Category: hallucinations
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hereditary
Sitting at the dinner table, my daughter suddenly turns and looks over her shoulder. “What’s wrong?” She turns back around. “That was weird,” she says. “I heard someone say ‘Yeah’ behind me.” We go on with our dinner and I make a mental note to talk with my wife. We’re starting to see more activity…
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not a cat, not a dog
This evening as I was taking my daughter upstairs to bed, she froze outside her open bedroom door. “What’s wrong?” Staring into her room, she said “I just saw a cat or a dog or something on my bed. It looked up at me and then slid under the covers.” I turned the lights on…
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rush
As I’m setting up the ironing board, something rushes towards me from the living room… low and broad and dark, like a wall of shadow. I do not flinch. It breaks around me like a wave around a rock, dissipates into streamers of fading black and gray… and then is gone.
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not a bat
“She says she saw something in the back stairwell,” my wife tells me. Our daughter is eight years old and not prone to flights of fancy or making things up. Also, we have been very careful to not let her overhear any of our conversations about what is going on here at home. When I…
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daylight come and me wanna go home
Sitting alone in the couch tonight, I slowly realize that I can hear someone singing. Somewhere in the house, a man is singing. It has a muted quality, as though it is coming from very far away. I stand for a moment and listen. I recognize it. The clear voice, the calypso intonation is unmistakeable.…
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music again
In my office tonight, getting ready to sit down and write… I stop. Music. Unmistakeable. Somewhere, someone is playing music. The house is asleep. I’m the only one awake. Yet there it is. Unmistakeable. I go out and stand on the front porch, just in case it’s a neighbor. Nothing. Back inside, the house is…
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shimmer
“There was something in the back hallway,” my wife tells me over dinner. “I saw it right before we were leaving.” “What did you see?” She thinks for a moment. “It was a blur in the air, almost shimmering. Just a movement…” Gooseflesh on my arms, the back of my neck. “That’s interesting you say…
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morning visitation
…and as I open the door leading from my office to the front of the house, I see a pale shape, not much more than the impression of a white dress moving through the light coming in the windows. It flows from right to left. I stop. I blink. It is gone.
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stench again
That smell again. A warm, yellow smell of rotting fish. My youngest daughter and I are in the back hallway when it drifts past. It almost seems to stop and turn back, encircling us for a moment. I look down and see that my daughter has wrinkled her nose. After a moment, the stench dissipates.…
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a sad girl
…lying in bed this morning, I woke to the sound of the bedroom door opening. I hear my wife slowly close the door behind her. I hear her footsteps on the floorboards, approaching my side of the bed. I cannot move, cannot open my eyes. I feel a fingertip on my arm, just inside the…
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doppelgänger
…and as I walk back into my office, I see — or I think I see — a man standing to one side and looking through my filing cabinet. It is me, myself. I am the one standing there, dressed in the same clothes I am wearing today. I blink. He is gone. I am…
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the walking men
Three or four times now, while I’ve been walking in the neighborhood with my youngest daughter, I’ve seen a man wearing a long black overcoat and a fedora. Three times now. Three different men. One of them is quite young, perhaps in his early twenties, with scraggly facial hair and glasses. Another is older, around…
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“Hey Dad?”
Walking through the office I hear — or I think I hear — my son’s voice, very distinct and clear, call to me. I look back down the hallway but, of course, no one is there.
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flake
Packing up for the day, getting ready to head for home… I reach for my cell phone and watch in amazement as a bright flake of light, a translucent chip of yellow-white light about the size of my fingernail, floats up from the screen towards my face. I blink, shake my head. It is gone.
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stench
Over the holidays, there were a number of points when I noted a pungent smell in the little hallway at the back of our kitchen — a cloying stench, like rotting fish. (I do not care for this little hallway. It feels off to me, somehow. There is a mirror of it upstairs and the…
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ragged
Sitting on the toilet in the back bathroom, I hear a sound at the door — as through someone pressed against it from the outside, maybe one of the cats? But the door has nearly an inch gap at the bottom. I can see nothing outside. A few minutes later I am jolted into a…
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whisper
As I come into the front room of our house, I hear man’s voice whisper something — a single phrase, very distinct but unintelligible. Cleaning up in the back bathroom, I hear voices pitched in an argument — just a few lines back and forth — again, distinctly audible but no words can be made…
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gitchy
A strange atmosphere hanging over The Last House tonight. The sky outside is heavy with rain, but it doesn’t look like any will fall. The heat is heavy, like a hand on your chest. Inside . . . everything feels pressurized, oppressive. There are shadows moving through the rooms, vague shapes darting here and there…
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early morning
Woken by my daughter early this morning, unable to get back to sleep so I head downstairs to sit in the predawn dark, looking up from my book from time to time as little beads of shadow stream across the floor like dark mercury. An hour or so later, I hear footfalls overhead. They move…
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laundry room
As I came into the laundry room this morning, a shadow moved in the dim light from right to left — coming from the hallway and passing through the closed and locked door at the top of the back stairs. The shadow was large, as wide as a refrigerator though not as tall. It has…
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lavender dress
My wife went to the market one afternoon this past weekend. The weather was warm and she was wearing a long lavender dress, very lovely. The dress has bare arms and drapes in a style reminiscent of a statue of a Greek goddess. While she was out, a flash of color caught my eye in…
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masks and shadows
Changing the sheet on my daughter’s crib tonight, strange flashes of faces in her room — white and black, bold stripes and contrast, large teeth and bulging eyes framed by wild hair . . . almost like the stark, menacing glee of Japanese oni masks. These flashes, somewhere between a mental image and a visualization…