I want to preface this by saying that I’m not mad. I don’t think I’m seeing things. I mean, I know I’m not. Something’s happening to me. My friend Pamela, who lives a few doors down from me, said I should try to take a photo or a video of what’s been going on. I tried that… Nothing showed up. Just me talking to thin air.
But there’s a reason I know it’s not all in my head. The other night the man appeared and… I’m getting ahead of myself.
It started about three months ago. I was up late watching TV at night and I saw something out of my window. It was a bright light; like someone was shining a torch through the glass. My house is at the end of our street and looks out onto an old piece of waste ground where some of the local teens hang about and drink. I just thought it was one of them messing about with a torch.
I looked out the window and couldn’t see anything, it was too dark, so I went to my door and shouted for them to bugger off. I never thought anything of it. I… I went back into the living room and the TV was on a channel I hadn’t been watching and the place was a mess. I always keep my newspapers and magazines under the coffee table - I’m too lazy to take them out to the bin - but pages had been torn out from them and they were scattered all over the place.
This happened in the space of what must have been twenty seconds. I was frightened and thought someone was in my house, so I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and looked around, but there was no one else there.
I made sure the house was locked up, and checked the doors and the windows, but I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept thinking about an old poltergeist case from England that was famous during the 1970s. Objects moving around by themselves, that sort of thing. But strangely, it was the light I’d seen outside that my mind couldn’t stop fixating on more than anything else.
After a couple of days, I managed to put the whole thing out of my head. At least, Until I was making dinner in the kitchen one night and I heard something tapping on the glass window next to me; a window that faces the patch of waste ground.
My kitchen is on the ground floor and I had the blinds down, so I couldn’t see exactly what it was, but there was another bright light coming from outside. Bright enough to shine through the material of the blinds.
I stood rooted to the spot. I can’t quite explain it, but the sight of the light made me feel almost sick with fear. Sure, I should have felt a little apprehension seeing it again, but this was more than that. I could barely catch a breath. Then it was dark again. The light was gone and the fear dissipated.
I hoped I’d catch a glimpse of who had been shining the torch through the window as they ran off into the night. I pulled the blind open and felt ill again. Someone was standing outside about an inch away from the glass. I could see the window fogging up from their breath. A chill went through me, and I couldn’t understand the way the figure was standing.
It was a man. But I couldn’t see much of his features. He had his right arm draped over his eyes so I couldn’t see what he looked like from the nose up. But it didn’t make sense. Surely he couldn’t have seen me either with his eyes covered over? He was just standing there. Not moving. Not doing anything. Just standing in that awkward pose with his arm over both eyes.
A cold sweat came over me, like the way you feel before you’re going to throw up, and I remember thinking, not convincingly, that this was all some sort of weird joke designed to unnerve ‘the guy who lives alone at the end of the street’.
I thumped the glass with my hand and told the man to get out of my garden. But he didn’t move. He didn’t respond. Again, the thought of it being a prank from some of the local kids came to me, but as I took in more of his features, that didn’t make sense. The guy wasn’t a teenager. I could see that much. He was in his thirties at least, maybe older. Although it was too dark to make out much else.
When he didn’t move, I started to think I was dealing with a real psycho, so I shouted through the glass that I was calling the police.
I swear. I turned to grab my phone, which was on the worktop behind me, and when I looked up, the man had vanished. All I could see was the dim outline of the waste ground beyond the boundary of my property, lit partially by a couple of well-spaced out streetlamps.
There was no way I was going to let this slide. I was almost angry at how frightened I had felt. How dare anyone make me feel that way, you know?
I called the police and they said they’d send someone around to check out the garden. But when they turned up, there was no one around. They said to phone if the man came back, and that was that. I didn’t exactly feel safe. I tried to sleep that night, but when I lay in bed the image of the man at the window, covering his eyes with one hand, stuck with me.
When I was a boy, my mum would sometimes make me a cup of chamomile tea if I couldn’t sleep, and it was always enough to make me tired. So, I got out of bed with the same idea in mind, this must have been about 2 in the morning, and started to make my way to the kitchen. To move from my bedroom to the kitchen, I have to cross a hallway, and when I did, I felt something for a moment. It’s something I’d only ever heard about but hadn’t experienced myself. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
I instinctively knew where to look: Down the hallway to the front door of my house. I watched, paralysed by fear as I saw the door handle move. It was as though someone was subtly testing the door to see if it was unlocked. Thankfully, it wasn’t. But the handle still moved.
I didn’t know what to do, so I shouted out. Something garbled probably about getting away from the door. In response, the door handle stopped moving. On the top panel of the door, there’s a round piece of glass about a foot in diameter. It’s slightly misted and more for decorative purposes than security. Especially at night, it’s almost impossible to see anything through it. That was the case until that same bright white light from the other nights throbbed on and off for a moment beyond it.
The light cast itself upward and I saw, for only a second, the same face as before. And in the same pose: A man, covering his eyes with one hand. This time, his mouth was open. The light pulsed on and off several times, very slowly, and it appeared that the face through the glass was talking. I could see the jaw moving.
I shouted again that I would phone the police if he didn’t leave. But that was when I started to hear something. Very low and hushed. But I could just about make out the man’s voice. Instinctively, I stepped towards the door so that I could hear better, and that was when a loud screeching noise bellowed from… Somewhere. It felt like the ground and my insides shook together. I didn’t need to check after that. The hairs on the back of my neck had returned to their usual relaxed state. The man was gone, light, voice, screeching sound and all.
I phoned the police, but when they came to my house they found nothing. I think they were starting to think I was making things up.
Then, I spoke with a neighbour of mine the next day, a woman who lived back along the street, and she told me that she’d had some issues with someone prowling around the outside of her house a couple of years previously. When she installed a security camera, the problem went away. She said maybe I should try that, at least if the guy came back, I’d have something concrete to show the police.
So, that was when I became determined to capture some footage of the man, for my own sanity’s sake and so the authorities could identify him.
The following night, I waited up until nearly 4 AM, but there was no sign of anything. So I eventually, exhausted, went back to bed, that was… Until I heard something at my bedroom window. I got up out of bed, grabbed my video camera, and looked out through the glass, but there was nothing and no one there. All I could see was the large piece of waste ground out beyond my garden.
But I could definitely hear something. It was muffled, but I was sure it was the man’s voice again. But how could that be? I couldn’t see him. I moved my head to about an inch from the glass, and just as I made out the sound of the words ‘the light won’t stop shining’, a hand slammed against the glass. I jumped back. The hand was pressed up on the window, but it was like it had come out of the air from nothing. It was pale but covered in what looked like soil.
I then heard the voice shout those same words again: ‘the light won’t stop shining’, and then the hand pulled back. When it did, I suddenly saw the shape of a figure move off out of my garden. I zoomed in as best I could with the camera, but when I looked through the viewfinder, I could see nothing. Then, when I looked with my own eyes through the window, there it was. The figure of the man, walking off into the waste ground.
I looked again at the viewfinder, but again it was showing me no sign of the man, and by the time I looked back through the glass again, the man had vanished. I guess that was when I started to suspect that I wasn’t dealing with a normal prowler. I now entertained the idea that the man wasn’t alive.
No amount of chamomile tea was going to let me sleep after that. Instead, I spent the rest of the night watching and re-watching the video footage I had taken. Not only had it captured nothing of interest visually, but even the voice I had heard speaking those unforgettable words, ‘the light won’t stop shining’, hadn’t been recorded. I had no idea how any of it was possible, but I had to find some answers or I was certain I was going mad.
A few hours of delving into websites about hauntings, and things of that ilk, brought me to a forum called ‘Things Unseen’. It was a place for people to share their paranormal adventures. Most of it was nonsense, I was sure. People playing at Ghostbusters, running around in abandoned places with video cameras and voice recorders, scaring each other and making up events to ensure that the endeavour was never pointless.
But, I didn’t know where else to go. There was a section of the forum specifically dedicated to ‘experts’, and I say that with inverted commas, ‘experts’ giving their advice to people interested in investigating the paranormal.
I wasn’t so much interested in investigating it, but I did want to find out if anyone knew how to get the man who was visiting me at night away from my house so I could sleep.
I posted about my experience, writing on their forums about how nothing was showing up on camera and mentioned every detail I could think of about the light, about what the man had repeated, about him covering his eyes with his arm and the fact that he wandered out towards the waste ground. Then, I finally passed out once the sun came up.
A few hours later, I got up, had a shower and went for a walk in the sunshine to clear my head. In the sun, the area next to my house, that piece of waste ground, seemed harmless. But even as I walked, I couldn’t erase the memory of the man wandering off towards it and vanishing.
When I returned home, I checked my computer and saw that a few people had answered the post I’d made on the forum. Most of it I couldn’t get on board with; ‘burn sage in your home’; ‘get an exorcist’; ‘move out’ one person even posted. That last one was the most reasonable in some ways, and if I was going to be visited by that man and that light every night, well, I’d have no choice but to leave. But where would I go? I had very little money. If I was going to be made homeless from these visits, I had to at least try something that might solve the problem.
That was when, amongst all the talk of ‘crystals’ and other hokum I filed under pure fantasy, I saw a post that caught my eye. It was very grounded. The woman who had made the post wished to remain anonymous. She was a long-time lurker on the forum of ‘things unseen’, but had to make an account just to answer my post.
She said that she’d had a similar experience. That something had visited her home at night from outside. In her case, she had lived in a small town in America, with her home looking out to a patch of woodland. At night, a small girl would wander out of the woods and walk around the outside of the woman’s home looking sad and crying.
It became clear that the girl was dead, as sometimes she would appear as a rotting corpse in a white dress and move back between the trees. The woman tried everything to escape the horror of this every night, but the only thing that worked was to try and discover what the girl wanted.
One night, the woman followed the girl back into the woods with a friend, and then found her standing next to a large redwood tree. The woman claimed that she’d actually spoken with the girl there and then. She said she was lost, and that the tree was the only thing familiar to her because she used to play next to it with her younger brother.
When the woman explained to the girl that she was dead, she sobbed into her white dress. The woman then asked the girl what year she thought it was and the girl said 1926. So, the woman told the girl that her parents were waiting on the other side for her and that she should be with them, that she could simply make the choice to be with them if she wanted to. The girl started to fade away as she told her this, like that was all she needed to know. Apparently, the girl turned and smiled at two shadowy figures that came out of the trees at that moment. She ran up to them and they embraced, and then suddenly, they were gone.
The woman wrote that she never saw the girl again.
It was her belief then that the man I was seeing was trapped by his lack of knowledge. He was wandering every night and didn’t know he was dead. All I had to do was tell him he was dead and then he would pass on to the other side. She even speculated that the light I was seeing, the light that the man said wouldn’t stop shining, was the light from the other side trying to help him. When I saw him shielding his eyes from the light, that was symbolic of his refusal to accept that he had to move on to whatever there is in the afterlife.
There was something about the woman’s words. Just a few nights before, I would have laughed at them. But there was sincerity in the way they were written. She believed them. And if all I had to do was tell the man that he was dead and had to move on, then it was worth a shot. Not that I was keen to face him, but I just wanted to sleep, and the idea of abandoning my home because of those visitations was not one I wanted to entertain.
I wish I had asked a friend to come with me, but something stopped me. I think I was embarrassed. People would have thought I’d gone mad. ‘Oh, hey, would you mind coming over tonight while I tell a dead man he needs to go to heaven?’ Yeah, that didn’t seem crazy at all.
And so, I was going to face it all alone.
I tried to get some more sleep during the day so that I was fresh-faced for the night, but I couldn’t fall over.
When darkness finally came, I grabbed a torch and a knife of all things, opened the door to the cool night air, and then sat in a garden chair outside my front door and waited. I waited, and I waited. By about 2 AM, nothing had happened, and I was starting to feel sleepy. I remember looking at my watch, I think it was just before 3 AM when I realised I’d closed my eyes. I must have nodded off for a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes, I looked out towards the waste ground and saw someone standing underneath one of the street lamps.
At first, I thought it was someone who was very much alive, but then it happened. A bright light momentarily flared up around the figure. I couldn’t bare staring at it, it was so bright. I covered my eyes, and when the light had faded away, I looked across again and saw that the figure beneath the streetlamp was still covering his eyes with his arm. He was kind of moving around slightly, almost circling the spot of ground, anxiously.
It was the man. I knew it.
I had never been so nervous. But this had to end. Torch in hand, I walked out of my garden and started to walk across to where the man was standing. I’m telling you, every step I took made my blood freeze. As I got closer, I could hear the man mumbling over and over ‘the light, the light, the light won’t stop shining’.
When I was just a few feet away from him, he stopped moving around as if he heard me, but his arm was still across his eyes.
‘Who’s there?’ he said in a frightened voice.
What do you say to a ghost? I guess I just spoke to him as a person.
‘I live in the house you’ve been visiting,’ I said, or something like that.
‘The light won’t stop,’ he said. I remember his mouth trembling.
‘It’s a good light,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re dead. And you need to go into that light to be happy again.’
‘Dead?’ He sounded surprised.
I took a step closer.
‘It’s okay, you’ll be safe there.’
And that was when he dropped his arm from his eyes. I’ve never seen anything like what I saw then. The man’s face was horribly burned from the nose up. I could see the white of his skull through patches where the skin was either gone or painfully thin. And then there were his eyes. All I can say is that they were sealed. The skin had fused over where his eyes should have been, like melted wax. The man must have been blind.
‘The light…’ he said once again.
I was confused. How could he even see the light with his face like that? I cleared my throat and said again. ‘The light is heaven. Go to it.’
Then, he was gone. I don’t know if it happened when I blinked or if he just vanished to the other side in front of me.
The waste ground felt empty. I was shaking. All I wanted was to get back to my house and hope that I’d never have to deal with anything so unreal or terrifying ever again in my life.
Turning, I took a step back towards my garden, but my left foot was stuck on something in the ground. A crushing pain wrapped around my ankle, and I instinctively shone my torch down at my foot to see what had happened. I hadn’t caught my foot in anything, but something had caught me.
A rotten, burned hand was sticking up out of the waste ground, and it had grabbed me by the foot. I let out a scream for help, but my voice just echoed around the emptiness of the place. I suddenly realised just how alone I was, and how stupid I had been.
The hand squeezed around my ankle, and then another hand reached up out of the ground and grabbed hold of my knee. It yanked me down and I lost my footing. Before I knew what was happening, my body was in a prone position and my face was full of dirt from the ground. Two arms wrapped around my body. They yanked and pulled at me. It was as if they were trying to pull me into the ground itself.
Then, a face pushed up out of the ground, and I screamed again as it pressed against mine. The eyes were fused shut, and the rotten mouth opened and closed like a shark, the teeth clattering inside. I nearly lost my mind there and then, but I remembered the knife I had brought. I pulled it out of my pocket and brought it up over the burned face. Repeatedly, I stabbed, down and down with each strike. But it did no good. The knife passed through the face like the thing was only half solid. Half of this world and half of somewhere else.
The hands continued to pull at me, and the face rubbed against mine, the closing and opening of the mouth, clicking over and over, again and again. It was desperately trying to pull me down into the ground, but I wouldn’t give up. Its efforts were in vain. I think it realised that eventually.
A blinding white light shone momentarily around us. I covered my eyes from it, and, with a groan and scream of its own, the figure tried to cover its eyes, letting go of me. I was able to break free from its other arm and then stagger to my feet.
I didn’t run to my house. I didn’t run to any house on that street. I just kept running and running until the madness of fear left me and I slumped down onto a park bench a couple of miles from my home.
After a thing like that, you don’t go back. Some friends and family, who all thought I’d had a breakdown, volunteered to go to the house and get some of my things. They wouldn’t listen to me. I was prescribed some anti-anxiety meds by a doctor and even she wouldn’t entertain the finger marks I showed her on my ankle.
‘Maybe you were attacked, but the rest was a hallucination,’ she said.
Yeah, right.
A friend gave me a spare room in his place for me to stay until I sold my house. I felt bad selling it to anyone. I just made sure it wasn’t sold to someone with kids or anyone elderly or living alone. I told the real estate agent: It has to be a couple in their prime. At least they’d have each other if that thing turned up.
I haven’t heard anything since that night. I wrote to the couple who now live in the house and asked if anything strange had happened since I’d left, any lights being shone through their windows by local kids. But they’ve never seen anything. Maybe it’s because they’re not alone.
Of course, I couldn’t let what I’d seen go, not entirely. I needed some sort of explanation. So here it is: I spoke with a historian from a local college. I wanted to know about that spot of waste ground. What she told me left me stunned.
A factory had been there at one time, sixty years before I moved to that house. The factory processed magnesium oxide. One day, there was a terrible fire at the factory and the magnesium oxide began to burn. I was reminded of an experiment a chemistry teacher had shown me back in high school. When magnesium oxide burns, it produces a dangerously bright light.
During the fire, six men were blinded by that light. The entire building then burned to the ground. There was only one casualty. A man named David McIntyre. He had been fired from his job there the day before. It was believed that he ignited the magnesium oxide himself. The fire was so intense, it burned a large hole into the ground through the concrete foundations. It was assumed that David Mcintyre’s body was vaporised by the 3000-degree heat.
Now I know what that light was. And I know that man is still down there somewhere beneath that lonely patch of waste ground. Both haunting it and haunted by it, forever.