The Back Room

This isn't exactly a story...it's a personal experience that to this day I have no explanation for. As a teenager I was plagued with constant nightmares regarding my own death, past lives and demons chasing me. Somehow I would always find a way to kill these demons and escape. These dreams always felt very real and sometimes an event from a dream would take place in real life, which really freaked me out. Once I dreamed about a demon wearing a black cloak and saw a person wearing the same cloak in a convenience store the next day. This is just one of many strange examples.

After leaving school the dreams became more and more real. I would sit up straight in my bed talking to people, often children, who were sitting on my bedroom floor, just to have my mother come in and ask me who the hell I'm talking to. After I found out that my boyfriend's father was a Sangoma (African witch doctor), a rather strange thing for a white person where I come from, I started wondering if that had anything to do with my strange dreams as they started shortly after we started dating. Then again, it could just be coincidence...

After 5 years together my boyfriend told me we had to break up and they were moving away because a woman his father had had an affair with had put a spell on them (what???). After they left the dreams stopped for awhile. Soon after I met my current boyfriend, who was still living with his parents at the time. He rented a room in the back of the house. The room was not part of the original house, it was added later when the landlord decided to expand. Over weekends I would sleep over and that's when my dreams returned, only this time I could not defeat the demons. This time they would get me and kill me. Other than that the room just had a strange feeling to it...I could never get myself to enter it unless I switched the light on first. Light bulbs also had a way of often blowing for no good reason, even if they were new. My mom told me about a man who committed suicide in the house but that was in a completely different room and before the expansion. I told my boyfriend about the dreams and he looked shocked: he told me he had been having similar experiences since living there. Sometimes he would dream about the room being sucked into a void and other times he would wake up in the dead of night with the feeling that he is being watched.

One night I woke up because I thought he was talking to me: I was always the one who had to get up and get him water because his side of the bed was against the wall. When I looked over at him he was fast asleep but something against the wall behind him caught my eye. It was a black head that reminded me of a wolf, with glowing red eyes. I couldn't stop staring at it. I started shaking my boyfriend, whispering for him to wake up, never shifting my gaze from the thing, which had started to grin at me. He finally woke up and asked me what was wrong. When I didn't respond he turned my face towards him, breaking my "eye contact" with whatever that thing was. When I looked back it was gone...

A short while after that my boyfriend's parents moved and we took over the house. I was very, very happy to move to the main bedroom. I converted the back room into a gym and at night I avoid it completely. I never saw that thing again and even though my boyfriend claims that his nightmares have stopped completely, he says every now and then I jump out of bed screaming.