I luuuuuuuuuurve Halloween. I am totally into the spooky, scary, eerie idea behind Halloween. I’ve been fascinated with the mere idea of ghosts and spirits walking the earth since I was a wee child. I didn’t start off fascinated. I started off as a greedy child who would dress up like a bum, complete with honey and coffee grounds on my face and my dad’s old clothes or in a witch costume that my mother would sew for me. Store bought costumes? Please. Halloween is the time to get creative.
Nevertheless, my fascination towards ghosts and spirits and things that go bump in the night happened shortly after an incident I had when I was approximately 8 years old.
We had gone down to visit my grandparents in California and were all nestled into our beds one night. My mother and father, of course, shared a room and my two brothers shared a room. This left me to the pull down bed in the hallway but I was okay with this because above me was a gorgeous stained glass window.
So, there I was, all peacefully slumbering one night in my hallway pull down bed at the tender age of 8, an innocent child, when my bed started flipping up and slamming back down to the floor. It did this repeatedly. The house was deathly quiet so I pierced it with a scream as the bed continued to lift up and crash back down. My dad came running out to the hallway where I was still screaming but the second he appeared, the bed stopped. He asked me what happened and in between hiccups and hysterics, I told him exactly what the bed had been doing.
Now, my dad is a very logical type person and believes that absolutely everything can be explained away scientifically. When I was little, I used to sleep in a very tight ball in the corner of my bed so my dad concluded that what must have happened is that I had done just this and this caused the bed to flip up and then come back down. Well, I would have bought into that explanation had the bed not repeatedly done this until he showed up to save me from whatever it was that was angry with me for being there. He calmed me down and went back to his room and while I did eventually fall asleep, it wasn’t for quite some time.
Over the years I thought about that incident and was just starting to doubt myself, “Maybe it did only flip up and come back down once.” Except that it happened again. This time I was about 12-13 or so and was in my own bed, in my own home, where I had slept many, many times while my parents were downstairs watching t.v. In fact, I could hear the television and as one who has always had a hard time actually falling asleep in the first place, I was still awake. I was lying in my bed, staring at the darkness, thinking about things when I started to hear a squeaking noise coming from the heating vent on the wall.
This was an older house that we lived in and the vent was about 6 inches from the floor, the shape of a rectangle and it was about 2 feet to the right of my bed. The slots in the vent were a bit wide and each room in the house had vents like this. Therefore, it was no surprise when a few weeks earlier, my older brother’s hamster got out of its cage and slipped in between these vent slats and ended up crawling around inside the heating duct to the point that he and my dad had to dismantle a portion of it in the basement to get the hamster out.
Because of this, I just assumed that the hamster had done it again and even though I was on the second floor of the house, his squeaking would still be able to carry that far up the vents. So I dismissed it as nothing. Besides, we weren’t allowed out of our beds after bed time unless we had to use the restroom or there was an emergency. I figured they could get the hamster tomorrow. So, again, I let it go and started staring back out in to the darkness again. Eventually I closed my eyes to try and sleep.
And then....
My bed started shaking. Now this was a normal, twin size bed so it didn’t lift up off the ground, rather, it was as if someone was standing at the end of my bed and had placed a foot on one corner and was shoving it. Or as if someone had climbed up on it and was jumping on the right end corner of it. It kept shaking. And shaking and shaking and shaking.
My parents were right downstairs but I could not get out of bed. I couldn’t get out of bed because this wasn’t an emergency, who would believe me about my bed shaking when they didn’t believe me about it when I was 8? Also I couldn’t get out of bed because I was frozen solid, petrified with fear. And I had that thought process that many kids have.
“If I don’t let it see me see it, if I lay here as flat as I can and squeeze my eyes shut and don’t move, don’t breathe, it will go away.”
The bed shook for about 45 seconds or so...and stopped just as suddenly as it began. However, I refused to open my eyes because I just knew that whatever it was, it was still standing there, waiting for me to open my eyes so it could kill me. Maybe an hour later, I peered through half closed lids and saw nothing there which enabled me to work up the nerve to completely open my eyes and look into the darkness towards the end of my bed. Nothing. I did eventually fall asleep.
When I awoke the next morning, I asked about the hamster. Nope. It had been in its cage the entire time. I asked if we had any earthquakes. Nope. There was nothing to explain it away. My bed has not been shaken since then, it was just those two experiences but it does not matter to me how anyone tries to prove it must have been this or it must have been that, I will never believe it was anything but something that didn’t want me there.
Many more Halloween Scary Stories coming up. And believe me, I have a LOT of them.
<--- Here Endeth The Lesson
