Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25357157-20140828214432

The following is a true story of what happened to me as a child, as well as my thoughts on it now as a young adult. It's not super creepy or scary, it's more strange and curious, if I wanted to make up a story I probably would have chosen scarier subject content than what you're about to read.

Some background details, feel free to skip this section but it helps one understand my reactions to what happened to me: I was raised a Christian. It wasn't really 'forced' on me, I just kind of grew up believing God existed, along with things like Heaven, Hell and ghosts/spirits. I never was forced to go to church or anything like that, I actually volunteered to in my early teens but found it too boring. At the time I played Tennis on some weekdays and Saturday mornings so having to get up on Sunday mornings, my only day to sleep in, was too much of a pain for me as a teenager. I was also not a mature child. At age 7 or so I caught a few scenes of 'I Still Know What You Did Last Summer' and it scarred me for a good month, having nightmares and such. It took me until age 15 to finally work up the courage to watch a film that was rated MA 15+ (Australian ratings, restricted to those 15 or over), the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead and still found it decently scary, though at this age that fear was also exhilarating. The only reason I even watched it was because I thought it was 'the funny one' (Shaun of the Dead). The final detail you should know is that I have fairly poor memory. All of the stuff here definitely happened, but some of the finer details such as my exact age and the exact duration I'm not certain on, but have written them with certainty for the purpose of the story.

To the actual story of what happened;

At some point in my eigth year of life, I began to experience something that I never spoke about with anyone and is difficult to describe and believe. Certainly not traumatic or horrific but definitely curious and creepy in my opinion. One night I would suddenly hear something. Something that would last for anywhere between 10 minutes to over an hour, and little did I know that I would have to experience it many days of the week, for around two years of my life. I began to hear breathing.

Wow, right? Breathing.

Now, my first reaction was to stop my own breathing and hold my breathe for as long as I could, to make sure it wasn't my own and that I wasn't freaked out for nothing. But of course, it wasn't. Despite this discovery, holding my breathe to make sure it wasn't my own became a ritual I would do on every night I heard this breathing, almost like the definition of insanity, but hey, I was just a kid. It was slow but almost calculated, sounding like some kind of breathing exercise, but with an intensity/anger about it. So naturally after stopping my breathing and discovering it was not my own, I hopped out of bed, ran for my lightswitch and flicked it on to check my room and the immidiate area outside of it for a person. But of course, no one was ever there, no matter where I looked, closet, under the bed (I had a race car bed up until age 10, it had no room for anything underneath) or in the surrounding rooms like the bathroom. However, it seemed like when I would do this, the breathing was harder to hear, at least most of the time, almost as if it was coming from the bed itself. This also became a habit, not something I did every time, but on many occasions during the beginning; making sure there wasn't somebody with a very clever hiding spot. After a while I had become paranoid of the air conditioner vent above my head, thinking maybe someone was watching me from in there.

The part that frightened me the most at that age was that the breathing was rarely static. Whenever the breathing would start, it would sound like it was coming from just outside my door. I would never hear footsteps accompanying this breathing, yet, every now and then it would 'creep' up closer, getting louder, until it sounded like it was right above my head, some unknown creature/monster/killer looking down on me hiding under my quilt. One time I was so concentrated on the breathing that I didn't realise I was laying on one of my arms and that it had gone dead. I crept my hand along my mattress in some sort of childish attempt to see if I could feel anything and eventually found an arm/hand and nearly screamed my lungs out until I realised it was my own. Other times the breathing would get further away, then come back. It seemed to have no pattern. Sometimes when I ran for the light it wouldn't get any quieter, just intense breathing coming from... somewhere.

During this I could never sleep. I would simply lay wide-eyed in bed, with the quilt entirely or mostly over my head, waiting for the breathing to go away or until I simply got so tired that I would fall asleep regardless. As I said; it would sometimes take up to an hour or more for it to go away, and other times it disappeared quickly, 'it seemed to have no pattern'. The one pattern it did have was that it never happened when I had a friend over for a sleepover, it was only there when i was on my own, and it never appeared until the house was quiet, everyone else having gone to sleep.

Eventually, for seemingly no reason, it stopped entirely and I was free. I could sleep in peace and I eventually forgot about the entire thing. I never spoke of it with anyone that I can remember, perhaps I did but their response wouldn't have been much or very sympathetic otherwise I'd remember it. I simply endured it, believing it was some kind of angry spirit that wanted to frighten me for some reason, as I believed those things were real at the time.

At age 12 we moved to a new house. The breathing had never again crossed my mind until this point, my brain possibly shutting it out completely. Then of course, not long after we had settled in, it happened again. I couldn't believe it, my reaction now a mix of fear but mostly annoyance. I basically blocked it out, telling myself that it was in my head, that spirits can't hurt people and they can only scare them so I had to simply ignore it. A few times I even cursed at it out loud, 'the fuck is your deal mate? Piss off'. Not exactly doing a good job of ignoring it. However, perhaps because I was harder to scare, the breathing seemed less intense, not as loud, like it was no longer trying to scare me but simply existed near me. After a few months of that again, it went away for good and once again was forgotten about, never to enter my mind for at least 6 years.

Some things to note; Neither house was exactly HUGE, but they were both decent sized, and mine and my parents rooms were on opposite sides of the house. It's unlikely I was simply hearing them. On top of that, my parents both snore as opposed to simply breathing whilst sleeping, and I recall on some occasions hearing one of them (most likely mum, she snores pretty damn loud sometimes) in the distance, it wasn't them. Nor do either of them sleepwalk.

At age 18 the memory of this experience randomly popped into my head once again and after some thinking I concluded that it was due to baby monitors. I assumed we must have had 2-way baby monitors and I was just hearing my parents sleeping, it explained the lack of footsteps for when the breathing would get louder and softer, as well as the volume itself and perhaps even the 'tone' of it. It was plausible to me that my parents would have kept it even until age 13 just to hear whether I was being a brat and staying awake later than they approved of, they were that 'controlling' kind of parents. However a year or so later I had doubts and noticed loopholes in my theory. I didn't know how baby monitors worked, wouldn't I have to switch the one on my side 'on' if I wanted to hear or communicate with them or were they designed so I would simply be forced to listen to them sleep? That was simply illogical design and doesn't seem right. I also felt it was too coincidental that their breathing would never be heard when a friend was over. Finally, I never ever heard them have sex, talk, mumble, whisper, never heard their matress squeak or them snoring, the absolute only thing I would ever hear is loud, intense breathing. I didn't really know what to think of it.

A few days ago, a.k.a. few years later, after reading some creepypasta which in turn caused me to remember my experience, I asked my mum if the baby monitor she kept in my room was a 2-way one, should she remember. She simply looked at me funny and said; 'we didn't use baby monitors on you at that age. We didn't need them to hear you staying awake, you were louder than you thought *laughs*. We stopped when you were about 6.'

After that reply, all I could think to do was to write the whole experience down and share it.

...I'm hearing it again.

NOTES: This part didn't appear in the original edit so you know but just wanted to clarify something and add a question.


 * 1) 1. The very last line of this story isn't true, I just added it for creepy effect ;)  But absolutely everything else happened to me though I assume it was all my imagination as there doesn't seem to be any logical, scientific answer otherwise.


 * 1) 2. I don't know why it got deleted, I thought maybe it appeared too much like a journal? Though it's not exactly 'dear diary' or anything. It starts how many stories do, 'oh I was a kid and thinking about it now I realise how fucked up this or that was', the only difference was that this was a true story from my perspective.


 * 1) 3. I wanted to mainly, out of 10, ask how creepy people find this? I think if most of the scores are in the lower half that it might be wise to simply write the story based off my true experience but add my own dash of supernatural fiction to make it creepier. I showed only 1 person this story prior to uploading and their reply was 'wait really? that's pretty strange.'  So not really creeped out much I guess, probably due to how I wrote it.

Thankyou for all reviews :)

Dentacles (talk) 21:44, August 28, 2014 (UTC)  