My Mirror Ghost

In my 24 years of life, I have had numerous encounters with ghosts and paranormal events. I have decided to write about each of them individually in chronological order starting with my very first experience which occurred when I was about seven years old... My mirror ghost.

When I was younger (than seven, I mean), I used to sleep in a bedroom on the second floor of my parents' two story house. When my younger brother was born (when I was five), my parents moved their bedroom and mine downstairs and made a third bedroom down there for my brother. In the end, the layout of bedrooms ended up being my room on the right as soon as you hit the bottom of the staircase, my brother's room was second on the right, the downstairs bathroom was straight ahead, and my parents' bedroom was on the left directly across from my brother's room.

As you turned into my bedroom, my bed was on the right alongside the wall my room shared with the staircase. Beside the bed, on the left, sat a small nightstand. On the left, along the wall my room shared with my brother's room, stretched a long, short bureau with a large mirror attached at its center. Straight ahead were two closets, one narrow closet with two mirrored accordion doors and the other a wider closet with four pastel-pink, shutter-like doors which hid the oil tank. In front of the pink closet stood a high bureau on top of which my TV sat.

Because we lived on a rural road without streetlights, the downstairs was pretty much pitch-black every night so my parents put a small nightlight in every room to ensure that no one would run into a wall or anything on their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

That night, I crawled into bed and my mother and father tucked me in as always and then put my dog, Gus Gus (a small white Maltese) on the bed with me. They kissed me good night and turned off the bedroom light, leaving only the amber glow of the nightlight which was plugged in beside the night stand. I remember falling asleep without any trouble.

A few hours later, I awoke to my dog growling. Now, Gus Gus was a sweet dog who never out-and-out growled at anything that wasn't an obvious threat so I was immediately scared when I heard him. There was a train a mile or two behind my parents' house and the vibrations of it did cause my dog to bark and growl when I first got him back when I was two. However, by the time of this particular incident I had owned Gus Gus for six years and by that time his only reaction to the trains were to chuff and then go back to whatever he had been doing.

Knowing that it wasn't the train he was growling at, I tried to figure out what else could have caused his reaction. I looked down at him where he was lying beside me and I expected him to be growling towards my doorway... But he was staring at the pink closet behind my television set. I looked in that direction and saw nothing so I turned to go back to sleep. Which is when my gaze fell on the mirror in the center of the long bureau. It was angled in such a way that, from my position on my bed, with my back facing the wall adjoining the outside front of the house, the reflection in the mirror was that of the pink closet from the bureau my TV sat on to the corner where the outside wall met the edge of the pink closet.

In the reflection, I saw a semi-transparent, human-shaped, white cloud floating slowly along behind my TV but in front of the pink closet and heading for the outside wall. I immediately turned my head back toward the pink closet only to see nothing. So I turned to the mirror once again and the cloud was still there, but it had progressed further towards the outside wall. I watched it continue its journey until it actually vanished through the wall.

I never got any sense that the spirit intended me any harm or that it even realized I was there at all. The spirit didn't scare me so much as startle me a bit. Though to this day I have trouble sleeping in rooms that have mirrors in them as they give me a sensation that I am being watched. However, as far as the spirits I have encountered in my lifetime, this is the one that confuses me the most. Why was my dog growling at it? What was it doing in my house? And, the most puzzling question of all, why could I only see it when I was looking in the mirror?

For those of you who may think it was a trick of the light caused by the nightlight in my room, I slept in that room from the time I was five years old to the time I was ten and I had a nightlight through most of those years. In all that time, that was the only instance where I saw a phenomenon like that. Also, I asked my father if his house had been built over anything. Native American burial ground or the foundation of a destroyed building, anything like that. My dad checked (mainly because I refused to leave him alone until he did) and according to town records and construction reports (which in Maine, as in most states with Native American cultures residing in them, would have had a report of the unearthing of human remains) there was absolutely no indication that anything existed on the spot my parents' house occupies, other than trees, right up until the time my dad built the house.