my eyes and my heart was going at the speed of light. My brain couldn’t (and still can’t) comprehend what happened. I told them I had to leave straight away that it was too freaky to stay. In truth I was petrified. I drove all the way home with the light on in the car and had every light on in the house that entire night.

The next day I rang her to ask her what in God’s name was that all about and was it related to what was happening there in general. She said it probably was. Needless to say I couldn’t comprehend how they hadn’t moved out, I asked but they has become accustomed to it I think. I guess they had their deposit, furniture that they had bought and all those real things to worry about. I know I would have been out of there in a shot.

She mailed me a few weeks later to say that her sister had decided to move out as it was becoming too much and that she though “it” knew as “Just recently bulbs keep blowing, nearly every few days and the TV turns itself off. That I can deal with but the other night something knocked on my bedroom door just as I got into bed, I was home alone. I was gonny run out and go down to my mates, I just had to ring my da and he stayed on phone till I was reday to fall asleep...boohoo”. She also mentioned the noise of feet running down the hallway in their apartment at night. She also subsequently moved out a short time after.

Like I said before, I am not saying whether I believe in paranormal things but just recounting an experience that I had. It was a Wednesday so no drink was involved, besides I was driving. It would be interesting to see if anyone else had heard of anything in this area or apartment block.