A spooky thing, for the upcoming season:

Ever since we moved in, I have heard noises at night. I told Blair about it the first time, and many times after, but she never hears it. They are the unmistakable sounds of someone running back and forth down the hall of our floor, and every so often I will hear banging too, like someone is pounding on a door somewhere. Whenever I hear it, I'll hurry over to the front door and look through the peephole. Then when I can't see anyone through that, I'll crack the door and look out into the hall. There's never anyone there.

Pause.

Yesterday, lots of things happened in our building.

When I opened the door to take the dog out, there was a tall woman standing there in the hall, looking completely off her face. She wore a tiny tank top and short short boxer briefs. They were inside-out. I muttered the thing I always mutter when I encounter someone unexpectedly: "Oh, sorry." She stared at me. Grunted. Turned and staggered toward the door to the stairwell.

Once we were outside and I was trying to let the dog pee, I noticed a man come out one of the doors. A very sketchy man, carrying a beat up plastic yellow bag. He walked across the street to a half-built garage, did something over there. Then he crossed back diagonally toward the dumpsters in our parking lot, and did something over there, too. I steered the dog back over toward the grass. I heard footsteps, and thought he was following me, but he disappeared back into the building. All the people I have told are pretty certain his sketchy behavior was drug-related. La Crosse is famous for alcoholism being a religion, and its impressive number of meth users. Drug use is so bad in this area that there is Narcan on the wall in businesses next to the fire extinguisher and the AED.

Anyway. Later, when Blair and I took the dog out again, as we were coming in, we encounter a woman screaming in the lobby. She's getting in the elevator, and one of our neighbors is trying to talk to her. "I do NOT need your help!" she's screaming. "You didn't want to help me before! Your help is worthless to me!" The floor? Covered in blood. I didn't immediately know where she was bleeding from, but apparently she had a massive gash on her foot/lower leg. Like the elevator looked like someone was murdered in it. There were trails of blood all over the floor, tracked across the lobby.

We, and several other neighbors we have gotten to know, all gathered for a huddle there in the lobby. One of the ladies knew who that woman was. We had the story from the neighbor she had screamed at. We wondered what we should do: we couldn't just leave blood everywhere like that. What an incredible biohazard! It was decided that one of us would call the non-emergency police number, so one of the guys did, while someone else tried to get ahold of the building manager and the maintenance guy, and the rest of us talked about it and also stood guard by the garage to warn everyone who came in that there was blood everywhere and to be careful.

A police officer showed up. He spoke to me, to Blair. He spoke to the guy who called, and to the woman who knew the woman we called out. The trail of blood led straight to her unit, but the woman would not open her door for the police officer. I was up there on our floor (of course this spazz of a woman lives on our floor) because I was bringing the dog back up.

Back downstairs, we were discussing what we knew about the woman. Apparently she has been spotted around the building high as shit, and had just gotten out of prison recently. Conversation turned toward the building itself. It's brand new. It opened in May of this year, just a few months before we moved in. Like, it's brand new. But apparently, someone has already died here. That wasn't enough to bother me, really, but the rest of the story really had me intrigued.

Resume.

This person died on our floor, of an overdose. Before he died, he was heard for some time running back and forth down the hall, looking for help. He would pound on random doors, except no one would open up for him.

A very eerie coincidence, I'm sure.

Still, every night I listen for the running and the knocking noises, and every night I hurry to the door and try to catch whoever it is, but I never spot anybody.

I just finished the first (and currently only) season of The Paper, which is sort of a sequel to The Office, and I enjoyed it! Maybe it took a few episodes for me to really get into it, but I ended up really liking the characters.

I also finished reading Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho, which I can highly recommend as something that sort of blends magical stories with Bridgerton era England.

Had a DnD session tonight and I took a slightly more active role than in the average session, which always makes me feel a little nervous, but it was great.

Blair is feeling a little under the weather. Or was, I guess, as she's feeling a lot better today. I went with her to get her hair cut, and while we were out, we also had lunch, poked around in a crystal shop, and did the grocery shopping.

She's going away this weekend for a mandatory class field trip, where her mycology class is traveling all the way to the University of Notre Dame, (like five hours away) from Friday morning until Sunday night to forage for mushrooms and then study them in the research laboratory. I'm not sure why they have to travel so far to do that, as there are tons of mushrooms right here in La Crosse, and she has a whole tackle box full of like fifteen different varieties to prove it, but whatever. I'll miss her while she's gone and I'll be worried the entire time. They're carpooling (I can't vouch for how her classmates or professors drive) and staying in research dorms (I don't trust other people) and she likely won't have all that much time to check in and let me know how they're getting on.

I will have to distract myself this weekend, which means hey, maybe I'll actually get a little writing done for the first time in what feels like a year.