oh god. oh god.. to this day I am still scared shitless of this incident, thinking about it makes the hairs stand up on my arms. Here we go.

When i was quite young, i’ll say 10 or 11, my sister and i were asleep in the double bed we shared in our apartment that we used to have in casablanca, morocco. The buiding was owned by my uncles wifes father, so we got a pretty good deal on it and it was right in the center of Maarif, a really cool shopping town in Casablanca, it’s an amazing place.

The building itself was extremely old, but inside the apartment looked rather modern and nice. in our bedroom we had a terrace and a huge window/sliding door. It was lovely because at night the moon would shine so bright into the bedroom and you could see everything, it wasn’t scary at all, it was beautiful and I felt so safe there.

One night I woke up freezing cold. This was in the middle of summer, in North Africa, and I was shivering cold. I also had an instinct that I had to wake up for some reason. I rubbed my eyes and sat up in bed, still rubbing my eyes. When my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I noticed my sister sitting cross legged at the end of the bed, with her back to me. She was looking down, and her arms were moving slightly as if she was playing with her hands, or perhaps sewing, not that I could see from behind, that’s just what it looked like if you can imagine.

Naturally I start talking to her, I talk about how I feel cold, then I start talking about how excited I am to go to the beach in the morning, I’m trying to make conversation with my sister like we usually do in the middle of the night sometimes. But she’s not responding to me. I talk to her some more. No answer, she’s still occupied with looking down at her hands, or something in her hand.

I get annoyed and firmly tell her to stop being a butthead and answer me gosh darn it!!! She doesn’t answer. I sigh and lean over to the end of the bed and angrily poke/flick her on the shoulder.

She slowly turns around. It’s not my sister. She looks like my sister, a little bit, she has the same shoulder length hair, but it’s not her. The look on her face will forever be embedded in my mind. I’ve never seen anybody look so angry. I’ve never, never, never felt such hostile, negative vibes in my life, I’ll never forget that horrible horrible feeling of pressure in the room suddenly pushing in on me, I was terrified.

I’m frozen in fear, of course, as any 10/11 year old kid would be if they realised a strange angry girl was sitting at the end of their bed. I don’t want to look at this girl any more so I look down at the bed, and I see a hand. I follow the hand with my eyes and realise that it’s my sister, she’s fast asleep beside me under the covers, completely fast asleep, mouth open, drool, the works.

I can still see the girl in the corner of my eye, but I’m aggressively avoiding looking up at her sitting at my sisters feet, instead I focus on my actual sister, I try to wake her up, I shake her, I shake her, my voice gets louder, I try so hard to wake her but she won’t.

I give up and decide to retreat to the safety of under the covers. I’m on the verge of tears by this point, I’m breathing heavily, I’m trying so hard to keep still and now make a noise, I know the strange girl is still on my bed because the horrible menacing feeling is still in the room. It was the scariest moment of my life.

I stay there for a really long time. Or it felt like a long time, like 8 to 10 minutes. I stayed under there until that feeling subsided, as did the cold in the room. Eventually I decide to peek out from under my covers, I can’t see the strange girl. So I slowly remove the cover from my face. As I’m doing that, suddenly my sister abruptly wakes up and sleepily and angrily complains about me waking her up, asking me why I shook her. She acted as if I had just done that, despite the fact that I did that over 10 minute ago.

I quickly explained what had happened, she told me to go back to sleep and to stop trying to scare her. I ran to my parents bedroom and told my mother and father who fortunately believed me, and then I went to sleep in the living room until morning. Because fuck that I was not going back in that room.

It’s worth mentioning now that something very similar happened to my grandmother and her sister when they were young. My grandmother felt cold, woke up to see a big shadow over her bed that gave off angry, scary vibes, she tried to wake her sister up by yelling and shaking her and she didn’t, then after the shadow left her sister woke up.