The light was barely shining in my room through the unlatched door. A heavy door, with a handle that looked like it was crafted by hand in the late 1800’s. There was a keyhole but no key as far as I ever knew, and a latch-lock mechanism on the inside. It wasn’t exactly the typical door you would see on the bedroom of a small child. It seemed ancient. Everything in that house did.
My eyes were barely open when I caught a glimpse of a figure out of the corner of my eye. Had the door been fully closed, I don’t think I would have noticed. I tried my best to rationally reason where the figure was coming from. Laundry on my dresser, I thought. No, that wasn’t it. The shape didn’t add up. I sat still for what felt like hours and just stared. I blinked and tried to re-focus my eyes. The figure was getting clearer. Tall, thin, with a hat that looked like it belonged atop Zorro’s head. “I must be dreaming,” I thought. I blinked again, and then it started to move. Toward me. Quickly. I didn’t close my eyes, I didn’t look away, I just screamed. Before he could get to me, my door swung open. Mom. And poof: he was gone. Already knowing the deal, mom climbed in bed with me. “It’s okay, baby. Go back to sleep.”
I was 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 and I can’t tell you which one because this was an almost nightly occurrence in my house. I don’t have any clear memories of a night I spent in that house that did not result in me waking up, at one point or another, screaming. My mom would crawl in my bed, dreary and half-asleep, and lay with me until I returned to slumber.
For this experience, I was awake. But many of my terrors in that house happened while I slept. I began having nightmares at a very young age. I don’t remember exactly when they started, because it felt like it was just normal to have these experiences. I didn’t always wake up screaming in the beginning, or so I’ve been told. I remember as a small child telling my mom that I needed to wake up from the nightmares before they got too scary, and I couldn’t figure out how to wake myself up. She told me to scream. Close my eyes and scream at the top of my lungs in my dreams, and I’d wake up.
It worked...for a while. Eventually my dreams figured out that this was my escape route, and they learned. They adjusted. I would close my eyes, wail as loud as I could muster, open my eyes and still be in the same hellish nightmare. I remember having dreams where I screamed for what felt like eternity before I finally woke up.
I swore I was sick. Something had to be wrong with me. It wasn’t normal to have these nightmares every single night. Something was just...off. I never thought I'd get a restful nights’ sleep. That was, until we moved away. And the nightmares went away. And other members of my family admitted they, too, had seen the mysterious Zorro-looking man. It took several years of anxiety that they would someday return for me to realize that the nightmares weren’t because of me. There was no evil that resided in my soul, that spilled out through my subconscious and into my dreamland. I wasn't hallucinating. There was never anything wrong with me.
It was the house.
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