This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 10:22:07 -0700 (PDT)
To: guestbook@ghosts.org
email mzambaco@aol.com
story When I was four years old, I experienced something that was attributed as being a symptom of one of the following: feeling abandoned by my parents when they went on vacation by themselves (we'd always gone as a family)to a foreign country to celebrate their tenth anniversary; a change of life situation, i.e., the transition from toddler to child; reeling from the effects a trip to an amusement park's haunted house had had on me. The thing is, I remember not caring that my parents went away, because when they got back, we were all going to Disney World together. It couldn't have been some psychological transition because according to my pediatrician, who also had a Ph.D in child psychology, there had been such a manifestation in my behavior about a year prior. And, finally, the monsters in the amusement park were just some ugly funny-looking things and not at all like what I thought I saw.
One night I woke up suddenly. I saw this little, masculine-looking creature partially hidden behind my armoire. I sat up in bed and just stared at this thing. At first, I thought it was harmless, looking very similar to a shrunken Herman Munster, since I had no notion at that point of what "Frankenstein" looked like because I wasn't allowed to watch any scary movies. This thing just stood there watching me, and the sense I soon got was that it was bad. Now I would label it a malevolent presence. But as I child I remember my gut instinct told me to get out of the bedroom immediately, which I did. I ran down the hall to my parents' bedroom and started to cry and told them what I saw. My father did the typical thing any parent does when their child tells them that, checked out my room, and pronounce to me that my room was monster-free. I was adamant. I explained to him that I DID NOT see a monster, I saw a strange little man with a long face, staring at me, and there was no way I was going back into my room whether at night or during the day, I was really scared.
I stuck to my word. I never went into the room during the day or at night, even if someone offered to accompany me. My parents didn't know what to do and thought I was psychotic and a paranoid-delusional. I spoke with my pediatrician who was also a child psychologist, and he found nothing physically or emotionally wrong with me, except for the haunted house/ abandonment theory. I was neither psychotic nor paranoid. I had and have no siblings, so it wasn't a jealousy/attention thing- believe me the last thing this only child wanted was more attention, especially negative.
Finally my parents, fearing for their child's (and their own) sanity, came up with a plan to get me to sleep and eventually sleeping back in my own room (I had "slept" first in my parents' room on a cot, then in the guest room, next in the hallway across from my parents'). The got a supply of empty capsules from the pediatrician, made out a fake prescription (I was extremely inquisitive and not easily fooled) for a "Nightmare Pill". They even went so far as to put a picture of the capsule in Gray's Anatomy, because I insisted that I understand how this was going to work on my brain. Because mind is stronger than matter, and I always seem to believe in the power of medical science, I slept in my room and never saw the thing again. But I never slept without the lights off again. My house was built new, where no other house had stood before. But after I saw this thing, I always felt (until I was 17 and we moved out) that some thing was watching me.