NOVEMBER 2000

This was a normal bungalow in a small housing estate on the outskirts of Derry city that my parents lived in for a few years. I’d moved up for a year after finishing university and trying to figure out what to do with my life. Perhaps one of the most distinctive things about this home is that it’s positioned on a bit of a promontory up above a road that passes by there which leads up to a roundabout. It was all on one level, but had an interesting layout. In fact, the way you moved through the house felt a little odd, as the way all the rooms were positioned at an angle or almost off-centre from the main hallway that carried you through the house. The bedrooms all were positioned on either side of where the hallway became pretty dark. At the time, my parents had just had the house altered by removing a wall that had closed off the front entrance area from the main living area. Overall, the atmosphere inside the house wasn’t heavy, exactly, but more…unsettling, especially if you were on your own.

This happened in one of the bedrooms down the dark hallway that lay towards the right side of the house. Now I had been sleeping in another bedroom directly across from the one I had this experience in, but I think I’d moved across to this room because one of my siblings had come to stay. I mean, none of the rooms felt great to be in, to be honest.

I had gone to bed at a reasonable hour, well before midnight. I had not been drinking or taking any form of medication. After reading a little, I got up and went to the light switch by the door to turn off the main light (there was no bedside lamp) and got back into sleep. Ignoring what was a now familiar discomfort with being in these rooms in the dark, I drifted off to sleep. At some point, as I turned over in bed and opened my eyes, I glanced over at the bedroom door (which was only one or two steps away from the bed, as these rooms were really small) and in the gloom could see the outline of a humanoid figure. I stared at it for a moment, not sure I was actually seeing anything, as it was gloomy and I wear glasses. But the outline of the figure was so strange – it gleamed and it had what I can only describe as a rainbow colour effect. I didn’t move, just kind of looking at it in its strangeness.

And then it moved. It came right towards me – I don’t remember noticing the outline having anything like legs, and I think it may have been more of a ‘purposive drifting’ in my direction.

Well, *that* got me moving. I leaped out of bed but because the room was so small and the distance between the bed and door so short, I went through it (closing my eyes). I remember my mind saying “you’re sleepy, you just imagined it, it’ll be gone once you turn around”. I spun around and looked in the direction of my bed. And it was there, the gleaming rainbow outline of a figure, but this time it was sitting. And I got the distinct impression that it was looking right back at me. And that it was amused. Even when I hit the light switch, it only faded away. It didn’t just snap out of reality, even as I kept rubbing my eyes to check it wasn’t some kind of weird eyestrain.

I wasn’t the only one to see things in the house – my sister’s ex saw a white figure in the window of the front living room when no one was in the house and he was walking up to the house, sometime in the same time period.

Submitted by Duncan