Your True Tales
January 2004 – Page 19

Phantom Hand
by Kate R.

Over the summer, my older sister went to visit some out-of-state friends. While she was gone, my other sister (younger) got to use her room. This left me overjoyed, because it meant that I had my room (which I had previously shared with my younger sister) all to myself.

One lazy weekend morning, I was enjoying sleeping in as much as I possibly could. I had lain in bed for a while, too lazy to get up or even open my eyes. One of my hands protruded from beneath the blankets on the side of my bed which faced the wall, but I was too lazy to pull it back under my sheet. Suddenly, a hand grabbed mine and started tugging on it. My mind still hazy with sleep, I figured that it must be one of my sisters trying to wake me up. I grunted and whined a bit with my eyes still closed and tried to squirm my way out of her grasp, but the hand which tugged on mine held on solidly.

Becoming even more annoyed at whichever sister was doing this, I twisted my hand around and grabbed the pointer finger of the hand that grasped mine, pulled on it for a second, then dug my fingernails into it - not too hard, but hard enough to be painful. The other hand started and let go of mine and withdrew itself. I expected to hear someone say "Ouch! Why'd you do that, Katie? Sheesh, just waking you up..." But no one did. The second the hand withdrew without a sound, my eyes flew open and I looked around. Not only was nobody sitting on my bed wedged between myself and the wall, which was the only place they could possibly have reached my hand from without sitting directly on top of me, there was no one else in the room, and the solid wood doors were tightly shut. It simply wasn't physically possible for someone to escape that fast without me knowing it. I would have felt their weight leave the bed had they been sitting on it and then risen, and they wouldn't have had time to do even that.

I never did find out what hand held mine or why it did this.

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