This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/ghoststories by /u/brattybrat on 2025-06-24 20:02:55+00:00.
I’ve been sitting on this story for a looooong time. But here it is for your enjoyment. It was one of the most terrifying nights of my life. Sorry it’s so long.
This happened a long time ago, when I was in my early 20s. A close friend had asked me to join her and her family for a vacation in Jamaica. I was young and broke and financially irresponsible, so I put it on my credit card, lol.
I should preface this by saying that I was raised in an atheist household, and that I myself, at that age, was adamant that there were no such things as souls, spirits, or ghosts, let alone God or gods or anything supernatural.
The first four or five days were nothing but fun. My friend and I stayed in a hut on stilts overlooking the ocean. It was beautiful.
Midway through our vacation, we had to change lodgings. We were still in the same resort, but they had rented out our hut to someone else for the rest of our vacation. We were supposed to move into an even better location: it was called the Great House. Instead of our hut on stilts, we would be staying in a house with a kitchen and three bedrooms. It was set back from the ocean, but we could still hear it, see it, and smell the salty water.
The first day that we showed up at the Great House, my friend and I began our inspection. As we walked in, we looked in a small bedroom at the front of the house. It was a very tiny room with one twin bed. Something about the room was dark and heavy, and not at all inviting. I commented on this to my friend, and she said she felt the same way about it. Then we proceeded to talk ourselves out of being creeped out by the room by noting that the bed was positioned in such a way that felt exposed, that the artwork was kind of dark, and that the feng shui was all off.
That night, I stayed in the largest bedroom in the house. It was beautifully appointed with a canopy bed and an en suite bathroom with beautiful tile and ample windows letting in the ocean breeze and the wonderful sound of the waves. Yet when I went to go to sleep, I found myself terrified. I could not shake the feeling that someone was watching me. This time there was no bad feng shui to blame. The room just felt off. I was so scared that I turned on the lights in the room and slept with them on that night (fitfully). In the morning, I told my friend how frightened I had been, and for no reason. She told me I was welcome to share her queen bed in her bedroom the next night. We went on with our lovely day, and I didn’t think about it again.
Later that evening, we had a small gathering for my friend’s sister’s birthday. We were all sitting around a large table in the center of the house when I noticed someone walk in the front door into the room. I looked up to see who it was, but there was no one there. I probably would’ve just brushed it off, but my friend’s father turned to me and said, “Someone just walked into the room.” My friend, sitting on the other side of her father, turned to us and said, “Yes, I noticed too!” But again, as a non-believer in such things, I brushed it off as us all noticing a change in temperature or perhaps a breeze or something else that happened at the subconscious level, and just went about my business.
That night, I did stay in my friend’s room with her. We giggled and chatted late into the night. When we turned out the lights, my friend went to sleep immediately. But I could not fall asleep; I wasn’t frightened, I guess I just wasn’t as tired as her. Shortly after I heard her quiet snores, I began to hear the unmistakable sound of footsteps. I listened intently. It sounded as if they were coming from above me, as if there was a second story to the house. But there wasn’t. In fact, there wasn’t even an attic. The sounds intensified, and it seemed that someone was pacing back and forth above my head, from the bathroom area and back to the bedroom door, over and over again. I looked for natural causes. Outside, the air was absolutely still. Looking at the trees, there was no tell-tale bending of limbs or shaking of leaves. Also, the window was open, and without a screen on it, the wind would’ve just come right into our room. So I ruled out the wind. There was no one else staying in the house, so it couldn’t be that either. And it was the middle of the night in a resort that had a security entrance. I could not imagine someone had snuck into the resort only to climb to the top of the house and pace back and forth above our bedroom. It just didn’t make sense.
I lay there, listening to the footsteps for what seemed like hours. The footsteps would fade in and out; sometimes they would pause here or there. Sometimes they stopped at the bathroom, and I hoped that they wouldn’t restart, but they did. At one point, I shouted out in my head, “Go away!” And almost as a response, the footsteps suddenly got very loud and focused on the area above my head. My body tingled all over. I had the thought, then, that I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, in every inch of my body, that this was a ghost. I still can’t tell you how I would know such a thing, but I did – just like you know the sound of a loved one’s voice. I just knew. And I remember thinking to myself at that time: “You’re going to discount this later, but try to remember this is real. I know this is real. I know this is a ghost.”
Eventually, I fell into a troubled sleep. I dreamed that somehow I was floating above my body, drifting upward toward the ceiling, and around me was a blue glowing light.
In the morning, I lay awake in bed, and my friend woke up next to me. She turned to me and said, nonchalantly, “There was a spirit here last night. It was right there!” And she pointed to the corner of the room above my head. My friend did believe in the paranormal, but it just didn’t scare her. I remember wishing that it didn’t scare me either.
Later that day, I told her father what I had experienced in the house. He laughed and told me he had had a conversation with the owners that morning. He’d asked them if there was a spirit in the house because of his experience of someone walking into the room the night before. They relayed to him that they thought it was the previous owner of the resort, who had been murdered in front of the Great House a decade before.
The next two nights I stayed with my friend in her room. Nothing else happened.
My friend and I have stayed in touch over the years. A few weeks ago, I visited her at her home six hours from where I live. We usually see each other at least once a year. I asked her if she remembered that experience in Jamaica thirty years ago. She laughed and said she absolutely did. I asked her to retell the story to me without prompting her about what I remembered, curious to see if my memory was off. To my surprise, her memory matched mine. I still remember that thought, that knowing—“You won’t believe this later, but this is really a ghost. This is the real thing.” And I do find myself disbelieving sometimes. But part of me knows, can remember the certitude, can remember the sensations in my body, and I know for sure that I encountered an angry spirit that night.