Katharina Buczek
Then, she started to hear running throughout her suite and the fridge door slamming shut right outside her room. The creepy part, though, was that she thought all of her roommates were in class when the noises would happen.
On top of that, she would take naps and wake up to her bedroom door wide open– which was totally bizarre because she would make a point to shut it before going to sleep. Plus, whoever opened it would have needed a key card to get in.
Still, she did not want to freak herself out and tried to explain away these weird incidents.
“Each of these, I rationalized. I heard the fridge slamming because one of my roommates came up from class to grab food and a drink and needed to get back. Both of my suitemates were dancers, so this did not seem too far-fetched,” she explained.
“I also got the faulty command strips from the bunch, etc.”
But then, during her second week of school, her entire mindset changed. The switch came after one of her suitemates thought it would be helpful to post their class schedules on the fridge. That way, everyone would be able to coordinate and know when people would be out of the room.
It was at that moment, though, that she realized she had been hearing running and the fridge slamming shut when she was the only person home. She even asked her roommates to confirm and learned that no one had been the culprit behind the weird noises.
And afterward, that realization sent off a week-long streak of terrible panic attacks for her. She would wake up in the middle of the night, around 3:00 a.m., feeling like someone was literally pushing on her chest. And she could not move or breathe.
“One of the nights, the last, was so bad that once I was able to move, I ran to the bathroom and sat under cold water,” she said.
“I also called my mom, bawling. Not the kind of call she thought she was going to get from her college freshman at 3:00 a.m..”
The day after her emotional call to her mom, her roommate also approached her with a weird story. Apparently, her roommate had overheard another student asking who had moved into their dorm room number. That student also claimed they wanted to talk to her and her roommates.
