The Shadow We Saw

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The night was dark and the entire house was barely lit. The light had been seized 30 minutes before but we lit up the candles as we awaited the fuel we needed to switch on the generator. My sister and I were in my room and we both sat there on the bed tired from the day’s activities. It had been a long day of meeting several people who had come to pay their condolences to the family. The door to my room opened while my sister and I were having a discussion about the several guests that had come to pay their respects to our grandpa, days after his burial rites. We looked at the door and saw no one but a shadow moving toward the direction of our room. The net door opened itself and for a moment we almost dashed out of the room in fear. My room is adjacent to the window overseeing the backyard, so there is no way the wind would have forcibly opened it up.

Three years ago, if anyone had asked my sister and I if we believed in ghosts, our answer would have been a resounding ‘No!’. It wasn’t because we did not believe in the possibilities of the paranormal or supernatural, it’s because we have not yet experienced such a thing ourselves. I mean, we’ve watched all the Chapters of Insidious together mostly at nights when everyone is asleep, so ghost stories to us was exactly what it was, a story. Although we enjoyed the movies and shrieked at the jumpscares, it never occurred to us that we would one day experience it for real.

It was barely a few days after grandpa passed away on the 8th of December 2020, just months after his wife (grandma) had passed away on the 14th of February 2020. Due to the lockdown necessitated by the pandemic, the burial had to be postponed till April 2021.
It was a loss that affected the entire family, but we found solace in the fact that they died in old age after a life well lived.

After that experience with the ‘shadow’, we both had several dreams about our grandparents. It wasn’t as real as what we had seen that night but our conviction about ghosts and their existence had shifted from zero to one hundred percent that very day.
As a child, growing up in Nigeria, ghost stories are usually heard from people who ‘claim’ to have experienced it themselves or seen someone who had. Although some of these stories are just made up to scare little children, others actually have an atom of truth in them, and our experience certainly proved that.

Till this day, two years after we saw the ‘shadow’ of the ghost, most people still find it difficult to believe us. Whenever they tell the story of what we saw that night, people would react in total disbelief and end the conversation by saying what we saw was as a result of the stress from the day's activities. Even right now, you reading this story probably feel indifferent about the truth of my story, my sister is certainly buying into that idea too but I know what I saw and believe with every fibre in my being that ghosts do exist. And just because we don’t always see them does not mean they can’t see us.