True Ghost Experiences

Watchful Figure

It all started when I was about eight. Or maybe I was nine. I don't remember. I was in third grade, and I was walking home from school. And I saw something, out of the corner of my eye, like a blur, and then it was gone. But it felt like it had followed me home from school or something, though I don't know why. No incidents at school, just one -- I was playing by a tree, a fruit fell, and a rabbit ran away. I don't even know why that stands out in my mind.

Anyway, I told my mom and she laughed, and told me "Yeah, it probably followed you home from school." I thought about this for a while, mulled it overin my eight-year-old mind, and decided it made sense, satisfied, I fell asleep.

The next few weeks were normal. No incidents, nothing -- just that one silver flashj, when I was walking home, and that was it. Then one day, when my friend and I were sitting beneath a worktable at school, trying to do our homework and hide from bullies at the same time, and all of the sudden all the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I felt really cold, and the radio that was playing on the table above us subsided into static, and my friend said maybe we should ask the teacher to turn the air conditioning down because it was really cold in there. And then he got up and started to walk, and stopped, and said "huh. It's not cold anymore, and then he came and sat down next to me and said,"I'm cold again". We decided that we didn't want to be cold, (plus I was nervous), so we moved to an area of the room I was more comfortable in. About ten minutes later, while some teachers were wheeling the piano into the room (it was one of those cheap ones -- they used it ! ! for sing-a-longs), one of the wheels stuck and the end veered intoi the table, knocking it over. I thanked God that we had not been sitting beneath the table.

That's when it got wierd. I felt it more often, like it was watching me intently, or tagging behind me. I would see silver blurs, which would subside, and I'd start to panic and feel like I was suffocating, and run out of the room. Mom just thought it was a "phase" I was going through, though it must have unnerved her when I darted suddenly out of a room where I seemed perfectly fine before.

I nicknamed it "rabbit", mostly because I was afraid of it and wanted to give it a name that at least seemed harmless, partly because the apparition had two spikes on its head that resembled rabbit ears. And it got worse. Mom enrolled me in a private Christian school because she thought that the bullies at school were the ones messing me up. It always appeared before something bad happened, and my reaction was to always run away from it, so naturally when a heavy shelf tipped over or something, I wasn't standing beneath it as I had a few seconds before. Or sometimes the reaaction would be delayed -- after seeing it in a certain place I would be terrified and not return for maybe a week, to learn that something had happened there, like when I saw it near our car when we were going to go watch the car races, and Mom asked me if I wanted to come with her to get gas before we went, and I said no, so my little brother (who loved me to death) didn't want to go either. Mom walk! ! ed back in the door an hour later, covered with grease and grime, to tell us that he car had burst into flames right next to a gas pump.

My fingers are shaking, so I'll finish. Mom took me to see some psychiatrists after I burst into tears in class after seeing it next to my teacher. I stopped seeing it for a while, just felt it watching me intently, then it was gone. Sometimes, if I wake up for no reason late at night, I'll see a figure like a man in a leather jacket leaning against the door frame, and I'll rub my eyes and it's gone, but I can still feel it watching me, and the butterflies in my stomach keep me awake for the rest of the night.