The Closet and The White Hand

I’ve always had a pretty good memory. Some memories go back to infanthood, such as the one when my mom held me in her arms when I was six months old, and my fat baby hands reached out to feel some wallpaper that was a shiny silver background with raised red velvet paisley patterns in it (yes they actually had wallpaper like that in the early 70’s).

The next memory is not so "normal" yet just as vivid. My parents were in their early twenties and I was three when we moved into our first tiny one bedroom apartment in Long Beach, California. The old apartment building was on Ximeno Street, which has since been torn down and is now the Wilson HS soccer field. Though it was tiny, it did have a big closet, and this became my room. It had my little bed against one closet wall, a shelf on the wall to the right and above the bed for a few toys, and two pictures hung underneath the shelf. I always went to bed with the closet light still on ? mom would turn it off later.

It was during the time that I would try to fight sleep that I would see the white hand appear. I would feel very drowsy but not wanting to shut my eyes, I would look around the little closet and see the shelf?and then white fingers of a white hand would start to appear over the shelf’s edge. The hand looked like normal hand, it looked like skin, I could see wrinkles in it, but it was very white. Like it was painted white.

At first I just kind of raised my eyebrows at this. I didn’t get up and run or scream or feel all that scared. I remember even now thinking about what the heck I was seeing and I somehow just knew it was disembodied. I never thought of a body or a freaky face that it might be attached to, it was just this?hand. It slowly fumbled around the shelf, feeling the toys, moving slowly as if seeing with its fingers. Eventually I just dropped off to sleep. This would happen off and on and I got used to it. Then one night I was pretty awake still when lying in bed, probably amped out on sugar, when the hand appeared, grasped this round stuffed ball toy on the shelf and threw it to the ground on the other side of my bed. This was the first time I got really scared. I just froze there, looking down at the toy on the floor not quite believing it was actually just on the shelf. I felt really weird, the light was a bit dim in there and the air felt thick?eventually I fell asleep.

The next night, went to bed a little worried. I knew I was going to see it, and I wondered why I didn’t say anything to my parents about it that day. I saw the hand come out over the shelf, and now saw white arm. I was terrified. The hand/arm crawled down the wall, with fingers walking and somehow sticking to the wall without falling off, toward one of the hanging pictures, and very precisely lifted it off the nail and let it drop. It fell on my bed, about three feet from my pillow. Now I screamed and ran!

I’m sure the story sounded pretty strange coming from a three year old. I was told it was my imagination and maybe it was?but it was strong enough to stick with me all these years. And we also moved out! A few years back I tried to research something about it, and found that a ghostly white hand apparition sometimes appeared to certain people in a certain family at different times for more than 500 years. Who knows maybe I am a part of that family, or maybe it was really just my imagination