Sliding Glass Door

It happened on a dark, crisp, Fall Friday night in Morgantown, West Virginia. It was raining outside, it had been for most of the day. My girlfriend and I had settled in to watch a movie and enjoy some time to ourselves. All my roommates had gone for the weekend. We had all the lights off with only the glow of the television to illuminate the room, and it was probably about 10:00 PM when it happened.

At first we didn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary, but creepy things had been happening at the apartment…footsteps with no apparent source, blurry figures walking by the window only to be caught out of the corner of your eye. We heard the sliding glass door open in the apartment below, then shut back. If you are familiar with these doors, they make a distinctive sound, and they aren’t quiet.

Like I said, at first we didn’t suspect anything, but then the nothingness, the quiet started to bother us. We knew the man who lived downstairs, and for the most part we knew his schedule at work. He wasn’t supposed to be home for another hour at least; he got off work at 11:00 PM!

Now I’m starting to feel scared and pumped up at the same time. I’ve got a feeling like the hair standing up on the back of my neck! I was confused. I usually felt this way when a ghost is near, but this was an intruder…so I thought. I looked around for a weapon to confront the intruder with and found an old broom handle used to secure our own sliding glass door. With this in hand I slowly opened the inner stairs which lead down to the apartment below and peered into the darkness.

That is what struck me the hardest, the darkness… and the quiet. There should have been a light, a noise, something. But there wasn’t, only pitch black, impenetrable darkness. Now I’m thinking that this intruder is simply waiting for me to come walking down these steep and narrow stairs into this terrible black darkness. No Way! I shut the door back and fastened it, but before I did, I heard a horrible half-grunt, half-snarl which sent an new wave of shivers up and down my spine. Now I knew there was no intruder, at least not a human one. Only some terrible beast or demon. By this time my girlfriend is now very scared and freaking out, so we called the police and had them come to check the apartment out. Of course both the windows and the door were secure, and the police found nothing.

At 11:30 PM when the man returned from his job we told him all the happenings and then we sat up throughout the night, afraid of the dark and telling ghost stories!