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The Ghost Who Gave Back Massages

February 8, 2009

ghost-towelAs we often did in those days, late one night in 2006 I lay stretched across the bed, on the phone with my girlfriend Christine.

Her Cuteness blathered on about such-n-such issue of little consequence when all of a sudden I heard her shriek followed by a loud *clunk* *clunk* *clunk*

“…Christine? Are you ok?”

It was no use. She’d dropped the phone.

Lingering silence.

…And then some rustling around like a squirrel burrowing into a pile of leaves.

She grabbed the phone, loudly whispering “Greg there’s something over here!”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s someone in here! I swear I just felt the bed move and a hand on my leg!”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just the dog?”

“No!!! A HUMAN hand!”

Taken aback but still not really buying it, I asked her exactly what happened. She said she was just lying there talking to me when all of a sudden the corner of the bed pressed down and a hand, five icy fingers and all, yanked her by the ankle. This is when she dropped the phone, and scrambled out of bed across the room to flip on the lights.

But the lights came on, and… nobody was home.

Confident everything was fine, I said “Christine, if there really was some psycho in there with you, there’s no way he could’ve hid from you that fast before you switched on the lights. Besides,” I added jokingly, trying to lighten the mood, “if he was gonna get ya, he would’ve gotten ya by now anyway.”

“Yeah…” she added nervously, but as if a little bit of my logic actually sank in.

I stayed on the phone with her a lot longer than usual that night to help her calm down and try to forget the whole thing even happened. Which worked. Sortof. Before finally settling off to sleep though, she still dragged her bleary-eyed sister into bed with her.

Because, you know… just in case.

(As an aside, it’s kinda funny how girls operate. Better the boogey-man snack on two young maidens than merely a single. Or maybe it’s an old throwback to prehistoric days; you don’t have to outrun the lion, only the poor schlub next to you :) Whatever the case, we just feel better in groups – if only to confirm our own sanity.)

I didn’t hear another word about the mysterious visitor until one evening when I spent the night at Christine’s – she told me about some strange feelings she’d had in this bed lately.

“What, you mean like that one night?” I asked.

“No… more like a kicking. Like this,” she twacked the lower side of the bed several times, causing the matress to wobble a bit. “And sometimes… it feels like there’s something inside the bed – under the surface.”

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but later that night a couple times I could’ve swore the foot of the bed shook a little. Just wrote it off to my imagination.

That is, until morning.

I woke up around 7am. Christine was already up and out of bed, with the unmistakable aroma of pancakes emanating down the hall. Mmm, food. Nice having someone so proactive like that. Even better when the mess required to create it all is in her place and not mine.

Rubbing my eyes, I stretched out for a couple more minutes of sweet surrender. It’s at this moment I noticed something moving. My arm. Which would normally be fine, except…

…I wasn’t the one moving my arm.

Still groggy, I lay there for a moment watching my right arm visibly move up and down as… something… rolled along, as if just underneath the mattress’ surface, down my arm and across my back.

Only after witnessing this did my “What The Fuck” Sensors kick in and I bolted up out of bed, instantly awake and alert.

To get an idea of what this felt like, imagine a big ball bearing about 6 to 7 inches in diameter rolling around underneath you with perfect fluid precision smoothness while you try to sleep. You hit it with your fist, or yell at it, and it goes away. Then, moments later it reappears… this time at your feet, pushing your right foot up off the bed a little, before continuing to roll up your leg and back to your back, shoulders, and head.

First I was weirded out, refusing to get back into that bed, even for a second. I mean, I could still see it moving around even when I was up standing on my feet looking back down at it. Christine felt it too, but after awhile preferred to pretend it didn’t exist, even when painfully obvious. Her philosophy was “ignore it and it’ll go away.”

Except it never did.

When we called, Christine’s mom suggested rodents might be afoot. Ridiculous, we insisted. True, her room may be a mess, but Animal Paradise it certainly was not. And besides, no living thing I know of could roll around in a perfect sphere shape for that length of time and especially not that smoothly.

Being the avid tester I am, I tried all sorts of experiments on it over the course of my stays. Sometimes it would go away for hours, then reappear just when you settled into bed and got comfortable. It also seemed to prefer the lights off. Turn them on, and it slowly dies away. Off again and it comes back full force. Particular kinds of activity *cough* also seemed to scare it off. It wasn’t particularly fond of lots of people in the room, either.

After I tested just about everything I could think of, it stopped being scary and started just being a pain in the ass. (Sometimes literally.) This is when I got angry with it, openly taunting and trash talking it – something the superstitious Christine did not find amusing. Finally I got sarcastic, gushing things like “Ohhhh yeah, thats it… a little to the right!… no, no…there! Ahhh!”

But deep down inside me still lurked this unsettling feeling – because even though I never dared tell Christine (didn’t want to freak her out even more than she already was), I began to feel the same presence on other pieces of soft furniture in her house – especially the couch and in the other bedroom. This thing seemed to follow me around.

And just when I thought it was ME who was crazy… I’d return home to the normalcy of my own place, and… everything would be fine. I’d lay on my own bed for an hour or more just waiting for the faintest shift or roll, but… nothing. Other people’s beds? Just fine too.

Up until this point, I’d never experienced any sort of “unexplained phenomenon” in my life. Heard of plenty, sure. (Loyal subscriber to Fate Magazine since 2004) But actually happen to me? Certainly not.

From what I’ve learned about “ghosts” (er whatever), they’re always localized to a particular location (house, stairwell, etc) or object, like say, a piece of clothing or a chest of drawers. So if that’s true, then it would make sense why I never experienced anything like that outside Christine’s house, or anything like it since.

So what do I really think it was?

I haven’t the foggiest. But whatever it was, it definitely was not natural.


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Tags: bedroom, boogey man, bumps in the night, christine, creepy, fate magazine, ghost, mysterious, mystery, strange, supernatural, unknown, weird

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