A Haunting Within my Dreams

A haunting can be much more than a ghost “frequenting” in a specific location. This story goes beyond that when the haunting began in my dreams…

On the last day of summer, in a year not so long ago, the sunset in the most beautiful array of colors as it slipped behind the Colorado Rockies. A light breeze wisped past with the smell of rain the air. What an incredible day, I thought. I fell asleep just as I had for many nights throughout that summer; a light purple sheet and a small crack in the window to let the smell of rain fill my room. It was quite literally the greatest ending to an incredible day… or so I thought.

A few hours after I fell asleep, I had the most intense dream with a great deal of detail.

Images of this house appeared to me, gloomy and from the early Victorian era; one which I had never seen before with tattered curtains and broken shutters. I walked through the front door, as if I had already known the way, down the corridor, past the kitchen, and into the parlor. For just a moment, I turned my sights to my hand, that had moved without my doing so, to a brass snake coil. In one fail swoop, I went through the wall and descended the spiral staircase to a room that took the appearance of boiler room at first glance. From there, I paced through the wreckage of debris, from the lack of upkeep, to a smaller door, behind some of the pipes. Ghosting through the pipes, I opened the door to find a beautiful ivory and emerald chiseled stone bed frame with white, silk curtains that draped to the floor like art in a painting. Lay just inside, a woman with fair skin, long, beautiful hair of raven, lips painted red, and a gown of emerald lace over a sheer layer of ivory.

At first, I was surprised. I thought that it was Princess Snow White, from the Disney collections, but as I took a closer look, this woman looked nothing like the way I imagined Snow White would look like in real life.

With that thought, I heard a whisper from behind me. “Free me.” I look back towards the woman that laid there, but this time the stone structure had been cracked and tattered and the woman was replaced with a rotting corpse of bugs of all kinds and pieces of flesh descending from the bone. The sight alone made me nauseous but what happened next, I cannot say in full certainty. What I do remember is a dark figure with red eyes and sharp, jagged teeth that came at me, and then I woke up.

Each night, the very same dream… with minor details added to different parts of the dream.

After a week, I began searching for the house, did research on the dark figure and reoccurrence of dreams. I happened to come across a picture of the house fitting my description in an old shop that I had seen on the edge of town. The shopkeeper warned me about the house being haunted and to steer clear of it.

Something possessed me to go to the house; it already felt like I lived there.

The house was as gruesome as it was in my dream, if not more so. The building’s cover was stained with dirt and peeled paint, rotted roof shillings, warped shutters that dangled from rusted hinges, and untamed vines that spiraled around the pillars. Glass had been fractured and fogged with despair. The smell ran rancid of decaying leaves and mud mixed with dust and death. And the chill in the air left the hairs on the back of my neck in a petrified-like state as the wind whipped through me. Every fiber in my being screamed to turn back, but I continued.

Little did I know that the inside held more secrets than I could imagine. Written symbols were revealed through the cracked and peeled wall paper while cobwebs and debris took up residence along every piece of furnishing. Just as I looked in one direction, something had moved in the other out of the corner of my eye. The ghastly moans and screams that came from those beings sent a series of cold chills through my body. The inaudible cries increased in volume until it felt like my mind was overbearingly crowded. I was stuck in a dark corner in a sea of voices that were not my own. Though I never saw faces to match to the voices, I knew that demons had overtaken me.

At one point, in all the pandemonium, an entity had asked my name, but for some reason I could not remember it. My name had no longer held importance to me. Despite the odd question, I was compelled to continue. I dredged through the corridor, tip-toed through the kitchen, and straight into the parlor, where everything seemed to be exactly in the same place as in my dream. Once more, I had turned to where I had found the brass snake coil, raised my hand towards it, and it began to move. In one fail swoop it slithered around my wrist and sank it’s fangs into my skin, drawing blood, then revealed the spiral staircase below. I descended the staircase, although most of it was blurred, until I ended up in the boiler room where I was greeted by arachnids of various kinds and dampened air followed by a candle lit pathway to the doorway just beyond the pipes.

As I opened the door, the shadow flew at me and through me. Everything went dim and then pitch black. For the first time since I had stepped into that house, the voices had seized. But when I woke up, I found myself in the stone bed with colors of lavender and cream…

Some time had passed since then, but I cannot say for certain how much. One day a small group of people stumbled upon the house. They searched the house making small jokes with laughs and ‘jump-screams’ until they came across a small journal; my journal? A young man called the others into the room and began it read from it. As the young man read my story aloud, from the pages of my dream journal, I had realized that I had become the dark shadow with red, glowing eyes and sharp, jagged teeth, awaiting the moment for that man to become my first victim.