I was at a concert for the new freshmen at my college in California. I had met a girl during orientation that seemed to be into me. At the time, I was only looking to make friends, since none of my friends from high school had transferred over to my new university. But I’m a social person, so it didn’t take too long before we had a little group going.
My roommate was nice and he kept to himself most of the time, though later on in the year we became good friends and still talk from time to time.
Well, on this particular Friday, everyone stayed out late hanging out at the fields of the campus, a few students had brought out guitars and we all had a good time after the concert, until campus police told us to start heading back to our dorms or drive back home because the event was over.
I walked with Mary, the girl I had met, over to her dorm, and we hugged goodnight, exchanged phone numbers, and I went on my way. Both of our buildings were on extreme ends of the campus, so the walk back was long. I didn’t know the area very well, but I couldn’t get over how silent the whole area had become.
I got back to my dorm, quietly opened the door, and changed into my pajamas in the dark. I could see my roommate’s sleeping silhouette, oddly curled into a ball near the foot of his bed, but didn’t give it much thought. I climbed into my bed directly across from his, and covered myself up in the blankets. I went to sleep almost immediately.
Sometime in the middle of the night, though, I began to hear my roommate humming a song in his sleep. Then I heard him cough in a deep voice, wiggle around in his bed. I heard several footsteps, followed by the door opening, and the door slamming. I don’t remember what time it was, but my roommate didn’t come back, his bed was empty and already made in the morning. He had mentioned that he would be going home for the weekends.
The next day, a Saturday, we had a few events going on at school, and I got to meet up with the same girl for lunch and dinner. We walked around the trails nearby, and overall had a perfect Saturday. We both headed back to my room to watch a movie on DVD she had brought from home, but around 15 minutes into the movie, she fell asleep. It was only 10pm, but hey, some people are like that, right?
After the movie was over, I moved her over a little bit on my bed, and I brought one of my blankets to the floor, and fell asleep. It was amazing to me how easily I could fall asleep in that room. It was just so quiet. But that didn’t always mean that I slept well.
In the middle of the night again, I heard something moving on my roommate’s side of the room. Then, someone humming. Then came the coughing sound. I almost knew what would happen next. Then, I heard the girl say, “Hey, why’d you move?”
“Sorry, those–” and she didn’t let me finish before she screamed. I got up and stumbled toward the light switch, flicked it on, and asked what was wrong.
With the faint light from the exterior street lamps, she was able to see a figure sitting on my roommate’s bed. She thought that it was me, and I startled her when I replied from right underneath her, on the floor.
I asked her if she heard the humming, and she said yes. She asked if it had been me, but she had somehow already assumed that it wasn’t. We didn’t really know what to say to each other, when we heard a light tapping on the door.
I walked up to open it, and found the hall’s resident assistant, in his pajamas, asking if everything was okay in the room, that someone had called him to tell him that they heard a scream coming from my dorm. I said that everything was fine, but Mary interrupted and basically told him the whole story, while I just stood there, trying not to make a fool of myself on my first weekend on campus.
The RA stood there, half smiling, and asked us to look up the history of my room, number 338 on the forums online. He said he was glad we were okay, and asked us to keep it down, whatever we were doing. It got a little awkward, but he calmly left, and I shut my door.
It took Mary literally two minutes to find the story on her laptop, which talked about a student in the 80s who had fallen down a window of my building and broken his neck in the middle of the night. He had some sleep problems and would be known to sleep walk. He was taken to the hospital but died later during the early hours of the morning. Supposedly, past students have reported sounds of someone in pain from room 338 ever since. Even when the room was kept empty. Mary seemed excited about the whole thing because, of course, it wasn’t her room. I started questioning everything, including reality, which brought up a weird sick feeling in my stomach.
What bothered me the most happened on Sunday night when my roommate came back and upon hearing the story of what had happened, he looked at me dead in the eye and told me that he had left early the day of the concert. He had missed the whole thing. It hadn’t been him the person that I saw curled up at the base of his bed.
I had been in the room hearing his hums of pain by myself in the room. I was there when the the presence sleepwalked away and didn’t come back. Needless to say, I started going home for the weekends too.
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