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ON MY OWN WITH THE SHADOW MAN
Submitted by: Glen Coburn
A few years ago, as I was stirring from the light sleep of early morning, the malicious, hushed voice from my youth startled me awake. "Remember me," it whispered , not a question but a taunt. The unsettling memory, the years of violation by this hateful thing stung me with the sense of dread that I lived every night. Throughout my childhood, the presence was heavy and imposing in the light of day but it was truly frightening after dark when I was alone in my room. But I was never really alone. It was always there.
My dad and I moved into the house the day my sister was born so my mother was still in the hospital. The house was full of unpacked boxes and that first night, the two of us slept on a bed with no sheets, no covers. My Dad was closest to the open door of the bedroom and I could see over him, into the darkened hallway. That's the first time I felt it. It was my introduction to the phantom that would be my unwelcome companion for more than a decade and would haunt me for the rest of my life. First, I felt the shiver, the awareness of the unseen presence. And then, the shadow came from around the corner and hovered slowly into the room at the end of the hallway. As I watched it pass, I knew that it saw me. Many years later, when I was a grown man, my father admitted that he had seen it too that night. For all those years, this thing was a part of all our lives but for the most part we never discussed it. Many times, I told my parents what I was going through and that the house was haunted but they ignored me and shrugged it off. They knew the truth all along but for some reason, they refused to get the hell out.
This is not an easy story to tell, not because it's uncomfortable to dredge it up but because the manifestations were varied and made their appearances over a long period of time. Every child shudders at the possibility of the scary guy in the darkened closet or the monster under the bed. For many kids this is a nightly ritual that kicks off a lifetime fascination with the great unknown. For most of my friends in those dreamy preadolescent years, the creepiness of bedtime was the product of a healthy but wild imagination. But for me, it was a perpetual journey into fear described with such conviction that my buddies knew it was true. Most kids who knew me, had no doubt as to the veracity of my claims because of the lingering influence of my supernatural house guest. I don't know for sure that it followed me around when I was away from the house. But I was never able to shake the taint of the haunting. Even when I spent the night at my grandmother's or at a friend's house, my senses were always on full alert. That heightened awareness of the energy behind things unseen is a gift and a curse that I'm stuck with for life.
The house was nothing special, a suburban tract house, the same age as me. Twelve hundred square feet, three bedrooms, two baths, conveniently located in Mesquite, Rodeo Capitol of Texas. The house had no history. Neighbors had been there before our house was built. They said that no one who lived in the house was very neighborly. They kept to themselves. The only notable thing about the place was that the people who lived there stayed only briefly. Then the house stood empty for a while. Then others would move and stay for a short time and the house would sit vacant. This went on until we moved in and we stayed.
At first, the shadow man was a casual acquaintance but he quickly insinuated himself upon me. He wanted me for a friend. But he wasn't very nice and I didn't like him. During the day, he was an invisible hanger-on that usual stayed up near the ceiling on the other side of the room. No matter how many people were around or how much earthly activity was going on, his sinister gaze was fixed resolutely on me. At night, spooky turned scary immediately when I tucked myself into bed. Usually, at first he would just hang around, waiting for the fun to begin. It was after my parents were settled in and asleep that my bedroom turned clammy and the shadow descended and swallowed up any glimmer of light. The heavy, brooding shroud came down on me as it had the night before and the night before and as it surely would for as long as I could imagine. It was like being weighted, sinking into deep, murky water. The weight pulled me deeper and the pressure of the water surrounding me made it hard to move.
Hushed voices in secret conversation drifted into my room from some ghostly party in the front of the house. The truly frightening experiences took place when I was a little kid, seven to twelve years old. In my bed, in the dark, fingers would poke me in the back. I always slept on my stomach because I thought it would be even worse if I had to tangle with this thing face-to-face. More than thirty years later, I still can't sleep on my back.. Sometimes, I heard soft giggles coming from what seemed like inches away from my ears. And often, it whispered my name. Mostly, I forced myself to remain totally still and quiet as if I were asleep and clue less to the taunting. I knew from the beginning that if I cried out for my parents, they would dismiss the incidents, return to their bed, leaving me to fend for myself. And then the spirit would be happy with himself and give it to me worse than ever. Once during this time period, extremely wrung-out, I cried to my mother, insisting that the house was haunted. She lay on her bed, distraught, face down in a characteristic emotional dither over her genuine hard luck. My mother basically told me that such an idea was ridiculous and to go away. I was certain that she knew exactly what was going on. But she wouldn't admit it for a very long time.
Enduring the personal harassment was the most horrible part of it. But there were times when the thing was more playful than cruel. One time, in the early morning when the room was tinted with a subtle illumination diffused through Sears gold rib-cord curtains, it played a silly trick on me. The matching spread draped over the side of the bed to the floor. This positioning is accomplished by what we call gravity. But in this case, the part of the bedspread that draped alongside the bed floated up bringing it parallel with the top of the bed. At this point, I was a tough sell when it came to being shocked. I just stared at it indifferently as the magic trick continued. This went on for at least a full minute until the covers moved slowly down into their natural arrangement. I remember at the time thinking that maybe it was the ghost of my dog Blackie who met up with a fast moving delivery truck on the street in front of our house a couple of years earlier.
As time passed, I became less impressed with the shadow man's shenanigans. I continued to be scared out of my wits at night but it's just like anything else, you get used to it. One of the luxuries of my youth was a tiny bathroom connected to my tiny bedroom. That bathroom provided the entity more opportunities to shake me up. On my seventh birthday, I was taking a bath. The bathroom door was closed. I was caught totally off-guard when somebody or something started banging on the door and frantically shaking and turning the doorknob. At this time in my life, I was generally too timid to speak up so I sat there quietly until it stopped abruptly. I got out of the tub, dried off and walked down the hall and into the kitchen. I asked my parents what they wanted with me and why they raised such a ruckus. They assured me that it was my imagination and that they didn't hear anything unusual. My sister was three months old at the time so I ruled her out as a possible suspect.
From early on, I started leaving the bathroom light on all night. It didn't seem to deter the phantom's unyielding harangue but it boosted my morale. To undermine the small comfort I found in having the light on, he would intermittently turn it off and on. Sometimes it would be off for an hour and then on again. And one time, he flicked it off and on rapid fire just long enough to get my attention but not long enough to wake my parents up. Over the toilet, there was a chintzy, framed dime-store print of waves crashing onto some rocks. It was big enough to extend the length of the toilet tank and it hung high on the wall by a single wire on a nail driven precariously into the sheet rock. This unstable hanging procedure predisposed a logical explanation in the event that it might fall off the wall. One night when the bathroom light actually stayed on, I lay in bed staring directly at the picture that was squarely in my view through the open door. The little white bathroom was well lit by two sixty-watt bulbs above the sink which was just a couple of feet from the crashing waves. In a slow deliberate move, an unseen hand lifted the picture up off the nail and brought it forward nearly a foot from the wall. It was suspended there for a few seconds and then it dropped, sending the crashing waves crashing to the floor. Of course, my story was again discounted even though the nail was still firmly in the wall and the wire fully intact.
Just about everybody who spent any time in or around the house had some kind of supernatural experience. I remember sitting in the den one afternoon with Kevin, a neighborhood friend. We were hanging out, watching television. We were facing the living room which was so close you could spit at the front door and hit it on a good day. I was focused on Merv Griffin doing his opening lounge act when I spotted some cloudy movement in the front room. My friend, who was less enthusiastic about Merv, was more keenly aware of his overall surroundings. He was seated so that he had a view of the entire living room when he saw a slow moving , white, translucent figure float across the living room. It was mid-afternoon on a clear, sunny day so the room was well lit. But still, the apparition was fully formed and very obvious. Kevin was really freaked-out. He was immediately on his feet, darting around the room, wide-eyed, talking fast and pointing to the living room. My mother was in the kitchen which was a few feet away from where my friend and I were sitting and she was totally unfazed. The kid wanted to get out of the house but it took him a minute to build up the courage to dash through the living room and out the front door. As a teenager, Kevin ended up huffing too much gasoline and is probably unable to corroborate the story. And besides, I don't have the time or inclination to find out what penitentiary he's checked into.
Greg was my best friend on the block. He lived across the street from me and he was the first kid I met up with when my family moved into the haunted house. He was younger than me and I saw him pedaling his kid-sized tractor down the sidewalk. I rode over on my bike and we were buddies from that moment on. Once, Greg and I were playing in my driveway. We had just seen an episode of the Three Stooges where Larry Fine knocked on a wall and somebody knocked back. We decided to try it.
I knocked on the garage door and immediately there was a knock in return. We thought it was pretty funny. Then we heard a crash somewhere inside the garage. We ran around to the side door, expecting to see someone jumping over the fence, into the backyard and sprinting for the alley. Instead, the door was closed. We checked to see if it was locked. It wasn't. We opened the door crept into the darkness. I switched on the light and we looked around to see if we could catch anybody hiding behind some of the garage junk and boxes. We didn't find anybody. We went back outside and around the corner to the garage door.
This time, Greg tried it. Again, the knock was returned. Determined to catch the intruder, we hightailed it to the side door and it was locked. Now, we knew somebody was playing a trick. We hurried back to the front and tried it again and in response, thump, thump. Then, we found the side door standing open. At that point, were becoming more sheepish but we bravely entered to find the light turned off again. I turned it on and repeated the search.
Now, to break the tension, I did my imitation of Don Knotts stumbling through the haunted house in the Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Greg cracked up at the hilarity of my performance as he always did. As a child, I was and continue to be as an adult, a real sucker for anybody who appreciates my humor. So, I was pleased with myself. I was doing my encore up near the big overhead door at the front of the garage while Greg stood next to the side door. Inexplicably, the light started switching off and on. It was certainly not an electrical glitch. It was a switch that made a significant clicking sound when flipped. We could hear the switch as it turn on and off. Needless to say we were spooked but when we caught our breath after racing away, we had a good laugh. The experience never deterred Greg from going into the house again or garage for that matter. Today, he's an intelligent, rational adult with a good job and a family. And I know he would get a kick out of telling the story of the ghost in the garage.
These are the highlights of my experiences growing up in the house. And since I've chosen not to write a book at this moment, I'll move forward in time. When I was in college, my parents finally broke their silence and we began to have long conversations, recounting our stories of the haunting. They described an early occurrence concerning a baby that cried throughout the night. My dad would go into my sisters room and she would be asleep but the crying continued. As he checked every room in the house, the baby was crying in whatever room he found himself. It stopped eventually but the mystery was never resolved. Incidentally, my sister only lived to be ten-years-old. She lived her entire life in that house and never reported any supernatural encounters.
My parents and I shared descriptions of what would eventually become the most striking manifestation. We all saw the same thing although each of us had their own spin. When I was a teenager, I started seeing what I thought to be an entirely different personality from the early, sinister shadow man. This entity appeared as a pale white, undulating form. From my perspective it looked like a hanging plant with tendrils caught in a persistent wind. At night, I would wake up and see it up high in one of the corners of the room. It would slowly move along the wall from corner to corner. Some nights, I would wake up to find it directly above my head. It wasn't at all frightening. I felt like it was watching over me like a guardian angel. This was reinforced by the fact that the scary activity had nearly ceased.
My dad refers to it as the squid or jellyfish. He and my mother saw it frequently, also up in the corners of their room. My mother saw exactly the same thing except that it seemed to be a part of a male figure. It used to stand at the foot of her bed and talk to her. She would wake up my dad and tell him and he would get up and search the house. As soon as he left the room, the spirit would return and continue his monologue. The only thing she remembers for sure was that he often said the words, "First Canada." We still wonder if he was referring to anything in particular or if it was a red herring.
When, I was a little kid having horrifying encounters, my parents admitted that they had seen the shadowy figure entering my room from the hallway late at night. They saw this with some regularity but chose to do nothing about it. Now, I have a ten-year-old daughter and if I saw this thing going into her room, I'd run in and grab her out of bed. And she would sleep in the room with my wife and I until we vacated the house. I
understand that my parents had difficulties, not with each other. but with finances and my sister's illness. Whatever the reasons for their inaction, the insistent taunt of the phantom in my room has effected me for life. Growing up in the midst of a relentless haunting is nothing compared to the physical and emotional abuse that so many unfortunate children endure at the hands of their own parents. But all children look to their parents for protection and rely on them to make the world a comfortable, secure place.
After I grew up and moved out, the activity continued. A few years later when my wife and I got together, we were at the house for a visit. We were sitting on a sofa in a new room that was formerly the garage. Suddenly, we heard a rhythmic banging coming from the laundry room that was on the other side of the wall from us. It sounded like someone had put a pair of wet tennis shoes in the dryer. No big deal. My parents were somewhat uneasy realizing that there was nothing in the dryer and that it wasn't even turned on. My dad went back to check and returned nonchalantly and asked us to come take a look. There was a yard stick placed precisely on top of the dryer. It was perfectly centered and one end jutted out just above the dryer door. It appeared that someone had taken the measuring stick , grabbed it on the end of the overhang and whacked it repeatedly on top of the appliance. The yard stick should have been hanging on a nail by some shelves five feet away from the clothes dryer. Our old friend was having some fun.
The most disturbing event that my wife experienced took place once when we were staying over night at my parents' house. My wife and I lived in Los Angeles and were in town to spend Christmas with our families. That night, we were sleeping in the room that had been my sister's. It was always the least active room in the house. In fact, I moved into it immediately after my sister had died in the room. In spite of the tragic circumstance, moving in was not at all disturbing to me. Good riddance to the hair-raising corner of the house where I had spent most of my life. My wife slept on the side of the bed against a wall underneath the window. I slept on the outside. In the night, she was awakened by what she at first thought was me talking in my sleep. What she heard seemed purposeful but was impossible to understand. Then she began to realize that the voice was much deeper than mine and that it wasn't coming from me. The weird continuous mumble was coming from somewhere on the other side of me, next to the bed. She never slept in the house again.
Just over ten years ago, less than a month before my daughter was born, we were visiting my parents. We walked into the kitchen and noticed a couple of large plastic bowls were sitting in the middle of the floor. My mother told us that the bowls were kept on the top shelf of the pantry which was around the corner, behind a wall and a short step down. She said that the bowls frequently made the move. That night, as we sat in the room that was formerly the garage, I noticed a chilly draft coming from the living room. As I looked in that direction, I felt him for the last time. He was up high on the other side of the room, Looking at me, through me. He knew that I felt him there and it gave him satisfaction. The terrible sinking sensation was back. The atmosphere hung heavy all around me. That was it. I couldn't speak. I could hear the conversation in the room but it was faint and far away. The gloom set in and I had to get out. With some effort, I stood up and held my footing. I faced him and walked toward him and into his space. I was full in his presence and he surrounded me. He knew that he disgusted me and that I hated him but it didn't matter. He would never let go. But I had other ideas.
I was brooding and silent as I stood against the front door. My wife was completely aware of my predicament. She felt the presence too. She got up and came to me. We said goodnight to my parents, got in the car and drove away. She said that my preoccupation with something in that room was obvious to everyone. And that my parents seemed to find it unsettling. She also told me that when she went to the bathroom earlier that night that she felt the shadow man in the back corner bedroom, my bedroom. He stared at her and imposed himself upon her as he always had on me. It was our daughter that he wanted. But I wouldn't stand for it. I told my wife that our child would never be taken into that house. She agreed. The next day my mother called and said that they put the house up for sale. There was no discussion of what had happened the night before or what had happened for all those years. Three days later, the house sold. After twenty-five troubled years in that house, my parents moved out. I never went back to the house. My uninvited companion stayed behind.
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