Ghost In The House

This is a true story from my own life.

During college I moved into a house that was new as a rental. The old man said to me that his mother moved away and they had no use for the house any more.When I first moved in, I lived alone and occasionally feel like someone was watching me from the dark late at night while I was studying. The kitchen was always very creepy and I would try to stay out of it late at night. I would frequently get the chills and have the hair on my neck stand up when I went to make tea late at night.

As the weeks went on, the feeling intensified, and sometimes I felt like a saw faint trace of a shadowy figure peering into my room. I would glance up from my book and the figure would vanish like smoke into the dark. I tried to convince myself I was just tired and should probably get some sleep. But it continued to occur, night after night.

Until the shadow started to have a shape, and began to look more like a man. I began to see flashes of color inside the black smoke. It was flashes of tweed, and his elbow patches on his coat, as he turned to flee when I came in.

He would let me get slightly closer each time I saw him. Until I saw he wore glasses and his trademark tweed jacket (at this time I still did not know who it really was).

Until late one night I had finally had enough, I asked him as he turned and fled, who he was and what did he want. He looked at me and evaporated into smoke as he always did, a look of great sadness in the corner of his eye.

A few days later I found a box of old pictures of mushroom species that had been taken in the 1970's, along with one picture of the couple that had taken them, and the hair stood up on my neck as chills ran down my spine. The glasses and coat were the same, this was the man I had been seeing. The house had been rented soon after the husband that had lived there for 50+ years died and the family had moved the wife/grandmother to a retirement home nearby.

A few days later, I saw his spirit again standing in the kitchen, staring into his old bedroom. I walked in, this time he stood and look at me. I saw his smile, as he look at me this time. Some part of me knew him now, the way he knew me, through a window, a picture, a portal to another time…

I looked at his eyes, and I told the old man. I said he was dead, his wife that he was looking for was not here anymore. He watched as I talked, then stood for a minute, before one last time turning and fading into the black of the night… but this time rather than shadows there was a flash of white light and that was the last time I saw his ghost in that house…