HARD TO
EXPLAIN TALES
Shadows
I was born and lived in Bluefield West Virginia until I was 6 or 7 and had many
weird experiences there. I had a situation in 1980 where very
strange things happened in the house I lived in. I had a situation (I say
situation as apposed to experience because I feared for my life) where I walked
into our kitchen one night and saw 2 yellow eyes in the dark staring at me. My
mother (a hippie) was messing around with a
Ouija board with my father and some
friends at the time (as many probably did in the late 60's and 70's and I don't
really know if I can say that was the cause of all that happened.
I even had a
dog named ouija and don't put much stock in their effectiveness). I ran into the
living room and explained what I saw but my parents explained it away saying it
was headlights coming in the window from a passing car.
I know/knew the
difference between headlights and eyes.
What I saw looked like a cat or dog's
eyes when light reflects off of them and they weren't coming from the
windowm
they were from inside the kitchen.
A little while later a big doberman
showed up on our front porch. My father ran it off because it was growling and
acting like it was going to attack.
No one knew who it belonged to
-
it was not
our neighbors (we knew them all...
people were friendlier like that back
then).
A few days after that I started seeing what looked like a black cat
walking around on the beams of the unfinished closet (my father was adding to
the house and my bedroom was under construction partly with the addition of a
closet). I told my mother who again dismissed it.
My brother and I shared a room
and I had forgotten all about the experience until he started waking me up
saying he saw "black men". I did not know what he meant but he said they stood
in the corners watching us all the time. My father (a marine ) would not allow
us to have a night light so my brother and I started using a Lite
Brite and
plugging it in to have some light should we need it in an "emergency". (it was
much closer than getting out of bed and crossing the room to flip the light
switch!) Each night my brother woke me up saying he heard or saw them
running under/around the bed and around us in the dark.
I figured it was only
his imagination and the dark playing tricks but it did make me think about the
black cat I had seen.
Finally my brother got over it about the same time I woke
up to it. My father had finished the closet and I awoke one night to see someone
standing in front of it.
I could not see them fully, just a shadow of someone
standing in front of the closet's white door, with the help of a little light
from an outside street lamp I could see them just standing there. I closed my
eyes and prayed like hell...I didn't open them again but hid under the covers
until I fell asleep. Sometime later I was awoken in the middle of the night by
what sounded to me like men marching. I heard someone say something like
"attention" or something...
I thought it was the
TV or some war flick my marine
father was watching. I opened my eyes and saw writing all over the walls..
It
looked like grade
school writings with scary stick figures and symbols.
I could
barely make them out in the dim light but they were scrawled everywhere. I woke
up my brother and flicked on the Light
Bright but nothing was on the walls or in
the room and in fact all the lights were off and no one was awake in the house
at all.
The next things that happened actually happened in the daylight. My brother woke
me up early one morning. He said that he was playing with his toys in bed (as we
often did when young until our parents got up) and had dropped his truck in the
gap between the headboard and mattress. The truck had gone under the bed.
When
he looked in the crack (which was about six inches wide) to try to get the truck
he said he saw someone under there looking at him.
My brother was shaking and
nearly
in tears...
I think the only thing that scared him more than that was the
fear of waking my father up early on a Saturday morning.
I looked in the crack
and saw nothing.
There was no one there. In denial myself I told my brother to
go back to sleep and rolled over.
When I did I could see in the
newly designed
closet which
still had the infamous "always open" door.
In the
bottom of the closet there was a stack of blankets my mother kept there for
storage....I saw the blankets move as if something was under the top one.
I also
noticed it wasn't folded any longer but bunched up as if someone were curled up
underneath it and laying on the rest of them. For some reason the only thing
that popped into my head was that it was the black cat...I
don't know why, because
whatever was under there was much bigger than a cat or dog;
it was human size.
I
got up, creeping towards it slowly...
I had made up my mind that I was gonna move
those blankets and see what the hell it was once and for all.
Brave or stupid, I don't know...
When the blankets moved again my brother grabbed me so hard and ran that
I actually had a bruise and big bleeding marks on my arm from his
fingernails...he pulled me into my parents room and cried and cried about it.
No
one believed him... and me, I knew to keep my mouth shut.
I didn't sleep much
the first week after that. I would try to nap in the afternoon so my brother
could sleep and I would stand guard. My father went away for Marine duties a few
days later leaving me and my brother alone Friday and Saturday nights while my
mother delivered newspapers. We decided to sleep on the couch with the lights
and the TV on so we would not have to be in the dark bedroom.
I remember
watching
Night Tracks videos (I don't think MTV was there just yet) and fell
asleep.
I remember slightly waking up to the sound of the
TV
turning off.
I
thought it was my mother coming home and I almost went back to sleep thinking
she would boot us off the couch
at
any minute but I didn't hear anything else...
it
was silent.
I opened my eyes and saw a face looking at me, but it was no normal
face. It looked like an old shriveled up man or woman with stringy white hair
and dead looking eyes (I'm getting chills just writing this). The face was just
inches from mine and I screamed pulling the blankets over my face to protect me,
but nothing happened. I wrapped my feet and legs tightly against my brother's
who was lying on the other end of the couch out of comfort but also to make sure
he was still there. After a few minutes I peeked out again and didn't go back to
sleep until my mother got home around 6:00 a.m.
My brother and I slept in the
bed with her until my father got home several days later and made us sleep in
our own room. Fortunately for us the house caught fire shortly afterwards. The
cause of the fire was supposedly a plastic chair (my brother and I both
owned one)
that
had been knocked over on the floor
by the
furnace and meltedm causing the fire...funny thing is, neither of my parents claimed to have done it and neither
me or my brother would get up at all after lights were out, especially alone.
My parents had not been getting along and after a particularly
violent fight my mother, brother, newborn sister and myself left that town. My
father stayed behind. We moved and I forgot about it for a few years...
or tried
anyhow until my father committed suicide. It was weird going back to that town
(thank god the house was long gone). Nothing had changed much
- it was still a
sleepy little town but it held a dreamy weird feeling to it and dredged up a lot
of unwanted memories..
.I was glad it was just a short stay.
I
don't plan on going back.
-Unsigned.