The Man In The Dark

I'm 22 now, and there have been a number of strange instances for me in my life. I thought it would be nice to share a couple of them with more people, seeing as how quite a few others seem to have had some similar experiences. I've been on a never-ending search for answers.

Let's start when I was about 13. I grew up as the eldest living child in my family, with 3 younger brothers and a baby sister at the time. My room was located in the basement of my family's home, which also had a ground floor, and a second story, and was located in a neighborhood of Spokane, Washington. Our house is actually one the oldest on the block, too, having been built in 1915. It used to be an old farm house, added on to and remodeled since then, though. I was the only one living in the basement at the time.

One day, I had my two best friends over visiting, and we were sitting on a small carpet that covered the cement floor of my old room, watching tv and talking. The room was pretty large, and we were sitting about six feet away from the closed door. The lights were off, so it was just the tv creating light, my two small windows being heavily covered.

As we were talking, the tv suddenly turned off, emerging us into complete darkness. My two friends freaked out a little, and I still remember the way we all sat there kind of afraid to move, nervously laughing about it in the dark. Well, seconds after the lights went out, I was looking past where one of my friends would have been sitting, if I could see her, and out of nowhere I saw a man's face materialize and start coming towards me from the other side of the room really slowly with a sort of grayish/bluish glow to it that I can't really explain properly.

He had a scraggly looking beard, sunken eyes, and he seemed to stare right at me with a sort of intense, yet emotionless, gaze. He had no body though, no neck, nothing else glowing from what I could see, there was only a face. I had felt so terrified. I remember freezing with fear, just barely being able to tell my friends that I was seeing a face in the dark, and as soon as they heard that, they rushed towards the door and out of the room, letting some light in. I was left alone, still frozen in a state of fear, and the face just disappeared before my eyes. There was no trace of it, and I never did see it again. I ended up not sleeping in that room for months, later moving to the top floor completely.

The top floor wasn't much better though. When I was about 16, I was sitting up against the wall under the windows in my room (now on the top floor of the house), and I was listening to music. I had just turned the radio off, and I looked at the bookshelf in front of me, that I had right next to the door. On top of it was an empty soda can sitting level with the light switch. I was only glancing at it for a moment, but as I looked, the light switch went down and the room got darker, but I could still see with the sunlight coming through the windows.

It unnerved me a bit, and I remember not really knowing what to do at first, but then shortly after that happened, the can that was sitting next to the switch, suddenly crushed inward from the sides, as if being tightly squeezed. It was so quick though, I saw and heard it in a matter of seconds. The first thing I did was get out of there and go tell my family. I didn't touch the can at first, but later on when I braved coming back, I picked it up and felt it, still crushed and leaving me with no answers.

I have no real explanations for it, but when I told my mom about it, she just said it was probably her mom trying to play tricks on us from the other side. My mom didn't have a good relationship with her mother, and she had died about 7 years prior, but I don't really think it was her. I've wondered a lot about whether or not it was that same entity that I had seen in the basement. I didn't sleep in my room for a few months after that, too, still pretty paranoid about something else happening in the room. I didn't know how to feel about it.

Just to clarify, I wasn't on any drugs either of the times and I have never been diagnosed with any psychological illnesses. These are just things I witnessed, and I hope to one day understand them better myself, while also sharing my experiences with others, to help them as well. I haven't had any recent odd-occurrences, but sometimes when I'm alone, I do feel as though something or someone is there with me. I definitely don't believe this life is the last.