This all started when I was five years old. My grandfather had just purchased an above ground pool, so as you might imagine his house became the house for all of his grandkids and extended family to come hang out over the summer. On one of these days, I was dropped off with my sisters and my cousin, and as a group of small children in the humid Floridian Summer, there was nothing we wanted more than to go straight to the pool.
We were told we all had to go into different rooms to get changed. There were two bathrooms and bedrooms, and I ended up in my grandfather’s bedroom to get changed right next to the bathroom my cousin was in. The bedroom itself was nothing special. A large comfy bed, a TV on top of a large dresser, and a wardrobe with a large mirror on the door.
I decided I would stand in front of the wardrobe to get changed, and things started off without issue until I had gotten all of my clothes off. Being a small child, I couldn’t help but laugh for a second at seeing myself naked in front of a full body mirror. I eventually smiled into the mirror one last time before reaching down for my swimming trunks. As I was struggling to push my foot into them while keeping my balance, that’s when I noticed that the mirror was off.
In reality, my left foot was in the air, poking into my swim trunks and trying to find its way through. In the mirror, my left foot was planted firmly on the ground. I was sure I was just looking at it wrong, so I stood back up to look at the mirror a little more closely. That’s when I made eye contact with my own face, which was still smiling like it had been a minute before. I could feel my actual face immediately drop into a look of complete confusion. I thought to try and blink my eyes shut to see if I was imagining things, but my real eyes weren’t the ones that moved. Instead the reflection gave me a friendly wink, before beginning to silently laugh at my reaction of complete panic.
I screamed and ran, throwing the bedroom door open. My parents had not yet left, and they came storming down the hall to see if I was okay. Tears had already formed in my eyes, and I struggled to gather my thoughts, yelling at them in short half-sentences that probably sounded like complete gibberish about the mirror. My father went into the room with me after that, likely just wanting to calm me down and possibly make sure I hadn’t really seen somebody else in the mirror that shouldn’t have been there. The room was completely normal, even the mirror that I had sworn had been mocking me only seconds before.
At this point my cousin had finished changing, and came out of the room only to laugh hysterically at seeing his naked cousin on the verge of tears standing in the middle of an open doorway. I was shaken up pretty badly by this, and finished changing with my dad in the room, standing between me and the mirror.
I wish I could say that there was more activity in that house, but there wasn’t. For the next few years, nothing strange happened. We moved into a new house, having my grandfather join us in living there after his wife passed. In this new house we had plenty of room for activities, so sleepovers became a new norm for us. Usually we would just play video games, watch YouTube videos, or even go swimming once we finished building an in-ground pool on our new property. However, as I began approaching puberty, my father began to worry about my appearance. Admittedly, I was not great at self-grooming, and didn’t care much for how I looked. My father came up with a couple ideas on how to address this behavior, and one of them included putting a large mirror in my bedroom, across from my bed.
At this point, I hadn’t thought much of that one-time occurrence. In the year or two following it, I had taken a couple occasions to stare into the bathroom mirror at our house, sure that I could make it happen again, but it never did, so I had convinced myself that a five year old child had let his imagination wander a bit too far. I say this because almost immediately, when I walked into my room and saw the mirror for the first time, I felt a cold static fill the room. Something felt off, and I found myself staring at the mirror obsessively, as if I expected something to come violently clawing its way out of it, but it never did. That is, not while I was awake.
In my dreams though, I began having a reoccurring nightmare that I would be awakening in my bed, which was too low to the ground to be visible in the mirror, and I would be facing the wall. When I would begin to sit up, I would look over at the mirror and see my reflection standing, staring down at me, the eyes full of malice. These nightmares would sometimes be so bad, that I would be unable to move when I woke up if I was facing the wall, not wanting to risk looking at the mirror again. I asked my father if I could take it down, but he thought I was being silly, and said I needed the mirror until I could learn to take my appearance more seriously.
Over time, the nightmares slowed down. I went into middle school, me and my sister made some new friends, and I slowly started to improve my grooming and wardrobe as I was beginning to find myself. Sleepovers remained a common occurrence too. In fact, it was at one of these sleepovers that the next unsettling event took place.
My sister had invited three of her friends over. My own friend I had invited canceled, so I was stuck hanging with the girls or being alone in my room. We were in the living room, watching a ghost hunting show, when one of my sister’s friends brought up the Bloody Mary game. Being a rather edgy tween who had a strong belief in the supernatural, my sister was immediately in on the idea. Despite my prior experiences, I was never firm on any supernatural beliefs, so I frankly thought the whole thing was dumb. I was surprised then, when my mom came out of her room, and told us to stop talking about the Bloody Mary game. This wasn’t like her, she was never the strict or paranoid type, especially about the supernatural. My sister asked why, and my mom explained to us that our ancestry connects back to the Tudor lineage, the royal family that the Bloody Mary legend stems from. She explained that while she normally didn’t mind paranormal conversations, she had always felt like a ritualistic game connecting back to our ancestor was a bridge too far. Hearing this only made my imagination run even more wild, realizing that if there really was some negative energy connected to our lineage, then perhaps my experiences with mirrors could be more than a wild imagination.
Time passed. We graduated Middle School, then High School. Eventually the time came for me to leave the nest. Talks about the furniture I would be taking with me began to arise. My mother asked me if I wanted to take the dresser in my room with me, but I knew it took up a little bit too much floor space for my small apartment. I remembered that wardrobe from my grandpas old house though, which wasn’t as wide and would’ve fit against the wall better, so I decided I’d ask her if that wardrobe was still in our storage anywhere. My mother shook her head and told me something that made my blood run cold.
“Your grandfather tried to give that one to us for our room,” she said, “but something about that mirror facing our bed kept me from sleeping at night.”