I am a skeptic.  I make a conscious decision to be a skeptic because I rather not believe the boogey man is about to pounce.  I am scared of what could be so I live in a world where only I know what IS can jump on me.

The closest thing I have ever experienced to a paranormal happening occurred when I was about 8 years old.  I was at my grandmother’s house, which has been in her family for many years.  The house was built in the late 1800s.

She kept the soda down in the basement refrigerator.  I was deemed with the task of going down into the basement to get some more soda.  The basement is what you might imagine a root cellar to be like.  It has stone walls and a rough stone floor with thin, 70′s style orange carpet.  There is a long hallway to your back as you descend the creaky stairs that have too much space between the steps.  At the end of the hallway, there is a coal furnace, toolbench, and exit to the outside.  You have to duck to walk down the hallway.  The only light shines from a lonely 60 watt bulb hanging from a chair.  I creep down the stairs in my school uniform, including big knee socks with no shoes.  Instead of going down the hallway, I enter the main area of the basement, which holds two refrigerators, a washer and dryer, and an ominous-looking door to what has been dubbed as, “The Pot Room.”  (The origins of this name are a story for another day.)

I shamble over to the refrigerator, trying to glare down the hallway with its shadows that the lone lightbulb will never reach while also trying to stare at the creepy door (I have never laid eyes on what that door hides…).  My breathing quickens, I always think as soon as I turn to the refrigerator that door will creak open.  I take a deep breath.  There’s no such thing as monsters.

I step in front of the refrigerator and relish the way the carpet feels through my socks.  It’s cold and very wet.  Like all old cellars, this one takes on moisture.  I reach out towards the fridge handle.  The second my fingers grasp the handle, I feel arms wrap around my stomach. The lonely bulb blinks out.  In that second, I lose my air and I think, “It’s finally happened, the door has opened and the boogeyman has come to get me.”  I get tugged backwards so violently that the steel handle of the fridge rips off with me.  I am thrown into the washing machine, still gripping that cold handle with baby-poop-green plastic piping.  It remains unbroken, the large bolts holding it to the fridge have snapped.

A few seconds pass and I am still breathing, hurting, my waist hurts where I was grabbed.  I crawl on hands and knees up the stairs through the dark, too shaken to even look down the dark, dark hall.

I had been electrocuted.  The water I was standing in catalyzed a short circuit in the fridge.  Why I felt those arms, I don’t know.  My grandmother says it was my angel, keeping me from being electrocuted to death.  That’s not the only paranormal occurrence in that house, but it’s the only one that happened to me.