For years I believed in Ghosts. Ever since I was a child. How could I not? when one of my first and strongest memories was of seeing one? back between the ages of about four or six I woke one night to a figure in my room. Even now 30 years later I remember it clearly when other memories have faded and become jumbled I remember waking and seeing a figure silhouetted a against the light from the window. I remember the feeling of air rushing from my lungs as I screamed, I remember the fear but I don’t remember the sound or anything else. If my parents came to comfort me or if I simply hid under the blankets till morning I honestly couldn’t tell you. All I remember is that one small snapshot and nothing else. I don’t remember speaking about it to parents.
As I grew up it seemed we always lived in old houses and as they breathed and settled in the night, I would lie awake, listening. Still too young to know what these noises were the image of the figure would come back to me again and again. The noises reconfirming to me what I already knew, Ghosts were real, I could here them and I had seen one. I did not sleep well.
Around the time I was hitting puberty I started suffering from what I now know was sleep paralysis. If you’ve never experienced sleep paralysis count your self lucky it’s a horrible condition to be afflicted with. Your brain wakes, your eyes open but your body is still asleep. Often you will feel like a large weight is on your chest and at the peripherals of your vision shapes will lurk. You are unable to move, unable to cry out and the only way out is to claw your way to consciousness. Sleep Paralysis to me felt like death and when I finally broke free I would shoot bolt upright in bed drenched in sweat and gasping. I never told my parents.
Thankfully I don’t suffer from sleep Paralysis anymore but it was something I was regularly affected by until my early twenties. Throughout my early to teens the night time became a place of torment. Convinced as I was by the existence of ghosts I would lay awake remembering that encounter, the old house creaking never silent, getting out of bed to stand on the landing, holding my breath, listening, skin tingling. Sleep was worse than being awake, not knowing If I would be visited by what I thought of as a malevolent force that I was powerless against.
Time moved on, as it does, and I moved away to University I Still didn’t sleep well but by now I was aware of sleep paralysis and was able to rationalise most the experiences I’d had whilst I was young. Still though the image of that figure in my room persisted as the clearest memory from my early childhood and still it would trouble me.
As my first year of University ended my parents had moved their first ever “new” house and I came home to visit for a few weeks to be fed and have somebody else do my washing. During what was becoming a rare family dinner with my sister and brothers present we started talking about the houses we had grown up in. How the windows would rattle in one with an easterly wind, how the boiler in one would clank at night and how the upstairs hall in another was always cold.
My sister started talking about how the first house she remembered, the one in which I had seen the figure, had always scared her. How the upstairs bathroom with its old iron bath had given her the creeps and how she always felt there was “Something” in that house. Even my oldest brother agreed with her that the house had never “felt right”. I decide it’s time to share with everybody what I’d saw in that house. I tell them of waking one night to see the figure in my room of remembering the feeling of screaming but not the sound and not remembering anything else. I tell them how as a child this had convinced me Ghosts existed and how silly I felt now as an adult.
my mum still eating listens to my story and at the end asks rather glibly “Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?” I ask her back.
"That was the night we were burgled" she says matter-of-factly.
"No, I don’t remember the house being burgled what happened?"
Again in an off hand manner she replies "Oh, well, they didn’t take anything. We think you heard something and woke up. When we came downstairs in the morning the back door had been broken open and there were some of your dads tools on the table. You must have heard the door being forced."
My mum starts clearing plates and nobody says anything. My stomach lurches “What do you mean tools?” I ask my mum.
"Oh you know a hammer, your dads chefs knife, they were laid out on the kitchen table, you really don’t remember?"
I just kind a mumble “no” and leave it at that nobody brings it up again nobody seems to want to think about it.
For all my life until that point I’d seen a Ghost in my room that night. It seems now I woke to find an intruder in my room, an intruder that had “laid out tools” on the kitchen table where I would have breakfast the next day.
Ghosts don’t scare me any more, people do. I still don’t sleep well, I still find myself on the landing listening to the house in the small hours of the morning. I’m still haunted by that figure. I have questions that are not likely to be answered. Like if I’d woke my parents how would an intruder make their way out of my room, down the landing, past my parents room and down two flights of stairs and out the house without my parents noticing?
All I really know for sure is I saw something when I woke that night and what my parents found on the table the next morning.
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Credits to: photofreecreepypasta
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