The man with the bear skull face

I awoke to the bathroom door creaking open.

For a moment, I lay in the dark, trying to remember who I was and where I was. Then I remembered. I was home, and my friend Undral was staying the night.

Ah, it must be her. She’d stayed up later than me, watching a movie.  I had gone to be early to take my kids to daycare in the morning.

Satisfied with this explanation, I rolled over and fell straight back into a deep sleep.

The next morning, Undral and I sat down for breakfast. She looked uncomfortable, picking at the scrambled eggs on her plate before finally looking up at me.

“Um… I don’t want to freak you out, but something happened last night.”

Tears immediately sprang to my eyes. I didn’t know what she was about to tell me, but I had an idea.

“Go on,” I said.

“I don’t want to scare you, but I remember you saying you thought your house was haunted”

She paused, searching my face for permission to continue. I gestured for her to go on.

“Last night, I was getting ready for bed in the bathroom. I lay down, but then I heard the light click back on. I figured I mustn’t have turned it off properly. When I got up to check, the door opened and the light went off by itself.”

I shuddered.

Undral was a scientist. She wasn’t someone prone to flights of fancy.

And she was the second visitor to experience something strange in my house.

A few weeks earlier, my dad had stayed with me. The next morning, he’d told me he’d got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. On his way there, he’d seen a shadow move across the wall. He’d assumed it was a passing car.

Then, as he sat on the toilet, he’d heard a loud knock on the wall next to him. A wall that was impossible to knock on unless someone was in the kitchen.  I knew for a fact that I didn’t do that, my kids were too small to get out of their cribs. 

It had frightened him so badly that he’d abandoned what he’d come in for and spent the rest of the night in the spare room.  His report surprised me, he was always so analytical and he didn’t make up stories. 

I already had my own suspicions.

My family had moved into the rental a few months earlier. One night, as my husband and I were settling down to sleep, he turned to me.

“What did you say?”

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“It sounded like you were whispering something.”

I hadn’t said anything.

My husband was staunchly atheist. He considered spirituality “cooked”, so I didn’t think much of it. It was strange, certainly, but I let it go.  Maybe the fan sounded like whispering?

Until I heard it myself.

One night, in that same quiet stretch between being awake and falling asleep, I heard it. I couldn’t make out the words. I lay there listening for a moment, then tried to ignore it and drift off. Probably the fan again. 

There were other things, too. When my husband and I were intimate, he seemed rougher than usual, and I had a persistent feeling that someone was watching us.  Like they wanted him to do that. Like we had an unwelcome audience that my husband was performing for.

I couldn’t explain it. I just knew I was uncomfortable.

A little while later, I developed a sinus infection. The pressure in my right cheek was so intense that it felt as though I’d been punched in the face.

During the night, I got up to fetch some water.

Our fridge was in the open-plan living and dining room. The house was dark as I walked towards it.

Then I looked at the couch.

I swear I saw a man sitting there. Not a full figure that I thought I needed to wake anyone.  It’s weird but it was in my mind eye.

He was sprawled across the cushions, legs spread, looking straight at me. I knew there shouldn’t or couldn’t be someone there.

I froze.

I opened the fridge. Its light spilled into the room, illuminating the couch.

The couch was empty, nobody to see. 

I told myself it was the darkness, the sinus infection, the half-awake state I’d been in. There were plenty of explanations I could reach for if I tried hard enough.

So I did what I’d been doing since we moved in.

I let it go.

A week after Undral stayed with me, my eldest son, who was three at the time, woke screaming in his room.

I rushed in and lifted him out of his crib. He was inconsolable, his little body shaking as I held him against me. Eventually, he calmed enough for me to ask what was wrong.

“There was a man in my room,” he said.

I rubbed his back and told him he’d had a nightmare.

Then he told me what the man looked like.

“He had a bear skull for a face.”

I stopped.

I told my son it was only a dream. What else could I say to a frightened three-year-old?

But I couldn’t dismiss his words as easily as I’d dismissed everything else.

My dad had seen something. Undral had experienced something. My husband and I had heard whispering. I’d seen a man sitting on our couch.

And now my little boy was telling me there had been a man in his room.

A man with a bear skull for a face.

I had spent months trying to explain away the strange things happening in our house. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation for every single incident. Maybe the shadows were passing cars, the whispers were half-formed dreams, and the figure on the couch was a trick of the light.

But whatever the explanation, my son had been terrified.

And something in me snapped.

I wasn’t scared anymore.

I was furious.

Whatever this thing was, it had no right to frighten my children. It could creep around the house, mess with the lights, whisper in the dark, or sit on my bloody couch if it wanted to.

But it was not going to scare my kids.

I decided I needed to sage the house. I’d get some sage and force whatever was there to leave.

Before I had the chance to buy any, though, I made my intentions clear.

I didn’t say it out loud. I said it as loudly as I could in my mind.

Leave us alone. If you don’t leave, I will MAKE SURE you do.

I held on to that threat for a while, turning it over in my mind, still angry at the thought of my little boy waking up terrified.

After that, we had no more strange incidents.

We moved away a couple of months later. 

I don’t know what was in that house. I don’t know what my dad saw, what Undral experienced, or what my son dreamed about. I can’t explain the whispering or the man I saw sitting on the couch.

Maybe there was a rational explanation for all of it.

But if that bear-skull-faced, sexually creepy ghost wants to stay in that house, fine.

It can stay.

It just needs to leave my kids the fuck alone.