It Was at the Door

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The spooky season is around the corner, so that means it’s about time to crank this blog’s strangeness level to high.

From a recent account I heard firsthand …

I’ve seen ghosts multiple times since I was a kid.

One time, I was spending the night at an elementary school friend’s house in the Chicago suburbs. I woke up in the middle of the night with the urge to pee, so I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. When I’d finished washing my hands, I looked up from the sink and caught sight of something in the medicine cabinet mirror that froze me where I stood.

The mirror gave me a view of the cabinets hung where the wall met the ceiling behind me. Through the right cabinet’s door, which was now open, I could see a small, spindly figure huddled inside with its arms wrapped tight around its knees. It took my still sleep-fogged brain a second to realize that I was looking at a little kid.

There were a couple of things wrong with that: One, my friend didn’t have a younger brother. Two, this kid was glowing green.

I whipped around, expecting what I thought – or hoped – was a hallucinati0n to be gone by the time I faced the open cabinet. But there he was, staring at me from the cabinet with at least as much fear in his eyes as I had in mine. Then he was gone.

At breakfast the next morning, I told my friend “I saw a little boy in your house last night.”

He tried to downplay it with an offhanded “Yeah …”

But then his mom walked over, set down a plate of pancakes, and said, “Oh, you saw our ghost?”

At that, my friend shrank back into his chair.

“Your ghost?” was all I could stammer.

“Yes,” she said, “he lives in the bathroom.”

That last part put me off my appetite. Because I hadn’t mentioned seeing the kid in the bathroom.

Later, the family made some inquiries with the bank they’d bought the house from. It turned out the previous owner had subjected his young son to continuous physical abuse. One night he’d finally gone too far and killed him. The killer dad went to prison, but his dead son stayed on. My friend’s family moved out after less than two years.

Here’s a second account from the same anon:

I’ve stayed at the most haunted hotel in Virginia – a couple of times, actually – on business. Let me tell you, it lives up to its reputation.

One night, I woke up to a rising vibrating sound. At first I thought it was the pipes in the far wall. Then I feared it was an earthquake. After a few seconds, the heavy oak dresser across from my bed slid four feet to the right. It came to a stop, and so did the sound.

There was no one else in my room. The dresser had moved on its own.

But that was nothing. Another time, I heard mumbled cursing and grunting from the hallway. I poked my head out the door and saw the figure of a man trying a door down the hall. He was clearly frustrated by his inability to turn the locked knob. He was also just plain clear. I could read the “Exit” sign on the wall at the hallway’s end through him.

For more adventures of the restless dead, read my acclaimed SF-horror novel:

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