A Hallucination or Reality?

This pasta is partially based on a true story.

It all started two weeks after my grandmother’s death. I was ten years old at the time, around the later half of winter 2006. I woke up early one morning and everyone in my house was asleep. I believe it was 4:30 AM. I walked out into the hallway and went into the bathroom, not bothering to close the door since I just had to take a quick piss anyway. Across from the bathroom door was the door that led down into the basement.

The door that led to the basement was a glass door, but with a flowery design on it so if someone was standing behind it you could see them but they would be fuzzy from the flower design. I never thought about seeing anything paranormal, and even as a 10 year old boy I still had no belief in ghosts of anything. It just never really crossed me mind.

Anyway, I was standing there in the bathroom, with the light off since it was just becoming lighter outside, when I heard a small tapping on the glass door of the basement. I finished up and approached the door. The tapping got louder and finally my eyes adjusted: it was a hand smacking the door from the other side. I could see a faint, pinkish white silhouette of an elderly woman. It looked like my recently deceased grandmother.

I felt shocked, but not afraid. I simply walked into the other room. The tapping continued, turning into a hard, fast pounding, until suddenly it stopped. Dead silence throughout the house. The faint sound of footsteps going down the cellar stairs. An episode of a possible hallucination over.

But was it hallucination? To this day, I look back at that spot on the cellar door where the hand was violently pounding, and I see a brownish, splotchy stain that resembles a handprint. And I swear that before that day nearly six years ago, that stain was never there.