My grand mother leaved in a rural area where witchcraft is a popular mean to bother your neighbour because his cows always eat the grass of your field. But it’s all superstitions, right? Yet, at every crossroads you’ll find an iron cross set in stone to prevent demons and witches to gather at these places they favor so much.
Anyway, my grandmother’s house is old, the oldest part of the building must be 200 years old, and the land belongs to my family since at least 4 or 5 generations of farmers, millers and ironsmiths. Some parts are more recent but it’s still a creaky place with thick carpeting and heavy curtains that block the lights, making small rooms always dim and crowded with shadows.
When I was 5, I slept with my cousin in a stuffy green bedroom furnished with two traditional beds, carved in dark wooden frames. They made me feel like a princess because they really looked like beds from castles. They were very hight, the top of the mattress raised up to my neck so I litteraly had to climb in bed every night, for real. It left a huge empty space unde the bed where an adult could have crawled easily and still had room to toss and turn, which was obvious very fun during the day when we played hide and sick, and absolutely terrifying at night. So I always hurried when I had to haul myself up into the bedsheets.
One night, something weird happened. My cousin was already in bed, and my big sister who was 12 at the time was accompanying me to bed to kiss me good night. The beds were standing on each side of a small nightstand, they were so big they took all the space in the room so moving around them was uncomfortable. The ceiling light was on. I entered the small row between the two beds, followed closely by sis and started to climb in my bed when suddenly I felt something grabbing me by the ankle that was still dangling near the floor. It pulled and I fell on the ground, my leg was dragged under the bed. I scream with all my heart and wiggled, it released me and I stood up as soon as I could, crying that something grabbed me.
My sister was alarmed and dropped on the ground instantly to look under the bed, the dim lit gap was empty. She said so. I looked, and yep, surely there was nothing more than a couple bundle of dust lazily resting on the dark wooden floor. I was really agitated, when she put me to sleep. My parents and my grandma came to see what was wrong and my sister said I felt something, like a hand, grabbing me by my ankle and dragging me under the bed. All the adults said that obviously I just fell of the tall bed. I insisted. My sister added that it was not possible that I just fell because of the weird movement I made, it really seems like I was being pulled under the bed. The adults did what they always do, they said it was our imagination and we all went to bed, half of us absolutely terrified of course.
The following week I woke up to a greenish smokey floating form of a cow skull above my head and yelled again so the whole house came to see what was wrong again. Bad dream, yadi yadi yada, I spent the rest of the holidays sleeping under the covers, and the next holidays too, and the next.
Around the same time, I catches a cold and needed to take a nap but I absolute refused to sleep alone in the green room so my mum accepted to let me sleep in the pink room where my aunt usually stayed in here own tall princess bed. I was peacefully sleeping, the door was open and my mum had left the light of the corridor on, so I was not in the dark and could here her voice coming from downstairs when I was brutally pushed outta bed. One minute I was all nice and tucked, drowsy, the next I was violently rolled and fell to the far away floor with an alarm in thud that worried my mum. This time I said I didn’t know what happened, that I didn’t know how I fell. And you know what made me so scared? My mum looked scared. I honestly thought maybe I just fell, but she remembered she tucked me well, so she was confused and refused to let me alone upstairs so she made me come with her downstairs.
Then, for a while, aside from a weird sense of doom you could feel creeping on you in certain rooms, nothing noticeable happened. Till my sister had her own baby and tucked him to sleep in the green bedroom. Big mistake.
My nephew was 3 months old and only knew how to rest on his back, he was small, prematured and spent his time sleeping. My sister had placed him at the center of the double bed that now occupied the green room. He was all bundled up, with pillows on each side of him in case he suddenly decided to learn how to roll. She left him sleeping, in the room, just seconds to talk to my grandma who’s bedroom is just next door, so less than a few meters away. She then heard a huge cry and ran back to her kid, who was wailing in terror.
She found him on his back still, at the edge of the bed on the opposite site of where he was left resting, but the other way around, legs pointing toward the bed board. Which is absolutely impossible to do for a baby this young, this small, with very little mobility and certainly not in such a short span, seconds, even more considering the tucking and pillows and all. My nephew has been moved. My sister asked the dad if it was him and he said no, he was really pale and alarmed too. My sister started rumbling about the house being haunted and my grandmother brushed it of, like she always did. But my sis remembered her when I was pulled under the bed in the same room and my grandmother went suddenly silent for a while. Way too silent.
My sister asked if someone died in the house and my grandmother said no, but. But in the previous centuries, it was common that babies died very young, some days after being birthed, and when it happened, people of the village often burried them on their house grounds so she admitted that when they remodeled the garden they had found shallow graves of babies here and there, just like our neighbors did when they remodeled their own properties.
Excuse me, what the actual fuck? And now I’m supposed to believe that there’s nothing in my grandmother’s house and that all of this is a collective dream? Oh another fun fact. My grandmother’s bedroom is the only peaceful one, idk if it’s because it’s well lit or because it’s the only one adorned by pictures of saints and a cross but I wonder, altho I’m not a catholic myself.