03 September 2020 | Haunted houses, Your Stories, Your True Encounters
About a decade ago, the economy picked me up out of my apartment and firmly plopped me back into my parents’ house in southern Denver. I adore my parents and get along with them really well, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being a failure in not being able to take care of myself financially. In hindsight, that was a common struggle for many of my millennial counterparts during that time.
On top of this, internal political issues at my job of four years had encouraged me to jump ship and land in a less-than-stellar management job at a big box pet store. The stress of this job really took a toll on me. Long hours of late nights, followed by early mornings, on top of really foul company drama caused me to lose about 20 lbs in my unhappiness. I blame my utter malaise on why I wasn’t affected more by what I saw in my room one night.
After a typical late night at “ye olde pet prison”, I made it home and headed to my room to unwind. Luckily I wasn’t doing a “clopen” and could sleep in the next morning before going back to work around noon. I turned on my TV, zoned out, and just decompressed for as long as possible before I decided it would be wise to get ready for bed.
At about 1:00 am, I was sitting on my bed, gazing at whatever was showing on TV at that hour and brushing my teeth. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an amorphous shadow float across my room. It was roughly the size of a basketball floating about 5 feet off the ground. It appeared to my right in front of my closed curtains, drifted toward my closet door, and then disappeared from view. Without really thinking much about it, nor turning my eyes to investigate further, I remember thinking “Huh, I wonder if that was a shadow figure like I’ve heard about?” and thought nothing more about it that night.
The next morning, both of my parents had headed off to work. I was enjoying snoozing in the quiet empty house when the vibration of my cellphone on the floor woke me up. When I picked it up, I had just missed a call from my dad. He had already called a few times and left one voicemail. Of course, you know this sent off warning bells in my head. I sat up in bed and eagerly listened to the voicemail hoping nothing was seriously wrong.
“Hey Katie,” came my dad’s voice from the recording, “I just wanted to check on you. Um… your mom had a weird dream last night and I just wanted to make sure everything is okay. Give me a call when you can. Love you, bye.”
My dad is an often gruff man. While my mother and I share a somewhat carefree and playful outlook on life, my dad is one who seems very grounded in reality. Given he spent his career in law enforcement, seeing the world in black and white is a necessity for him. However, he has always surprised me with how thoroughly he believes my mother and I on the occasions she and I sense something beyond what we fully understand in this existence. I have told my dad about odd happenings I have experienced in my life fully expecting him to reject the notion that there is anything paranormal in our world. In reality, he always hangs to my every word and never rejects that what I’ve sensed is in any way fabricated.
I called my dad back immediately. He refused to delve further into what my mom had dreamed of, but I could tell it had him nervous. He said to not worry about it, but he was glad I was okay and wished me a good afternoon and evening at work. Of course his response didn’t satisfy my curiosity, so my next step was a call to my mom.
“It wasn’t actually a dream,” replied my mom over the phone, “I saw something in our bedroom this morning.” My mom, being a school bus driver, rises before the sun each weekday and gets ready to head to work. During what my family jokingly calls the “butt crack of dawn”, my mom keeps the light lows in their bedroom to hopefully let my dad gather as much sleep as possible. That particular morning, she stood by her side of the bed as my dad shuffled under the covers to roll over and continue sleeping. As he moved the blankets, my mom froze in place. “As the blankets settled, I saw a large shadow appear on his side of the bed. Very quickly, it backed away from the bed and disappeared through the curtains across the room. It made me very uncomfortable, Katie.”
She asked my dad to move the blankets again, trying to replicate whatever action he had made that could have caused a shadow such as what she had seen. No matter what, the two couldn’t recreate anything to explain what my mom had witnessed. While listening to her, my memory of what I had seen the night before came back to me. “What time did this happen, mom?” I asked.
“Maybe 5:00ish? It was early. Still dark,” she replied.
“I saw something in my room about four hours before that.”
After a moment of silent contemplation, my mother replied, “Do NOT tell your father. He’s pretty freaked out over what I saw. He won’t handle it well if he knows you saw it, too.”
To this day, my mom and I have not told my dad that both of his “sensitives” experienced a similar shadow moving around their house. I still find it interesting that I witnessed the shadow enter the house through my second floor window in a smaller size with a nonthreatening vibe. When it moved to my closet and disappeared from my view, it would have ended up in my parents’ room next door from there. Did it wait there for the night, growing in size and maliciousness before my mom witnessed it exit through their bedroom window? We will never know for sure.
Submitted by Katie to Weird Darkness and My Haunted Life Too
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