HALO

I’ve been best friends with this guy since the fifth grade. His parents own a house in a sub-division just outside of Winfield, but live in Point Pleasant. Anyway, we get together with a group of friends every so often at the house just to get away from parents, spouses, whoever, and just have fun. Kind of like a guys night out, but we stay in and watch movies, link some x-boxes together and kill each other in video games, or whatever. We’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, off and on.

On Thursday, Oct 23rd of 2003, a friend of ours was in from New Orleans and we were at the house playing Halo. There were four of us in the house. Two were down the hall in the den and I and another guy was in the living room. All the lights in the house were off except the light in the den and the light in the kitchen, which partially illuminated the living room. We had been playing for a couple of hours, when I started seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. It kind of looked like someone in gray clothing was walking by the doorway to the living-room, heading for the kitchen. I thought one of the guys down the hall was going to get some pizza but no one ever arrived in the kitchen.

It kept happening and every time I turned to look, there was nothing there. I kept taking my glasses off and rubbing my eyes, and cleaning my glasses, even though what I was seeing wasn’t through the lenses, since it was always out of the corner of my eye. It started getting mad because it kept distracting me from the game, but I never said anything.

A little while later, we took a break and the guy whose parents own the house came down the hall with a confused look on his face and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I keep seeing things move out of the corner of my eye.” He then proceeded to tell us that it was always in that hallway, and it looked like someone, a BIG someone, in a grey sweatshirt walking around. And that he had been seeing it all day, even before anyone else was there. At first he thought it was our friend from New Orleans, who is over six and a half feet tall and weighs over three hundred pounds, but he didn’t show up until after my friend started seeing this thing in the house. Since I didn’t want to taint his description, I asked him to describe it before I said anything about seeing the same thing. He described the exact same thing I had been seeing, in the same places, and even in some of the same times.

The best way to describe what I saw is like this. You know when you squint real hard, so your eyes are barely open, how everything has that blurred, hazy look to it? Imagine seeing someone like that, dressed all in gray, and walking past a darkened doorway, but your eyes are wide open. It was really freaky, especially with my friend seeing the same thing, but it wasn’t really frightening. I had always wondered how I would react if I was ever faced with something possibly paranormal. Would I freeze, run in fear, or what? I guess what I would do is sit there and joke about it being a ghost for a few minutes and go back to playing Halo, because that’s what we did. But like I said, we’ve been meeting at the house for about twenty years and this is first time anyone has seen anything out of the ordinary there. And we haven’t seen anything of it again since we talked about it that night. Also, the other two guys in the house, one of which was sitting between me and the doorway when I kept seeing it, didn’t see anything at all.

I also have an update for this story. I work at an old house museum, which is also supposed to be haunted… but that’s another story, and was talking to the son of one of our volunteers a couple of weekends ago and the conversation came around to ghosts. His father used to have my position at the museum before moving on to bigger and better things, so he knew about the ghost stories from the museum. I made the comment that I had been working at the museum for over a year I hadn’t heard or seen anything supernatural or really unexplainable. So I told about the one story I had experienced… the HALO story. Well, unbeknown to me, he was a member of M.A.J.D.A. and had a little experience with investigations. So when I was describing to him what I saw, using the “squinty eyed” analogy, he interrupted me and asked, “Did it kinda look like a big mass of smoke, like someone had a cigarette and was moving it around?” I was stunned. He just described perfectly what I had seen. He said, “Yeah, that’s ectoplasm.” I had to go give a tour to a group of visitors, so we didn’t get to discuss it any further then that. But it did lend some credence to the experience.