The blog challenge prompt is “write about a haunted place”.

Do I believe in ghosts and paranormal whatnot? Yep.

Have I been to a haunted place? I don’t know.

Have I encountered a spirit? Well, let me tell you about that.

I think it was sometime in 1989 when the famed ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren visited Fort Hays State University and Hays in general. They went to the usual places to get a feel for the lingering spirits–Boot Hill, the Blue Light Lady‘s mound, etc. That evening they then gave a lecture in the Black & Gold Room in the Union where they discussed their findings and told about their adventures in other locations.

I went with a friend and her boyfriend, because we liked ooky spooky stuff like that. I think I was also going to get extra credit for attending in my paranormal psychology class. The place was packed, so we sat near the back. They turned off the lights and went into their spiel with a slideshow illustrating their stories.

I have always had an active imagination. It was a hard rule in my family that I was not allowed to watch scary movies after 7 PM after I watched some vampire movie when I was 3 and then woke up screaming because I swore the vampire was peeking over my headboard. If I needed to stay awake while babysitting late, I brought along a Stephen King novel to read after I put the kids to bed. But generally I could handle creepy documentary stuff late into the day. That changed this particular night.

I was fine as they described different haunted locations they had investigated. I was fine as they scrolled through many slides of orbs and old buildings and shadowy figures. But then they got to plasma.

They paused on the slide of a seemingly very solid gentleman staring out at the audience from the corner of a room. They explained that while most ghosts and spirit visitors can’t actually touch a living human, the ones made of plasma can and do. The entire time I could feel this gentleman in the slide just staring into my soul, and my anxiety was skyrocketing. I was mentally screaming at the presenters to change to a different slide, but they just kept it on that one. My heart rate was astronomical and I was shaking. Finally I just bolted up out of my seat, startling my friend as I said “I’m out” and power walked right out the exit door to my car and drove home.

You would think it ended there, but it was just beginning. I got home where I lived alone with my 2 cats, and tried to watch a little TV to relax before bed, but I couldn’t really get settled. Finally I went to my bedroom for the night. Oddly enough, my cats refused to come to my bedroom–this was HIGHLY uncharacteristic of them. I turned off the light and climbed into bed and stared at the darkness waiting to fall asleep.

Then I noticed a glow in the upper corner of my bedroom. I like to sleep in dark, so my curtains were heavy purple velvet to block out light. However, I did live in direct line to the town baseball field, and when they were playing a night game, the floodlights lit up my bedroom. I figured it was that or a streetlamp shining in, so I tugged my curtains closed and checked the corner.

Still there.

Did my curtain get a hole in it? My cats were declawed (I know, I know–it was a different time back then, and now none of my cats get declawed. When you know better, you do better.), so they wouldn’t be putting holes in them unless Taime decided to use her teeth. I checked the curtains and could not find any holes.

The orb was glowing increasingly brighter.

I waved my hand between the window and the orb to see if I could create a shadow that told me the light was coming from the outside somehow. There was no shadow. The orb hovered in the corner unmoving and unblinking, roughly the size of a soccer ball. It was white. Now that I have the power of the internet at my fingertips, I have searched the meaning of different colors of orbs and know that it was an orb of protection–back then I had no clue and every orb was evil incarnate as far as I was concerned.

At this point I was done trying to sleep. I couldn’t tell my boyfriend to come over and keep me company so I wasn’t alone in the room with the entity (since my cats made it clear that they drew the line at ghosts), because he was the property of the U.S. Army and 1,700 miles away at Ft. Lewis, Washington.

However, I could and did call him. Calling him when he was living on base in the barracks was a process. There was one phone in the hallway, so I would call it until someone answered and then they would go find him and he would sit in the hallway and talk to me. I kept him on the phone with me for over 5 hours. Yes, that was an expensive phone bill that month. No, I didn’t care that he got no sleep that night and had to go to work the next day. I was not about to be left alone with that THING in my room. To his credit, he stayed on the phone and talked to me all night (boy had a gift of gab) about anything and everything we could think of that didn’t involve the orb that was glowing at me. Every time my anxiety spiked, it glowed brighter–this did not help my mind one bit.

The orb was inconveniently located right above the door that led from my bedroom to the only bathroom in the house. Luckily for me, the bathroom also had a hallway door right outside my bathroom. At some point in the night, the call of nature could not be ignored. I got up slowly and left the phone off the hook on the bed headboard as I crept out of the room into the bathroom. The orb didn’t move from its spot and didn’t follow me to the bathroom, to my relief. I leapt back into my waterbed and returned to my phone call safe and sound.

As dawn got closer and the sky started to lighten, the orb began dimming and shrinking. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it was noticeable. I finally let my boyfriend hang up and get a couple hours of sleep (yay for time zones) when I was certain that the orb was going to continue to fade away.

By the time the sun came up fully, the orb was gone. I was so zinged up on adrenaline that I got through my day and my classes without feeling the lack of sleep much. I’m sure my eyes were as bugged out as my brain felt.

Now that I know (many years later) that it was an orb of protection, my hypothesis is that the plasma entity at the lecture had managed to attach to that slide or the presenters, and it locked on and tried to follow me home. SOMEONE on the other side (I don’t know who, but I have plenty of ancestors who would not have cottoned to a spook messing with me) stood guard all night to keep it away, but thoroughly freaked me out in the process.

The orb never returned, but neither did the plasma being, and in my book that is a win-win.