Three of My Paranormal Experiences

1. This takes place around Christmastime when I was 13 years old. Do the math and that was around 2008. My aunt always had a way of going all out for Christmas with countless decorations, lights, and little Christmas trees. Her crowning achievement though was the eight-foot tree in her sunroom outside. Each year, she’d decorate it with over 300 ornaments and what seemed like miles of lights. The best part was that it rotated in the tree stand. Her house was really something around that time of year. It's important that I tell you this because I need you to understand how important this was to her.

My brother and I, but mostly me, had told her we would help decorate that year. Neither of us had any idea what we were getting ourselves into. Over the next three days, I was wrapping things in garland, untangling lights, and getting things from the attic. This all took place between eight or nine in the morning and about eight that night. So, yeah a full workday. Once the day was over, I’d head home, which was within shouting distance, eat a late dinner and attempt to go to bed. I say attempt because, for whatever reason, my body wasn’t having it.

I continually drifted in and out of sleep, never really reaching that deep slumber you need to rest. I would end up staying up until five or six in the morning before finally falling out, from pure exhaustion I’m sure. This left me with about two to three hours of sleep before heading back over there and helping my aunt all day. Over those three days, I maybe got eight hours of sleep. On the night of the third day though, my body had enough. We were finished decorating, so I headed home, skipped dinner and went straight to bed. I didn’t turn on the TV, listen to music, nothing. I just went to bed. Before I knew it, I was asleep.

I woke up some twelve hours later the next day. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean I got up, stretched and was ready to greet the morning. I mean my body woke up. I was still in bed. Not quite ready to face the day, I continued laying there. Soon after, I felt something crawl over my legs at the foot of my bed. I didn’t think anything of it because our cat, Gizmo, loved sleeping on my dirty clothes and my closet was right at the foot of my bed. If I weren’t half-asleep, my body would have recognized that it wasn’t our cat, Gizmo. Cats don’t weigh that much. Looking back, I can only equate the feeling to someone stepping over you while you’re in a sleeping bag, camping. Like, I felt the blankets compress around my leg near where the steps were. I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, soon after this, I felt something grabbing on my right ankle. Keep in mind I was lying on my stomach. It wasn’t a hard grab, it was actually pretty gentle, but soon it began pulling me back. Somehow my sleeping brain didn’t register just how insane this whole situation was, so I just shook my foot and the feeling dissipated. Only seconds later though, it started on my other ankle. Again, a soft grab and then a tug. My foot started lifting from the bed before, again, I just shook it away. Finally, I felt both of my ankles getting grabbed and the pulling began. It was a bit harder this time, but for some reason, I allowed it to go on much longer. Writing this out still gives me goosebumps to this day.

My entire body began slowly moving down the bed. I know it sounds insane but I could feel my shirt rolling up underneath me as I was pulled closer to my closet. Finally, something in my rational mind clicked and I jolted awake and scurried to the back wall where the head of my bed was with my knees pulled to my chest. I can still remember what I saw to this day. It was an all-white face with deep black eyes that resembled an abyss. Its mouth hung open and it too was black as tar. It looked angry… I find it so strange that something that had no pupils could express such emotion, but I remember it looking straight at me and letting out an otherworldly scream. It was deep and rumbly while being breathy and high-pitched at the same time.

It's incredibly hard to describe. I’m not afraid to admit that I screamed. Not only did I scream, I screamed for my mom. I had no idea what she would do but at that moment it was all I could muster. The face vanished soon after that and I left the room. When I eventually returned, I remember looking around the doorway and into the closet to make sure it wasn’t in there. Luckily, it never was. As I’ve grown up, I've learned about sleep paralysis and thought for a while this could have been what I experienced, but I’m not sure. I was able to shake it off of me, and I had a handful of sleep paralysis episodes later in life that were nothing like this.

I’m not sure what was on the land before my uncle bought it, but I feel like there may have been something residing there. Maybe not necessarily evil… but very angry.

2. My first experience with sleep paralysis wasn’t as eventful as others. I know some people have talked about seeing things in their rooms, something on their chest, or even being touched, but that didn’t happen to me. Mine was fairly mild. I was about 14 or 15-years-old and had fallen asleep in my room watching something on television. Most likely Ghost Hunters. Some hours later… I woke up. But I didn’t wake up. I’m sure anyone who’s dealt with SP before knows what I mean. I could feel the blanket over me, hear the low voices on the TV and tell I was in a very uncomfortable position. When I tried to move… I couldn’t.

My heart immediately started racing. In my young brain, I convinced myself I’d managed to paralyze myself. Completely irrational, I know, but I was young. I laid there for most likely only a minute or so before finally breaking out of it and waking up completely. For some reason, I wasn’t as scared as I thought I should have been. I mean, not being able to move or break from restraints is one of my biggest fears, but for whatever reason, it didn’t really get to me. I started Googling “not being able to move while awake” and that’s when I learned what SP was. And that was that for a few years.

I didn’t have a second episode until I was in my twenties and living with my wife in an apartment in Greensboro. We’d moved there after graduating to go to college. I ended up dropping out, but that’s beside the point. She was working as a babysitter and I was working third-shift at Harris Teeter. I had the following night off, so I was at home working on stuff for my YouTube channel. Around 3PM or so I was feeling a little drained, so I decided on taking a nap until she got home around 5:45 or 6PM. I left my little closet studio and went to lay in bed.

Real quick, I need to explain the layout a bit. We had three large windows on one side of our bedroom. The side I slept on faced these windows, and the bed itself was only a few feet from them. Behind me was the rest of the bedroom and a small hallway leading to our bathroom. Now, I’d fallen asleep rather quickly, but I am a light sleeper, so when I woke up to the sound of footsteps behind me, I assumed it was my wife getting home from work coming to wake me up. I went to turn around and greet her but couldn’t move. “Great,” I thought, “This shit again. No worries, she’ll come over and wake me up and all will be okay in the world.”

That didn’t happen. The footsteps just continued but never seemed to get any closer. They were always just near the edge of the bed. This went on for what felt like an hour, but eventually, my eyes opened and I quickly rolled over to see what was behind me. Nothing. There was nothing there. Hoping my wife had just made her way out of the room, I headed out and went to the living room but… I was alone in the house. As a matter of fact, when I eventually checked my phone, my wife had texted me saying she was going to be late getting home.

So that would mean that she hadn’t come home and then left and that’s what I heard… she was never there. I never had another experience quite like that one, but I have had SP a few more times. None have ever come close to that experience, however. 99% of the time it's just the feeling of something in the room with me.

3. This story isn’t necessarily scary but… just weird. I’ve never been able to come to a rational conclusion about the whole thing. It happened at my aunt's house sometime in the fall or early winter. My uncle would go deer hunting around this time, and my aunt, who was in her fifties at the time, wanted someone to stay there with her. We lived on my uncle’s land so it wasn’t more than a three-minute walk through my yard to hers. I was maybe 4 or 5-years-old and had my own room over there so I volunteered. On top of this, we always had a great time together. I’d say it was the third or fourth day I was there that it happened.

I was in bed playing with my GameBoy Advance, staying up much later than I should have been. I can’t say for sure what time it was, but it had to have been after midnight. As I was laying there, I heard the silverware drawer in the kitchen slowly slide open. At first, I thought it was just my aunt getting a late snack, so I hid the Gameboy under my pillow and acted like I was asleep. But then I heard something much more jarring.

Go into your kitchen, take out the silverware drawer and shake it as hard as you can. Now, imagine that sound but in the middle of the night at 5-years-old. I was frozen in fear. I sat there for a minute waiting for my aunt to walk by, waiting for anything, but I didn’t see anything. I only heard the sound of my aunt snoring. She was fast asleep. She’d not gone into the kitchen. I mustered up my courage and headed out into the hallway to turn on the kitchen light. As I turned the corner from the hallway into the kitchen… I didn’t see her or anyone for that matter. It was reassuring and also terrifying in a way. I knew we were the only two in the house, so at least no one had broken in.

I walked over to the drawer and slid it open only to find that everything was in place. Nothing was even crooked. I ran back to my room and hid under the covers before I finally fell back to sleep. I never told her about it and only told my parents years afterward. I’m not sure what it was, but I’ve always thought there was something in her house. There were many nights, even when I was a teenager, that I would see some sort of short black mass creeping beside my doorway out of the corner of my eye. I could have been nothing but… then again… who knows?