Hello and welcome to mini episode 32 of Real Life Ghost Story.

How are you doing today? I'm alright how are you doing? Yeah absolutely just wonderful fabulous ready for some more spooky stories.

Okay. Story number one comes from Victoria. Back in the early 90s when I was a young university student I moved out of home for the first time with my best friend.

It was a decrepit old unit on the top floor of a rundown apartment block but it was all we could afford at the time.

New farmers since become gentrified and heaving with hipsters but back then it was a pretty dodgy area of Brisbane.

Soon after we moved in the police came knocking looking for the previous tenants who as it turned out had been grown weed hydroponically in our unit.

Thus explaining the moldy carpets and surplus of power points. We were stalked and ambushed on multiple occasions by the well-known Bourne Terrace Flasher and also operating in our suburb at the time was a serial rapist who scaled drain pipes to climb into unlocked upper story apartment windows and attack young females like ourselves.

You know looking back our parents must have been thrilled. Like most students we were dirt poor and hardly had a stick of furniture between us beyond what we'd brought with us from our childhood bedrooms.

We had to beg, borrow and steal the basics and couldn't afford to be foosie. One of the more substantial items we needed to source was a couch.

My flatmate had a friend whose parents ran a long-term storage business and if a client failed to pay their bills and abandon their container then all of the contents became property of the owners.

They had this one container which had been rented out for many years. However the client had eventually ceased to pay so they cracked it open and found it full of old crappy furniture from the 70s.

It wasn't worth selling and they were planning to dispose of it so their son arranged for us to have the world's ugliest dark brown velvet couch. We accepted it gratefully.

Even now 25 years later I shoulder whenever I visualise the couch crouching in the corner of our living room hideous and malevolent.

Our first run-in happened soon after it arrived. I was home alone on the couch one afternoon recovering from a late night out when I fell into a deep sleep.

I walked the terrifying sensation of a heavy body pinning me down and throttling me. The presence was furious and male and my mind immediately went to the drain pipe rapist although this clearly wasn't a flesh and blood man.

He was like a very dark angry mass with a hazy outline. Although I couldn't see him clearly I somehow knew he was about 40 with straggly blonde hair.

I was utterly panicked. It took all of my strength to fight him off and I ended up falling to the floor with the effort.

My heart was thumping and I was sweating profusely but the instant I broke contact with the couch I knew that I was safe and completely alone.

I had never heard of sleep paralysis at the time and had never experienced it before but in any case I'm not sure this qualifies given that I was struggling hard throughout the experience.

At the time I tried to rationalize it as a very bad nightmare but it was just so real that a big part of me remained unconvinced.

I was so traumatized that I gave the couch a wide berth after that. I got hold of an old bean bag and used that instead. However the evil couch wasn't quite done with me yet.

About a month after this I was asleep in my own bed when I had a terrifying dream. The door to my room swung open and to my horror in stalked death.

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