//JMN: MY GHOST STORY

Disclaimer: This is a true story... It didn't happen to a friend of a friend of mine. It's not one I'd heard around a campfire or from television, nor is it another one of my fictional creative writing pieces. This is the retelling of events experienced by me, first-hand. I’ve spent the better part of my adult life trying to rationalise what happened during those two nights in the mountains when I was little. What I know now and what I saw then could be two totally different things. But then again, maybe they aren't... We lived in a remote, quiet suburb carved directly into the edge of a mountainside situated above a cold rainforest. At night, the silence there was peaceful; it was heavy, damp, and chillingly pervasive. I loved it. As a kid, I was a notoriously sound sleeper. Even as a baby, lightning storms would lull me to sleep, that kinda thing. But one night, for no reason I could identify, my eyes snapped wide open into the freezing moonlit dark of my shared bedroom. On this night me and my sister weren't the only ones sharing this room... Sitting right at the foot of my bed was a figure. It was a ghostly, indistinct white shape; like a humanoid fog. It didn't move, but I knew with absolute certainty that it was looking at me. Where its eyes should have been, there were only empty sockets—hollow voids through which I could see nothing. Then, its mouth began to move. At first, there was no sound, just the frantic, silent shaping of words. Then came the whisper. "Help me..." It repeated it over and over, a desperate, rhythmic chant. The entity wasn't aggressive. It just sat there, frozen, staring and whispering. Maybe for a minute. Maybe longer... Fear unlike anything I had felt before was gripping my heart and lungs, unable to do anything but stay locked in a staring match with a phantom with no eyes. And then, as if caught by an invisible breeze, it drifted sideways toward the wall and simply vanished through it... I could scarcely believe what just happened, but I knew what I had seen and I knew I was awake because I couldn't sleep afterwards. I just laid there shivering in my warm bed, wondering what it was, afraid it would come back. But it didn't. Not that night... The next morning, over breakfast, I tried to tell my mum. Her response was the classic, well-meaning dismissal every scared kid gets: "It was just a bad dream, sweetheart." I just stared into my bowl of cereal, wanting to believe her, dreading what might happen after climbing under the covers later that day... Dusk had fallen hours ago and I woke up again for the second night in a row. The same heavy silence. The same freezing air. The same ghost. Only this time, the figure wasn't sitting at the foot of my bed. It was standing next to it, near my left hand. Looming ominously. Staring down at me. "Help me." The ghost started talking immediately, but it wasn't a distant murmuring whisper this time; it was an insistent command. It began to build in volume, getting louder and louder. Panicked, I glanced to my right. My sister was there, sound asleep in her own bed, completely undisturbed. Why isn't she waking up? I remember thinking. The wailing had grown so impossibly loud it felt like it was reverberating inside my own head rather than filling the room. And then, just as abruptly as it had started, its voice cut out. For the first time, the white figure broke its gaze. It looked away from me, staring down at its own feet. Instinctively, my eyes followed its gaze to the floor. A pitch-black shadow hand had erupted from the floorboards. It wrapped its fingers firmly around the standing ghost’s ankle and, with unnatural speed, violently yanked it downward. The ghost's scream was cut off as it was dragged straight through the solid floor by the shade into whatever lay beneath. Suddenly, it was just me and my sister in the room again. Only the sharp, high-pitched ringing in my ears remained of the apparition, like severe tinnitus. It was over. As strange and horrifying as it seemed, nothing bad happened to me that night. Not really. The entity, and whatever dragged it away, never returned. Nor did I ever wake up like that again to this day. Never. But after my many retellings of that story to friend and family alike, I still wonder about whatever was under our floorboards; asking myself what could be hiding in the earth of the mountain—and what kind of entity makes a ghost scream for help... FIN. So, what do you think it was? An echo, a memory, or something more sinister? Do you have a story like this, something that you can't quite explain?😱 Get in the comments, post your own spooky tale and have a frightfully good October!👻