Midnight Stories: A face in the dark

About Midnight Stories: October is the month of spooks and things that go bump in the night, so what better than a series of scary stories to get you in the mood for Halloween? Read on.

In the late 1970s and early 80’s when widespread drought caused power outages at two-hour or half-day intervals in the old hometown, I slowly came into my clairvoyant abilities.

From my readings, experiences and conversations with a well-known parapsychologist, I learned that I am partly clairaudient and very much a reluctant medium.

Clairaudience is the ability to hear sounds and voices that are outside of the natural range of hearing. It’s like having an invisible telephone near your ear some of the time, catching snatches of conversation.

At around age sixteen while reading by lamplight in a bedroom I shared with my sister, I heard soft breathing.

Knowing full well that my parents and other siblings were gathered in the master’s bedroom two doors down the hallway, I strained to hear if it really was breathing I heard. And – as if to taunt me – the “breather” increased its speed and volume!

I fled screaming from the room.

I became my brothers’ butt of jokes for a couple of days after that and my late father dismissed the episode as nothing more than the product of an overactive imagination.

When my sister heard the same breather while she was in the bathroom during another blackout shortly after my episode, they stopped making jokes.

Then she, a younger brother and I would alternately hear it in our room and near my mother’s walk-in closet with discomfiting regularity after that.

Next to the breathing came the orbs – but these only I saw.

Once, outside our bedroom window on New Year’s Eve.

And again inside my maternal grandmother’s house (which is right next to ours), this one followed by a sound – a hollow oomph – much like what an imploding light bulb would make. Depends on who you put the question to – orbs are supposed to be earth-bound spirits in the form of balls of light.

One sweltering summer day, my sister had to go out of town for work and I was left alone to brave the night in the room we shared. The year was 1980.

I came awake abruptly in the dark. The oppressive heat meant we were in the midst of yet another blackout and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a patch of sickly-green light near the foot of the bed.

At first I thought the light came from an outside source as there was a row of windows to my left. But I wondered why – if the neighbors had electricity – we didn’t.

To investigate where the light came from, I sat up in bed and saw another pair of eyes looking into mine. The eyes came with a nose, a rosebud mouth and nothing else. It hung there, this pale green phosphorescence like a Venetian Carnevale mask, just looking back at me.

Clearly the face was that of a young girl – maybe fourteen or fifteen.

I felt the slow tingle of goose bumps crawling up my arms and recoiled from the sight mumbling The Lord’s Prayer as I did so. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get past the first line. I just kept saying ”Our Father in heaven, holy be Your name” over and over again, my face pressed into a pillow.

I threw the bedclothes over my head and shivered underneath the hot flannel blanket, sweating rivulets in the humid weather.

I wanted to run from the room but all three doors to it were fastened with deadbolts and I knew it would take time for me to rotate the lock cylinder of any one door before I could make good my escape. Enough time for the specter to get to me!

While I was pondering this, I felt the cotton mosquito net billowing inwards as if from a light breeze.

The apparition was moving, brushing against it and my huddled form!

I tried to scream for my brothers asleep in the next room but the scream caught in my throat. I poked an arm out of the confines of the muskitero – scrabbling for the lamp and matches I know would be there on the side table – but my hand found nothing, not even when I swept it across the table’s entire length.

By this time I was screaming inwards and sweating profusely, but the silence was unbroken by the stand fan’s whirr or the hum of restored electricity. The quiet was deafening, not even a cricket chirped.

And in my head – like a mantra – “Our Father in heaven, holy be Your name…”

I don’t know if I fell into exhausted sleep or fainted as a result of my ordeal, but the next time I opened my eyes, it was morning and the first thing I saw on the bedside table was the lamp and a box of matches.

Postscript: Our last home was built in 1966-1967 and while visiting the construction site with my father as a child, I saw some work men filling a huge hole in the middle of the property.

My father explained that the previous owner claimed a Japanese bomb landed there, but the man – our neighbor of seventeen years – confided to two of my brothers just before we sold the place in 1985 that a young woman on her way to her confirmation was waylaid by three men on the shortcut that used to run across our property. She escaped their clutches, but fell to her death in an unused well on the property. The body would not be discovered until the smell prompted people using the shortcut to investigate its source.

Aside from me, sightings of a “white lady” had been reported by some graveyard-shift government employees who used to maintain offices nearby. Also by a neighbor who worked as ground crew for an airline whenever he walked home late. (The airport was just a five-minute brisk walk away from our house).

Neighbors taking after-dinner strolls either turn back or scurry past our house when they come to it.

They say it looks particularly lubrigo, or gloomy, on full-moon blackout nights. — BM, GMA News