Rachel (0:00)

Foreign.

Jack Wagner (0:06)

Welcome to Other World. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. What you're hearing right now is a short preview of a full Patreon episode that's available now. If you want to hear the entire thing, you could sign up@patreon.com Otherworld this story comes from a woman named Rebecca and it takes place in New Zealand at this time. She was 19. She just moved out of her parents house and in with some friends looking for some freedom. And she often found herself hanging out at another friend's house that they called Appleby Mansion. This place was not in a good state. It was a crumbling house in severe disrepair. It was far from a safe living environment. But despite that, Rebecca's friends did the best they could to make it more inviting. They decorated the walls, tried to spruce it up a little. However, it was not long before they all started experiencing some very strange things that revolved around the theme of doppelgangers. I'm gonna let Rachel take it from here and tell the story herself once again. If you want to hear the entire thing, it's available on our patreon patreon.com Otherworld this episode is called Applebee Mansion and you're listening to the Otherworld Patreon.

Rachel (1:28)

The vibe was not good there. You know, our energy was great. Like, I really enjoyed the people that we were spending time with and like the stuff that we were doing. Like people were playing cool music and stuff and there was just something about the place that felt quite intense and quite off. It was quite noticeable, but that wasn't, you know, brought up by anyone for some time because it's just a house. Like, it's just a. Just a shitty old house. You're not really trying to read in too much to it in a. You know, you sort of think maybe once you've hung some pictures on the wall, maybe that feeling will change. I remember my first impression of the place was just that it's really cold and kind of foreboding. And also it was strangely hard to navigate, which is not something that you really. That's not an impression that a building leaves on you. A lot of the time, you know, we were partying and stuff, but I wasn't drunk all the time. Like, I'm going to this place in the middle of the day and being like, hang on. Like, didn't I just come into this room? I just. It was hard to find your way around and to remember where you were and to remember how to get to, I don't know, the kitchen or whatever bedroom and it was just a. It was just kind of a. It was a disorienting place. Yeah. And the place, the electrics didn't work. So you know, once you were there at night time. Again, this was before like advanced mobile phones, like we have at the moment that have torches and flashlights and stuff like that. So I don't actually know how the place was lit. Probably a lot of candles, which would have been a bit of a liability, but that's what we were working with. Within a couple of weeks the flat was relatively established, people had moved in and word started getting around that people were having weird experiences there. And the theme that seemed to be attached to these experiences was that each occurrence involved basically a doppelganger or someone that looked like you or someone that you knew that clearly wasn't them. Quite a destabilizing feeling occurrence. So the first I heard of it was when one of my friends, who we'll call Shelley, moved in. Her and her boyfriend Justin was helping her shift and they were doing a long day of it. They were going, you know, back and forth from their car to Appleby mansion with boxes and furniture, like back and forth just over it, you know, moving day no one really likes. And they were just by the end of it, working independently, trying to get it done and you know, just focused on the task at hand, slogging through. At one point, Shelly was out in the car grabbing one of the boxes that she wanted to move in. And she turned back to the front door of the house and she saw Justin was there with his back to her. So she called out for him for help to lift this heavy box. Cuz she was quite a small girl. And he didn't respond. He was just kind of like standing there for a beat or two. Then he walked through the door, through the front door, down the hallway. Didn't respond to her. So she heaved the box somehow herself, feeling kind of annoyed with Justin for not helping. And when she got to the front door she saw that he was at the opposite end of the hallway again with his back to her. And she called out again for help, but again he didn't respond. He just turned left kind of robotically and headed into the lounge. So at this point she's tired and irritated and she called out like, what the fuck, Justin? And from the car behind her, Justin responded, what? So Justin's in the car and she's just seen Justin in the hallway. There was no one else on the property, so no idea what's happening there. And I guess they just got on with the day. But she did mention it to me as something that was kind of like strange. She was like a pretty high stress person anyway so she was freaked out by what had happened because she's not a person that leads with anything sort of spooky in life but she was like I knew what I saw was definitely Justin but it wasn't Justin because he was in the car. So how is this possibly happening? And that kind of set the tone for her time at Appleby Mansion as well. Like she was definitely on edge and uncomfortable staying there after that which was hard for her. And that's why this came up because she was needing like support from a friend about what she was going through. You know these stories were coming from people that weren't, you know, they didn't lead with an interest in the supernatural. It was just people that I'd never heard talking about like ghosts or anything spooky.