It’s kind of embarrassing that I was afraid of a “monster in my closet,” especially considering I was a teenager.
When I was in my early teens, my father bought a house out in the country. He gave me the second biggest room and I honestly loved it at first. It was the first time in my life where I didn’t have to share a bedroom with a sibling. My closet wasn’t anything unique except that it didn’t have any doors. It was also pretty shallow where the back wasn’t too far off from the entrance.
What a misleading appearance since everything changed during the night. When I went to sleep at night, I began noticing two things that seemed out of place: first it was extremely quiet. No noise could ever be heard outside, including any cars that passed by or the tv blaring from the living room. I suppose it would have been the ideal sleeping situation if it wasn’t for the second thing: the sudden presence in my closet.
Once it was night, the lights off, and I was in bed, the silence only drove my attention to the closest. It was unnaturally black, as if it had become some kind of an abyss. I could never see the back of my closet at night, even after my eyes had adjusted to the darkness. It was like someone had hung up a black sheet in my closet.
At first, I just ignored the worried feeling and fell asleep but only to wake up later with the ominous feeling of being looked at intensified. Sometimes, when I opened my eyes, I caught a glimpse of a figure standing in the shadow. I would always close my eyes as soon as I saw it, but it caught me looking a few times and got excited. The presence I felt would sometimes loom right over me, like it was trying to get my attention.
Whatever it was, it enjoyed making me feel afraid.
I began making adjustments to help me sleep better: a fan so I can focus on the white noise, I adjusted the bed and made it so I could turn my back away from the closet, and I always went to the bathroom beforehand. Or just piss the bed. Because, if I woke up in the middle of the night, every sense of my body would quietly scream “Do not leave your bed. Do not show that you are awake.”
After I moved out, I returned back and got placed in the same room. It was still there, watching me. I eventually moved out of state for a while, got married, and just recently moved back to my home state. Strangely enough, the first thing I thought when we first visited my father was that “My wife must never sleep in that room.”
Luckily, nobody is in that room. It’s been changed to a storage room more or less. My brother keeps his computer set up there but he’s never in the dark when he plays. However, when I was visiting late one night and I went to the bathroom, I felt it again. Frustrated that it has no one else to torment.