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All my childhood bedrooms had something in common. Only now that I live alone did I realize what that was.
My father works for the United States Geological Survey, basically NASA, but instead of air and space, they monitor Earth. Once when I was five, Dad said he was the man who went to find “who poisened the water hole”, which isn’t far from the truth. When we lived in the west, his main work trips consisted of visits to national parks and reservations to do water and soil tests. Because he moved up in ranks quickly, this meant we moved from place to place so he could remain close with his higher ups. I never minded it, and to this day it’s odd to me when I’m told by my friends that they grew up in the same house their whole life. Normally, we’d stay in one spot for maybe three years and move again. I will say, this almost sounds like my dad was a hitman. I promise he’s not.
Anyway, my point is, new houses meant new rooms. I love my current bedroom in my apartment, a quiet space for me to sit and watch a movie, draw, work on a project, call my friends, or just decompress after a day at school. I can decorate it however I want and make it my own. I didn’t have that luxury when I was younger. I shared a room with someone since my sister was born, and with six children under one roof, you can’t really get “your own room”, you were assigned a dorm and a bunk mate (normally my sister, the second oldest. We'll call her Liz).
That’s how I know I couldn’t be the only one who was weirded out.
I’ll start with our first house in Montana, a miniscule condo in the mountains, the first I can remember clearly. We moved there sometime in 2007 or 2008, because I celebrated my third birthday in that kitchen while my mom was pregnant with my first little brother. It was an odd placement. There was a curve off what was essentially the highway, one that led to a dirt road with three, one story, tan double family homes. We had the one at the end of the turn, with a large front yard and plenty of room to run around. Before I go on, this was the weirdest house we lived in. Maybe it’s just from childhood memories that feel more like dreams than recollections, but I have vivid memories of that house, a story for another time.
What I want to talk about is our bedroom. In the daylight, it was a quiet place that we reserved for sleeping, as we’d more often than not be running around outside or playing in the living room. But at night, and in an area with little light pollution, it essentially became a void of inky dark. I’ll describe this with more colorful language because, again, these few memories are vivid to the point of lunacy, like a flashback. A childhood memory about childhood dreams is apt to sound fanciful. My two younger brothers (let's say Davy and Fred, respectively) were born while we lived in that house (as I mentioned), and so cries in the night were jarring, of course, but they were relatively ignored by Liz and I. I would hear them when I was sleeping, dreaming about walking through the woods, looking for my brothers. When I woke up, my heart would be pounding, and I’d sit up in my top bunk, trying to calm myself down before eventually climbing down the ladder and going to my parents room, peeking into the crib on my mom’s side, just to make sure the baby was still there.
When we moved again, I was in second grade, and my parents found a larger house in town. We lived here for almost five years. The house had an addition near the back, where the master bedroom was, but the original master was where Liz and I stayed. The two youngest sisters (Maggie and Mary) who completed the six of us, were born while we lived here. As usual, the babies were with my parents at night, and now that their room was across the house, it was harder to hear if a baby was fussy late at night. However, on several occasions, I’d wake up to feet pattering down the hall. I didn’t give it much thought, however active my imagination was, it would always be far too late at night for me to realize what I was hearing until the next morning. They weren’t measured or slow, they sounded the way mine did when I was trying to be quiet, those long steps kids take when they peek under the tree at Christmas.
Finally, one morning, while eating breakfast, Mom asked if I was sick. I was confused, saying no. She told me that Liz had come to her and said that I’d been walking to the bathroom every night. Looking back on this, and with no history of sleepwalking, I don’t know how this could be. In fact, when I asked my sister recently, she told me that, no, she never saw me, but she heard me moving down the hallway. I explained that I had thought it was her moving in the night. She went very quiet and told me that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
Fast forward to our house in Idaho. I moved bedrooms a few times in those two years, as the two youngest sisters were old enough to sleep in a “big kid room” and were assigned to the two oldest, my sister and I. The room I was initially in was right off the master bedroom, and I shared it with Maggie.
Maggie was a decent roommate. I was twelve and she was four, so more often than not, she’d crawl into my bed when she had nightmares. Sometimes, if I had the misfortune of being awake when she did this, she took it upon herself to tell me what was keeping her up. A bad dream, a stomachache, but one February night, about a month after we moved in, she told me that the lady by the door had been looking at her.
“She’s scaring me, she won’t go.”
Hey squirt, now she’s scaring me too. As much as I hated the idea, I moved Maggie between me and the wall, turning my back on the door and sitting with my little sister until she fell asleep again.
This continued, though erratic and never remembered by Maggie in the mornings, for several months, until Maggie decided that the basement room Liz and Mary shared was a better place to sleep, especially in the summertime, when the heat of the day would stay long after the sun had set. So Liz and I swapped, Mary was in the bunk above me and Maggie was in the basement bedroom with Liz. The first few nights went by without a hitch, until I woke up to my little sister's voice in the dark.
“Hi!”
Oh, hell no. I stood up, balancing on the edge of the bed frame to lift Mary down into my own bed. I remember this instance a little better, probably because it was relatively recent, 2017. It might have also been because Mary wasn’t talking to the door, but to the dresser by the window.
The first house in Pennsylvania was the smallest, relative to the size of our family. I was in ninth grade at this point, and had hoped in vain for my own room. Instead, I was put in the master bedroom with the three other sisters. My parents had a room across the way, as did my brothers. The master was a decent size, but was quickly cramped by four girls from the ages of five to fifteen. The two sets of bunk beds were in there, making the room feel like barracks, or a very girly spaceship. I’m pleased to say that nothing strange happened for the first year we were there. In tenth grade, my mom moved the boys to the third level, a large carpeted upstairs area that we had been using as a playroom. Mary and Maggie were moved to the boy’s old room, leaving Liz and I with the master. Again, we slept there without a hitch for several months.
Before I continue, and as I have said before, I don’t sleepwalk, sleeptalk, or really move when I’m asleep. So when I woke up at an ungodly hour for seemingly no reason, the only worrying reason would have been thinking I was about to throw up, the only logical reason for my eyes to be open. I didn’t feel sick so I tried to roll over and go to sleep.
I couldn’t move. I could move my eyes, but I laid on my back, arms pinned to my sides under the covers, unable to do anything. There was something, or someone in the room besides the sleeping form of Liz. I could feel them leaning over me, like when you close your eyes and your friend pretends to punch you. The sensation of a form near me was really strong, making me work harder to turn or at least kick.
Something pressed onto the side of my bed, so much so that I swore if I had been able to see the mattress by my elbow, it would be indented, dipping from a weight pressed on it. That’s when I started moving. Not me moving myself, but the mattress moving me. I was being shaken, slowly, but smoothly and deliberately. I tried again to lift my arms, but they were still stubbornly unresponsive. The presence was still there. If anything it was stronger, looming over me like a cartoon rain cloud. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. This had never happened before, and in the back of my mind, I was really scared. But I think I assumed I was still asleep. Finally after about ten minutes of consistent movement, I cleared my throat.
“Hey, I’m good now.”
Probably not the greatest thing to be said, but it was the only thing I could find to say. My voice surprised me. I wasn’t expecting anything to come out except that weird soft voice you get when you try to talk in a dream. My voice was sudden and weird in a quiet room.
However, the shaking stopped after I spoke. Like almost immediately. I laid still for a moment, before testing my arms again. I pushed myself up and looked around. I saw nothing, exactly as I expected, and yet my attention was drawn to my doorway. Nothing was visible, and yet it seemed like something would be there. I looked in that direction, my knees pulled to my chest, before saying the only thing I could think to say.
“Thanks, goodnight.”
I’m telling you the exact course of my actions. I wish I could have said something cooler.
The final, current house we live in is decently tame. It was built in the 80s, and the original owners live down the street from us. Now, if you squint, I was technically given my own room; a space about half the size of a standard college dorm, with a temporary wall put up to separate it from the actual bedroom next door. I had assumed it to be an office when I saw the photos on Zillow. I didn’t need that much space, and I’d be out of the house in two years. I walked in the first day to drop off my boxes of clothes, opened the door, and felt an absurdly strong feeling of dread smack me for a moment. I just kind of stood in the doorway, then tossed my box in and sprinted back outside. When I reluctantly returned from helping to set up the kitchen, the feeling was gone.
As I packed up my clothes for my freshman year of college, I heard it, the same cries from my days in the mountain house in Montana. Where I had heard them in a dream before, there I was in my room, very much awake. I set the clothes in my arms down in the cardboard box, stood still for a little, trying to see if I could hear more. Nothing. I pinched my arm, waited another moment, and returned to boxing up my closet.
But, what does all this mean? If I'm taking this long to tell you these stories, I must have an idea of what was going on in the rooms where I should have felt safest.
I could brush off these weird encounters as the product of an overactive imagination, but I’d rather consider something a little more plausible, depending on your view on the supernatural, or the concept of spirits. While writing, I not only called my sister, but the neighbors who built the house. They had been past the age to have children for a long time, but recalled the room I lived in as a storage space for their children’s old baby clothes, bassinets, and cribs.
I began considering. Each room I have slept in, all my life, was either near or originally the master bedroom. One could argue they were used as nurseries. If I line up the encounters I had (hearing a baby fussing, small footsteps, feminine apparitions) they all seem to point back to childcare.
Bear with me.
The only one I couldn’t place for a long time was the sleep paralysis episode. What was happening? Arms by my side, not being able to move too much, and something causing me to shift from side to side.
Almost as if I was being rocked. Being rocked and looked at from the edge of a crib.
I won’t say I wasn’t parented properly, I will say that, in a large family, the responsibility of tending to a smaller child, or five other siblings, usually falls to the oldest. I’ve changed all the diapers of my siblings (much to their chagrin), and have mothered them, dare I say almost as much as my own mother. I’m not complaining, I love my sisters and brothers.
Maybe I just happen to draw the spirits or the memories of other caretakers and children because that’s what I am.
I hope, if or when I become a ghost, I can do the same. Visit people. Never with malicious or ill intent, just checking in on the ones I love long after they’ve left the room.
#entertainment
source
My father works for the United States Geological Survey, basically NASA, but instead of air and space, they monitor Earth. Once when I was five, Dad said he was the man who went to find “who poisened the water hole”, which isn’t far from the truth. When we lived in the west, his main work trips consisted of visits to national parks and reservations to do water and soil tests. Because he moved up in ranks quickly, this meant we moved from place to place so he could remain close with his higher ups. I never minded it, and to this day it’s odd to me when I’m told by my friends that they grew up in the same house their whole life. Normally, we’d stay in one spot for maybe three years and move again. I will say, this almost sounds like my dad was a hitman. I promise he’s not.
Anyway, my point is, new houses meant new rooms. I love my current bedroom in my apartment, a quiet space for me to sit and watch a movie, draw, work on a project, call my friends, or just decompress after a day at school. I can decorate it however I want and make it my own. I didn’t have that luxury when I was younger. I shared a room with someone since my sister was born, and with six children under one roof, you can’t really get “your own room”, you were assigned a dorm and a bunk mate (normally my sister, the second oldest. We'll call her Liz).
That’s how I know I couldn’t be the only one who was weirded out.
I’ll start with our first house in Montana, a miniscule condo in the mountains, the first I can remember clearly. We moved there sometime in 2007 or 2008, because I celebrated my third birthday in that kitchen while my mom was pregnant with my first little brother. It was an odd placement. There was a curve off what was essentially the highway, one that led to a dirt road with three, one story, tan double family homes. We had the one at the end of the turn, with a large front yard and plenty of room to run around. Before I go on, this was the weirdest house we lived in. Maybe it’s just from childhood memories that feel more like dreams than recollections, but I have vivid memories of that house, a story for another time.
What I want to talk about is our bedroom. In the daylight, it was a quiet place that we reserved for sleeping, as we’d more often than not be running around outside or playing in the living room. But at night, and in an area with little light pollution, it essentially became a void of inky dark. I’ll describe this with more colorful language because, again, these few memories are vivid to the point of lunacy, like a flashback. A childhood memory about childhood dreams is apt to sound fanciful. My two younger brothers (let's say Davy and Fred, respectively) were born while we lived in that house (as I mentioned), and so cries in the night were jarring, of course, but they were relatively ignored by Liz and I. I would hear them when I was sleeping, dreaming about walking through the woods, looking for my brothers. When I woke up, my heart would be pounding, and I’d sit up in my top bunk, trying to calm myself down before eventually climbing down the ladder and going to my parents room, peeking into the crib on my mom’s side, just to make sure the baby was still there.
When we moved again, I was in second grade, and my parents found a larger house in town. We lived here for almost five years. The house had an addition near the back, where the master bedroom was, but the original master was where Liz and I stayed. The two youngest sisters (Maggie and Mary) who completed the six of us, were born while we lived here. As usual, the babies were with my parents at night, and now that their room was across the house, it was harder to hear if a baby was fussy late at night. However, on several occasions, I’d wake up to feet pattering down the hall. I didn’t give it much thought, however active my imagination was, it would always be far too late at night for me to realize what I was hearing until the next morning. They weren’t measured or slow, they sounded the way mine did when I was trying to be quiet, those long steps kids take when they peek under the tree at Christmas.
Finally, one morning, while eating breakfast, Mom asked if I was sick. I was confused, saying no. She told me that Liz had come to her and said that I’d been walking to the bathroom every night. Looking back on this, and with no history of sleepwalking, I don’t know how this could be. In fact, when I asked my sister recently, she told me that, no, she never saw me, but she heard me moving down the hallway. I explained that I had thought it was her moving in the night. She went very quiet and told me that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
Fast forward to our house in Idaho. I moved bedrooms a few times in those two years, as the two youngest sisters were old enough to sleep in a “big kid room” and were assigned to the two oldest, my sister and I. The room I was initially in was right off the master bedroom, and I shared it with Maggie.
Maggie was a decent roommate. I was twelve and she was four, so more often than not, she’d crawl into my bed when she had nightmares. Sometimes, if I had the misfortune of being awake when she did this, she took it upon herself to tell me what was keeping her up. A bad dream, a stomachache, but one February night, about a month after we moved in, she told me that the lady by the door had been looking at her.
“She’s scaring me, she won’t go.”
Hey squirt, now she’s scaring me too. As much as I hated the idea, I moved Maggie between me and the wall, turning my back on the door and sitting with my little sister until she fell asleep again.
This continued, though erratic and never remembered by Maggie in the mornings, for several months, until Maggie decided that the basement room Liz and Mary shared was a better place to sleep, especially in the summertime, when the heat of the day would stay long after the sun had set. So Liz and I swapped, Mary was in the bunk above me and Maggie was in the basement bedroom with Liz. The first few nights went by without a hitch, until I woke up to my little sister's voice in the dark.
“Hi!”
Oh, hell no. I stood up, balancing on the edge of the bed frame to lift Mary down into my own bed. I remember this instance a little better, probably because it was relatively recent, 2017. It might have also been because Mary wasn’t talking to the door, but to the dresser by the window.
The first house in Pennsylvania was the smallest, relative to the size of our family. I was in ninth grade at this point, and had hoped in vain for my own room. Instead, I was put in the master bedroom with the three other sisters. My parents had a room across the way, as did my brothers. The master was a decent size, but was quickly cramped by four girls from the ages of five to fifteen. The two sets of bunk beds were in there, making the room feel like barracks, or a very girly spaceship. I’m pleased to say that nothing strange happened for the first year we were there. In tenth grade, my mom moved the boys to the third level, a large carpeted upstairs area that we had been using as a playroom. Mary and Maggie were moved to the boy’s old room, leaving Liz and I with the master. Again, we slept there without a hitch for several months.
Before I continue, and as I have said before, I don’t sleepwalk, sleeptalk, or really move when I’m asleep. So when I woke up at an ungodly hour for seemingly no reason, the only worrying reason would have been thinking I was about to throw up, the only logical reason for my eyes to be open. I didn’t feel sick so I tried to roll over and go to sleep.
I couldn’t move. I could move my eyes, but I laid on my back, arms pinned to my sides under the covers, unable to do anything. There was something, or someone in the room besides the sleeping form of Liz. I could feel them leaning over me, like when you close your eyes and your friend pretends to punch you. The sensation of a form near me was really strong, making me work harder to turn or at least kick.
Something pressed onto the side of my bed, so much so that I swore if I had been able to see the mattress by my elbow, it would be indented, dipping from a weight pressed on it. That’s when I started moving. Not me moving myself, but the mattress moving me. I was being shaken, slowly, but smoothly and deliberately. I tried again to lift my arms, but they were still stubbornly unresponsive. The presence was still there. If anything it was stronger, looming over me like a cartoon rain cloud. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. This had never happened before, and in the back of my mind, I was really scared. But I think I assumed I was still asleep. Finally after about ten minutes of consistent movement, I cleared my throat.
“Hey, I’m good now.”
Probably not the greatest thing to be said, but it was the only thing I could find to say. My voice surprised me. I wasn’t expecting anything to come out except that weird soft voice you get when you try to talk in a dream. My voice was sudden and weird in a quiet room.
However, the shaking stopped after I spoke. Like almost immediately. I laid still for a moment, before testing my arms again. I pushed myself up and looked around. I saw nothing, exactly as I expected, and yet my attention was drawn to my doorway. Nothing was visible, and yet it seemed like something would be there. I looked in that direction, my knees pulled to my chest, before saying the only thing I could think to say.
“Thanks, goodnight.”
I’m telling you the exact course of my actions. I wish I could have said something cooler.
The final, current house we live in is decently tame. It was built in the 80s, and the original owners live down the street from us. Now, if you squint, I was technically given my own room; a space about half the size of a standard college dorm, with a temporary wall put up to separate it from the actual bedroom next door. I had assumed it to be an office when I saw the photos on Zillow. I didn’t need that much space, and I’d be out of the house in two years. I walked in the first day to drop off my boxes of clothes, opened the door, and felt an absurdly strong feeling of dread smack me for a moment. I just kind of stood in the doorway, then tossed my box in and sprinted back outside. When I reluctantly returned from helping to set up the kitchen, the feeling was gone.
As I packed up my clothes for my freshman year of college, I heard it, the same cries from my days in the mountain house in Montana. Where I had heard them in a dream before, there I was in my room, very much awake. I set the clothes in my arms down in the cardboard box, stood still for a little, trying to see if I could hear more. Nothing. I pinched my arm, waited another moment, and returned to boxing up my closet.
But, what does all this mean? If I'm taking this long to tell you these stories, I must have an idea of what was going on in the rooms where I should have felt safest.
I could brush off these weird encounters as the product of an overactive imagination, but I’d rather consider something a little more plausible, depending on your view on the supernatural, or the concept of spirits. While writing, I not only called my sister, but the neighbors who built the house. They had been past the age to have children for a long time, but recalled the room I lived in as a storage space for their children’s old baby clothes, bassinets, and cribs.
I began considering. Each room I have slept in, all my life, was either near or originally the master bedroom. One could argue they were used as nurseries. If I line up the encounters I had (hearing a baby fussing, small footsteps, feminine apparitions) they all seem to point back to childcare.
Bear with me.
The only one I couldn’t place for a long time was the sleep paralysis episode. What was happening? Arms by my side, not being able to move too much, and something causing me to shift from side to side.
Almost as if I was being rocked. Being rocked and looked at from the edge of a crib.
I won’t say I wasn’t parented properly, I will say that, in a large family, the responsibility of tending to a smaller child, or five other siblings, usually falls to the oldest. I’ve changed all the diapers of my siblings (much to their chagrin), and have mothered them, dare I say almost as much as my own mother. I’m not complaining, I love my sisters and brothers.
Maybe I just happen to draw the spirits or the memories of other caretakers and children because that’s what I am.
I hope, if or when I become a ghost, I can do the same. Visit people. Never with malicious or ill intent, just checking in on the ones I love long after they’ve left the room.
#entertainment
source
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