Watched the horror movie "The Ring" on VHS and the little girl Samara was standing beside the couch I was trying to sleep on for hours.
I had flown into Florida with my family to stay with my grandparents at their canal-facing house over some holiday week. I was about 12 years old I think, and my dad rented the VHS to watch with my older brother, grandpa, and I. An important detail to add is that the house had large windows in every room with no curtains that faced the canals in the backyard, and there were no lights on the canals themselves, so at night you just saw pitch blackness outside. It was about 10pm at night, and everyone headed to bed except for my dad, Grandpa, and brother so we could watch the movie. We all sat in the living room and began watching it for the first time. About halfway through, I'm starting to nervously make jokes about the movie, trying to act like it wasn't scary and to get support from anyone else about how silly this movie was, but everyone had fallen asleep at that point. I kept watching, and started to feel uncomfortable. Movie ended, and I bolted to my small sleeping couch located in the room on the opposite end of the house, down a long hallway with wooden flooring. I had to get to my couch as quickly as possible to avoid the TV auto-powering off and covering the room and hallway in darkness.
At this point I was sweating, and I couldn't figure out why. I was cold and clammy, stomach was hurting, and started to see shapes and movement in the darkest corners of the house. I grabbed my tiny knitted blanket attempted to cover myself up. I tried getting comfortable, but the couch was too short and my feet would hang off the side, so I curled into an awkward position to keep whatever lurked in the dark from grabbing my feet first. I calmed down a bit, and even with my stomach pain and dizziness, felt like I was getting close to sleeping.
kshhhhhhhhhhhhh The VCR (plays VHS tapes) turned itself off, and I could hear from across the hallway that the TV defaulted to static. If anyone remembers the movie "The Ring", static is bad. I started to freak out a bit.. thought about walking to the TV and turning it off, but rejected that idea because that's exactly how you die. I calmed down a bit after I didn't immediately see a little girl crawling out of the TV (had clear sight of the TV about 40 feet away down the hallway from my vantage point). Put my head back down, curled back up, closed my eyes. creeaak
Yep, that's Samara walking down the hallway. I froze, and tried to listen for other footsteps, then a few seconds later, creeeaaaak. This time it was a little closer. I had a feeling it was my older brother trying to play a trick on me, so I whispered out to him, "Hey, what are you doing?". No response, so I peaked over the side of my couch and looked across the long hallway towards the living room where he was sleeping, and saw no one. I hunkered back down, and listened. creeaaaaak This time, even closer. I tried to rationalize it, thinking maybe it's just the house settling, maybe I don't have a good ear for where sounds come from in this house.. CREAAAK Right behind the couch. I knew someone was standing behind the couch. It's that feeling you get when someone's watching you and you just get this sensation that attention is being directed your way, or the feeling of someone being close by, and you can sense their presence.
I didn't move or breathe or blink for a solid minute. I lay there coming up with escape plans, which direction I should run, whether or not I should keep the covers on my head so she couldn't suck my soul out through my eye balls, where the TVs were in the house so I could find the path with least chance of being near one. The feeling never left, and I sat there in complete darkness, knowing she was right there behind the couch, probably staring at me, waiting for me to uncover my covers or make a sound.
I don't have much memory of the time between that and the sun rising, but I do remember finally seeing sunlight in the wee hours of the morning, and hearing my dad starting to rustle about making breakfast. That finally gave me the courage I needed to look over the couch, and I saw nothing.
In retrospect, I think I had a fever, stomachache from the food earlier, and I had to go to the bathroom. All those combined wracked my body, and I wasn't about to move from my bed to go to the bathroom in complete darkness, so that exacerbated things to the point where I hallucinated all of it.
Or it was a ghost and I was being haunted.