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Thuds From The Ceiling And Phantom Odors

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Anonymous

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Okay, maybe. I doubt it, but theres something going on that's freaking us out.
I wasn't going to post this, but JUST now, it happenend again, slightly louder than ussual.
Anyway. We're in an apartment on a college campus... the building is no more than 30 years old, and seems to be in good shape. The roof is flat.
A month or so ago, we started hearing loud thuds from the ceiling.
Its not scampering animal feet (although I heard that once, I think). Its a defenite THUD. They range from annoyingly loud to frighteningly loud.
No, I haven't mentioned this to campus security. I've assumed its something up with the roof. But.

Its a second floor apartment- nothing above us except insulation and shingles, and maybe pipes. And no one goes climbing around up there. And the noises are WAY too loud to be animals... Could it be the roof falling down? I'd imagine we'd hear more creaking and groaning if that was it. We were hear a good two or three months before it started happening. Yes, this coincideded with the arrival of snow. But it doesn't seem to variate with snowfall/temperature.

Didn't mean to write this much. But its gotten annoying. Does it fit the modus operandi of a poltergeist? I don't know much about them.

Oh! And the smells. We smell odd, strong, realistic odors occasionaly, for brief periods of time. Yes, its a college, chances are they're floating in from nearby apartments. But its winter, so all the windows are shut. And twice when it happened I openend the door and checked the hall-nothing.
So far, we've smelled pizza (warm Papa John's, to be precise) peanut butter (very strong, it was like I had my nose in a jar of it) and my roomate smelled cherries earlier today. We've never both smelled something, only one of us.

So. Are we crazy?
 
I don't know about the smells but I recognise the thump sounds from back in my own Uni days. Every so often there was a huge thud from above me, and I asked maintenance about it, they went up and it turned out to be a poorly maintained air conditioning/heating unit.

Apparently when the air conditioning turns on it opens an air vent (like blinds he said, made of several metal slats) but instead of opening smoothly it jammed and then all of a sudden, jerked open.

Maybe it's worth contacting someone to get them to have a look at it?
 
If it's faulty air-conditioning that causes the thumps, maybe that's the cause of the smells as well?
 
Yeah, I didn't think of that :eek:

It could be that the air con is spreading smells from one room to the other ( :cross eye ), and although I've never experienced adour contamination, in halls if someone had a nasty cold, by the end of the week literally everyone would be suffering, so if colds can spread, maybe smells could too?
 
Well, its winter. I don't think they have any fancy air system here... I don't see any vents anywhere. But yeah, I bet its probably faulty something-or-other up in the ceiling.
Its so LOUD though. Ceiling-shakes-loud.
When I get my broken key fixed I'll ask if there's been any other complaints... I don't really think its a poltergeist, but thought I'd ask. Its gotten pretty unnerving.

Oh, and how the apartment is layed out... they're stacked, two stories, in rows about 8 units wide. The hall is just a flight of stairs leading to two doors, our and neighbors. I checked this hall twice when I smelled the phantom smell... and it defiently wasn't coming from outside.
 
Best get your landlord to check it out TBH, I wouldn't like a 300kg piece of machinery falling on my noggin :wince:

I like the sound of a ghost pizza delievery boy though :chuffed:
 
I checked this hall twice when I smelled the phantom smell... and it defiently wasn't coming from outside.
Click to expand...

Sometimes they come in through the floorbaords aswell. I used to live in an old victorian terrace house and you could always smell next door when they were cooking......
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm baayyycon!!:p
 
The walls may be thin enough to let smells through, too.
When I lived in a terraced house I could smell next door's cooking.
The thump may be another student walking about on the roof, or it may be expansion/contraction of the roofing material.
 
I live in a housing development of custom built flats. I get a lot of bangs and thumps at all hours of the day and night but these are attributable to cheap shoddy plumbing used in these places. Sadly can be the cause uf unspecified odours too :(
 
This is very interesting -

A friend of mine had the same thing happening in her house. It was detached and built probably in the 1930's, 2 storeys high with an attic on top. Sometimes we would hear TREMENDOUS crashing and banging going on in the loft, so loud that it was as if someone was in the loft moving things around in a rage. There was also a horrendous smell, which was like a cross between tar and oranges with a bit of purtifaction thrown in for good measure.

Oh, and on separate occasions we both saw a white figure in 2 of the bedrooms. My friend's mum wouldn't believe what we'd seen, until she witnessed a bowl of milk, left on the floor for the cat, lift slowly into the air, tip over and spill milk all over the place, hover, and then, inverted, slam back onto the ground.

So I suppose, Piscez, that until you start to see things, it might be best to hope it's a faulty air-con and thin walls!
 
Any chance you can get in the roof void/ on the roof to see what kind (if any) of equipment is up there? Definately tell the landlord about it. If there is no kind of equipment up there maybe install a camera to record stuff. All depends on what kind of access you can get. Make notes of the times it happens and what kind of smells you sense - it may help to tie it up with something happening in the flat.

Of course you could have a ghost Elephant with a taste for Pizzas or a Tramp who found a warm place to stay for the winter.
 
Thuds from the Ceiling

Thuds from the ceiling can be caused by airplanes or especially helicopters flying low over the house.

The backwash from the helicopter, say, presses down the roofbeam about an inch. When the roof pops back into its normal shape there's an echoing, a sympathetic pop from the ceiling.

It's exactly like being inside a drum.

This effect can be carried through to lower floors.

P. S. It is this same effect that has mislead some conspiritologists to believe that the 9/11 WTC explosions actually took place in the buildings' basements. Surviving witnesses in the basements claim that they heard the explosions and that they sounded NEAR to them. Sure they did - revererated floor by floor down to them in the "echo-chamber" of the basements.
 
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