In retrospect, it should have been obvious from the start that there was something going on. It was my first time renting an apartment, but even I thought that the landlord was eager for me to move in as soon as possible. The rent was ridiculously low for the area, the apartment itself was in pristine condition, and the whole process from touring the apartment to moving only took about a week. Nothing like that comes without a catch.

Apartment 311 was a pleasant place to live at first. It had 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, and since I lived alone that meant I got to convert one bedroom into my own office space. It came with a handful of paintings already, so it didn't even have the off-putting liminal feeling that some empty apartments have. The only immediate downside I could tell from the start was that there a slight smell in the living room from time to time. It wasn't anything too noticeable but you would occasionally get a faint whiff of some sort of musty odor.

I was living in apartment 311 for a couple weeks before I noticed anything was wrong. It started out with simple stuff, like various knick knacks being placed on the wrong shelves, snacks and small objects going missing, things like that. Once or twice I found the fridge left open. These things would only happen when I was asleep, and it made me feel like I was going crazy. There was no way anyone could be breaking into my apartment just to steal some useless crap and move around some collectibles. The door was locked whenever I went to bed, and even if someone hypothetically had the key, I always made sure to bolt the door as well. I considered getting some security cameras set up, but I balked at the price when I looked into that possibility. Though the apartment was admittedly cheap, between rent and utilities I still couldn't afford to set up an entire security system.

I tried to put it out of my mind, assuming that maybe I was just sleepwalking, or getting up for a midnight snack and forgetting by the next morning. I'd never been an easy sleeper, I was often prone to night terrors and other disturbances, which had only gotten worse now that I was in an unfamiliar environment.

Of all the sleep problems I've experienced, by far the least pleasant is sleep paralysis. It used to happen fairly rarely, maybe once every 2-3 months, but after moving into the apartment it became an almost weekly occurrence. Now, usually my sleep paralysis is fairly mild. I find myself unable to move, eyes open, and I find it difficult to breathe. Sometimes I feel like there is a presence in the room with me, but before I moved I had never experienced any form of hallucinations, visual or otherwise. I'd never seen a ghost, monster, hag, or any other sort of entity while I was paralyzed, it was only ever a sense of dread and total paralysis of the body. That changed about the same time I noticed the missing food and misplaced objects.

As usual, it felt like I had woken up, but couldn't move a single muscle. It was hard to breathe, and I had this awful feeling like I wasn't alone. I tried to calm myself down, to remind myself that I had been through this before, and it always wound up okay, but something felt... different. It was then that I noticed the door to my bedroom slowly opening, inch by inch. I could hear the creak of the hinges as it swung inward, someone or something was coming into my room.

He peeked his head around first, dull eyes reflecting the faint glow of moonlight from my bedroom window. He was bald, with pale flaky skin. I wanted to scream when I saw his expression, but I was still a prisoner of my own body. The man had a forced, rictus grin on his face, chipped yellow teeth clenched tightly together, grinding against one another.

I watched in horror as the rest of the man's body slowly passed into the room, tip toeing as if he were creeping up behind someone in a cartoon. The man was utterly emaciated, almost skeletal in appearance, and covered in sores and pockmarks. He was stark naked and smeared in dirt and filth. I could do nothing but watch as he slowly inched ever closer towards me, until I could feel his hot breath upon my face. It smelled like the musty odor I sometimes detected in the living room. Not once did I see his expression change, he didn't even blink as he stared at me, and I could feel hatred radiating off of him like heat from a furnace.

He just stood there, looking at me for what felt like hours. Eventually he turned around and slowly sneaked back out of the room, gently shutting the door behind him. A few minutes later I started to be able to move again, the paralysis wearing off as my body started to wake up properly.

I had to call in sick to my job that day, the experience was such a shock to me that there was no way in Hell I'd be able get any work done. I spent a good hour just checking every room to make sure I was entirely alone. I searched in the closet, underneath the sinks, in my office, anywhere I thought someone could be hiding. When I found nothing, I managed to convince myself it was all a hallucination, that I was safe.

Things continued about the same for a while after that. Objects still went missing from time to time, the smell in the living room stayed just as musty as it ever was, and about every week or so I'd have another sleep paralysis incident. Of course, now every time I did experience sleep paralysis, I'd have to see my unwanted visitor again. I named him Jimmy, to try and reduce the terror a little bit, putting a silly name to a horrifying face helped lessen my fear slightly. As far as sleep paralysis hallucinations went, Jimmy wasn't too bad once I started to get used to him. He never touched me or sat on my chest like some people's nightmares did, he just stood and stared. It was still deeply unpleasant, mind you, but I felt lucky that it was a consistent kind of unpleasantness at least.

Then I found the photograph. I noticed it underneath a pile of papers while I was doing some cleaning up, a picture of two women embracing in front of a waterfall. I didn't recognize either of the women, and I assumed it must have been from the previous tenant. I texted the landlord, Greg, and asked if he still had the old tenant's phone number so I could give her a call. He obliged, and within a few minutes I was calling her.

She picked up after a couple rings, sounding slightly exasperated. "Hello this is Rebecca, who is this?"

"Hi, my name is Flora, I'm the current tenant of apartment 311, I think that you may have left a photograph behind when you moved, I was wondering if you'd want to pick it up or I could mail it to you or something?"

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. "Hello?" I asked.

"You need to get out that apartment, you're not safe."

I honestly didn't have any response but to laugh. "Is this some kind of joke?" I asked her between chuckles.

I heard her sigh with frustration. "Its not a joke, I'm serious. Things have been going missing right?"

That got my attention. "How do you know that?"

"It happened with me too. My girlfriend and I kept noticing things being moved or disappearing while we were asleep. Little things mostly, snacks, trinkets, nothing major. Now, I never saw this, but my girlfriend swears one time when she got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water she saw this naked man just staring at her. He was covered in sores and looked more like a corpse than a person. She woke me up and we called the police of course, but they didn't find anything. I think..." Rebecca paused for a moment, choosing her words.

"What? What is it?" I asked, increasingly panicked. I began to worry that "Jimmy" was more than just a simple hallucination.

"I think 311 is haunted. We asked around to some of the other residents, and apparently the last guy to live there just disappeared. Our best guess is that he must have died and his spirit just never left. My girlfriend is into some occult stuff, so she tried a cleansing ritual or something like that, but it didn't work. Things kept disappearing, and eventually we just decided to move."

I hung up the phone. It was rude, sure, but I was just so shocked that I didn't know what to do. At the very least I began to understand why I got this apartment for so cheap.

I found myself just sitting on the couch for a while, occasionally getting a whiff of the musty smell. I stared blankly at a painting on the wall, one of the ones which was already there when I first moved in. It depicted a woman in a white dress sitting underneath a tree reading a book. I couldn't tell what was making me so focused on it, it seemed utterly unrelated to what was happening. Eventually, I snapped out of it and went into my office to do some research.

After a little bit of digging, I found out some information regarding the tenant who lived here before Rebecca, the one who disappeared. Apparently one of his coworkers put out a missing persons report 6 months ago. His name was Michael Hansen, and I gasped when I saw a photograph of him. He looked exactly like "Jimmy", albeit not so emaciated and filthy.

I hastily packed some of my things and made arrangements to stay at a friend's house for a couple nights, telling them that my apartment had a roach problem and the landlord needed to fumigate it. I called into work and gave them some sob story about an uncle dying, enough to get time off for a few days. With no more distractions from the ghost of Michael Hansen, I slept soundly on my friend's couch, unbothered by any sleep paralysis.

The next two days were spent researching. I checked out dozens of books on folklore and the occult from the local library, scoured paranormal internet forums, and even watched a few episodes of some cheesy ghost hunting TV show. I was determined to figure out a way to put the spirit of Michael Hansen to rest.

The stories were all wildly different, with countless potential solutions to my problem. Some sources said salt was a surefire way to banish spirits, others said iron was a good ghost repellent, but most simply said I should give up and move. However, one myth piqued my interest. According to some beliefs, the spirits of the unquiet dead could be tied to objects from their life, binding them to the place where the object resided. If the object which their soul was bound to was destroyed, it freed their spirit and they could move on to the afterlife. I remembered the paintings. I had assumed that they were put there by the landlord, but it was just as possible that they were left behind by Michael.

I arrived back to the apartment, determined to grab the paintings and burn them, laying Michael Hansen's soul to rest once and for all. I felt like some sort of hero, a badass monster hunter who saved the day with her intuition and a little bit of booksmarts. One by one I pulled the paintings off the walls, putting them in a cardboard box. I made a mental note to buy some lighter fluid on the way to the empty lot where I planned to burn them. I approached the final painting, the one which showed a woman in a white dress beneath a tree.

I pulled it off the wall and recoiled as the musty smell increased in intensity. Staring in confusion, I saw a small rectangular hole where the painting used to be, about 4 feet off the ground and 2 feet by 2 feet in length and width. I shuddered in fear, remembering that Michael's body was never found. Perhaps he was murdered, his corpse hidden in the walls by some unknown assailant? I nervously flicked on my flashlight, peered within the hole, and screamed.

I ran out of apartment 311 as fast as I could before calling the police, sobbing with terror. I had been prepared to find a body, maybe cut up into little pieces and wrapped in duct tape. I was ready for death and decay and rot. There is something fascinating about ghosts, something somehow romantic about the notion that part of someone could live on even after death.

There was nothing romantic about seeing the clenched-tooth grimace of Michael Hansen, glaring at me with hate as he stood in the small section of hollow wall which he had been living in for the past 6 months.