True Ghost Experiences

Whirlwind Girl

OK, completely and totally non-fiction story here. This is my most extreme experience to date (mind you I'm only 25 so there's plenty of time yet!).

When I was at College, both me and my housemate were very into all things Weird. We wore black, we read ghost stories etc. A bit on the pretentious side now I think of it, but it seemed serious when we were 19. A roleplaying friend of mine had a mother who made her living as a psychic (they were a very _poor_ family!). Her name was Sandra.

Along with a few other friends interested in the occult, we asked Sandra if she'd come round one evening as we wanted her opinion on the house that we renting at the time. The house was a 1930's semi-detatched. Very boring. But right at the top of the stairs, outside the bathroom door, there was a cold spot. Neither I nor Alison could bear to be on our own in the house, and both of us had, on occasion, sat outside on the doorstep until the other one came home from a nightclub. It wasn't necessarily an evil feeling, but definitely... sentient. After we had been there 4 or 5 months, it would start to move around the house - like a tiny whirlwind, skipping from one room to another. We were not the only ones to feel it, certainly, many of our friends refused to use the bathroom in our house because of it, and many friends had followed it around the house in curiousity. It just frightened the willies out of me. Having a bath was a very traumatic experience. Oh yes, and the light-bulb at the top of the stairs used to blow on a regular basis - every week or so, so you'd be in the _dark_ with this cold pillar following you into the bathroom. Oh, ick, it's frightening me now, thinking of it.

Anyway, we asked Sandra to come and see what was what. She was a lovely lady, very friendly and chatty. She did some regressions on members of the group which seemed to work on everyone except me, and I was a little sceptical by this point.

"What do you think of the house, Sandra?" Alison asked her, having told her nothing of our 'whirlwind'.

"Very transient..." she said. (No mean feat here - it was a rented house, of course it was going to be transient...) "However, there is something on the landing, isn't there?" My mouth dropped open, maybe there was something in this after all...

"It's a little girl... and she's very frightened, isn't she, Anne?" Sandra looked straight at me.

I felt as though I'd left my body behind all of a sudden and I was on the stairs as a little girl - perhaps 4 or 5 years old. I was desperately running up the stairs because I knew that at any moment... the hand would get me. The stairs ran up the side of the house, and the front door was at the bottom of them. As I watched, my mouth dry with fear, the letterbox on the door shot open and a hand reached through. It was brown and leathery and covered in bumps, cuts and warts. The fingernails were like claws, and the arm was impossibly, impossibly long. And it shot up the stairs behind the little girl, trying to grab hold of her nightdress to pull her back down towards whatever was waiting behind the door. She was screaming and running as fast as she could, but her little legs wouldn't carry her fast enough. The hand was just about to grab her nightdress when all of a sudden I was back as me, sat on the living room floor surrounded by my friends. I was hyperventilating badly and Sandra took some time to calm me down, saying, "You can't hide behind that any more, breathe slowly." This turned out to be odd, as I had in fact been using the hyperventilation as a way of getting out from awkward situations for years, completely involuntarily. I've had no problems since.

I still don't know whether our 'whirlwind' was the ghost of that little girl or the imprint of her childhood fear. I suspect the former as I detected sentience behind the fear and cold. But I've never experienced anything so immediate and so totally frightening as those few seconds I spent experiencing the fear that she felt. After this event, we took to talking to the 'whirlwind', verbalising our fear to her, and making her realise that she was frightening us as she had been frightened herself. Although it never stopped, and we were always apprehensive about being in the house alone, it became better after that day.

I don't have any pat explanations for what happened - I still don't know what happened to me, and I doubt I ever will. But words can't express the stark fear that little girl had, and it's far too easy to forget that the 'ghosts' we fear were once human too.