Context:

One day, as I was leaving my dorm room to walk to class, the maintenance worker for my hallway stopped me to share that a vacuum that had been standing perfectly upright suddenly fell. He said, “It took force to get that down,” however, there was no physical force apparent. I stopped and listened to what he had to say about what he had just seen and then began talking about encounters that he had while living with his mother and grandmother. This is one story he told me. 

The Story:

About fifteen years ago, he lived in a Los Angeles home with his mother and grandmother. There wasn’t one specific moment, but rather a collection of strange experiences that impacted everyone in the household. He said, “Nobody was talking about it until things started getting more physical and hands-on.”

He described a series of nightmares that grew more intense over time. At first, they were recurring dreams of being chased, and he would wake up in a panic. As time went on, however, the dreams began to resemble sleep paralysis. “I would be in heavy, heavy sleep and couldn’t wake up because I felt like an energy was holding me down.”

One specific dream he shared involved him running through a parking lot, trying to escape someone who was chasing him with a knife. He couldn’t wake up while it was happening, and when he finally did, he was exhausted and out of breath, as if he had actually been running.

The dreams continued to worsen and feel more and more real: “I was waking up heavy, sweating, and gasping for air. We all started sharing similar stories, and we all started talking about what we were feeling or how it was feeling.”

Both his mother and grandmother shared experiences of “feeling like somebody was sitting on their chest and wouldn’t let them go. It was the feeling like you wanted to scream and yell, but something was holding you from it.”

One night in particular has remained with him until this day. It happened in the middle of the night. He shared that his grandmother would frequently come in and out of the rooms, so initially, he wasn’t afraid. He described that he was staring at a shadow that was short just like his grandmother.  

Another thing that he and his grandmother used to do was jokingly growl at each other. He said that as the shadow began walking away to leave the room, he began growling at it. 

“When I growled, it immediately turned around 360 degrees, but the way it looked towards me, I immediately knew that that wasn’t her anymore.”

It stood over him and began growling back at him louder and louder. “That was the for real moment that I felt that black presence, that black shadow was staring at me, and it was growling at me. That was one of the most physical moments that I had ever felt.”

After this night, he called his family friend who was an exorcist. With a broom, the exorcist fought with the presence in each corner of the house. After he retrieved the spirit, he found it was an old man and placed it in a box to bring to release it at a cemetery. 

Afterward, he, his mother, and his grandmother were cleansed with sage, white roses, and various mists.

Even now, he says it’s eerie to think about. Both his mother and grandmother have since passed away, and he hasn’t shared this story with many people in a long time.

Informant’s Thoughts:

He doesn’t find the story unsettling just because of the shadow itself, but because of the shared, physically impacting experiences that all of his family members had that were unspoken at first. What stays with him is the identical sensations and the way something unseen seemed to move through all of them at once. Now that his mother and grandmother have passed, there’s no one left who remembers those nights the way he does. No one to confirm what happened or to question it. 

His experience also strengthened his belief in ghostly presences, and he has become more attentive. When something reminiscent of those experiences occurs in everyday life, such as the broom story in the dorm, he is more skeptical, whereas prior to this experience, he never thought twice about spooky presences. 

My Thoughts:

To me, it is very interesting that the exorcist discovered that the presence was that of an old man. It makes me wonder if the man had lived in the house before Alex and his family moved in. If so, what happened to him?

I’m struck by how all of these experiences occurred during sleep at night. Sleep paralysis is most common among children and young adults, which is interesting because all three people living in the home were full-grown adults. This makes me further consider the possibility that the presence was real. It could also suggest a kind of generational haunting, potentially significant in the way it connects us to our ancestors.

This story lingered with me long after he told it, partly because of coincidence—when I heard it, I was on my way to my ghost stories class.