Supernatural Entity In My Home As A Child

For privacy reasons I will not share the exact location this took place, but I will state it occurred in a newly built house in Southern California. I currently still live in this house. This event took place in the late 1990's.

One night when I was about 8 years old, I was sleeping in my sister's room with her. She is 4 years younger then me and we sometimes slept in each other's bedrooms together as little kids. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and she was asleep. I didn't know if my mother and father were also asleep, but all the lights in the house were off, which was normal for that time of night. I wanted to know if my mom or dad were awake, so I stood on the bed I had been sleeping on, and looked through the open bedroom door through our hallway, and into the living room of our first story house. From the bed I could see the backdoor to our backyard, and part of our living room fireplace right of the backdoor.

It was then I saw the supernatural entity. It appeared to be a humanoid figure in a white cloak. The entire figure was made of a bright white light that didn't seem to illuminate the room around it. It's face was hidden beneath the hood of the cloak. I couldn't tell if it seemed male or female. It looked slightly shorter then an average adult, and seemed thin. It held its hands together in front of itself and silently paced back and forth in front of our fireplace. After seeing it pace back and forth a few times, I was overcome with fear and tried to silently lay back down in bed and fall asleep, which I evidently did.

The next morning I told my family about what I saw. I searched for any evidence of what happened the night before, but was unable to produce any. I don't know if any of my family believed me, but my mother said she thought it was scary that I saw something in our house when I told her the next morning.

I haven't seen anything like this since that event. I never brought up the event with my family again, but I've occasionally thought about it throughout my life and tell the story sometimes to friends and coworkers when discussing the paranormal and supernatural. I wanted to post this story to document this event. Now as an adult, I still wonder what occurred that night so many years ago. I think it was some kind of spirit, maybe a ghost, but our house was brand new, and nobody had or has passed away in it yet. The land the house is built on was a field of chaparral before the neighborhood was built, and I don't know much else about the land unfortunately. I hope someday I will find a answer to what I saw.