sorry....I'll try again

As a teenager I had many experiences that just couldn't be explained. Some of them could be dismissed as the overactive imagination of a depressed teen. There was one event, no, a series of events that spanned several years, that were witnessed by people other than myself. These I hold, to this day, as evidence that supernatural events do occur. There, I said it. If I ever run for office, this will probably turn up and cost me votes. But so be it. It is a true story, elements of it were witnessed by others. So here it is.

Background info:

There is a spare bedroom in the house I lived in from age 13 to 18. The house was built in about 1973. We bought it from the builder, who lived there with his family until 1980. As far as I know no one has ever died in the house. I doubt anyone is buried under it, because the water table is so high; the pond that is next to the house was meant to be a basement. The girl who used to live in my room committed suicide in 1992, but I don't think that is at all related.

There is also an old wrought-iron bed in the spare room that my parents found in an abandoned house by a dry river bed. I almost always felt uneasy in that room at night. About that same time it was not unusual for my friends that stayed over to wake in the middle of the night only to find that we had had the same dreams.

Age @16.

Once a dream was had about that room. In this dream, a large hairy hand reached through the window and pulled me outside. I awoke in fear and went to my friend to see if he was OK. He was startled to wake, and then, reluctantly, told me of his dream. He walked into that dark room, and looked in the mirror. There was an old old woman whose skin was so thin you could make out the bones of her skull through her face. Her skin was stretched so tight as to force a wide grin. An unfelt wind tossed her hair and dirty white linen gown, and her whole body was glowing with an eerie blue light..

I ran to get my dad. "Dad, there's a ghost in here." But he only laughed at me as he looked into the completely ordinary mirror. He left. Wondering if I had imagined it, I touched the mirror lightly with my fingers. Nothing out of the ordinary I thought.

Then a skeletal hand, made of smoke, glowing with the same blue light shot out and grabbed me. It was huge. From fingertips to wrist it was about two feet (60 cm). It started to pull me into the mirror. I woke up panting and with a heart rate of about 200 beats per minute.

One night C. came over. As always holds true in the horror movies, my parents were out of town and my brothers were off drinking and carousing. Our yard is rather large, 4 acres, and the nearest neighboring house can't be seen. It was a typical Mississippi night: humidity about 600%. No moon. No streetlights. Pitch-black, but you could see a little when your eyes adjusted. Cicadas sang quietly because of the uncomfortable heat.

We sat on the trampoline discussing this book, or that girl, whatever. C said he could hear a high pitched whine in the distance. I couldn't hear it, but followed him. We walked to one of the corners of the yard that bordered some woods. We both stopped when we saw... something.

It was solid black, about two feet high. I thought it was a bush at first. When we got close enough to see it clearly, we noticed that it was a humanoid shape. Its face had no features, just pits where its eyes would be. From the waist up was showing, from its waist down it was sticking into the ground. It's hands rested palms down on the earth as though it was supporting his weight with his hands. (Forgive me for attaching gender at this point, but I definitely think of it as male.) As though he realized we could see him, he turned his head to the left and sunk into the ground.

I said, "C., did you see that?" "Yes," C. answered. "Well what do you say we GET THE $#%& OUT OF HERE!!!" I started running like an animate golf ball in Arnold Palmer's back yard, but C. insisted that we walk calmly, but quickly, back to the house.

The three dogs we owned, and two or three of the neighbors dogs joined in on the fun, and started barking out in the corner of the yard where we had seen him. C. and I compared notes on what we had seen, to verify that we hadn't gone insane. We had definitely seen the same thing. I drew a sketch of him. It scared us both just to look at the picture, so we burned it in a candle flame. However, there was one section that wouldn't burn. I held it with tweezers in the candle flame, but the paper, where I had drawn his hand, wouldn't burn. I was never able to destroy it. The whole time we discussed this the dogs were getting closer.

C. is a rather silly person, and when our conversation had shifted to other topics he started making silly faces in a full length mirror, near the spare bedroom, at the end of the hall. Then all of a sudden, he looked, as Shaggy always said of Velma, as though he'd seen a ghost (Ironically Velma is my grandmother's name).

He looked behind him, got up and ran around the living room saying, "I gotta get out of here. I have to go." When I calmed him down enough to tell me what was going on, this is what he said: "I was looking in the mirror, and I could see the bricks of the fireplace behind my reflection. I saw a blue skeletal hand creeping across the bricks." I asked him if it was attached to any creature, but he said that only about half the hand appeared because of his limited field of vision.

After a while he returned to the same place and started looking more closely into the mirror. He made the scooby doo face again and ran to the den about twice as hysterical. I calmed him down and he said he had seen the same giant skeleton hand, but this time had seen up the arm to the shoulder. Both times when he turned around to look back at the fireplace, it wasn't there. This time I never calmed him down all the way, and he left. I was in the middle of our Mississippi farmhouse, all alone for the night. I did not sleep well.

I don't think C. ever saw the Shadowman again. However, I saw him on quite a few occasions. On some nights I would wake up, and he would be standing over me, now the size of a full grown man, looking down at me. I was shocked, of course. I would stare, rub my eyes, and he would just stand there. Then I turned on the light and he would cease to be. From that point forward I always slept with a bedside lamp.

If a friend would spend the night. I always slept in the guest room and let them have my bedroom. When I slept in the guest room, he appeared almost every time. I got used to waking up and seeing him and just kind of accepted it as my own personal curse. Then, as if his presence wasn't enough, things started moving around. A book would fall off a shelf. A pen would slide across a table. Then the next step. Things started happening away from home.

Once I was at the home of a girl I had been out with about three times. I was 17. As the conversation drifted from one topic to another, I told her that I sometimes had seen weird things. Furthermore, that there had been strange occurrences on dates that scared the you know what out of the young lady I was with. So when I told her this she got up from her chair, walked away from me, then turned to me to tell me I was a crazy SOB. At that time a stuffed animal shot out from under her bed. Of course it scared her to no end. I picked it up, I think it was a rabbit, and said, "See, I told you so." Funny thing, we never went out after that.

At age 18 I went off to college. He never appeared in my dorm, but the occasional weird thing would happen, moving pens, falling books and such.

When I would go home for the weekend, sometimes he showed up, sometimes he didn't. As I got more and more into life away from home, I saw him less and less.

Then once when I was about 20, I had a young lady as an overnight guest. My parents were home. So separate bedrooms were expected. I took the guest room and she took my room.

He showed up that night. I turned over and went back to sleep.

Then next morning I was talking to my friend. She said, "I saw you looking at me last night." "What are you talking about?" I said. "I didn't get up last night."

She of course had seen a shadow standing in the doorway. She assumed I was sneaking in for... ahem... a political discussion. When she sat up to speak to me, she said I crouched down and kind of vanished.

That was the last time I remember seeing him. Now at 28, my trips home are less and less frequent. I have moved far away and now only get the chance to go home about once every year and a half. Now, even if I sleep in the guest room, he doesn't show. If anyone else has seen him, let me know. He's kind of like an old friend and I do wonder what he's up to these days.

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