The Eye of Sauron

With heartfelt apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien I titled my current post. After hearing this latest tale of a supernatural encounter, I had no choice.

Now anyone who knows me, understands I like chilling tales, at least from the safe distance of my imagination, but this story actually disturbed me.
I recently met a guy named Bob who sold me my new cell phone. In the course of him showing me how to use the cool device we started talking about the web, and I showed him my book trailer for Shepherd’s Fall. (I never miss an opportunity to hand out a bookmark or mention my novel. And why not? It took ten years of pounding away at the keyboard to get to this point, so I promote it everywhere I go.)

Anyway I digress. When Bob learned that I write ghost stories, you guessed it, he had one to tell me. And boy was this one a killer.
As a teenager, Bob awoke one night to discover a little girl standing next to his bed sobbing. The fact that he could see through her sent him crabbing backward and slamming into the wall his bed was up against. The girl vanished, and Bob spent a sleepless night.

Over the next few years he saw the girl several times--sometimes her entire figure, other times just a suggestion of body.

Once, a visiting friend took a break from playing video games and went downstairs to the kitchen in the middle of the night. He saw the ghostly girl standing facing the refrigerator. The friend didn’t want her to turn around and see him, so he crept back up to Bob’s room without a snack.
Bob has no idea who the girl is. His family built the home, so it is not like she had lived in it before she became a life-challenged entity.

Bad enough to have one ghost in the house, his father had an even stranger experience. This is the one I find most disturbing.

On the night his father got baptized as a Christian, he came home and saw a giant red eye staring in a window to the master bedroom on the second floor. Angered by the apparition, Bob’s dad charged outside to the window in question and searched for the specter. This to me seemed like one of those bad moves in a horror movie, but then again, this part scares me.
He didn’t see it, but he walked around the yard commanding the spirit in the name of Christ to leave the house, because it was protected by God. This was several years ago and things have quieted down since.

I’m not sure why I find the big red eye more disturbing than other hauntings, but I do, maybe because it reminds me of the red pig eyes in the Amityville Horror.

Luckily Bob and his family haven’t experienced any paranormal events for some time, and he is comfortable in the home. I think I would sleep with one eye open, but that’s just me.