It Couldn’t Just Be In Our Heads
The house I grew up in had a slightly strange design in that all the bedrooms were clumped together at one end of the house and the kitchen and living room were at the other end.
The two areas were connected by a long, narrow hallway that had a bathroom in the middle and a bunch of closets on either side. My bedroom door was at the end of the hall.
There were two other bedroom doors facing each other, across the hall, on either side. This meant that if you were sitting in our living room, you could look straight down the hallway at my bedroom door. Many strange and frightening things happened in that house.
Things would disappear, stuff flew off the shelves, there were strange voices or breezes, etc. There was one thing, though, that we could never rationalize away or lie to ourselves about. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced. The darkness at the end of the hall.
The hallway was not just very long and narrow, it was also paneled in a dark wood, so it was pretty dark down there naturally if no lights were on. However, with the living room lights on, there was always enough light to see down the hall and make out my bedroom door.
Sometimes we would be sitting in the living room and get the feeling that we were being watched or that something was about to happen. When that feeling would come over us, the end of the hallway would be completely blacked out.
It was as if someone dropped a curtain over the end of the hall. You could see part of the way down, and then there was just blackness. When this would happen, our three little dogs would go to the mouth of the hallway and sit in a line across it, staring down into the darkness.
Sometimes they’d bark a little or growl, but mostly they just sat and stared. Once in a while, one of them would get brave enough to walk down the hall, but they never got more than halfway to the darkness before they would stop and back up.
They would walk backward up the hall, never turning their back on whatever they were looking at. After a little while, the oppressive feeling would lift, the darkness would disappear, and the dogs would wander off.
This didn’t happen often but compared to all the “normal” spookiness in that house, that was the one thing we could never convince ourselves was just in our heads. Story credit: Reddit / spider_party