Scary Bedroom

Hello everyone. My name is Brad and I live in the UK. I have spent a good year or so reading and re-reading all the amazing stories on COS, and thought that once I had got through them all, I would send in some of my experiences. These are the first couple that spring to mind.

When I was 8, my family moved out into a little village in the country. The bedroom I shared with my brother for a few years (until my sister moved away and he got her room) was particularly scary and was always cold. My brother and I used to play a game he came up with, by the name of: "Imagination Ceiling". Played at night, you spent a bit of time with the big light on, then turned it off and described what you could see in the darkness. It must have been something to do with the eyes not being so good in the dark for however long it takes. We used to see really bizarre things in the ceiling, but the scariest event occurred one night when I was about 12.

We had bunk beds and I was in the top bunk. I woke up in the middle of the night to see what looked like black lumps, or patches of darker areas, slowly moving across the ceiling and sliding down the wall against which the bed was pushed. I seem to remember putting my hand on the wall (what bravery!) and when one rolled over my hand, it felt very cold. These were not shadows or something projected, they were big dark patches.

I was becoming more and more terrified and leapt out of bed to switch the light on. Like in all my worst nightmares, it did not come on, and I was so beside myself with fear that everything felt unreal and dreamy for a while. Gathering my wits, I went out onto the landing and looked out at the church across the road. All the street lamps were off, and the night was a mucky brown colour. It must be a power cut. I went to the door of my parents room and through the closed door tried to convey my terror to my mother, who told me to stop messing about and go back to bed. No way was I going back in there, so I sat on the landing all night.

Another weird thing to happen in there was when I was about 17. My best friend Paul and myself were playing a game on my ace ZX Spectrum 48K supercomputer (I think it was Commando - where you have machine guns and bombs and have to take out the little soldiers). We were taking it in turns to play. It was about 1am, since my father was watching cricket from Australia which was on all night here in Blighty (Paul would nip down every so often to check on the score, but I find most sport - and particularly cricket - very boring). We had changed over, and I was now killing the little soldiers, and Paul said, in a croaky voice: "Look at that". I turned in the direction he was indicating, and a glass was moving slowly from one side of the shelf to the other, and it stopped just short of the edge. His face turned a nasty shade of pale, and said something of the order of "what the hell (or insert swear word of choice) was that?" After all the other scary stuff to have gone on in there, this was quite mild, and consequently I was not ruffled. I just said "Someone must have wanted the glass moved. That's alright." He was aghast. "How can you be so calm? A glass just moved on its own!" He picked up the glass and inspected it, then tried to push the glass across the shelf himself. This time it made a dragging sound that was not there before. I wondered whether it was riding on a cushion of air and water (like the big laugh trick we used to do at school dinners - floating plastic beakers across the table in spilled water), but this was ruled out too. We could find no explanation.

Thanks for reading, and a Merry Yule to you all.