Dark Shadowy Figure

Up until a few years ago, my brother Dan and his boyfriend Jeff were living in a three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. They weren't living there long before they began to have some rather frightening experiences. The experiences seemed to center around Jeff, much to his dismay.

One night, Jeff was sleeping alone in the spare bedroom (maybe he and Dan were fighting--I'm not sure). He got that feeling you get when there is someone watching you, and he opened his eyes to find that there was a dark, shadowy figure leaning over him and watching him as he lay in bed. Jeff failed to mention what his reaction was at the time, but needless to say he was pretty terrified.

He encountered the figure on several other occasions. Walking through the hallway one night, for example, he suddenly realized it was walking down the hall straight towards him. It happened so suddenly and quickly that before he could stop he actually walked right through the apparition (or it walked through him). He said that he went ice cold and the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end.

To confirm that Jeff wasn't simply losing his mind, my brother saw the figure a couple of times as well.

Now, Dan and Jeff had done some minor renovations on the house, one of which consisted of extending one of the walls in the livingroom. By doing so, they also extended the hallway that ran along the back of the house on the other side of the wall. This hallway led to the bedrooms and bathroom.

One night, Jeff was just entering the hallway when he saw the figure. It moved down the hall, but then actually turned and passed through the new part of the wall that Dan and MJ had built. Jeff knew that Dan was sitting and watching TV in the livingroom on the other side of the wall. He paused for a moment and then called out, "Uh, Dan, did you see that?" Dan answered, "...Yeah..." Apparently, Dan had seen the figure come through his side of the wall, walk through the livingroom, into the kitchen, and toward the door that went out to the garage, where it finally disappeared. Dan and Jeff figured that the figure was oblivious to the new wall and that its movements were still determined by the old layout of the house.

Dan and Jeff continued to encounter the figure, often during the daytime. It still seemed drawn to Jeff, especially when he was sleeping or trying to sleep, and I think Jeff finally got fed up with it. One night when he opened his eyes to see the shadow standing over him again, he leapt out of bed, turned on the light, and--using lots of obscenities--demanded very loudly that the ghost leave him alone. Dan says he heard it all from the next room. Jeff didn't have any more problems with the figure hovering over him while he was in bed, though Dan did see it walking through the livingroom several more times.

Eventually, Dan and Jeff told their experiences to a guy in their neighborhood who had lived there for years and knew everything about everybody. He said that in the seventies, a teenage boy had died suddenly in the house, apparently from a drug overdose. His room was the spare bedroom (as I was very unhappy to learn, for this is where I'd been sleeping during my visit there--fortunately, I never saw anything).

Just a couple of other strange occurrences in the house--at night, Dan and Jeff would sometimes hear the faint sound of what seemed to some kind of sporting event playing on a radio, but could never figure out where in the house it was coming from.

Finally, the neighborhood kid who looked after the dogs when Dan and Jeff were out of town had a strange experience. He had been looking after the dogs for a few days and came in one day to find dishes in the sink where there had previously been none. Knowing no one had been in the house (or should have been in the house), he got a bit scared and beat a path out of there. When Dan and Jeff returned home the following day, there were no dishes in the sink. Sort of odd.

Dan and Jeff moved from the house a few years ago and are happily encountering no spirit activity in their new home.