by Cara Dack

Created on: January 14, 2009

When I was a teenager, we lived in a detached house that had been built in the late thirties and subsequently used by Nazi soldiers during the second world war. The house was cold and often draughty but we put that down to bad insulation and the fact that it had been built on reclaimed marshland. For three years we lived there quite happily until one night when I was seventeen.

It began with a horrible and vivid nightmare. My father and sister were in it, for some reason my dad was mad at me and told me that I had to sleep in the bathroom. The house where the dream was taking place was a similar layout to our actual house but clearly several hundred years older. So I proceeded into the bathroom with was laid out exactly like my bedroom with the bath where my bed was. I climbed into the bath, in my dream there was a mattress in the bath and blankets and I quickly made myself comfortable.

While I was lying in the bath my heart began to tighten as I heard footstep coming towards the room. The door opened and a tall man walked in. He was clearly old and his skin looked like that of someone who had died and started to decompose, at was all gaunt and green. The man climbed on top of me and tried to rape me...

At that point I woke up my heart racing. My bedroom was dark and I groped for the switch for my lamp. As the light flickered on I watched in horror as the man from my dream walked out through my bedroom door! Eventually my heart rate slowed down and I began to think that maybe what I had seen was just a trick of the light, surely I hadn't actually seen the man from my dream. I lay in my room for nearly an hour trying to get back to sleep, too petrified to turn the light back off.

In the end I went into my sisters room where there was a spare bed and tried to sleep there, but just as I was beginning to feel ok I looked towards the open doorway and there stood the man again! He disappeared after a few minutes and I never saw him again. I never did find out who it was who haunted me that night, he was never seen by anyone else in my family or any of the previous occupants. Sometimes I believe it may just have been my eyes playing tricks on me, but at the time it seemed so real that it was many months before I was able to sleep with the lights off. It is fortunate that it has never happened since otherwise I would probably still be sleeping with the lights on to this day.

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