My wife and I were spending christmas over her parents house. They have one of those ranch houses way out in the country with a guest bedroom in their basement, but there are no windows. At night, it is completely pitch black down there - so black you can't see anything. Just a small room with barely enough space for a bed and a small desk. My wife and I get tucked in, and after a long day, fall deep asleep. About an hour or two later, we both wake up, at the exact moment, screaming at the top of our lungs. Something jarred us out of our sleep - my heart starts beating a mile per minute, all my hairs stands on end, it was like being physically shoved from the most peaceful bodily state to the most tense and fearful one in under a second. As that initial wave of terror dissipates - my wife starts screaming, "I see a face! I see a face!" I roll out of bed, positive that there is someone else in the room with us. I can just feel it, the way you know someone is watching you or the another person's presence is in your space. And the thing is, this presence felt very hostile. Not evil, I don't think, but just pure, focused hostility. I eventually turn on the lights, and, nothing. Later, my wife described the face as a woman's, her skin gray, her features drawn, eyes peeled back, mouth frowning, and hovering over us. The other strange thing is, that while all her siblings and parents were also sleeping nearby, no one else in the house heard us screaming.

After that frightening experience, I became more interested in the history of her parent's property, curious to see if there was some sort of link. For what it's worth, we learned a little bit later that her parent's property used to contain the county's poorhouse in the 1930s. It wasn't the exact spot of their house or anything, but near enough to give me chills.