I was 7, and I still can't explain it.
Hi. This is my first time posting on Reddit, so I hope I'm in the right place.
I've wanted to share something that happened to me when I was very young. Honestly, I don't know if there's any proof left today, but I felt like I needed to write it down somewhere. I've never told anyone about this because I was always afraid people would think I was crazy, especially considering what happened and how young I was.
I'll try to explain everything as clearly as I can, even though some details have faded over the years. I was around seven years old when it all started.
For over a month, maybe even two, I experienced sleep paralysis almost every single night. At the time, I had no idea what sleep paralysis was. I just thought I was having nightmares.
At first, I woke my parents up every time it happened. After about a week, I stopped because I felt like I was bothering them. I just endured it in silence. Little by little, I became terrified of going to sleep and started feeling constantly anxious.
I shared a bedroom with my brother. My bed was positioned so that a dresser partially blocked the bedroom door.
Every single time I experienced sleep paralysis, I saw the exact same man.
Sometimes he would slowly open my bedroom door. Other times, he was already standing behind the dresser near the entrance. I could never make out his face. My bedroom was too dark, but I could clearly see his silhouette. His hair looked either very short or slicked back—I honestly couldn't tell—but nothing stuck out from his head. I couldn't see his eyes or any of his facial features. He would slowly walk around the dresser. He never climbed onto my bed. He would simply stop beside it, facing in my direction as if he was watching me.
Some nights he would get closer. Other nights he would simply stay at the edge of my bed.
Years later, I realized something I had never really paid attention to before: every single time I had one of these episodes, my bedroom door was actually open.
Sometimes I eventually managed to fall asleep anyway. I also often had the feeling that someone was breathing on me after I fell asleep, although I still don't know whether that was real or simply caused by fear.
Every morning, I kept everything to myself.
Back then, I loved searching through every corner of the house. In our bathroom, there was a mirrored medicine cabinet.
One day, for reasons I still can't explain, I felt an almost irresistible urge to look on top of it. It was stronger than me.
There were completely ordinary things up there, like towels, but there was also a key.
It was an old-fashioned key, one of those large metal keys you see in old houses.
The strange part is that nothing in my house used that type of key. Every door either used modern flat keys or didn't even have a keyhole. Even my bedroom door had no keyhole.
Directly across from my bedroom, there was an attic hatch in the hallway ceiling.
Nobody in my family ever went into that attic. We never stored anything there. It served absolutely no purpose.
When I looked up at the hatch, I noticed that it wasn't completely closed.
It was slightly open.
I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of fear. I still can't explain why, but just seeing it like that terrified me.
I didn't tell anyone about it. I simply put the key back exactly where I had found it.
Later that day, I wanted to tell my brother because he was the person I trusted the most. In the end, I decided not to. I was already asking him almost every night to check that nobody was standing by the bedroom door before we went to sleep, and I didn't want to bother him even more.
That night, I had sleep paralysis again.
I saw the same man.
The next day, I went back to look for the key because I wanted to know more.
It was gone.
I hadn't told anyone about it.
That's when I started becoming genuinely scared.
There's also something important you should know about my father.
We didn't have the best relationship, although I didn't really realize it at that age.
When I was little, he often made comments that implied I was somehow "connected" to certain things. He never said it directly. It was always through hints or vague remarks. And whenever I brought up anything related to the paranormal or spirituality, he would look at me in a strange way, almost as if I had just revealed a secret he had been keeping.
The strangest part is how everything ended.
One night, after another episode of sleep paralysis, I finally managed to get out of bed.
Normally, whenever I woke up during the night, I refused to go to the bathroom because I always had an awful feeling the moment I had to leave my room.
That night, I couldn't hold it anymore.
I was terrified, but I convinced myself it was only because of the fear caused by the sleep paralysis.
I walked past the dresser.
My heart was beating so hard that even now, while writing this, I can still feel that fear.
I opened my bedroom door.
Like every other night, the first thing I looked at was the attic hatch. From where I was standing, I couldn't tell whether it was open or closed, and part of me didn't even want to know.
I slowly walked to the corner of the hallway.
That's when I saw the top of his head.
Then his eyes.
It was the same man, standing at the top of my staircase.
The moment our eyes met, he stood up and started running toward me.
I immediately ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and spent the rest of the night there.
The next morning, my mother knocked because she needed to get ready. She asked me why I had slept in the bathroom.
I never had the courage to tell her what had happened.
From that night on, I never experienced sleep paralysis again.
Because of renovations over the years, I can no longer recreate what the house looked like back then, and the medicine cabinet where I found the key was eventually thrown away.
Even today, there are several things that still bother me.
I never found out what that key was for. When I eventually asked my mother about it, she told me we had never owned a key like that.
Years later, when I was around fifteen, my father admitted that he had practiced spiritism. He told me he had experienced what he described as visits to other "universes" for short periods of time. He also told me about the man who introduced him to those practices, someone he believed was extremely experienced. According to my father, after one séance that supposedly "went wrong," that man—who had practiced spiritism for years—took his own life the following day. My father never wanted to talk about it again after that.
To this day, he still regularly meditates or performs rituals that he says help protect his mind and keep his inner self at peace.
My mother, who is a very rational person, also told me a story about her own mother. My grandmother is deeply religious—to the point where she used to take me to church every Sunday when I was little. She claimed that, when she was younger and living in Portugal, she witnessed one of her friends becoming possessed. She said the person's body twisted into unnatural positions and they began speaking words that nobody could understand.
Finally, when I was around sixteen or seventeen, my best friend—who I considered my brother—and I tried to "communicate with a spirit." He also claimed to have experienced several strange events in his own house.
I won't go into every detail, but we both felt an intense cold that was only present on the chair beside us. The candle flame flickered at certain moments as though it were responding to our questions. My friend also had a device that was supposedly able to generate words linked to a spirit's presence. The words we received seemed to describe a soldier searching for someone.
I have no idea whether any of these events are connected.
I only know that, when I look back at everything together, it still deeply unsettles me.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story. (Vid of the hallway in comment)