ON ALBANY

A residential street in Chicago on the north west side in a yellow house with two floors, this is where I married and started to raise my family of three.  This is my husbands family home he was the third generation to live there.  In the begining it was a happy place to raise to children safe and secure so I thought, my daughters were born a year apart the youngest a year and a half apart from each other…The oldest daughter had talked about the man with the red eyes in their closest and I always thought she was trying to scare her sister, the middle daughter who at the time had trouble sleeping in that room always before bed…she would develop coughing attacks..she was about three…we had taken her to the peditrician and she was diagnosed with asthma…I never thought it could be somthing else.   We lived on the first floor of the house and the Grandfather lived on the second floor both apartments were basically the same a big kitched dinning room with bay windows and a living room and two bedrooms and a very small bathroom, at times in the dinning room I would hear scratching by the windows in between the wall of the two windows..always late at night i would always search out side thinking someone was out there scratching at the siding of the building but always no one there.  My middle daughter would always have trouble sleeping she would start crying before bed and caughing I would often have to stay in the room until she fell asleep..she would always tell me that there was someone in the closet and dont you see him he is there..  she would often get up and sleep walk to where I had put bells on the door in case she would try to go out the doors and I often slept on the couch just in case she started to sleep walk…One night I had seen her get up and walk to the window area in the dinning room and I asked her what are you doing and she told me she was following the light, her night terrors continued until about five and within this time frame I too noticed strange funeral type of smells a flowery scent, our yellow lab always laying guard by my daughters bedroom and growling.  I too noticed strange noises in the kitchen like the stove was shaking and I go running out there thinking one of my daughters were slamming the oven door…or the slamming of the pantry door with such force it had shook the apartment.  I remeber when the Granfather would go out for the day and I would always hear someone walking up his stairs to his apartment or someone walking in his apartment.. I think the final straw came when it was another sleepless night and I was sitting in the kitchen crocheting…I kept seeing in the entry way of the dinning room a shadow going from left to right and right to left out of the corner of my eye..I looked at one time and there I saw a pair of brown shoes standing their and the blue work pants I immediately ran torward out bedroom which was off the kitchen out of fear and woke my husband and looked around the apartment but no one was there.  I wondered after that for the longest time that is why my middle daughter had the asthma attacks and was sleep walking maybe there was truth to what the oldest daughter saw and the middle daughter was seeing and feeling..My oldest daughter would tell me much later that there would always be a man standing over my youngest daughters crib.. and that she would always cover her head with the covers cause she was scared and at one time there was a picture that hung over the youngests crib of a guardian angel in which fell into the crib narrowly missing the youngest daughter to where I removed it from the room..  My husbands family finally sold that home and they had renovated it..made apartments in the basement and in the attack and renovated the Granfathers apartment…but to this day the first floor is always empty.