Tonight we've got a nice little true short story for you called The Sleep Watcher. Hope you enjoy it.
My grandparents lived in a two-story farmhouse about 5 miles outside of a sleepy Iowa town. The house was up on a hill surrounded by their farmland, and a sizable yard with deep ditches. I would help my grandparents mow lawn. I, of course, got the rougher job of mowing those ditches and trimming with the push mower. There were other things I’d rather be doing on a summer day, but they paid me and my grandfather always kept the fridge stocked with soda, so I didn't mind.
Once school started they would pick me up from school and I would stay the night there. The second floor of the house had two bedrooms and one large room between them. In one of the bedrooms there was a bed, desk, and dresser so if I had homework I’d often do it up there. It was nice because I didn't have my own room at home. However, when it got late my grandparents would always call me to come downstairs and sleep on the couch. I found this strange. I would ask them why I couldn't just sleep in the room upstairs and they always said, “we just want you down here with us.” This went on for several months.
One day back at my house I was having a conversation with my mother about the next time I needed to go out and mow their lawn. So I decided to ask her if she knew why I always had to sleep on the couch when there was a perfectly good bed upstairs. She said, “Because at night there is a man that watches you sleep.” She just blurted it out as casual as can be.
I said, “there’s a WHAT? A man?”
“Well it’s not really a man, it’s a ghost or something,” she said.
“ You've seen it?” I asked.
She said, “Yes, it’s been there since I was a little girl. My sister and I had to move our room downstairs because we just couldn't sleep up there.”
“Yeah right,” I replied.
She then said, “Well if you don’t believe me ask your father. When we first got married we stayed up there for a few months until we found a home. He saw it too.” So I ran off to talk to my father.
Now my father is a no nonsense person. I’d even say grumpy. He never had time for “ghost crap.” I walked into his workshop across the road, went into his office and sat down on a chair. He is a wood carver and was whittling away on his current job.
Without stopping he soon said, “Well, what do you want?”
So I asked, “Is there a man in grandma’s upstairs that watches you sleep?
He stopped, put down his tools and said, “I don’t want to talk about that.” He then took a drink of coffee and went back to whittling. Evidently the conversation was over about that subject.
Something that interesting wasn't going to leave my mind so easily. In the weeks to come I asked my father the same question over and over. Finally it paid off and the old man cracked.
He said, “Fine, I’ll tell you but after I do you won’t want to stay at your grandparents house again.” I braced myself and he continued. “As your mom said we stayed there when we first got married. I had heard about the thing in the attic and I thought it was a bunch of crap. But one night at about three in the morning your mother shook me awake and said, ‘Mike, there it is.’ I opened my eyes and it looked so much like a man standing there that I lunged at it to tackle him I just went through it and fell onto the floor.” Being a kid that was enough for me. I even stopped doing homework up there. But that’s not the end of the story.
Years later after I grew up and moved out, my parents got a divorce. My grandfather had passed away by then and my mother moved in with my grandmother into the farmhouse. My youngest sister Annie was still in high school at the time and moved in with them as well. She stayed in a small room just under the stairs to the second floor. In fact you could see the underside of the stairway going through the room. Annie was having a hard time sleeping in that room because she would hear footsteps going up and down the stairs all night. Unfortunately I was living 2000 miles away at the time and couldn't go check it out.
One night when she was home alone, Dad received a call from Annie asking if he could come get her. She said she was scared alone out there because someone was pounding on the door. My father assumed that a salesman had stopped by and scared her. He realized he had a few things to do first and called her back to tell her but there was no answer. Fearing something had happened he raced out. As he was driving up to the house he saw her sitting in the yard.
He got out and said, “you know Annie generally if you’re scared because someone is pounding on the door you don’t go outside.”
She said, “No, not the front door. Someone was pounding on the door to the upstairs!” My father went in and searched but of course found nothing. To this day I wonder what she would have seen if she had opened the door.
A couple years later I moved back to the area. Unfortunately by then my grandmother moved into town and my mother had the place torn down and built a new home where the old one stood. My mother happily said there was nothing spooky happening in her new place. So I thought it was all over. However my other sister Heather had done something kind of silly before the home was demolished.
Heather said she felt bad for the ghost. So when they were cleaning out the furniture she went upstairs and said out loud, “This house is going to be torn down. If you want you can come home with me.” Why she did this is beyond me. I guess she always did have a soft heart. Later the house was gone and all was quiet.
Many months later my sister started waking up at night to hear her toddler talking to someone. She’d ask him to whom he was talking and he’d always say, “Monster.” Then one night she saw it. She opened her eye and there he was standing in the doorway. She said she sat up startled and it would just fade away. She claimed she didn't mind because she felt it wouldn't hurt her.
Then one night she woke up to her teenage daughter screaming. She ran into her room and found her hysterical because she saw a man in her room. Heather tried to tell her she didn't think it was going to hurt anyone but she refused to sleep in her room. Finally after a couple days she got her to go back and then it happened again. This was getting to be a bit much.
Heather had taken a few things from the old house before they tore it down and one thing was a desk and shelves unit that she planned to refinish. One day she went out the garage to get started on the project and she got a strange feeling like someone was there, followed by a loud buzzing in her ear. She decided to check out where the desk came from so she called my grandmother. Come to find out the desk was in the house when my grandparents moved in and was the only thing that remained of the original home. This gave her the feeling that she had a little leverage. So she went back out and started scraping old paint off the desk. Soon the buzzing started again.
She dropped the tools and yelled out loud, “Stop it now! I’m not going to destroy it. I’m refinishing it and plan on moving it inside. But if you don’t stop scaring my children I’m going to smash it and throw it in the trash!” Heather has not had a single thing happen since then.
Why was the ghost apparently trapped in the attic? Was he clinging to the final piece of his beloved home? I went to Heather’s house and stayed the night a couple time but never saw a thing. I guess the threat did the trick for now. At least until someone else gets the desk.
