Missing Time

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a ghost story. It's something strange that happened that to this day I still don't have a logical explanation for.

I was at home, alone in my apartment. I can't remember the exact date but it was in 1997, around the middle of September. It was late at night, but I wasn't sleepy yet, so I decided to stay up and try to fix this chair I had whose arm kept falling off.

I was sitting cross-legged and barefooted on my floor, wrestling with this chair arm. (I never did fix that chair, but trying to was a good way to wear myself out enough to get to sleep). I happened to glance at the clock just as the digital display turned over from 11:59 to 12:00 (midnight). I glanced away, then glanced back. The clock read 12:10. In what felt like the blink of an eye, ten minutes had passed according to that clock.

I blinked a few times, thinking I was seeing things, but the clock turned over from 12:10 to 12:11. I looked at my VCR clock. It read 12:11 too.

Huh, I thought. That was weird. Must be getting tired.

So I started to get up to get ready for bed and realized I was light-headed and somewhat disoriented. Even though it was my own apartment, for a moment I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. The moment passed, but it took a few minutes for me to get my bearings.

I also noticed my left foot was bleeding, with a little puddle of blood around it soaking into the carpet. I took a closer look and found a puncture, about half as big around as a pencil and about a quarter of an inch deep, kind of slanted into the skin. It didn't hurt, and though it was bleeding freely, it certainly wasn't gushing. After I got my bearings, I went to the first aid kit and cleaned up the wound. Though it soaked through several bandages, it eventually stopped bleeding.

I looked around very carefully for anything I might have cut or punctured my foot on, but the carpet had just been vacuumed and I couldn't find anything at all, let alone anything that could have made a puncture that deep and that big. I'd like to think of myself as more practical than paranoid, so I just wrote the whole thing off as a 'whatever' and went to bed. I figured I'd just zoned out for a few minutes and missed a spot while vacuuming or something.

I turned off the lights and curled up under the blankets, waiting to drift off. Just as I started to fall asleep, I got the weirdest feeling, like the room simultaneously became colder and warmer, and I felt a sudden chill and flash of heat all at once.

This brought me wide awake. I was facing the wall, curled up around a pillow, and my back was to the rest of the bedroom. Since this was my room and I was used to sleeping in it, I was usually comfortable there, but just then I felt terribly exposed.

Have you ever felt someone's presence before you actually saw them, like feeling 'eyes' on you? I felt like there was someone in the room, standing right beside the bed looking down on me. Though I hadn't heard anyone come in, I still wasn't in the mind of 'creepy things are happening,' so I thought it was an intruder and turned around and sat up, panicking for reasons that were all too non-supernatural.

Of course, no one was there. Which was a relief, but I still felt the need to get up and check all the doors and windows to make sure they were locked. Which they were.

All snug and secure, I went back to bed. The moment I laid down, I felt it again - a very intense presence 'standing' near the bed. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. I looked again, and again no one was there. Not to mention my wounded foot started to really hurt, throbbing painfully.

There was nothing else to do, really, but lay there in a state of irritable creepiness until I finally conked out from exhaustion. The presence was still there when I fell asleep, still looming. When I woke up the next morning, it was gone. And that was that.