The Apartment Above

The first time Lena heard it, she was too tired to care. She had just finished unpacking the last of her boxes and collapsed onto the old leather couch with a bottle of cheap wine. It was almost midnight, and as she faded into the soft haze of half-sleep, a faint thumping started overhead. Footsteps. Slow, steady, pacing back and forth.

She cracked an eye open. Her apartment was on the top floor. There shouldn’t be anyone above her.

The sound stopped.

Maybe she was imagining things. Maybe it was just the wine. She passed out moments later.

The building was old, but not quite charming. Five stories high, built in the 1950s, with cracked tile floors and a once-grand staircase that now groaned under every step. But Lena didn’t care about that. It was cheap, and more importantly, it was hers.

After the breakup, she needed space. No more friends offering their spare couches. No more awkward glances in the office. No more running into her ex at the coffee shop like it was scripted by the universe.

She wanted silence.

Instead, she got footsteps.

Every night, sometime after eleven, they started. Pacing. A slow drag, like someone in heavy boots. Then the occasional scrape of a chair. Once, she even thought she heard music — a soft, old-timey waltz that faded in and out like a memory.

She mentioned it casually to the building manager, Paul, a wiry man with thinning hair and the sour breath of someone who lived on diner coffee.

“Above you?” he said, frowning. “There ain’t no unit above 5D. Just the roof access and some old storage.”

Lena blinked. “So nobody has a key to go up there?”

Paul scratched his neck. “I got a key. But nobody's been up there in years. Last guy who did maintenance up there fell through the floor.” He chuckled without humor. “Don’t worry about it. These old buildings make weird sounds.”

Lena nodded, but something about his tone made her uneasy. Like he knew more than he let on.

She started recording the sounds. At first just on her phone, then with a proper digital recorder she bought online. And every night, without fail, it was there.

11:03 p.m. – Footsteps begin.11:07 p.m. – Chair drag.11:15 p.m. – The waltz. Always the same tune.

She played the recordings for her friend Marcy over lunch one Saturday.

“That’s creepy as hell,” Marcy said, leaning in. “You should call someone. Police, maybe?”

Lena shook her head. “What would I even say? ‘Hi, I think there’s a ghost ballroom dancing on my roof’?”

Marcy didn’t laugh.

One night, Lena stayed up. Not just half-awake, but truly alert. She brewed strong coffee and sat in the dark with her recorder running. At exactly 11:03, it began. This time, she followed it.

She crept into the hallway, up the narrow stairwell that led to the roof access. The door was padlocked. But she noticed something odd — dust patterns on the floor had been disturbed. As if someone had walked there recently.

She leaned in, pressing her ear to the door.

Footsteps. Right on the other side.

She gasped and stumbled back, heart pounding.

The next morning, she confronted Paul again.

“I heard someone up there,” she said. “Right behind the door.”

Paul looked at her for a long moment. Then he sighed and motioned for her to follow.

He unlocked the door to the roof access, then the second door that led into the attic storage space. The air inside was stale, thick with dust and disuse.

“See?” he said. “Nothing up here but broken chairs and old paint cans.”

Lena wandered deeper into the space. There was something eerie about the place. The wooden beams overhead, the strange echo of her footsteps.

Then she saw it: a section of the floor, recently disturbed. Cleaner than the rest. There were marks, too — faint, but unmistakable. Like a chair had been dragged.

“Someone’s been here,” she whispered.

Paul stepped beside her. “This used to be a unit. Back in the day. Before they sealed it off.”

“Why?”

He hesitated. “Tenant died. Couple decades ago. Old man. Music teacher. Used to play records every night. Drove the neighbors crazy. Eventually they found him dead in that chair.”

“And no one moved the furniture?”

Paul gave her a crooked smile. “Wasn’t much left to move.”

That night, Lena didn’t sleep.

She played the waltz over and over, trying to match it to something. It wasn’t modern. The recording quality, the instrumentation — it felt older. She sent a clip to a music professor she found online.

He replied within hours. That’s Gustav Lange. "Blumenlied," 1867. Beautiful piece. Hard to find that particular recording.

She asked where it might have come from. He told her it sounded like it was played on a wax cylinder phonograph.

That night, she stayed up again. And this time, she brought bolt cutters.

The lock on the attic door gave way easier than she expected. Lena stepped inside, flashlight in hand. The space was silent. Dust motes danced in the beam of her light.

She made her way to the back of the storage room. Something compelled her forward. A strange sense of purpose, like following a thread.

There, behind a stack of rotted boxes, she found it: a small wooden chair, worn smooth by time. And beside it, an old phonograph.

She crouched, heart pounding, and lifted the needle. Nothing. Then she noticed the crank.

With shaking hands, she wound it. The machine groaned, clicked, and then — music.

"Blumenlied."

The same haunting waltz.

She sat frozen, eyes wide, as the melody filled the attic.

Then, footsteps.

Behind her.

She turned, but there was no one there. The music kept playing. The phonograph spun on.

Then a whisper: "You heard me."

Lena ran.

Back to her apartment, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t sleep. She packed. Every few minutes, she looked at the ceiling, waiting for the music to start again.

It didn’t.

The next morning, she left the key on the kitchen counter. Paul wasn’t in his office. She didn’t care. She just wanted out.

As she was hauling her suitcase down the stairs, a voice called out.

“Miss Lena?”

An elderly woman stood in the entryway, holding a bundle of mail. Her eyes were cloudy with age.

“You lived in 5D, right?” she asked.

Lena nodded.

The woman smiled faintly. “You heard Mr. Albrecht, didn’t you?”

Lena stared. “Who?”

“The man upstairs. He used to play music every night. Even after he passed. I hear him sometimes, too.”

Lena opened her mouth to speak, but the woman turned and shuffled away before she could say anything.

Two weeks later, back in her sister’s guest room, Lena reviewed her recordings one last time. Most were just faint echoes. But on the final night, just after the music stopped, there was a whisper she hadn’t noticed before.

She turned up the volume.

"Thank you."

That was all.

And then silence.