When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I lived with my mother in a one-bedroom apartment. The apartment we lived in was pretty scary now that I think about it as a grown-up! The name of it was the “Deville” and it was surrounded by a cornfield with no other building structures around it. Our bath water would run black for a few minutes until it was clear as well! It was creepy but was what my mother could afford at the time. One afternoon my mother was in the bedroom napping and I was in the living room playing with my hot wheels on the race track carpet mat while watching tv.

Suddenly I saw an extremely bright light shine through the kitchen window which made me turn to see what it was and I couldn’t believe what I saw appeared to me in it! It was a tall inky black figure of what looked like a man in a top hat with a wide brim, dressed in an old-fashioned Victorian suit with a cape of some sort! There was no face though, no eyes and of course it terrified me and I ran to the bedroom for my mother! When I made it to her, I shook her and screamed for her to wake up immediately! It was as if she was knocked out, she didn’t respond at all and my Mom was a very light sleeper and woke up at the slightest noise usually. There had never been a time she hadn’t immediately woken up if I called her, but nothing was working and it frightened me! Was it trancing her to not wake or was it muting me for her not to hear me?! The air felt weird, I couldn’t hear anything outside and normally it was pretty noisy in that cheap old building. I was so scared when she wouldn’t wake up I climbed over her and tried to climb up the wall but I was too little and there was no chair. I was forced to turn around and crouch, scrambling over to the doorway. My greatest fear was to look out the bedroom and see if it was clear to the front door! I  was desperate though, and I peeked around the corner. As I looked out to the kitchen window I could see it had no bright light and everything seemed normal. I turn the corner to peep the front door and it all seemed clear to make a run to it, I somehow knew I had to get out of the house.

I bolted like a rabbit towards the front door, and almost immediately a dark shadow entity appear right in front of the door blocking me from leaving the apartment. I screamed and slid onto the floor momentarily frozen desperate to not get closer to it. It didn’t move, it just stared at me with menace. I got up, jumped back towards the kitchen, and grabbed a kitchen knife my Mom had left on the counter making dinner. When I turned around, what appeared to be a huge dark cloud of smoke just flowed in a circular motion around the knife and I felt it freeze to the point I couldn’t feel my fingers! I panicked and dropped the knife and ran through the cloud of dark smoke to the front door.

Once I opened the door and stepped outside I ran screaming to every neighbor’s door until I found help. I was hysterical for over an hour, and the neighbor even tried to go to the apartment and wake up my Mom but the door was locked. I didn’t lock the door, I left it open when I ran outside screaming and no one else was there. The neighbor was friends with my Mom and thought it was really weird she didn’t wake up, she’d never known her to do something like that before and even my Mom was confused later when she came outside looking for me wondering where I was. She said she’d been having a nightmare when she woke up but didn’t remember me trying to wake her up or leave the house. She never did that again, and she wasn’t using drugs or drinking so I know that’s not what happened. It bothered us both a lot for many years, I have never seen it again and hope I never do! I’m a grown man and this memory still scared me over 30 years later. What I do know is that this was no sleep paralysis like some say it is. This is no joke and is 100% real people!