Foggy Apparitions

This story may not seem super-scary, but it was to me and is entirely true.

I am very well grounded, in my early thirties, and have a Master's degree in Business (MBA). I also want to state that I pride myself on my ability to be as objective, logical, and scientific as possible in all aspects of my life. This may be why it took me more than 7 years to finally analyze and discuss the events that happened to me over a couple of months during the winter of 1996. I didn't even tell my wife until a year ago.

In September of 1996, my wife and I married after 3 years together. Right after our marriage, we were looking to buy a condo but hadn't found the right one yet. My wife's grandparents, who always travel to Texas for the winter (we live in Oregon) offered to let us stay at their house while they were gone. We readily accepted, knowing it would give us more time to look for a condo. The house was also in the same suburban town we lived in, making it convenient.

I have no idea what the history of the house is, other than that her grandparents had moved into it only a year or so before. It's a normal looking, one-level suburban neighborhood house, built in the mid or late sixties. The only unusual occurrence that I was aware of was that they had a lamp that would come on by itself quite frequently. It was one of those lamps that you just touch the base, and it turns on (or off). I thought nothing of it at the time.

The first couple of weeks were uneventful. We set up our living quarters in the spare back bedroom. Being a busy young couple, we hardly spent any time at the house except to sleep. Then my troubles began.

One night, I abruptly woke up in the middle of the night. I don't know what woke me up, but I had the feeling that something was not right. My heart began racing, and I listened intently, thinking that maybe someone broke into the house and that was what woke me up. I listened as hard as I could, but didn't hear a single sound. I continued straining to hear, unable to calm down, as I looked toward the bedroom door and into the hallway. Although I couldn't hear a thing, I just had the strong feeling that someone was coming down the hall very slowly. Just when I was about to give up and try to go back to sleep, I saw a head peek around the doorway looking into the room. I flipped out. My first thought was to grab something to hit the person with, so I frantically grabbed the closest object I could think of: my old BB gun that I had put under the bed. My adrenalin was gushing, and I jumped towards the light switch, turned it on, and ran into the hall holding my BB gun like a baseball bat. In the hallway I found? nothing. I quickly turned on the hall light and every other light while I ran around the house. My wife, woken up from the light, asked what I was doing. Feeling kind of foolish, I said I thought I heard something. She laughed, saying I looked ridiculous standing in the hall in my underwear with my BB gun. I proceeded to check all the doors & windows, which were all locked and shut tight. I wrote it off to an overactive imagination, and tried to go back to sleep.

If that were all that happened, I would have forgotten about it (besides the fact that my wife kept teasing me). But unfortunately there was more.

We like to watch TV in bed at night before we sleep, so we had our TV at the foot of the bed on a small dresser. I was a night owl, so I usually stayed up a good hour or two later than my wife watching TV. One particular night, I was awake watching TV (like usual) while my wife slept next to me. Something in the corner of my eye, in the corner of the room towards the ceiling, caught my eye. It appeared to just be a little fog, about the size of a watermelon. At first, I thought it was an image burned into my eye, like when you look at a bright light and then look away but still see an image of the light. So I casually glanced to the other side of the room, expecting "it" to follow the motion of my eye. It didn't. It stayed right where it was. Now it had my attention. I still wasn't spooked at this point, thinking it might be some weird reflection from the glow of the TV. It was kind of distracting me at this point, so to prove it was the TV, I turned it off. The "fog" was still there. Now I was starting to feel uneasy. It just sort of hovered there, like a miniature cloud. I tried closing my eyes and trying to ignore it, but I would get very uncomfortable knowing it was there. I also did not like looking directly at it. In order to try and take my mind off of it, I turned the TV back on. While trying my hardest to watch TV and ignore it, it began slowly drifting towards the center of the room, over the TV. Needless to say, I left the TV on all night and somehow eventually fell asleep. This continued almost every night for the next several weeks. I hated that thing and was becoming chronically tired because I was staying up so late, unable to sleep with that little "fog" cloud hovering around, and trying to distract myself by watching TV late into the night. It never came towards my end of the room, but always stayed at the end that the TV was at, usually drifting slowly from the right side of the room to the left, near the ceiling.

Occasionally there was another smaller "fog" about soccer ball sized (but they weren't perfectly round), that accompanied the larger one, that did the same thing only moving at its own pace. I was terrified, but I would not tell anyone or even admit to myself that it was a "ghost" because I felt that would be like admitting I was crazy.

The height of my fear came one night, when I had tried turning the TV off and going to sleep about 4 times but couldn't sleep because of the intimidating "fogs". Finally, getting irritated, I thought to myself "this is ridiculous, I'm just going to turn the TV off, ignore those stupid things, and go to sleep." I turned off the TV again, laid down and closed my eyes, and just as I began to drift off I heard a voice hiss, sarcastically, right in my ear "Yesssss, so our guesssst can resssst". I sat bolt upright, suppressing a scream. Admittedly it sounds like some corny phrase from an old horror film, but it sure scared the heck out of me. The voice came from my right ear, but almost like from inside my ear, I can't quite explain it. I was panicked, almost started crying in fear and frustration, and did not sleep the rest of the night. I tried to convince myself the next day that I was just freaked out and imagined it in my head, but it didn't really seem that way at all. It was then that I really began to believe, against all of my rational, logical thought processes, that the house was haunted.

Only a couple months later my wife's grandparents returned early, because their 5th wheel trailer had flipped in a freak windstorm. We moved out on our own shortly thereafter, and I've never had any experiences like that again. However there are a couple things that have happened that made me think that it wasn't just my mind playing intensely real tricks on me.

For one thing, a couple of years after we moved out, my wife told me that her grandmother mentioned that she woke up one night to a man standing at the end of her bed. She screamed, waking up grandpa, who turned on the lights and searched the house. They found nothing, and all windows and doors closed & locked. They are not the type of people to believe in ghosts or even talk about such things. They figured she must have imagined it, although she swore there was someone there. The other thing is the lamp and their big TV in the living room. To this day, both of them come on at random times all by themselves, when no one is in the room. My wife mentioned to me that the last time she visited her grandma she heard the TV come on in the other room, and assumed it was grandpa. When she got up to go say hi, he wasn't in there. She went down the hall to look for him, and he was sleeping in his room, where he had been for a couple of hours. When my wife asked about the TV, grandma just said, "oh that funny thing just does that sometimes". When I finally told my wife about the foggy apparitions I had been haunted by, she said she never saw anything but always had a strong feeling of being watched while we lived there.

Are all of these episodes just a coincidence? Maybe, but due to what I went through, it's hard to accept. I certainly don't patronize people who claim to see ghosts anymore, I just keep my mouth shut. Whatever the case, I just hope that it never happens to me again.