The Ghost Who Woke Me from my Nightmare

When I was seventeen I lived in rural Kansas near one of the Civil War battlefields. Throughout my childhood, I had been plagued with ghostly visits and nightmares of drowning in a river. One night I was having an awful nightmare. This one was particularly disturbing because I kept seeing myself dead in bloody water in a bathtub. I could smell death and I was consumed by fear, because this seemed all too real. Just then, I was gently "shaken" awake. When I awoke, I sat up in bed, relieved that I was still alive. No one was there. I shook it off and went back to sleep.

A while later, I continued to have this ominous dream, only this time I saw my body laying in a bathtub full of blood in my grandparents' bathroom (their house was just down the road from me). Again, I was awaken from the horrific scenario in the same gentle, yet urgent manner, but there was no one there.

At this time, I thought I had merely been imagining the feeling of being shaken awake, but I was too tired to contemplate it, so I went back to sleep. Once again, I resumed the torment of dreaming of my own death in a bloody bathtub. This time the dream had a change of location to my ex-boyfriend's bathroom. There were demons present in the dream this time. I became really frightened and found myself in his upstairs bedroom, I imagine to seek consoling from him. After scanning the room, I found that he was not there. However, I did stay long enough to take note that he had re-arranged his room. It was rather tidy and I noticed his drawing board was in a different location, prepped with notebook paper that had safety pins in each corner of the paper.

For the last time, someone woke me up, this time with an even more urgency. As soon as I opened my eyes, there was an attractive young man hovering parallel to my body about two feet above me. I froze. He was glowing, white with well defined features, but he had no body, only a "fading" torso. He was looking at me really intensely and his mouth was moving in an obvious attempt to communicate with me, as if he was trying desperately to give me a message beyond the grave. My heart was pounding and when I was finally able to move out of my frozen state after what seemed like at least a minute, I rolled off the bed and ran into my mother's room. After relaying the fantastically horrifying experience to her, she just said, "Aimee, go back to bed!".

I did not return to my room that night, needless to say. I slept in my six year-old brother's room, instead.

The story does not end there. The next morning I had play practice at school. During the break, my female cast members and I went to the girls' room to freshen up. While I was washing my hands, a rather obnoxious girl came bolting into the bathroom hysterically shouting , "I seen a ghost, I seen a ghost!" She said that it was down the hallway from the theatre and identified the apparition as being a young male. I think I turned white. I did not utter a word to anyone about my ghostly visit the night before.

Quickly, I exited the girls' room and went to the commons' area to make a quick phone call to my ex-boyfriend to make sure he was still alive. We had not spoken to nor seen each other for two weeks, and I was a little worried at this point that he might be deceased. The ghostly man in my room had resembled my ex-beau, but I had not thought of the possibility that it actually could have been he who gave me the ether-worldly visit in the night.

I hastily shoved a quarter into the payphone and dialed his number. I was relieved to hear his voice when he answered. He was indeed still breathing and his blood was still pumping through his veins. I described the whole creepy incident to him, even the part about me visiting his room in the night. He remained silent, listening to my every word. When I was finished telling him everything, he said that he did clean his room and rearranged some things, as I had described them. Also he noted that his drawing board was where I had said it was in the dream, only there was drawing paper, not notebook paper, and paper clips in the corners of the board, not safety pins.

Now, in my thirties, I continue to have creepy nightmares to this day, and although I have heard and felt strange things, I have not physically seen an apparition since I was about nineteen. The mystery remains who the ghostly man was. My theory is that it was either a Civil war ghost who watched over the place, or an apparition who followed me home from one of the cemeteries I used to visit.