35. The Exact Same Thing
When I was 13 I moved into my brother’s bedroom, as it is an extension to the original house with an en suite and is far larger than my old room. Originally it was a tiny boxroom with an entrance to the attic but was extended outwards. The attic entrance is always open, with a permanent set of metal ladders angled up into it. There’s a picture of it here, the grey arch is where the original room ended.
Within a few weeks of moving in, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to see a figure staring down at me, with a white head like a skull and a formless black body. It would slowly move down to the foot of my bed and stare at me until I moved, at which point it would sink into the floor.
Just sleep paralysis, right? And I’d begged to move into the room and had just got it set up so I wasn’t going to leave. I didn’t really talk about it to anyone, it gradually became less frequent over time.
Eight years after this my brother mentioned at a get-together that he used to have a sleep paralysis demon when he lived in that room a half-joking, half-freaked-out way to other people when the topic of them came up.
He described the exact same f*cking thing.
Neither of us mentioned it to anybody else at the time it was happening so we have no explanation for us both experiencing the same thing.