A True Ghost Story You Won’t Want to Read after Dark
There’s nothing like a good ghost story to bring on the chills, but most of what you come across on the Internet seems more like urban legends than real spook show stuff. The best real ghost stories always come from direct or unexpected sources — like this one.
Years ago, I taught EFL in Germany to students from all around the world. At the end of one of our courses, a fellow teacher and I took some students out for a drink as a goodbye gesture. A friend of mine, this teacher was more “out” about her occult and paranormal interests than I was at the time, so I was a little bit embarrassed when she asked me to tell some of my own (rather hair-raising) ghost stories to the group.
But I did as she asked and the group seemed to enjoy them — except for one guy from Chile. I don’t remember his name anymore, but I do remember he was really clean cut and conservative looking, the kind of person who usually thinks ghost stories are just a bunch of silly superstition. From the look on his face, I assumed this was the case.
“Do you not believe in ghosts?” I asked him politely. I was his teacher after all, so I wasn’t going to argue my story was real.
“No, that’s not it,” he said. “It’s just that I have a ghost story of my own I don’t usually tell people.”
We all leaned in.
“It was in Chile when I was in my teens. I spent the night at a friend’s house and they had a guest bedroom in the basement. The room had been added on at some point and it was big and kind of weird. It didn’t have any windows and you had to get up and walk all the way across the room to turn on the lights on and off.
When it was time to go to sleep, I turned off the light and stumbled around in the dark a bit until I found the bed. I lay down and started to drift off.
In the middle of the night, I felt something crawl across my body.
It reached all the way up to my face. It was a hand.
The fingers reached across my mouth and nose and started smothering me. I couldn’t breathe!
I started thrashing around and the hand loosened its grip; I could feel it crawl back down to the ground and scurry across the floor.
I lay there, wide awake, my heart pounding a hundred miles a minute. No way in hell was I getting up and walking across the room to turn on the lights…
I must have fallen asleep at some point because next thing I knew my friends were waking me up. I told them what had happened the night before and there eyes got wide.
“Oh no,” they said. “Not the ghost hand.”
“Wait, you know about it?”
Before they lived there, the house had apparently been damaged in an Earthquake. Part of it had collapsed and several people got trapped under the debris and suffocated to death somewhere around the area where this new basement room was where I spent the night. They said a few family members who had slept in the room had had experiences similar to mine.”
Everyone in the cafe was quiet after such a story until my friend piped up. “If they knew the room was haunted, why in the world did they let you spend the night there?”
“I asked them the same question,” he said, “but all they did was shrug.”
Still one of my favorite true ghost stories of all time — but I’m glad it didn’t happen to me!
