Continuing with our series of real-life ghost stories, we bring you a short run-in with shadowy manifestations: The Cyclone In the Corner.
Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn't fit those norms because it isn't fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.
Things come out of angles. H.P. Lovecraft was on to something when he wrote "Dreams in the Witch House," a short story about a house inhabited by a dimension-hopping witch. Within the house is a room with a bizarre design -- the corners, the angles are off in ways that make no sense and indeed, are hard on the eyes. It's done more for function than form, because the angles permit the witch (and her horrifying attendants) to travel between dimensions. Much like a knife's edge cuts through one surface of a two-dimensional sheet of paper to the other, so too does the witch traverse dimensions using higher-order mathematics that might stump even Stephen Hawking... only to perform such gruesome acts as might have been thought up by Stephen King.
Sorry. I thought the parallelism was funny.
In any event, Lovecraft's art seems to imitate life, as you'll find out now.
For some time before I married my wife we maintained a long-distance relationship. She left home to attend college upstate. I was still living with my parents. Since we couldn't see each other regularly, we made sure to call every night. Our phone calls usually started at 9:01 p.m. because that was when the free cellular talk time promotion kicked in. Often our conversations would go on well into the night, and I'd be the only person still awake in the house. As a courtesy to everyone else trying to sleep, I'd turn off the lights and TV in my bedroom at around 11:00 p.m., and shut my door.
This one night, at around 12:30 a.m., we were in the midst of a conversation too good to cut short. I noticed my cellphone battery was about to die, so I got up off the bed and plugged the phone into a wall socket under my window. The house was dark and silent, and the only light entering my room was the orange glow of the streetlamp coming through the blinds.
I cut off mid-sentence when I noticed something odd at the opposite end of the room. In the corner near my hall door was a billowing cloud of inky black churning up at the ceiling. At the floor directly beneath it was another cloud. Now, mind you, it was dark in the room, but the clouds were darker still, like the exhaust from coal-fired factories of the late 1800's.
"Oh God," I remember saying.
My wife (fianceé at the time) panicked. "What? What is it?" she yelled into the phone.
I could not respond. She kept demanding to know what was wrong.
"Honey," I said, eyes fixed on the thing in the corner. "Quiet."
The clouds churned and rolled in their respective corners. In their darkness there was an almost granular aspect, like they were dust devils or whirlwinds that kick up the dust when a breeze sweeps past tall buildings.
The clouds grew larger. Each let out a tendril as they spun in place. The fingers met in the middle and swirled in a tight spiral.
"Oh my God," I said. A funnel cloud had formed in the corner of my room.
"What's wrong?" my fianceé yelled.
Before I could tell her, the whirlwind spun itself out. The black clouds dissipated. Where once the clouds had been, I could now see into the corner, even with the dim light of the streetlamp outside my window. The corner was empty.
"I..." I stammered. "I'll call you tomorrow."
To this day, I'm not certain what it was I saw. I mean, I am certain what I saw is in fact what transpired, but whatever it was that I saw manifest in the corner is anyone's guess. It's not like an actual cyclone could have formed in my room. The room's only window was shut, and the air conditioning alone could not have caused so strong a breeze. Or the clouds, for that matter. Moreover, if a whirlwind had actually formed, there would be no dust or dirt to sweep up into itself, yet the thing was pitch black.
Another interesting point is this: my dresser sat near to where the cyclone formed. The dresser was covered in loose papers (mostly letters and other opened mail). When the cyclone touched down, it had formed a tight vortex, which would indicate that the "winds" were strong, yet it disturbed none of the nearby papers.
It's never happened before, or (thankfully) since.
Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn't fit those norms because it isn't fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.
Things come out of angles. H.P. Lovecraft was on to something when he wrote "Dreams in the Witch House," a short story about a house inhabited by a dimension-hopping witch. Within the house is a room with a bizarre design -- the corners, the angles are off in ways that make no sense and indeed, are hard on the eyes. It's done more for function than form, because the angles permit the witch (and her horrifying attendants) to travel between dimensions. Much like a knife's edge cuts through one surface of a two-dimensional sheet of paper to the other, so too does the witch traverse dimensions using higher-order mathematics that might stump even Stephen Hawking... only to perform such gruesome acts as might have been thought up by Stephen King.
Sorry. I thought the parallelism was funny.
In any event, Lovecraft's art seems to imitate life, as you'll find out now.
For some time before I married my wife we maintained a long-distance relationship. She left home to attend college upstate. I was still living with my parents. Since we couldn't see each other regularly, we made sure to call every night. Our phone calls usually started at 9:01 p.m. because that was when the free cellular talk time promotion kicked in. Often our conversations would go on well into the night, and I'd be the only person still awake in the house. As a courtesy to everyone else trying to sleep, I'd turn off the lights and TV in my bedroom at around 11:00 p.m., and shut my door.
This one night, at around 12:30 a.m., we were in the midst of a conversation too good to cut short. I noticed my cellphone battery was about to die, so I got up off the bed and plugged the phone into a wall socket under my window. The house was dark and silent, and the only light entering my room was the orange glow of the streetlamp coming through the blinds.
I cut off mid-sentence when I noticed something odd at the opposite end of the room. In the corner near my hall door was a billowing cloud of inky black churning up at the ceiling. At the floor directly beneath it was another cloud. Now, mind you, it was dark in the room, but the clouds were darker still, like the exhaust from coal-fired factories of the late 1800's.
"Oh God," I remember saying.
My wife (fianceé at the time) panicked. "What? What is it?" she yelled into the phone.
I could not respond. She kept demanding to know what was wrong.
"Honey," I said, eyes fixed on the thing in the corner. "Quiet."
The clouds churned and rolled in their respective corners. In their darkness there was an almost granular aspect, like they were dust devils or whirlwinds that kick up the dust when a breeze sweeps past tall buildings.
The clouds grew larger. Each let out a tendril as they spun in place. The fingers met in the middle and swirled in a tight spiral.
"Oh my God," I said. A funnel cloud had formed in the corner of my room.
"What's wrong?" my fianceé yelled.
Before I could tell her, the whirlwind spun itself out. The black clouds dissipated. Where once the clouds had been, I could now see into the corner, even with the dim light of the streetlamp outside my window. The corner was empty.
"I..." I stammered. "I'll call you tomorrow."
To this day, I'm not certain what it was I saw. I mean, I am certain what I saw is in fact what transpired, but whatever it was that I saw manifest in the corner is anyone's guess. It's not like an actual cyclone could have formed in my room. The room's only window was shut, and the air conditioning alone could not have caused so strong a breeze. Or the clouds, for that matter. Moreover, if a whirlwind had actually formed, there would be no dust or dirt to sweep up into itself, yet the thing was pitch black.
Another interesting point is this: my dresser sat near to where the cyclone formed. The dresser was covered in loose papers (mostly letters and other opened mail). When the cyclone touched down, it had formed a tight vortex, which would indicate that the "winds" were strong, yet it disturbed none of the nearby papers.
It's never happened before, or (thankfully) since.
