I’ll get into some background on my childhood home before I elaborate on my most terrifying dream, which I used to have on a reoccurring basis when I lived there. I haven’t had it since I moved out.

When my parents purchased the house I grew up in, there were some odd things about the house. The bedrooms in the home had deadbolts on them, on the bedroom side. Never got a good answer as to the why, and honestly it may be better not knowing. They later found out that one of the daughters that had lived there had walked down to the nearby train line where she then committed suicide. I never learned about either of these things until I was an adult. Pretty creepy!

I used to spend a lot of time in the basement of this home. As a child, it was where all my toys were stored and as I got older it was where I would play video games and hang out with friends. I had friends that swore they saw things moving down there unassisted and one time a friend told me they heard the piano we had playing with nobody present in the room. I never saw or heard any of that, but there were times in the basement I felt like I was being watched.

So with that background out of the way, back to my reoccurring dream. It would always start with me doing something in the basement, and it would always be a different activity. I could be doing laundry, playing games, or just grabbing something from our secondary fridge, innocuous things like that. I was always performing these activities inexplicably late at night, around 3am. While in the process of doing the task, I would begin to feel like I was being watched, with an overbearing feeling of pressure and impending doom surrounding me. This feeling of doom would quickly evolve into terror, and every time I would rush to the basement steps as the terror and pressure increased. I would then begin rushing up the steps, while feeling the malevolent source of my terror just behind me.

In the dreams, I was always too terrified to look behind me. The further up the steps I would get, the heavier my feet would feel. By the time I was halfway up the steps, my feet felt like cinder blocks. A sprint up the stairs turned to a slow walk, as if I was suddenly geriatric. With every advancing stair the feeling of doom would only become more and more overbearing, as if I was drowning. Still, my eyes were glued on the light shining from the kitchen above, safety just in front of me. My slow walk slowed regardless, until I was just a step or two away from the kitchen, fighting with every ounce of my strength to keep going. Darkness would creep around the edges of my vision, and at this point I would lose control of my own body.

Without even seeing anything, I knew there was something at the bottom of the stairs, controlling my body as if I was a marionette. I cannot begin to describe how terrified I was of turning around, but regardless, my body was forced to turn by this force to gaze upon it. I was involuntarily turned around and forced to sit on the very top step, just shy of salvation, frozen in place.

At the bottom of the steps was a man in a clean black suit. He had pale skin, a flat, expressionless face, and black sunken pits where his eyes should have been. He would stand motionless at the bottom of the steps, presumably staring at me despite his lack of eyes. There was nothing I wanted less than to look at him, but I was forced to sit and stare into his black gaze, completely powerless. It felt as if he was looking right through me, straight into my soul, feeding off of my horror. It’s at this point that I would eventually awaken in a sweat. Ugh.

It’s been years since I’ve moved out and I can’t think of a single time I’ve had the dream since. I’m not particularly superstitious but I sure as shit don’t love that dream, or being in that basement late at night alone.