This is a story I do not often tell. I promise, sincerely, that this has scarred me for life and although I have looked into psychological explanations for what I heard and natural explanations for what occurred, they remain unsatisfactory.
When I was a child, I was scared of the dark. I swore to my mother I heard voices in it. They were not evil, but they were not familiar and so they scared me. It was not uncommon in the middle of the night for me to wake up and hear “whispers” as I would call them when asking my mom. She figured they were just “bumps in the night” and typical kids nightmare material. I tried often to explain to her that it was more than that, that they sounded different from one another the way people’s voices do.
On some nights I would get so scared from these “whispers” that I would sleep in my mom’s bed with her. It was an added bonus that the bathroom was directly outside of her bedroom door for my late-night tinkles.
I should add at this point that when walking out into the hall to go to the bathroom, you looked directly down the stairs that would lead you into my living room on the first floor (as my mom’s bedroom was on the second floor).
On one such night, around Christmas, I awoke and felt the need to relieve myself. I walked out from the door and distinctly heard the phrase “Look!” and to my astonishment, a red light, almost like a spotlight, was cast upon the wall at the very bottom of the stairs. The light had no other source, it was by itself, and I was transfixed by it.
Being a little kid, and it only being a few days from Christmas, I KNEW what this light was. IT WAS SANTA!!! How else could he get into my house to know I was being a good boy. I was so excited I began walking down the stairs to greet him, picking up my pace after the second step as it began to creep off the wall and fade into the darkness in my living room.
That’s when I heard him. A very strong, masculine voice. Different from the first. Not at all like my father’s (not to say he isn’t masculine, it was just distinctly different). It said “Stop! Right now. Go back up those stairs.”