under the bed

okay...


because everybody seemed to dig our perhapanauts halloween scary story contest, and because i, sadly, have some funerary obligations today, i'm going to resort to my old trick of plugging (stealing from) one of my favorite spooky stories sites--YOUR TRUE TALES over at paranormal@about .com.
enjoy.

Your True Tales
November 2008

Under the Bed
by Phillip W.

This story took place in a small town in Alabama. Back in the early 1980s, my aunt lived in a house that was located literally in the middle of nowhere. The place used to creep out my younger brother and me, but we loved to go there because my aunt had four children. The house was very old and it had all wooden floors.

There was always an uneasy feeling when we were inside. For the most part, not much happened that was out of the ordinary when we were there. There were a lot of noises during the night, though. On several occasions, I heard floorboards creaking, as if someone were walking around. Most of this seemed to be coming from upstairs and sometimes in the hallway downstairs that connects the front of the house to the back rooms. Sometimes I also heard a thumping sound from upstairs at night. The thing is, no one stayed upstairs ever. There was just a spare room, a bathroom, and some small storage spaces up there. My aunt's room was downstairs, and we all stayed in a room down the hall from hers.

I rationalized that the sounds were caused by the wind, or the fact that the house was so old, and really never thought twice about it. I refused to ever go upstairs though. The thought that the place could be haunted never really crossed my mind. I just thought it was a creepy old house -- that is, until one night in particular.

Bedtime had come a long time ago, but us being kids we stayed awake and goofed around for a while. Eventually, we all fell asleep. This night I seemed to have a lot of trouble staying asleep though. I kept waking up periodically for no apparent reason. On about the fourth time waking up, I thought I felt a poke on the heel of my foot, which is what woke me. I rolled over and looked around the room, but nothing was out of the ordinary. I lay back down and tried to go back to sleep. After I had laid there for about five minutes, I started to hear a tapping sound. I listened for a minute, and that was when I came to the terrifying realization that the sound was coming from underneath my bed!

I was too afraid to look under it, so I just tried to ignore it and pretended to go to sleep. After it did it for almost 10 minutes, the tapping suddenly stopped. What happened next I will never forget for as long as I live. There was a lone window in the room, and that night the curtains were pulled back. I was facing the window, and just moments after the tapping stopped, a white transparent figure slowly moved past the window from right to left. It seemed to be walking on the front porch, which covered the entire front of the house. The figure appeared to have a glow to it, kind of like the moon has.

Needless to say, I was horrified. I froze in terror, with my eyes fixed on the window. My heart pounded so that it felt as if it could jump out of my chest. Fortunately I didn't see it again. I tried to rationalize what I had just seen, but I couldn't. We were in the middle of nowhere! There were no roads, no cars, no nothing, just a long dirt road and a bunch of trees. Everyone else was asleep, so I was the only one who saw this. I was too scared to sleep after that, so I just lay there for the rest of the night.

The next morning, I was thinking about what I had seen, and I remembered that sometimes my aunt would hang clothes out to dry on the front porch. This must have been what I had seen, right? Maybe it was a sheet or something. I asked her at breakfast if she had left any clothes out on the porch last night. She said she didn't dry anything at all the day before. There was no other explanation for what I had seen. Honestly, I really didn't think a sheet could have looked like that anyway. This thing's movement was too animated to be a sheet. I guess I just wanted to think that. After this incident I didn't want to stay there anymore, but luckily they moved not long after that anyway. To this day, I believe that this was something paranormal. Because there just is no other explanation, and I was definitely awake.


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"five for friday!"
one thing that i find a little sad, as i get older and this crazy world seems to spin faster and faster, is how audiences these days, weened on hyper-paced, hand-held, almost seizure inducing films now find many of the classic black and white movies from the 30's, 40's, and 50's to be too slow, too tame, and too boring...
it makes me sad too to think that some of the very talented stars of those films might one day be totally forgotten.
in an effort to keep at least a few of them from fading into obscurity,
name the five classic film stars

1.








2.








3.







4.









5.


now go netflix a movie by any one of them--you'll be glad you did!


have a great weekend!
smell ya later!
todd