Knock Knock

This covers two events that took place roughly a year apart from each other.

The first event took place on a Tuesday night. It was the early 1990s. My parents were divorced and my dad would always visit me between 8pm and 9pm on Tuesday evenings. After my dad left I would then flick to BBC2 and watch Quantum Leap, which would run from 9pm until roughly between 9.45pm and 10pm.

It was on one particular Tuesday night, whilst I was watching Quantum Leap, that I heard a knock on my bedroom door. My bedroom was at the back of the house with the bathroom to the left-hand side as you exited the door and a short corridor leading to the stairs and a turn to the right to my sister's bedroom before continuing to my mum and stepdad's front bedroom.

There were three distinct knocks on the wooden bedroom door. Startled, I asked who was there. There was no response. I then rushed out of bed and flung open my door.

There was nobody.

I went into my sister's bedroom and both of them were fast asleep. My stepdad was at work and my mum was downstairs watching TV. The next day I asked my mum and my sisters and they promised that neither of them had been up there.

The speed at which I shot from the bed to the door meant that neither of my sisters would have been able to scamper away from the door to their bedrooms and then get back into their beds and pretend to be asleep without making some kind of racket outside on the landing.

The second event took place around a year later. Again, it was the early 90s. It was also the early hours of a Wednesday morning. I was fast asleep so, yes, it is entirely possible that I was dreaming this, however I don't believe I was.

I opened my eyes because I felt a...presence in my room.

I had gone to sleep with my small bedroom lamp on. The room was dark but still bathed in a very gentle yellow glow from the bulb. The first thing I did was glance up at the clock on the wall. It was 2am. My eyes were then drawn towards the door.

The door was slightly ajar and about two thirds of the way up the door was a face peering around the side of the door, looking into my room at the height of a grown adult, not a child.

As the lamp was only very weak, the area near the door was cast in shadow, but I could make out a few fuzzy details of the face. Its hair was very short - almost a crew cut. The eyes were dark and deep-set into its face. Very much in shadow so I could only really see the sockets. It had thin, red lips. No expression on its face. It was just staring at me.

But the thing that struck me most about the figure was that it had what I thought was an enlarged forehead. Not huge, but bigger than your average person.

In my confused state I glanced at the clock again and said, without really thinking, "Go away. It's 2 o'clock in the morning." And with that the face slowly withdrew and the figure closed the door behind it.

I fell asleep.

The next morning I went downstairs and spoke to my mum, who said that she had been fast asleep, and that there had been nobody else awake at that time. And, out of all the people who lived in the house, the only one that ever would have checked on me during the night would have been her.

I never found an explanation for what the knocking was or who the face belonged to. Was it paranormal? Is there a simple explanation? I don't know, but it's something that has stayed with me for a long time. So much so that I almost expected something to happen the following year, which it never did.