(I can’t believe a week has gone by before I’ve said anything about this.)
Last Thursday, January 14th, was one of the most eventful days I’ve ever had. First, one of my brothers who had been back home for the holidays was arriving that morning, and I had a meeting with Advisor Hotpants later that afternoon. But it all started before 6:30am, when I awoke to loud shrieking followed by a knock on my door.
It was my brother’s girlfriend Kate, who had just moved in with us. (With my brothers away for winter vacation, Kate, my cousin Ken, my brother’s dog Zoey, and I were the only ones in the house.) I was groggy when she came into my room, having been asleep for only a couple of hours.
“Did you open the kitchen cabinets?” she asked.
“No.”
“I just went downstairs and all the cabinets are open.”
OHHHKAY, WIDE AWAKE NOW.
This was the sequence of events as it was told to me: Kate went downstairs to the kitchen, then walked over to Ken’s room and knocked on his door (he didn’t respond). She went up to her room for less than a minute, then back down to knock on Ken’s door again. This time he woke up, and they both headed to the kitchen. They were a few feet in the room before freezing in their tracks. All the upper cabinets were open, including the microwave and the doors above the stove hood. It took two whole seconds for the sight to sink in, and then only a nanosecond for Ken to push Kate out of his way to run to my room (No notions of “women and children first” here, it seems. This is a residential neighborhood in southwest Las Vegas, yo. Do or die.).
It wasn’t a bloody knife or a corpse or anything of that sort, but the image of opened kitchen cabinets (and the microwave!) was terrifying. I didn’t want to see it. Luckily Ken manned-up and closed them all before I went downstairs.
I was skeptical though. I asked Kate if there was any part of her memory that was unaccounted for (I thought maybe she had fallen into some sleep-deprived trance and opened the cabinets herself). She recanted her steps with conviction, and after I made Ken swear he hadn’t done it, we were no closer to a reasonable explanation.
(A few days earlier we experienced a couple of other unexplainable things, one of them being a bottle falling off the top of the fridge even though it was a considerable length from the edge. [It also inexplicably landed a few feet away, which by our reasoning, would only have been possible if it had been pushed.] We all slept in the loft that night, slumber party style with the lights on.)
Ken, Zoey and I were in the sitting room (adjacent to the living room and out of view of the kitchen), and Kate was standing outside with the front door open. I was still in my pajamas, shaking from the combination of fear and cold when Ken asked uneasily, “Um, can anyone else see that?”
Oh. My. Gosh.
The chandelier in the living room was swaying. Not shaking a little, but rocking back and forth.
I gasped, and the next thing I knew I was being pushed towards the front door (this time Ken was guiding me out, and thankfully not offering my soul). I saw a blur of Zoey as we ran past her, and a blur of my shoes as I ran past them too. Kate had no idea what was going on, but that didn’t keep her from screaming all the way to the driveway.
I was so scared I was nearly in tears, but focused on odd things, like my socks–red with silver snowflakes. If I had to run to the gas station, would they hold? And would “haunting” be a legitimate excuse to miss class? Would my professor let me make up my quiz? How would I even begin to explain that?
We’re still not sure what happened, and I’m not fully convinced in either direction that it was something of the supernatural world, or if it was somehow either one of them. In the meantime, I’ve resorted to eating breakfast bars and stopping for coffee each morning because I’m too afraid to go into the kitchen alone. On the upside, maybe I’ll be able to shed some of those pesky pounds I put on over the holidays.
Has anything like this ever happened to you?
Rose by any other 