The Floating Face

My dad was always a skeptic about things, but after he died my mum told me a weird story about something he once saw.

One night we were staying at our old beach house. My Nana was there and I remember her teaching us that old prayer "If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take" or however it goes. That was strange in itself because she was more of a spiritualist and I had never heard her pray like that before. Anyway me and my younger brother (we were about 7 and 5) were staying down in the old basement room. We were scared about sleeping down there, so we made a 'fort' using foam mattresses and blankets and lay down inside it. My brother always fell asleep straight away and I always lay awake being scared. So I left the little lamp on in the fort and fell asleep eventually.

The next thing I knew my mum was yelling at us and was pulling or fort apart. The lamp had fallen and the bare hot bulb was resting and starting to burn into the foam mattress. She screamed at us for being so stupid and was really shaken up, saying that five minutes later the whole mattress (and maybe the basement) would have gone up in flames.

That was about 18 years ago but I still remember it. The strange part of the story I thought was that my Nana for no good reason had made us recite that spooky prayer before we went to bed. But the REALLY odd thing is what my mum told me once after my Dad died when I was 17. I was talking to her about some spiritual stuff (I was a bit reluctant because she is not the type to encourage me to get into that area) and to my surprise rather than telling me I was talking rubbish, she said that I was similar to Dad, and that he had experienced something that made him a believer in spiritual signs.

She recalled that night at the beach house (which I would have sworn she had forgotten by now) and said that some time in the middle of the night my Dad had woken her up shaking and said he had seen something. At the base of the bed he had looked down and seen a blue face floating in thin air. He didn't say what it looked like, except I think she said he described it as 'square' face whatever that means. Anyway, he was so adamant he had seen it he had jumped out of bed and paced around trying to work out what it was. That was when my mum had an urge to get up and turn on some lights.

While he was 'pacing around' as she put it, she went downstairs for "no real reason" to check on me and my brother. When she entered the room she smelled burning and was surprised to find the mattresses and blankets in the middle of the room. When she pulled the top blanket off our fort, she saw that the light was about to set the exposed foam mattress on fire and me and my brother were fast asleep.

It seems kind of inevitable to me to reason that the blue face that my 'non-believing' dad saw was a warning that something bad was about to happen to us downstairs. After all, if he hadn't waked my Mum up she would never have found us when she did.