ClawHands I remember very vividly thinking he was made up of pinpricks of coloured light, so these days you could say he was pixellated! But then, I remember thinking he looked like the image in a comic, made up of sort of dots. He was seated but there was no chair. And he was looking down to his hands that seemed to be doing something but that was also not visible at all. He didn't look up. I was so terrified I didn't dare move, even to pull the covers over my face, so it felt like forever til I plucked up the courage to turn round quickly so I couldn't see him. He was very preoccupied and maybe only a yard or so away from me, and on my side of the bed.
The thing was, it was an unfamiliar bed with a metal headboard thingy and as I turned, I miscalculated and banged my head badly on the bed rails. That was how I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was not a nightmare or sleep paralysis. The next morning I had a bruise on my forehead.
Again, we had houseguests. It was usually my dad's room so I hadn't slept in there since I was a baby. As dad had the only double bed, he slept on the sofa and one of the houseguests - a little girl the same age as me - shared the bed with me. We were both about 12.
We were strangers, had only just met, and so in the morning I didn't tell her what I'd seen. I thought she'd think I was a nutjob.
I told my dad, though and although a sceptic he was surprisingly open and accepting and seemed to believe me. Maybe the fact I got the floor height of the old room right convinced him. He had done the building work before I was born and I had no way of knowing the floor had once been three foot higher.
15 years later the other girl and I went out for a meal. Apropos of nothing, she said to me "Do you remember that week we first stayed at your's?"
I said I did.
She proceeded to tell me about the night - she was sure I was asleep when it happened - she saw the ghost of a creepy old man, floating mid-air.
My husband had heard me tell the story a million times, probably only half believing it. He nearly fainted on the spot.
Turned out she told her mum and I told my dad and neither told the other. She didn't tell me as we'd just met - and I might think she was mad. Maybe not the same night but it was defo the same week as that was the only time we ever shared that room.
I'm a genealogist and bit of a historian in my old age and I have searched the censuses. He looked like a late Victorian farmer/farm labourer. Sadly no census for that time gives house numbers for the lane and so it is impossible to be sure who lived in which house! (It became a terrace later but we lived in the original long farmhouse and the other houses were added later, joining other cottages to our house).
I also searched the 19thC newspaper database for any grisly news stories but found nothing.