Ghost Stories

A Pajiba friend has been posting some of his ghost experiences, and they inspired me to tell my own. It’s the Halloween season, I guess.

It’s not as exciting or vivid as his, but it sure scared the hell out of me when it happened.

The first one happened in my bedroom of the house I grew up in (on Westminster). My bed faced the window, which faced nothing, really. Just the fence and a narrow strip of side yard. And one night, as I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep, I saw something.

It didn’t look like much at first. Just a shadow. But the shadow looked . . . wrong somehow. If you lie in a bed and stare at a window for that many years, you get pretty familiar with where the light hits in any given situation. This shadow just didnt make sense. It seemed detached, set apart from the fence, and it didn’t fall like any shadow I had ever seen.

Just as I was puzzling over this, the shadow moved. And the best I can explain it is that the shadow seemed to ripple slightly and move through my window. I was terrified, unable to move or cry out or do anything except stare at it in rapt horror.

I remember lying there, crying and unblinking as I felt a kind of malevolence  rush over me.  The room was thrumming with it. And all I could think to do, frozen as I was, was to silently pray.  My relationship with the church by then was tenuous at best, but some habits and faith will stick with you no matter what. I fervently sent up every plea I could think of, shivering the entire time as the room grew colder and the shadow hovered first in the window, then past it, and then moved closer to me. And as I lay there, I watched the shadow suddenly dissolve. I bolted upright and ran to the bathroom where I huddled in a towel and tried to convince myself that I had been dreaming.

But I knew I hadn’t been asleep. Not at all. And I didn’t sleep in my room for a week.