Sleeping Disorder

My name’s Idola, I live in southern California, S.D., and have for all of my life. For the longest time I only believed in a certain religious standpoint since I was in school, no other afterlife included, until I was around eight years old and it was the year of 2004. It was the beginning of third grade and I met a particular girl in my class; she was quite strange and convinced me that there were ghosts and demons that followed her all the time. I couldn’t debunk her ‘experiences’ so I decided that there really must be something other than what I was taught. Soon, I got engrossed in the paranormal and read everything I could on it.

I didn’t believe in demons or other specific bad entities, but I tried to stick to what was scientifically possible. For a whole year I studied, or tried to as girls my age just seemed funny when they ‘researched’ something like that, the paranormal and kept my head on something like: Spirits are like spiders, more afraid of you than you are of them. But it never helped that I was a child, still kind of am, and this was something that seemed beyond reach of even adults. There was one night, though that changed all of my hopes and fears into mixed confusions, what I believe to be my very first ghost experience that I was aware of.

I had been waking up at 2-3:00 in the morning through my bedtime hours every night for the previous three nights. At first, I brushed it off and tried to sleep, but the last night I woke up was the night the experience happened. I was cocooned inside of my blanket and was sweating; just as I was about to open it up and free my body from the blanket’s clutches, the bed began to shake. At first, it felt like someone below me, as I was in a bunk bed with my two brothers, but it moved in a certain way that I knew something was wrong. Scared, I was glued to my spot at the front edge opening of the bunk, and something climbed onto the top where I lay. People have asked before, "Wouldn’t it have been one of your brothers?" or said something like, "Oh, maybe it was your cat." But I know it wasn’t. The space between the wall and that bed is much less than the text box I am writing in now. Nothing human is able to fit through there and... what kind of cat do you have?

So, I lay motionless, and I could feel the pressure of a four legged (or perhaps something crawling) being moving across my bunk. I was sure that it had seen me and had come to do me harm, but it did nothing at that time. I couldn’t even see it. So, slowly, it made it’s way past; I was by this time wide awake, praying that it didn’t hurt me.

And an overwhelming sense of dread suddenly passed over me as it stopped at the head of the bunk. I couldn’t breath, I wanted to call out, but I couldn’t force myself to say a thing. I could have turned around at that moment and confront it, but some sort of mind setting had stopped me.

It moved down the other side without stopping again, but I remember this part clearer than day. I can still hear what sounded like tap shoes or a type of shoe a businessman would wear, though others have said, "What about hoofs?" I don’t want to think about that option, hitting the wood of the bed on it’s way down. Then the almost silent rattle of it dropping onto a misplaced plastic bag, and jumping back underneath my bed.

I never told the girl at school about this, and I have only shared it with really close friends and relatives, but now I look back on it and always wonder, "What would have happened if I decided to look?" I guess I’ll never know.