The Ghost in My Room

I have a problem. I'm a skeptic, but I'm a skeptic who wants desperately to believe. The fact is, I do believe in ghosts, try as I did to explain the experience some other way.

When I was a teenager, I lived in the attic of my family's home. The attic was half finished and half simply storage. My room was huge and perfect. It had nooks and crannies. It was another world. It was my haven.

One night, after returning home from a date very late, I prepared for sleep. I was about to draw the curtain around my bed when I saw a man in the far corner of the room near the stairway. He was large and he said nothing. He was dressed in rugged work clothes and had a hat with a wide brim. He was either a black man or a white man baked dark in the sun. I never knew which, and neither does my sister, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Needless to say, I was immediately frightened. It was very late though, and I imagined that I was dreaming or drifting into dream. I quickly shook off the vision. But a few weeks later I saw him again, this time in a different part of the room. He was still distant from me, but I could not shake him off so easily this time. That night I just closed my eyes and wished him away and never looked again until I was asleep.

After that, I saw him in the daylight also, but only a few times and only glimpses. Even so, I began to feel like he was always lingering. Finally one night I woke up to see him at the foot of my bed. He was obscured in shadow, with the brim of his hat low ever his eyes, but it was the closest he'd been to me. I sat up and addressed him directly. I said, "you can't be here. You can't be in my room. You have to leave here!" and he vanished. I never saw him again. In time, I assured myself that, despite my desperate desire to believe in all things magic, I had merely made my visitor up from thin air.

Years later, my sister remarked offhand that there was a ghost in the attic. The attic room became hers when I left home, and she said there was a ghost there. A man. He was either a black man or a white man baked dark by the sun. She couldn't decide which.

"Did he wear a hat?" I asked. She nodded.

"Was he a black man?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," I said. "His hat covered his face."

"And he was always in shadow," we said together.

After further discussion we found that we both saw our visitor when we got our first serious boyfriends and dated a lot. We thought that he might be jealous or maybe just protective of us. He was real though.