FicWad

Note: This is my first upload on any internet site, and I'm kind sensitive to criticism, so please don't yell at me. If there's a way you think I could improve my rather childish blathering, please tell me so politely. And please, keep in mind this was for a college class, for a teacher I don't like very much.




How many of us will occasionally get the cold, prickly feeling that makes our hair stand on end and makes us feel somehow as if we were being watched or stared at by someone, even when we know that we are very much home alone? How many others will catch a quick, darkly colored flicker at the edge of our vision, only to dismiss it as a trick of the light or a small animal darting out of sight? What would any of us do if we found that these things were not, in fact, paranoia, tricks of the light, or small animals? My family home has been plagued by shadows, voices, flickers, and other strangeness ever since both my brother and myself are able to remember.
Both my brother and I have a sort of 'sense' for if there are spiritual creatures or beings that have taken up permanent residence in a room or building. Mine will, most often, manifest itself as a feeling of there being other people in the room or a semi-conscious thought that the room is somehow 'fuller' than it should be. In familiar places, both of us are often able to tell the number of presences in a room. In our house, both of us know that there are at least nine or ten separate spirits divided up in three or four rooms. Our parents' room has three, the living room has four, my room has one, and there are two more that have claimed dominion over the entire house. Our house is also inhabited by at least three 'shadows' that both of us are unsure of. They acted maliciously toward my brother, but seem to be semi-benign when I encountered one.
Some of the strangest and most disconcerting stories, for me at least, are those of my brother's shadow encounters. The shadows he saw seem to be malevolent things that were bent on terrorizing him when he was younger.
My brother used to, and to some extent still does, have trouble sleeping. He would sit up in his room for hours on end, trying to convince his mind to sleep. He had several unpleasant encounters with the 'shadows' that inhabit our house. He used to leave his door open during the night, but he no longer does, mainly because of these incidents. He has told me of only two such encounters, but I am nearly certain that he has had more.
The first that he told me of was some time after midnight during his third or fourth grade year. He was in bed, trying to get to sleep, when he suddenly felt that there was something horribly malicious somewhere near him. He told me that he looked in his doorway and saw a willowy, black humanoid shape that was about as tall as he was at the time standing right outside of his room. He said that he could feel that the “thing”, as he called it, was evil and only meant him harm. He never told me what happened after he saw the shadow thing and there is the highly disquieting fact that ever since then, he was extremely prone to having horrible night terrors that would cause him to wake up screaming. This continued until we went to a Wicca shop and the woman there suggested that we get him a piece of raw, unpolished Amethyst to draw in the negative energy that caused the terrors.
The second shadow he told me about may have been on the same night that he saw the humanoid shadow. The description he gave me, however, was painfully vague. He described it as a ball of shadow bouncing around extraordinarily quickly outside of his door.
My encounter with one of the shadows was much less traumatic and must more recent than my brother's. It was just this past break, in fact. Before I start this story, however, I must say that I have excellent night vision and rarely miss objects or misjudge distances if there is the slightest amount of light. I must also say that we have a night light on at all times in the small bathroom that is between my room and my parent's room which provides enough light for most people to see by.
It was around 12:30 at night and I had forgotten some of my things downstairs, clothes and my pillow if I remember correctly. I was heading downstairs to fetch them so that I could change and get myself to sleep. I had already brought all of my other belongings up to my room for the night, but was not particularly tired, and expected to stay up for another hour or so. I was walking towards my parents' room to reach the stairs and I noticed a rather pile shaped mass of shadow outside of my parents' bedroom door. It felt as if something was watching me as well, but I thought nothing of it, because my family has a habit of piling baskets of clean laundry there and the feeling of 'being watched' is fairly normal in our house. I skirted around it and headed down the stairs. I spent little time down there, simply long enough to grab my things before heading back up. When I came back up the stairs, however, the mass of shadow was gone. I waved my hand around where the shadow mass had been and there was nothing but thin air. I shrugged and walked back towards my room. As I got to the door to my room, I turned back to see if the shadow had been a trick of the light. I saw nothing that I could have mistaken for a pile of laundry baskets and the feeling of being watched was gone. No one else was awake at the time, and I had heard no movement upstairs, so I simply decided that the shadow was harmless. I went to sleep that night and woke up much more refreshed than I usually am after six or seven hours of sleep. This merely made me think that the shadow I had encountered was either benign or beneficial.
Another story I have about our spirits is one I've always thought of as the “Living Room Bedtime” story because it seemed as if the presences were telling me that I had been up quite long enough and that they wanted rest as well.
I was staying up far later than I should have been one night during the fall of my 10th grade school year. It was cold in the house, the usual 62° that my parents always set the thermostat to at night. I was reading, I no longer remember what it was, on our ancient, tan desktop computer in the TV room. I was wrapped up in my big brown and off-white comforter with little more than my right hand and head sticking out from under the blanket. I remember that what I was reading amused me and I would occasionally giggle quietly. It was around 3:30am that I heard something shifting around in the living room. I got up, thinking that it was my brother, Russell, who had trouble sleeping most nights (even back then). I remember walking over to the bottom of the stairs and looking into the living room, expecting to see one of the lamps turned on and my brother laid out on the small couch, playing video games with the volume almost off- per usual. I saw nothing. No lamps on, the TV was off, the only light was from the hanging light in the front part of the house. The oddest part was that there was nothing that could have made the noise I had heard. My brother was not there. I went back to the computer, thinking, I'm sure, that it was merely my imagination that had produced the quiet shuffling sound. At around 4:00am, there was more noise in the living room. This time, however, it was a soft “shiff” noise, as if someone was pushing a PS2 game across the wooden table, then a loud “thup” and clatter as if a game had fallen to the floor and hit something. I jumped and stared at the doorway to the living room, afraid that someone or something was prowling about in the other room and had caused the noise by accident. I got up and went to the kitchen to grab one of the knives from the block next to the refrigerator, knowing, even then, that if I had to I could deal serious injury to someone with any decent sized blade (Now, give me a blade 1 ½ inches long, and I could, in theory, kill someone. I have... added to my knowledge of human anatomy since then.). I crept over as quietly as I could to cautiously look past the staircase, holding my weapon out in front of me and staying alert for any other noises that might be caused by another person wandering about on the first floor of my house. I heard nothing, and, when I peeked into the room, there was nothing there. There were no humans or animals in the room that could have caused the sound I had heard. I flicked on the 'big' light, a tall, black halogen lamp that made a slight hum when it was lit, and looked around the living room again, hoping that there was a logical explanation for the noise. There wasn't and this was when I truly noticed, through my sleep clouded senses, that the room felt like it usually did when the presences were being particularly active. I distinctly remember that I hastily apologized to them, turned off the light, hurried back to the computer to turn it off, then returning the knife to the kitchen, before gathering my blanket up to go to bed. I turned off the lights in the same order I always have, first the TV room lamps, then the larger ceiling mounted light, then the computer monitor, then the kitchen light, and finally heading up the stairs and turning off the front light from up there. Before I went up, I apologized, yet again, to the spirits in the living room and promised that I wouldn't stay up that late ever again. And I never did after that.
The last story from our house is more a strange happening that affects all of us except for my father, the unbeliever. My brother, my mother, and myself have all experienced the strange phenomena of hearing someone calling our name, even if we are the only ones in the house. My brother and I will hear our mother calling us from upstairs and our mother will hear either my brother or myself calling for her from downstairs. It appears to only happen to my brother and me when we are on the first floor and only happens to my mother when she is on the second floor.




And that's the end.