My shadow woman

For years I had been asked to never speak about this incident to anyone, but promises are meant to be broken right?

When I was about nine or ten when my family and I moved into a new house, coming from our last which is where I spent five years of my life growing up you can guess that I wasn't that fond of the idea of moving away. At first, the house seemed normal enough; a standard six bedrooms and three bathrooms, there was a loft where the toys went, a large backyard and both a basement and an attic. I spent most of my time exploring the surrounding area, it wasn't a neighbourhood per se but more of an open lot that had a few houses that were close enough to be considered neighbours.

The house was made a lot different than my last house, with three main floors, on the first floor was the living room and the kitchen with the guest bedroom and a bathroom, in the kitchen was the door that opened up into the basement that always smelled like sand and oranges. The second floor held me and my sister's bedroom along with two other rooms -my father's study and another guest bedroom. The last floor -the third floor- sat my parent's room and the small loft where most of the toys stood. Above that was the attic which was mainly just a mess of air tubes and old boxes from the last house. My sister's bedroom sat next to the stairs and the end of the hall and mine as on the other side facing the back of the house; whenever my door was left open I could see straight down into the hallway and a little way down the stairs. Every night I left my door cracked open so that the light from the bathroom -which we always kept on- would illuminate my room just enough so that I could barely make out if something was in my way to the bathroom.

After a week after we moved I started waking up in the middle of the night feeling as if something was watching me. The first few nights I would turn to look at the door and find nothing and would scold myself for being so easily scared, eventually, I would fall back to sleep. However, the sixth night that this happened I turned over to see a shadow standing in front of my cracked door. The shadow was crouching with one hand on the doorknob and the other at its side, at first I assumed that it was my older sister Molly as she always came to check on me in the middle of the night, but something about the way the shadow was hunched over made me think that it wasn't my sister. I was too scared to check it out or call out her name so I just hid under my blanket and closed my eyes hoping that whatever it was wouldn't come into my room. This continued for a few days, I would wake up and see the shadow sitting there and I would hide under my blanket. Soon enough I bulked up the courage to ask my sister if she was sitting in front of my door watching me sleep and she looked at me like I was mad telling me that she had better things to do than to watch me sleep in the middle of the night. After that, I started closing my door and for a few months, I slept through the nights without anything happening.

Then one day after we had been there for about five months I started waking up to the sound of something scraping against my door, it didn't sound like a fingernail or anything like that but it sounded like a piece of chalk going across my door. I never got up to check what it was and when I got up in the morning nothing would be on my door, so I shrugged it off thinking that I was just imagining things. Things got worse though when I started walking up to my door being opened, it wouldn't just be left cracked either, it was always fully open and it would be completely dark in the hallway. What made things worse was the fact that I could still hear the scraping sound only this time it sounded like a shoe against the floorboards. I told my parents this and they didn't believe me, telling me that the "house was old" and that "old houses make weird noises" but something about the way my sister looked and acted whenever I brought it up like she...knew about it already. One night things really hit the roof and I saw the same shadow but this time it was standing in front of my open door, a tall woman with her neck bent to the side stood there just staring at me. I screamed and tried to hid under my blanket but felt something grab onto my ankle, kicking with everything that was in me I pushed my way out of the bed and down the dark hallway and up the stairs into my parent's bedroom.

By the time I had gotten there, I was a sobbing mess and they tried to reassure me that everything was fine. My mum told my dad to just go check on things and to take me with him so that I could see that there was nothing wrong. I didn't want to go at first but they persuaded me in the end, as we made our way back down the stairs my father stopped hearing the scraping sound, he stood in front of my and followed the sound towards my sister's door. He opened it to find my sister on the ground shaking and vomit coming from her mouth.

I don't remember what happened much after that, I know that we got her to the hospital and that the doctors said that she had almost overdosed on some kind of drug and that if we hadn't found her as soon as we did that she would have been dead. When we went home the next morning I sat in the back seat with my sister holding her hand and she bent down to whisper in my ear, "She sent you didn't she?" I looked at her not sure what to say. Had my sister known about the shadow woman all along, had the woman come to her, had she saved my sister that night? I never did get a chance to ask; that was the last time I saw the shadow woman and my sister asked me to never speak about it again.