Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Haunted Room

When I was growing up, on house my family lived at was frequented by ghosts.  I don’t know who/what the ghosts were, or where they resided specifically.  I just know that every now and again, we’d experience strange things.  Often, our entire family would get strange dreams within a very short period of time.  Once, when I was seven, the ghosts got a bit more impish with me.

The house was part of a duplex; each side had 3 bedrooms on a corner lot.  My room was small and in the middle of the house with large windows along the backyard.  It had one normal door to the hallway that lead to the other two rooms, and one sliding door that opened into the kitchen. I often keep both doors shut at night.  My room was only illuminated by distant street lights thru closed roller blinds.  This one night, I was awoken in the middle of the night, in my bed of course.  I remember being on edge and scared, but still curious.  I felt something in the room with me.  I didn’t know what.  My parents had taught me about demons (from the Christian Fundamentalist perspective), and since I had nothing else to reference, I immediately associated my sensations with my limited understanding of demons.  My mother also taught me that if I had an encounter with such demons, I could simply call upon god’s name and that would scare them off.  For some reason, this night I did not immediately resort to this.  I was too frightened to speak or get out of bed, and I was a little curious actually.  I tried to get a handle on what I was feeling.  I imagined Halloween style ghosts floating near the ceiling. Of course, the reality is, doing this did nothing, and I soon found that out.

Trying to convince myself that it was all just in my mind, I started to relax a bit.  For a short while, I just laid in bed, awake.  I was lying on my side when I noticed something coming from my closed closet on the oppose wall from my bed right, in front of me.  There was a dark half circle shadow that appeared from the crack between the closet door and door rim, as though it was a hand reaching out from inside my closet.  I couldn’t believe it.  I stared as long as I could dare.  I was so frightened, I hide under my blankets.  My heart was pounding. I never saw anything like that.  What I had been taught said that this was a demon.  I got up enough courage to peak out from under my blankets and looked again.  It was gone.  The sense that something else was in the room was not gone.

Without the visible manifestation, I did start to calm a bit.  I began to think that since these demons were in my room, I would simply look out the window over my bed until they decided to leave.  So I sat up in bed and ducked under the blind with the plan of just looking into our backyard.  Well, this calmed my nerves for a second or two, until I saw a large silhouette appear as white shadow right on the window all around me.  I looked at the edge of the silhouette around me on the window, rolling me head and eyes from my right, up and to the left.  I was sitting with my face practically pressed against this manifestation!  In an instant of pure fear and dread, I zoomed back under my blankets and just started instinctively praying to god for all of this to go away.  I was tense for quite some time, but the other presence was gone. I was awake for quite some time that night.

I told no one of that event for years.  Of course, I’ve since realized that the spirit in my room that night wasn’t able to harm me, regardless to its nature.  What are ghosts?  I don't know.  In this case, I guested is that it was an earthbound ghost that was having some fun with me.  Or, maybe this are demons of some sort, whatever that means.  Anyway, other visitations did occur, but after that night, I never experienced any other tangible manifestations at that house.

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