At 5 AM one July morning in 2007, I awoke to the sounds of my daughter screaming. I flew down the stairs to her room on the main floor and found her sitting up in bed, staring at the foot of the bed and still screaming.
She was yelling that someone had grabbed her foot. A quick search of the room confirmed that no one was hiding in the closet or under the bed. The alarm was still set. No one had entered or left the house. At the time, my daughter was 17; she had always been very responsible and we had no reason to believe that she was lying.
She recounted the story for my wife and I. A few moments before the incident, she had woken up and was lying in bed on her back, relaxing. Suddenly, she felt a distinct pressure on her right foot. At first she wasn’t alarmed because she thought it might be her cat, Mozart, reaching up and pulling on her to get her attention. Mozart often slept in her room and let her know when he needed to leave. What my daughter didn’t know was that Mozart was in our room at the time. When she sat up, intending to shoo him away, there was nothing there. She could still feel the firm pressure pushing on her foot, but there was no cat clinging to her. In fact, it felt like a human hand was holding her foot and when she started to scream, it let go.
My daughter was so convinced that this wasn’t her imagination, she didn’t sleep in that room for several weeks.
This is why we believed her.
When we first moved to our current neighbourhood, we lived in a smaller house just down the street. Over the years, we got to know Mark and Sandra in the ‘big white house’ down the street. They had made a number of improvements to their house including the addition of a large back porch and a bedroom for their oldest daughter. We always admired their house and when Mark got a job offer in the states, they offered it to us before they listed with a realtor.
Two years after we moved in, we received a phone call informing us that Mark had been killed in a plane crash. The crash happened in June, 2007, one month before my daughter’s paranormal encounter.
For the first few weeks, none of us spoke about our thoughts concerning the encounter; we didn’t want to make it more ‘real’. But when we did start discussing it, we all had the same feeling. If there is such a thing as spirits, it would make sense that Mark would be drawn back to the house he lived in for so long… to a room that he had built for his oldest daughter. If the essence of the person we knew was suddenly ripped from his corporeal existence in a violent crash, he could be forgiven for being confused and returning to the wrong home. He probably felt it was his daughter he was reaching out to, in a comforting sense to let her know he was there.
Although she always believed that the encounter was not hostile, my daughter was uncomfortable returning to her room. I had to sleep there for a few nights to show her that the ‘haunting’ had passed. I have to admit though, for the first night, I kept my feet away from the end of the bed.
Eventually, my daughter resumed sleeping in her room again, and to the best of our knowledge, Mark has never returned.
Recently, we had another bizarre experience with more sinister overtones, but that’s a story for another time.
Out of respect for our friends, their names in this story were changed. However, all other facts in this story were recounted as accurately as possible.
