For about four years, starting at about age 3, I had a nightly encounter with what I have named the Knocking Thing.
From what I remember, when I was a toddler, my bedroom window faced the street side of our Southern California house. It had shuttered windows, and my single bed was placed up against the wall near the windows. I recall the closet in my room, too. My room was right across the hall from my parents’ bedroom.
I remember when I first noticed the Knocking Thing. I could feel a presence near me, every night. Maybe it was the same one I wrote about in the post, First Memories. I have no idea. But the Knocking Thing was in tune with my breathing. I would breathe in, and as I breathed out I would hear this faint knocking sort of sound, always three times. Breathe in and out, hear the knock-knock-knock. Repeat many times. It terrified me. It wasn’t a sound like a knock on a hard surface. It was almost like someone quietly clicking their tongue against the roof of their mouth. Not really a knock, not really a click, but something in between. I can still hear it in my mind, but I struggle to describe it in words.
I told my parents about it, usually in the middle of the night. Since I sensed the presence most strongly by the windows, my dad actually went outside a few times to see if there was someone in the carport near the windows. Of course, there wasn’t. He did the parent thing of looking under the bed, in the closet, all the places a child might fear there was a monster hiding. Of course, he found nothing.
I was insistent that there was something around. And I knew instinctively that it was reacting to me. I experimented. If I held my breath, I didn’t hear the sound, though I could still sense a presence. When I started to breathe again, I’d near the knock-knock-knock. My solution was to breathe less often, which started a lifetime habit of holding my breath. I also pulled the covers over my head, as if that made me invisible! It did muffle the knock-knock-knock sound, and so I continued to sleep with the covers over my head. As a little kid with no knowledge of protection prayers or ways to clear a room, sleeping with covers over my head seemed like the way to go. And I did it for years.
I was afraid of going to bed as a kid, knowing that I was going to hear that sound and feel a presence that I couldn’t see. The situation never escalated. It didn’t do anything other than make the odd knocking sound and leave with me a feeling of fear and dread. I have been trying to figure out for years what this thing might have been, but I have no satisfactory answer. I do know that it was attracted to me, and moved with my family to Bellevue, Washington when I was about 7 (see My Haunted Childhood Home).
It’s been years since I’ve heard the sound, but I know what I’ll do if I do hear it again – pull the covers up over my head and hold my breath!