Now, I’m not usually one to brag about my accomplishments, because I pride myself on my humility, but this year, I can say with confidence that my apartment is the spookiest apartment in Boston. So please strap in, grab some of last year’s candy corn, and prepare yourself for a literary tour of what the scariest home in the Columbia Point region has to offer. Be warned, however, for this story is not one for the faint of heart. Or stomach.
As soon as you enter my apartment—if you dare—you will be steered into my kitchen. Here, you will come face to face with our first attraction. If you look once again to your right, you will see a graveyard of meals past: remnants lying in wait on the stovetop. The scraps anticipate a proper burial, but how is a proper burial to come when it was never once agreed upon whether the roommate who cooked was to dispose of the scraps, or if the roommates who didn’t cook were encumbered with this task?
Across from the stove is the refrigerator, or as my roommates and I call it, “Ghost Town.” Firstly, I would just like to clarify that a ghost-town is very different from a graveyard. Please get that straight; I don’t need any false rumors floating around about my spooky apartment lacking variety. You see, a graveyard houses only dead things. On the other hand, a ghost-town has the potential for life, it just rarely sees it. Therefore, a ghost-town is a pretty eerie place. I would argue, as everyone who makes the mistake of going into my fridge would, that the sight of an empty jar of pickles (no pickles, just the juice), a loose onion (why is it orange?), and the ends of several loaves of bread in a Ziploc bag (I know these will come in handy someday) make for a horror that can be felt deep down in the pit of your stomach. That, or the very old candy we gave you at the beginning of the tour is beginning to cement.
Next, we move into the main attraction: the living room. At first, it appears to align itself closely with the living rooms of other ordinary college students, though this is of course, by design. By putting foam, smiling skeleton decorations up over the holes in the wall, hanging fake bats over the window with the blinds that never close, and by putting a Day of the Dead table runner over the sticky lemonade mess that has yet to have been cleaned up, you start to think “aw, cute,” or “how festive!”
Masterfully, you are engrossed in the knick-knacks around the apartment, and I have distracted you from the most horrifying part of the tour. You may not notice it at first, but after a few seconds spent in the living room, BOOM!—you notice the coffee table. You see that the table is littered with silverware, chipped mugs with tea bags fossilized on the bottom, the carcasses of god-knows-how-old Cup of Noodles styrofoam containers, half-filled plastic water bottles, various snacks left open in the air to spoil or to grow stale, and a candle that accumulates wax but is seldom lit. More concerningly, you see that no one has done anything about this monstrosity.
At this point, you may be wondering: what’s so scary about a coffee table that needs a little scrub down? Wouldn’t that take you like ten, maybe 15 minutes tops to clean? To those skeptics I retort: isn’t the fact that no one has cleaned our coffee table in so long perhaps the scariest part of all of this? We are practically living in a trash heap what, because someone has a paper due at midnight? Because someone has a midterm the next morning? The table is clearly a symbol of the lack of motivation humans face day after day until they inevitably die, and if you don’t see that, then maybe this spooky apartment just isn’t for you. Or maybe you don’t see that because you clean your apartment a little more frequently; I don’t know.
No matter whether or not you think my apartment is spooky, I definitely recommend trying to find a spooky apartment in your building (I’m sure there are plenty around), or maybe even trying to start a spooky apartment of your own! If you decide to start your own, you’re going to want some quotes from some reputable reviewers to get yourself on the map. So far I’ve gotten “oh, well this place is…lived in,” from my friends, and “Abbey, this is truly haunting,” from my mom.