This occurred in 1954, when I was 9 years old. Daddy had just finished building, an addition to our house, so I got my own bedroom, my sisters shared another bedroom, and Mama and Daddy had their bedroom. Across the hall was an empty, spare room, in which some old family furniture and other stuff was stored.
One night I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, as was not at all uncommon for me. I rolled over, facing the open door of my room, across the hallway, and into the spare room. I noticed what looked to be a round spot of light, about the size of a basketball at that distance. At first, I didn’t think too much about it, figured it might be the moon (there was nothing but woods out back). But then I thought, the moon usually appears on the other side of the house, so I figured I would get up to see what it was, but I looked back at it, and it had moved, not along the wall, but coming out of the room towards me. At this point I was getting scared! I even thought I was having a nightmare and started pinching myself to try and wake myself up. Unfortunately that didn;t work I was wide awake, and it kept coming towards me. I could not see anything below the white spot of light, no body at all, but I could see shadows for eyes, a nose and a mouth. It appeared to be a glowing head. I stood up in the middle of my bed, and when it got to within an arms length of me, I lost it and shrieked like a banshee. Immediately, Mama and Daddy came running in and turned on the light. The thing vanished and they tried to comfort me, and convince me that I only had a bad dream. Just go back to sleep. NO! My sleep was over for that night, and until I left home in my late teens, I always had to have a night-light on. I never believed it was “only a bad dream” but I couldn’t prove anything else, so that should have been the end of it, right?
WRONG, about 35 years later, I went home for a week-end visit, which I did periodically (I had many years earlier, left central Maryland for Giles County, Virginia). But the evening of that visit, after Daddy had gone to bed, Mama said: ” by the way, do you remember that nightmare you had?…” to which I replied, jokingly, “which one” (I did have nightmares from time to time, but…), to which she described THAT experience, and then said “we told you it was a bad dream”. I said “oh yes, I remember that”, and then Mama said that she had seen “something” scary too, more like a blob that glared at her. When she said that, I remember thinking, “Dang, I wish I hadn’t heard that…”. I always felt that we were not alone in that house.
Although that event happened almost 72 years ago, I remember it as if it had happened last night. To this day, I have never felt fear or terror anything like I did that night in 1954.
As a post script, this “thing” apparently followed my youngest sister to her home, after Mama and Daddy had passed on, and we sold the house. She refers to it as the Imp, and it has visited some mischief on them, and, at one point, appearing visually to my brother-in-law. This caused a stir, but after that, the Imp seems to have departed (or, at least, is laying low… for now…).
