The Thing In The Hallway

I've been reading the posted stories on YGS for over a year now, so I've finally decided to post my first story about my very first experience. While it isn't exactly a spine-tingling tale of horror, there is definitely some spine-tingling in it, and the spine being tingled is mine...

This incident took place in 1992 in Orange Cove, a tiny town near Fresno, California. My wife Jenn's mother had passed away unexpectedly that September, and we were there from LA to attend the funeral and help out Jenn's dad Bob wherever we could. We didn't know that her father would die within the month; as it turned out, we were in a one-month period between funerals.

Jenn's parents lived in an old adobe house that her grandparents had built in the 1940s. It was in an orange orchard, and as far as anyone knew, there had never been anything else built on the land before the house was constructed. It had a large, almost square living/dining room, a kitchen on one side, and a hallway opening off the other side. Along this hallway was a window looking out to what had once been a porch but was now an enclosed laundry room, a bathroom on the left, and two bedrooms on the right. There was also a door for a hall closet between the bedroom doors. To get to the bathroom, you had to walk all the way down the hallway, past the closet. The hallway had no lights or electrical outlets; a window at the far end held bits of decorative glass like insulators and jars. At night, it was as if the glass panes of the window had been painted on the outside with black paint; no light came from neighbors or streetlights, because there were none.

The night after the funeral, we were sitting with Jenn's father at the big dining room table; Jenn's sister Cynthia was also there. It was hot, and very dark outside and inside the house, the lamps in the dining room weren't very bright. At some point during the visit, I needed to answer the call of nature, so I walked down the dark hallway, heading for the bathroom door I knew was far down on the left-hand wall.

When I passed the closet door, the most amazing thing happened to me - for some reason, every hair on my body stood straight up, and I felt what seemed to be a massive charge of static electricity on my chest! There was no reason in the world for it - I had touched and seen nothing in the hallway. It was so strong that I could barely breathe. After standing for several seconds in complete shock, I continued on to the bathroom, where I completed my task with great difficulty, as the strange tingling effect was still in full force over my entire body and was very, very distracting. I had never felt anything like this in my life, and I have been electrified and shocked by Van De Graff generators, Tesla coils, capacitors and magnetos, among other electrical gadgets. This was absolutely and completely different.

I walked unsteadily back down the hallway, and the effect just stopped dead as I entered the big room. I walked over to my wife who was in the kitchen, and said "WHAT the hell is in that hallway?" My wife knew exactly what had happened--I was white as the proverbial sheet, and my hair was still standing on end; she said "Well, I see you've met our ghost!" Her sister then exclaimed "What? You knew about the ghost too?" As it turned out, the sisters had had many of their own experiences with the thing in the hallway, but, oddly, had never mentioned it to each other. When other family members who had visited the house over the years were later asked if they had ever noticed anything odd about the hallway, all of them replied that they DID NOT like it, and hated having to go down it in the dark to use the bathroom. The area just in front of the hall closet was singled out as the creepiest area by everyone, and the 'ghost' seemed to stay in that area; it apparently never came out into the living room.

Over the next few days, I experimented with the Tingler (as I called it), and found that I would get the hair-on-end/shock effect every time I walked past the closet door, though the effect was much less noticeable in the daytime. It seemed to like to follow me into the bathroom, but it would never follow me into the living room. It wasn't caused by static electricity, or exposed electrical wiring- - the hallway had no electricity, period. Our best guess was that something had been 'pinned' to the spot years before, perhaps by a murder or something traumatic, and the house was unknowingly built over it.

After Bob passed away and the house was empty, the effect became weaker and weaker until it was gone. Because of this, we think that people living in the house might have somehow sustained the Tingler, as the house was continuously occupied for many years. Thankfully, I never had another experience like that after the Tingler faded completely away. We visited the people who bought the house a few years later and walked down that hallway - and it was still gone.

I still wonder, though - the house was built with a wooden floor about a foot above the ground, which I don't think was disturbed in that area by the construction. If someone dug under the old floor where I first encountered the Tingler, what might be found buried there?

Gives me a bit of a tingle just thinking about it.