And things that go bump in the night.

A light hearted blog today, hope it makes you smile. I have seen some banter going on in the Twitterverse recently to do with ghosts and the paranormal etc and it got me thinking about times I have been truly scared.
I can only recall two occasions when I have felt absolute terror, the stomach
In knots kind of terror, the stuck to the spot feeling you get when faced with something unknown.
The first time was many years ago, I was still at home with my parents so must have been early teens from what I can remember, it was winter and early evening so just getting dark enough to put a light on. I was reading, sitting downstairs on the sofa, no one else was in the house at the time, just me. I remember thinking about getting up to put the light on when a noise caught my attention. I listened, not worried at first, but then it came again from above my head upstairs, a kind of thump followed by a scrape. I knew I was definitely the only person in the house and froze,thump scrape, thump scrape, I heard it moving across the floor, I was too terrified to move as i tracked its progress and sat in absolute fear as it reached the stairs, it sort of banged and slid down the stairs one stair at a time agonisingly slowly and I'm sure my eyes must have looked like saucers by now, I can still feel the prickly feeling and the line of sweat that trickled down my back as I watched the partly open door in absolute horror, goodness only knows what I thought was going to come through it but what I didn't expect was to see our cat backing in through the door dragging behind him one of the teddy bears off of my bed.
The second occasion I was a bit older,married and living in my own house with 2 very young children. Again it was late evening, the girls were in bed and hubby was watching telly in the living room. I was half way down the stairs when I heard someone stop outside our front door. It must have been quite late because the chain was on the door and I always did this once we were all settled for the night. I could partly see an out line through the glass panel on the door, a very shadowy figure appeared to just be standing there.
To my absolute horror I heard a key go in, my head did that 10 second inventory check thing, hubby is in, kids are in bed, I'm here, no one else has a key!
So how? Who? it's really quite strange but at this time all common sense left my head and a blind panic descended in it's place, the key turned and the door opened as far as the chain would allow it to, I watched in frozen horror from half way up the stairs as a hand reached round the door and felt for the chain, suddenly I was galvanised into action, no one was going to come in and hurt my family, I shot down the remaining stairs and with a hefty push trapped the arm in the door.
Luckily I recognised the agonised scream from the other side of the door before I actually broke ' my brother in laws' arm. Yes, it was my brother in law, my husband had left his door keys in his brothers car earlier that day and he had come round to see hubby and return his keys at the same time, he thought it would be easier to just let himself in rather than knock. Don't think he ever attempted that again.

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