The Thing in the Doorway

This is the scariest thing that ever happened to me.

When I was a teenager, my family lived in a haunted house. I won't identify the house except to say that it was a small 1930's era house in Lexington, KY.

Over a period of several years we all became accustomed to the fact that the place was haunted. One of our otherworldly occupants was so friendly that we gave him a name, "George", and even learned to laugh at some of "his" pranks.

However, George was not our only visitor.

I come from a long line of insomniacs. We've learned to live our lives in the night hours when the rest of the world is sleeping, and consequently we're not nervous about being "alone...in the night" as Shirley Jackson would put it.

Luckily I'm an inveterate reader, and that's what I was doing the night in question. I was comfortably stretched out on the living room couch, a book propped on my chest. I was totally involved with my book, and had nothing else on my mind.

I have excellent peripheral vision, and a flicker of movement to my right suddenly caught my attention. I looked up, and what I saw literally made my breath catch in my throat.

About four feet away from me, standing slightly to the left of the door to the hallway was a ....thing. More than anything else it resembled a columnar cloud of greasy, oily smoke. The smoke was moving, coiling in and out of itself. Expanding and contracting, almost as if it were breathing. Appalled, I lay there staring at it for about two minutes, watching it, praying it wouldn't move toward me. It didn't. It did something worse.

The roiling, smokey column began contracting and expanding a little more quickly, as if it were trying harder. And then, suddenly, wispy filaments of "smoke" began to extrude from its sides. And then I knew - it was growing arms!

I'm ashamed to admit that at this point I screamed, threw my book at it, and ran! Twenty minutes or so later I forced myself to return to the living room, and of course it was gone.

A couple of years later I found out that my father had had the identical experience. With the exception that he was asleep on the couch and what woke him up was his dead mother's voice shouting frantically in his ear "Jack, raise your head up!". The only thing funny about that experience was that he reacted exactly the same way I did--he threw a book at it and ran!

What was it we saw? I don't know. The only thing I can say for sure is that it wasn't - and never had been - human.