By JOSHUA THOMAS

C-S-E Editor

I love to scare people. There’s nothing I desire more to send a chill up the spine with a twist of phrase, or evoke imagery that produces a full-blown nightmare. Even just a fleeting moment of fear. It’s not often that I have the chance, so when Halloween rolls around, I’m attracted to the opportunity like a vampire to a warm neck.

One thing that is important to me though, in doing so, is that the truth remains unembellished, so that the fear I dredge up in the reader is the same fear I felt in the moment.

About two years ago, I was housesitting, taking care of dogs for the family of a friend. It was just my friend and I, the animals, and a massive empty house. While I’d previously had small, odd experiences in the house, there was nothing that caused me to fear the dark and the unseen spaces around corners.

My friend and I were sleeping on the the couches in the living room, the dogs asleep on the floor between us. Suddenly, I woke from a deep sleep, eyes not fluttering, but shooting open — fully asleep to wide awake in an instant. I’m hard to wake up, and sometimes even a loud ringing phone, or construction right outside my window, will just become activity in a dream that pushes me further into sleep. I never just wake up.

But this morning, I did.

The sun was just coming up, and dawn seeped in through the cracks of the curtains and lit up the room. As I opened my eyes, I instantly understood that I woke up for a reason — that something woke me up purposefully. The dogs remained asleep, so it wasn’t a noise that startled me awake.

It was a feeling.

Directly across the room was a hallway that curved at a sharp 90 degree angle, leading down another small hall into the kitchen. My eyes were naturally focused there, as the hallway was directly in my line of vision. But that wasn’t the reason my attention was drawn there. I felt somebody there. As quick as I opened my eyes, I watched a person step from the direction of the kitchen, walking with purpose toward the wall in front of them. As the person approached the coat rack, and the front wall of the home, they was suddenly gone — thorough a solid, closed door.

Without even processing what I’d just seen, I woke up my friend with an urgent yelp, and the words “There’s someone in the house!” involuntarily poured from my mouth. Those words confused even me, because I knew what I had seen was not a human being, although it was human in shape, with humanesque movement, despite being black and see through, albeit fairly opaque.

“What?” asked my friend with a start, and I informed him that I just saw somebody in the hall. Without pause, we both heard a noise come from the direction of the kitchen, and we sat at attention, listening, staring at each other with fear in our eyes, thinking that somebody had come into the house.

As we listened, a voice entered the room.

“Hello”, said the voice clearly, as if there were a person speaking just feet in front of me. The voice sounded familiar, like my friend’s sister. The dogs jumped to their feet and all, in a group, immediately ran to the voice, howling and barking as if they were surrounding a person.

We waited a second for his sister, or somebody to enter the room, but nobody came.

Suddenly, the voice rang out again, louder than before and spoke the name of my friend. “Travis”, it said. He jumped to his feet and ran into the kitchen to find nothing. The door was still locked. All of them were. We looked out the windows, and no cars were in the driveway. If somebody had come and gone, we would’ve seen the car, and the alarm at the end of the driveway signaling a vehicle’s arrival would’ve gone off.

We both checked our phones, thinking maybe one of them had accidentally called somebody or that somebody called us and the line picked up, and they were there trying to get our attention. Nothing. No missed calls, nobody on the line. We scoured the house for televisions left on, for radios going off. We looked out the windows in the direction of every neighbor and there was nobody in sight.

The sound of the voice was destined to remain a mystery, although my friend did mention that when it said his name, it felt like a family member trying to get his attention. It was not a sinister feeling that accompanied the voice, or the figure, although disembodied voices and shadows moving with purpose cause unease no matter their intent.

Every once in a while, my dog will still go crazy, barking at that same empty doorway as if somebody is there. My dog, a Boston Terrier, is hard to get to bark in any situation, but she becomes obsessed, running back and forth, cowering behind a chair staring at something I can’t see, insisting upon my attention for up to an hour, confused about why I’m not panicking too.

I wondered if it was just shadows on the wall until I was told by the home’s owner that her five dogs have all done the same, whether alone or together. When there was only one dog in the house, she made excuses, like I initially did, but when each successive dog had problems with that same empty hall, she wondered if there was something more to it.

Maybe an empty hallway is just that and there’s nothing to fear, but on the other hand, maybe fear is the initial response in those scenarios for a reason, and though our eyes might register a hallway as empty, maybe it never really is. And in that case, what if that something we can only sometimes see or sense is always really there?