Ever see a ghost?

[njhorror]

Quote Originally Posted by With Strength I Burn

I was lying down on the floor in my room taking a nap. I then had a "paralysis sleep" or hypnagogic sleep. I would hear footsteps and a great feeling of dread. I looked at my door and saw the silhouette of a black figure. I started having foreboding thoughts about looking into its face. However, I failed and when I saw "its" face, my vision zoomed into "it", and I felt as if I experienced the universe all at once. It was truly frightening, and I screamed with terror within myself. Another time, it appeared again in the same place. This time I averted my gaze, but it moved in a undulating fashion towards my back. I began having unintentional hateful, threatening thoughts towards it, and then I saw a kind of "Milky Way looking portal" open up in my back. I felt as if it was fusing with me while my mind kept automatically thinking hateful thoughts such as, "I want to kill you! Go away!" The final time I felt its presence happened while I was thinking about a souvenir my friend gave me: an ammonite. My friend is very quixotic, and he uses the ammonite stone as a metaphor for the infinity inherent in meaning and universe. While thinking about the symbolic value of his gift, I fell asleep on my back, this time lying on bed, with my hand outstretched. The figure felt like it came again and handed me an item that felt like a black obsidian... or perhaps something else. This was the strangest...

I had a similar experience in the last home we lived in. I was going by the cellar door and I thought I glimpsed a hooded figure walking by the stairs which then stopped. I had an overwhelming feeling of dread, and what felt like a warning NOT to look down the stairs. I was frozen to the spot and saw in my minds eye what appeared to be an old crone in a hooded cloak. As my mind focused on the hood I realized that there was no face but a glimpse of a great mad void with stars scattered in darkness where the face would be. I knew that to look into that face would be to give myself over to unimaginable suffering. I left the house, and we moved soon after, though not for reasons having anything to do with this experience.

[njhorror]

The one thing about this experience that I've unintentionally omitted is that the hooded figure and its "face" was so devoid of even the slightest suggestion of "life" that the impression was chilling to the core. A stone has more life, because at least at some point it shared its existence with the living. This thing and life could not exist on the same plane, but if it did the inevitable result was the annihilation of life.