For a bit of preface, this is a story I once perceived as paranormal, but through my years and experience in life, I have chalked this story up to an acute case of sleep paralysis. Being real life horror, I consider this one of the more unnerving tales I can tell you, which as they always say, truth is way more stranger than fiction.
I remember this night acutely because it unnerved me so much it’s impossible to forget. I was a young teenager at the time, around 13-14 years old. Anyone who knows me personally knows that silence, especially when I’m trying to sleep, agitates me. Like my every nightly ritual for every night that I can remember, I turned my TV on to find something to fall asleep to. I fell asleep soundly, completely unaware of what was to transpire in the night ahead.
I have dealt with chronic insomnia for a very large portion of my life, which comes into play here. I wake up several times in the night to this day, and this night was no different. I would guess that I woke up about two hours after I originally fell asleep, considering my TV was on a sleep timer that lasted two hours (again, insomnia makes it hard for me to fall asleep). I know this because when this happened my TV was off and I was greeted with complete and absolute darkness. Usually the dark doesn’t unnerve me, but on this night, it sent me completely on edge.
Besides the almost irrational feeling of paranoia I had when I awoke, the next, and frankly most terrifying thing I experienced, was that I was completely immobile. I could still feel all of my senses, I could see the impenetrable darkness all around me, I could fell the sheets of my bed on my skin, I could smell the dinner my mother cooked that evening and even the lingering of her cigarette smoke while she did so, I could hear my heartbeat becoming more frantic in my ears and the rush of blood in my veins, and I could even taste my tongue swallowing over and over in my current state of anxiety. But I could not will my body to move even in the slightest.
Not having will over my body was horrifying on its own, but what I went through next is what haunts me to this day. I blinked my eyes and in what seemed to be beyond time and was instantaneous, it appeared. It appeared to be a young man, or what was supposed to be, in the right corner of my mattress. It wasn’t simply standing by my bed, it was going through it. I could only see it from the thighs up, and it appeared human, all except for its visage. That face I will never forget and it haunts me over a decade later.
It was completely white and devoid of life, black voids where its eyes and mouth should be. I don’t remember it having a nose, which made it seem all the more inhuman. In those “eyes” I saw the complete darkness of the void itself, nothing lay beyond that as far as I could tell. I felt my breathing become more and more erratic, I heard my heart beating harder with every second. Never in my life have experienced fear like this and all the while I was unable to to do a thing to stop it. I was helpless in this moment.
While I could do was stare in the abyss that was this creature’s eyes, it opened it’s mouth to reveal another void, preforming a soundless scream that things beyond my realm could only hear. All the while, all I could do was watch in silent terror. Then, as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. In that instant, I regained the control and rights to my body again.
Being the stoic that I am, even at a young age, I didn’t react like most people would have under my circumstances. I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream. I simply laid there in the dark for an immeasurable amount of time, staring at the ceiling and moving all of limbs one by one, just to make sure I still could. After the shock of what happened wore off, I succumbed to my exhaustion, turned my TV back on, and attempted to go back to sleep.
But I can tell you, to this day, I didn’t sleep for a moment that night.