My Dog Knew

When I was younger my family would move from house to house quite often. When I was around 14 my mother, sister and I moved into a rental home in a small gated community near Sarasota, Florida. It seemed like just another normal move when weird things started happening.

The way the house was set up, you walk in the front door and immediately to the left is my sister's room. Straight ahead you find the open living space and to the left of that behind a counter is the kitchen. To the left is my mother's room and straight ahead is a giant sliding glass door to the backyard. Before the living area is a small hallway leading to my room.

I have a dog that would sleep with my mother in her room along with my sister who was young and did not like sleeping alone. After a week or so of living in the house my dog would wake up and start growling directly at the open doorway as if something were standing there just watching. It would be like that for an hour or two almost every night. At the time, we thought he was just seeing a reflection in the window. That wasn't the case however. One night my dog started growling like he normally does, but his line of sight wasn't stationary. Whatever he was growling at moved ever so slowly from the doorway to the foot of the bed.

Moments later the thing, invisible to her, lept into my mother's body and caused severe convulsions that woke my sister and sent her running to my room. It was a night of pure terror. The haunting doesn't stop there.

A few nights after, my room started getting the brunt of the activity. I would wake at almost precisely 3am to my mother's voice telling me to wake up, like she would normally do in the morning but certainly not dead in the night. I would wake up and see a figure standing in my doorway with similar bodily features to my mother except faceless as if shrouded in shadow. I stared at it in horror as it slowly dissipated from my view and run to my mothers room, who was dead asleep.

This wouldn't happen every night but often enough that I would be afraid to fall asleep until after the haunting hour. One night the figure actually approached my bed after waking me up in my mother's voice and stood to stare and didn't go away for probably a good 15 seconds that felt like an actual eternity to me.

Finally, one night after I fell asleep early I woke up standing directly over my mother with my headphone cord in my hands as if I were about to put them to my mothers throat and strangle her as she slept. I began to cry, which woke my mother and she allowed me to snuggle with her and my sister that night. I hid the headphones and didn't tell her about what I was seemingly about to do that night.

Finally, after a year of torment we moved away from that awful house and the activity stopped for all of us. I assume whatever we experienced was bound there. I hope whoever moved in there next didn't go through the same things that we did.