I’ll be the first to admit I was a total scaredy cat growing up, even terrified of the dark and any noises that startled me. Throughout my life, I have had so many unexplained experiences that I have been told maybe I am haunted or at least every place that I have lived at all had some sort of strange occurrence. So much so, that in the past, I have been asked to join two different ghost hunting groups. I prefer to believe that maybe I am just sensitive to the things that go bump into the night.

Everyone loves a good ghost story…even the skeptics. I may not be as scared as I once was, but every now and then something stops me in my tracks. Like the one time I was awakened out of a dead sleep to a pungent old lady perfume that afterwards, dissipated within a few seconds. Or when my daughter Olivia, 3 years old at the time, had an imaginary friend named Milly, who in turn, played lots of games on us all. Another time, I awoke to a little boy standing next to my bed staring at me.

Still, one experience I had, to this day, gives me goose bumps every time I think about or share it.

I grew up in a very small town in Maine. I lived with my mother who worked nights. It was my responsibility to watch over my younger brother and sister while she worked.

Occasionally, the lights would flicker. Pans would fall from the kitchen counter for no apparent reason. We would hear loud crashes that sounded like something had broken, only to search the house and find nothing.

And then there was the feeling. That unmistakable, eerie sensation that something was watching me.

I dreaded the dark, I dreaded sleeping. I dreaded being alone in that house. Whenever I told my mother about the strange things happening, she would reassure me that it was probably my imagination. At the time, I think she was trying to convince herself of the same thing. We couldn’t afford to move, so there wasn’t much choice but to live with whatever was happening.

In 2001, I was 17 years old. One night I had gone to bed. My room was pitch black, and my bed was positioned directly beside my closet. The closet door was wide open. I never left it open. At some point during the night, I woke up. I was lying on my back, completely paralyzed. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I could only stare into the darkness.

And then I saw it. Coming from inside my closet was a dark mist.

It wasn’t smoke. It looked more like thousands of tiny black particles packed tightly together, moving as one mass. Slowly, it began coming toward me.

I was petrified. As the black mass moved closer, it began to spiral above me. It swirled and twisted in the air before suddenly breaking apart. Then it rushed directly into my chest.

That was the moment I could move again and I let out a deafening scream.

It was around 3 a.m.—what many people call the Witching Hour. My mother had just gotten home from work and came running into my room. She held me and did everything she could to calm me down, telling me that it had only been a bad dream.

For years, that was the explanation I was given. But after I graduated and moved out, my mother finally told me something that changed the way I looked back on that night.

She believed me. In fact, she had experienced strange things in that house herself.

So had the neighbors who lived below us. She was afraid to tell me when I lived there because she didn’t want to scare me even more.

My mother’s bedroom was on the third floor. One night, she woke to what sounded like a baby crying. She then felt what seemed to be a little girl standing beside her bed, kicking her in the back as if trying to wake her.

Later, we discovered that a family who had previously lived in the duplex had suffered two heartbreaking losses. They had lost a young girl to meningitis when she was in the third grade, and they had also lost a newborn baby to sudden infant death syndrome. The duplex had also suffered a fire during the early 1900s.

I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother had experienced what is sometimes described as a residual haunting—a replay of something connected to the home’s past.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Years later in 2013, a medium reached out to me and asked if I had experienced anything unusual while living in the duplex. After hearing about my experiences, she paused. Then she told me something that sent chills through me.

A new family was living in the same house and they were experiencing very similar things.

The family had two young daughters who shared a bedroom on the third floor.

At night, the girls reportedly saw a black mist with red eyes. The same black mist I had seen more than a decade earlier.

To hear that another family had witnessed something so eerily similar was almost impossible to comprehend. For years, I had questioned whether what I experienced that night was simply a terrifying dream brought on by sleep paralysis.

But hearing that two young girls, living in that same house years later, had described seeing a black mist with red eyes made me question everything.

Was it a haunting? Sleep paralysis? Something our minds simply couldn’t explain. I don’t know. What I do know is that I still get goosebumps every time I think about that night. And maybe that’s why, after all these years, I still prefer to believe that I’m not haunted. Maybe I’m just sensitive to the things that go bump in the night.