EC: Second one this is a little scarier.

Interviewer: Okay I am ready.

EC: So, I am about 10 years old, and the architecture of our house is very important in understanding this story. In the back of my house is the laundry room, and then down this long hallway is my room. I am in the laundry room for some reason, I don’t know why I was in there I didn’t do my laundry at that age, and I remember I think my parents were outside when this was happening.

It was kind of like mid-afternoon, and it was kind of dark. It was still light out but there were no lights on and it was shadowy, and its already been determined I don’t like the dark. 

So I go out of the laundry room and look into my room, and you know those nest chairs that you put in a wooden frame, I had one of those by my door, so you couldn’t see it, but it was right by the door, this is important to the story. 

So anyways, I am at the end of the hallway, and I look in my room, and there is this black, wrinkled, hand draped over the side of my nest chair. At first I thought it was weird, I could clearly see it was a hand. The hallway was long but only 15 or 20 feet, and I could see the hand all the fingers splayed out.

So I’m really apprehensive at first because I am like what is that, then I thought maybe it wasn’t a hand and it was just like some toys or something I left on the chair because we use it as like catchall.

I am walking to my room and I am already convinced that that is what this was, some random stuff in the chair or a stick reflecting weirdly in the light. 

But, I get about halfway down the hallway, and the hand retracts into my room. And that’s when I went oh, that is not a thing, that’s a person.

I have no idea what made me do this, but I decided to go into my room. I think I was curious and had a lot of innocence, but I remember feeling very cold and goosebumpy, like I am right now, when I tell it.

So I go into my room, and I look to the right where the chair was and the door to my Jack and Jill bathroom, and there’s this hooded shadow figure walking into my room, very short, my height. I can’t see a face, and I can’t see a body but I can see the hand. 

It isn’t walking towards me, it’s walking towards the bathroom. As it is walking through my bathroom door, it was like it was hunched over and it was slowly straightening out. So now I am standing like a foot or so from my bathroom door, and it’s in the bathroom and I’m watching it.

Anyway, it started around my height, and now it is maybe a foot taller than me, it was growing and then all of a sudden it faded. There was no face, there was no body, just hands.

For a while, I tried to convince myself it was just a shadow because that part of the houses didn’t get light at that part of the day. But then I was like, shadows don’t have a form, and don’t have a figure, and don’t have a definite shape, and I can still remember the hand, it was wrinkly. 

And I remember I was just standing there for minutes. I was just scared that it was going to come back somehow. I wasn’t super afraid. It wasn’t trying to hurt me or chase me. 

In my bad dreams, I’m always running from something, so that’s what I’m afraid of, but it wasn’t happening, so I wasn’t really scared; I just knew, hey, this isn’t normal. If this were a person, what was that? If that was a ghost, too, what was that?

That was the big one. That was the closest I think I have come.

Interviewer: So you mean like closest as in distance?

EC: Yeah, because I had a few other stories. These two were the most telling. 

Context: This story is from an informant who has multiple ghost stories from her childhood of feeling a presence in the house between the ages of 7 and 14. All of these stories are with sort of uninterested ghosts who didn’t really engage with her other than appearing to her. The informant’s house is not really old, it is from the 80’s or the 90’s. The informant has lived in several different houses, and things have happened everywhere; the informant is convinced that it is her and not the location. 

Analysis: The informant believes in ghosts, ghost stories, and that this story was 100% real. She said that she tried to convince herself that it was just the light playing tricks on her or that it was some object that was making her perceive some weirdly angled toy like that, but that when she got up close to the ghost, it was undeniable. I believe that ghosts exist, but perhaps only for certain people. In my life, they have never appeared to me, but from stories like this one from my friend, I believe they appeared to her. The very corporeal and detailed descriptions of texture are perhaps the most convincing part of the argument for me.