What does it mean to say a man fell from the ceiling? That is, if what fell from the ceiling was even a man at all.

I'll warn you here: you're about to read a ghost story. Unlike most you've read or heard, this one isn't fiction. It's real. It doesn't have any plot or character development because its purpose is to relate the facts of these experiences. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. As with last week's entry, its point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

To fully understand the weirdness you're about to experience, we'll have to get technical. A ceiling is the overhead interior surface that covers the upper bounds of a room. In contrast, a roof is the uppermost covering of a building. While it is wholly possible to fall from a roof, it is not possible to fall from a ceiling. The surface of a ceiling faces downward, toward the floor of a room, and so it is impossible to stand on ceiling without first nullifying gravity.

One night, lying in bed, I awoke. For no apparent reason, my eyes simply opened. I had been sleeping on my back, and so the first thing I should have seen was the ceiling. Our ceiling was white with a popcorn finish. A ceiling fan hung in the center of the room. None of these things could I see. Instead, there was pitch black. This was peculiar because, although it was dark and the only light that entered was from the incandescent streetlight outside my blinds, there was usually enough light to make out the edges of things inside my room. Many a time had I awoken at night to see the ceiling fan hanging above my head (I'd been against installing it from the start, and too many of my nightmares consisted of the thing coming loose and scoring a direct hit on my face). Tonight was different. Tonight, it was as though a black tarp had been hung from the ceiling.

I looked left, toward my window, wondering why it was so dark. At first I thought there might have been a block-wide power outage, but discarded this notion when I saw the streetlamp burning outside. Shifting my eyes back to center, I noticed something very wrong in the corners of the ceiling. Thick ash billowed in the corners, as though the room were on fire and were filling with black smoke, yet I sensed no heat nor the smell of burning. There was a lot of smoke in the room. The entire ceiling, end to end, was completely consumed. (See: The Cyclone In The Corner).

Just as I was trying to make any sense of all this, the cloud snapped like a taut rubber band. The smoke collapsed into itself, forming a tight sphere about the size of a basketball. In the next instant it drew up into the shape of shadow man and plunged from the ceiling.

It struck me. With its palm. Right square on the flat of my forehead.

The thing that fell on me hit me with enough force to bow the mattress and send my legs kicking into the air. Then, nothing. It was over as quickly as it had come on.

I ran to the bathroom mirror and checked for injuries. A blow like that, and I'd have black eyes in minutes, possibly a broken nose. Nothing. There were no marks. My head didn't even hurt.

The following morning I checked again, thinking that by then the bruises would have started to show. Still nothing.

I've experienced several bizarre occurrences, as I've shared with you. This one is unique in that the manifestation touched me -- hit me pretty hard. Most times, when these things meant me ill, there was a feeling of menace about them, but never did they touch me.

I've only told this story to a handful of people. Very few know, excepting you, now, of course. No one believed me when I told them. I don't mind so much if you don't, as I'm writing this more for my sake than anyone else's.

Some things you just have to get out.

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.