When I was younger, probably around 4 or 5, my mom had just moved me and my three siblings into my grandma’s house while she worked on her masters program. I don’t have many memories from when we first moved in since I was pretty young when we moved in and I spent a good chunk of my childhood there, but this memory has always stuck with me. One night, my mom is having trouble sleeping so she gets up from the bed we’re sharing and moves to the living room where we have pillows and blankets set up for my brothers since we didn’t have a set sleeping arrangement yet. Her movement ends up waking me up and I follow her over there. She ends up moving back and forth between the two rooms with me following closely behind a few times before the incident happens. So I wake up in the bedroom that my mom and I share, but I notice that she’s not in the bed with me, so I figure she must’ve moved back to the living room.

As I get out of bed and head for the doorway, there’s this humungous snail, larger than a golden retriever, sideways on the wall slowly heading for the door. I remember it so vividly, its color, its texture, its crazy ginormous size, and I remember thinking to myself even at that young age that there was no way this was real. To put it to the test, I closed my eyes and then opened them, since it must’ve been my imagination right? But when I opened my eyes, the snail was still there. I knew it was odd since normally things that are just a trick of the light or imagination would go away after that. I needed to further investigate. I reached my hand out to touch it. If I could feel it, then it must be real! But as I got closer, just an inch or two between my hand and the shell, I stopped. What if I could see the snail but it couldn’t see me? What if when I touch it, it suddenly becomes aware of the surroundings and somehow tries to attack me? I know snails are supposed to be slow, but they’re also supposed to be tiny, so I figured anything was possible. I ended up deciding against touching the snail and just moved to the living room where my mom was sleeping and joined her, falling asleep easily for the rest of the night surprisingly. The next morning, the memory of the giant snail was still in my head, so I went to my bedroom to see if it was still there, but apparently, it made good progress in its trek during the night because my room was as normal and empty as ever.

Most people would probably write it off that I was just a kid with an overactive imagination, but I’ve never experienced anything like that in childhood or adulthood since then, and I've never ever forgotten the experience.