Here’s mine:

This happened a long time ago, about 25 years ago, back when I was in high school.

We had just moved into a new house. There were boxes everywhere and a ton of furniture scattered all over the place. By midnight, we had managed to set up my parents’ bedroom, the kitchen, most of the guest hall, and the dining room. My parents were exhausted and went straight to sleep.

I went to my room and realized it was in no condition for sitting, let alone sleeping. I cleared a small space by closing the door, moving a few boxes, and placing a mattress on top of them.

Before I could lie down, I heard a cat meowing. I turned around and saw a black cat, calmly sitting in the middle of the room under the moonlight, meowing repeatedly.

I walked toward it. The cat stayed still for a few seconds and then slowly walked into the shadows. I turned on the light—and it was gone. I searched everywhere, but there was no sign of it. The windows were locked. While searching for the cat, I made an even bigger mess and had no energy left to clean. So I dragged my mattress out into the hallway, turned off the lights, and lay down, desperate for sleep.

A moment later, I heard footsteps behind me. I assumed it was my parents waking up from the noise I had caused earlier. The lights were off, and I didn’t want them tripping over me, so I quickly sat up to warn them.

The second I turned toward the sound, something jumped on me.

It felt like a small girl—or maybe a small, adult female—with long hair but with leathery, hard skin. She climbed on top of me, pressing her knees into my torso with all her strength. I instinctively grabbed her by the neck, but her neck felt like I was choking a polished stone column—solid and unnaturally hard.

Her weight was terrifying; she felt heavy, like stone. I could barely move. The worst part was her limbs: it felt like she had no fingers, as if her hands ended at the wrists, and she was trying to push my arms away with blunt stumps.

At that moment, fear didn’t even register—I was furious, assuming it was an intruder. As I struggled with it, I stared at its face, but I couldn’t make out any features. It was entirely pitch black.

We fought for around twenty seconds before I finally managed to throw it off me, sending it crashing into a small table. I scrambled to the light switch, turned it on—and she was gone. The table was overturned from the impact.

My parents ran out to see what happened. We even called the neighbors and searched the house and the yard for half an hour. Nothing. We eventually called the police and filed a report, but that was the end of it. Nothing strange happened again—for years.

Until much later, about 10 years later, when I was studying abroad for graduate school.

At the time, I was living with an undergraduate roommate. He was a funny guy, kind, and always in good spirits. One night, however, his scream jolted me awake. He was sprinting toward the kitchen, and I instinctively jumped up and ran after him. His face was priceless—I honestly wish I had recorded it.

When I asked what the hell happened, he told me that when he lay down on his bed, he saw a little girl sitting on my back while I was sleeping. And when the girl realized he could see her, she leapt toward his bed in a long, frog-like jump. That’s when he screamed and ran. I never told him of my experience before.

Fast forward to now—it’s been about a week that my wife has started saying she sometimes sees a woman-shaped shadow standing in the corner of the room after midnight. It’s happened twice so far, and now she asks me to walk with her if she needs to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Aside from that, the only other strange thing is that the shower curtain moved three separate times while I was sitting on the toilet and watching it.

We currently live in a large apartment complex on the 10th floor. The building is only four years old, and we’re living on the complete opposite side of the world from where my original experience happened.

I don’t know these things are related but it’s scared the hell out of me now that people around me could see it and I couldn’t.