A Personal Experience By LuLu

It was in October; I remember it like it was yesterday. My room was small and my bed was placed against the door that was connected to the storage, which can be opened through another door on the outside of the house. My father had sealed the door next to my bed with caulk and nailed it shut so it would not be opened from the outside. One week passed, and when I was sleeping in my bed, my sister Rita and I noticed a shadow of a hand on the wall moving from side to side. I thought it was my other sister playing games and trying to scare us. I finally fell asleep. Then I heard someone knocking on the door next to me. I got up to tell my mother; she came to investigate and she said, “Go to sleep; there is nothing there.” For weeks this was happening, and I was crying so much every night my mother finally switched my bed to the other side of the room. Then it stopped. After a couple of months passed, we forgot about it, and my mother moved my bed back to that side though I was begging her not to. That night, I cried myself to sleep. The next morning my mother woke me up asking me how I opened the door when it was sealed and I told her, “Mom, I didn’t open it!”

A couple of months passed and I felt relieved, because all the knocking had stopped—but what came next was very scary. I had a dream of a little girl with long eyelashes. She was pretty, and in my dream, I felt she wanted to show me something. She was climbing out of the bedroom window and motioned to me with her hand to follow her. In my dream, I started following her when I heard my mom talking to my dad while he was getting ready for work. I opened my eyes and the little girl was standing next to my bed looking down at me. I screamed, covered my face with my blanket, and my dad came running to the bedroom. He saw there was nothing there and he told me I was just having a nightmare. I said, “Dad, I don’t want to be in this room anymore.” My parents moved me from that room, and while nothing else happened after that, we eventually ended up moving.

Thirty-two years later, I was brutally raped and I became pregnant. I had a beautiful little girl with a lot of hair and long eyelashes. When I was getting her ready for her first day at pre-kinder, she asked me make her hair into pig-tails. I did. As she was getting on the school bus, she turned to wave good-bye; she looked exactly like the little girl in my dream.