Third Time's The Charm
Quin Shalapata, Ontario, Canada
June 2006
I was seven years old when I had my experience, I'm 25 now.
My mother and father were out at a party and my grandmother was babysitting me. She was a bit overweight and her ankles had begun to deteriorate, so she was slow to get around. A friend of mine, Tammy, and I were playing house in the basement. We had draped several blankets over some old chairs, one of them being a lazyboy type chair, the couch and the T.V. stand. It was evening so it was dark outside and we had the lights on. We played for a while, then we agreed it was "pretend" bed time, so I got comfortable on the lazyboy chair (the seat portion was on the inside of the fort), and Tammy curled up on the floor at the foot of the lazyboy right below me and we pretended to sleep.
Now I'm not sure why, but I didn't have my eyes closed the whole time, I was just pretending, so I was looking around when something caught my eye at one of the wrinkles in the blanket over my head. It was a shadow, not of a whole figure but just the tips of fingers, then the whole hand, then the rest of the arm, as though someone were reaching over the outside of the blanket very slowly. It was a mans right hand , no doubt about that, and it had a large ring on the middle finger. The fingers were long a nd bony. I wasn't scared, I was more fascinated. When the hand stopped reaching, it was resting directly over my head. The next thing I know, I feel a tap on my head, then another one, then one more. After the third tap it sat there over my head for another few seconds, then slowly went back the way it came. Thinking it was my dad come home to play a trick on me, I threw the blankets off of the chair, and looked around the room. There was no one there, Tammy was still on the floor asking me why I was wrecking the fort. I didn't answer her, instead I ran up the stairs and asked my grandmother if she had come downstairs, and she said she hadn't. I know it wasn't Tammy, because she was on the floor under the fort with me, and I know it wasn't my grandmother because she wouldn't have had time to climb the stairs to get away, and her ankles made it hard for her to even use stairs. And my mother and father were still out.
My grandmother told my mother what I had told her, and that was about it for a while. Then one day my mother was looking through a pile of old comics my father had finally decided the toss out when she froze, looking a one of the comics she had in her hand. It was about and evil wizard, and he was displayed on the cover. What caught my moms attention was his right hand...which had a large ring on the middle finger. It was the only comic like it, and my mom tossed it out in the trash.
I've never had any other experience like it, and remember it like it was yesterday, and I get shivers when I think about what if I had decided to play the trick on my dad instead, and thrown the blankets off while the shadow was still there...what would I have seen...what would have happened?. I still don't know if there was any importance to the tapping on my head three times, or if there was a connection to that comic.