Readers Stories A Haunted Mirror The seaside town of Pacifica, where I grew up, is just a few miles south of San Francisco along the California coast. Our Cape-Cod style home afforded my family four bedrooms. Mine was situated on the ground floor at the rear of the house. A covered patio abutted my windows. There came a day when my mother asked me if I would like to have a mirror in my room. When I asked her where she'd gotten it all she would say was that it came from an old house in San Francisco. The tall, narrow, full-length mirror was of an old design having a white, ribbed, wooden frame with rounded corners. The back of the frame seemed unusually thickly padded and had an old parchment backing. I gladly accepted the mirror and nailed it on my bedroom wall; a wall I could see from the hallway as I passed my room. Soon after the mirror was in place I began to see an odd occurrence in my bedroom. Each time I walked down the hallway past my room I would glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, a dense black figure in the mirror. It was always leaning over my bed with its black hands agrasp over my pillow where my throat would have been, had I been lying there. Each time I glimpsed it I'd look straight at the mirror, and each time the figure would be gone. At night I began to see two white lights directly over my bed above my head. This mystified me as my room had no direct lighting from outside, and I could think of nothing that might cause such a reflection on my ceiling. I made many attempts to find the source of the lights to no avail. Eventually, for reasons of aesthetics, I moved my bed a few feet down the wall. From the hall I could no longer see my bed reflected in the mirror, but each night I continued to see the two lights overhead. They had moved with the bed, but there was nothing on my bed that could have caused this. I happened to be looking at the mirror one day when I noticed that there were thin lines in the lower right corner of the glass. They were the markings that occur when one draws on the back of a reflective surface. I inspected the back of the frame and found it undisturbed. Over time the lines grew in number, covered, inch by inch, more area. One day as I was looking at it I discovered that the lines had formed into a fine drawing of a skeletal human hand. I immediately asked others in my household to come and confirm this, as I wasn't sure whether I was imagining the image or not. Each person verified what I saw. It was not my imagination and yet the padded backing had not been disturbed. Over time the lines progressed until they had formed a clear outline of a skeletal hand, wrist, arm and shoulder. About the time it had begun a crude drawing of a head and neck I gave the mirror to my brother, Alex. He had need of a mirror in his room upstairs. He hung the object on a wall adjacent to several large posters he'd tacked there. One afternoon, when the rest of us were lazily watching TV, Alex came tearing down the stairway demanding to know who had just been in his room. He was extremely agitated and none of us could satisfy him that we'd not been in his room during the five minutes he'd been away from it. He finally conducted us up the stairs to see what had happened. All of the posters on the wall beside the mirror had had their upper corners ripped free of their tacks and were hanging out into the room, anchored only by their bottom tacks. No one had been in his room when this had happened. Alex decided one day to move the mirror to another wall, and all of the posters on that wall were similarly torn free from their top corners. He then nailed the mirror to a tall, narrow space between his two closet doors. His bed ran parallel to this wall about two feet from it. One night, as Alex lay in bed watching the shadows of a tree playing on his bedroom window opposite the foot of his bed, he suddenly noticed a movement in the mirror out of the corner of his eye. A tall, dense figure was emerging through the wall next to the window. The figure approached him until it stood at his feet. Alex looked directly at the mirror. There was no figure in the mirror at all. Then he looked back towards the opposite wall. Again he saw the figure reflected there, again out of the corner of his eye. The phantom soon returned to the wall it had come through and disappeared. Diana, a friend of mine, happened to express an interest in the mirror, so Alex gave it to her. The next morning she showed up at our front door. When I opened the door in answer to her knock I briefly noticed a white cat by her feet which quickly bolted out of sight. "When did you get the new cat?" I asked her. Her answer to this was "We need to talk about that mirror." Diana related how she had temporarily placed the mirror against a wall in her brother's room, on the ground floor, the night before. In the morning her brother had demanded that she remove the mirror from his room. He told her that he'd gotten very little sleep all night long because of the mirror, though he could not see anything but the side of the frame from where he lay. No matter how he was pressed he refused to go into further detail about it. Before Diana could comply with her brother's demand she happened to see a strange white cat come boldly in through their open front door. She had never seen the cat before and followed it with her eyes. It walked through their living room, looking neither left nor right, and walked straight to her brother's bedroom. When she followed after it she found the cat sitting in front of the mirror. It looked directly at the mirror, then turned it's head and looked into Diana's eyes, and then at the mirror again. It did this several times. Feeling very disturbed by this she decided to visit me, and the cat joined her, staying right beside her until I opened my front door. The mirror then found itself amongst other items in our storage room in the backyard. There it stayed until Roger, a friend of Alex's, asked if he could have it. Roger soon moved to Spokane, Washington and took the mirror with him. He took for his bedroom an unfinished area of the basement. The space was cordoned off by freshly hewn, wooden beams, and Roger hung up posters and fabric to create finished walls. He hammered ¾-inch nails through the frame of the mirror solidly into the young beams. A few months later Alex flew to Spokane to spend a few weeks with Roger. He and Roger were sitting upstairs the kitchen one-day. At one point Roger was on the phone with his girlfriend while Alex sat nearby fiddling with something on the table when, out of nowhere, they heard a huge noise from the basement. It sounded as if an entire warehouse of glass had exploded. While Roger stayed on the phone, Alex volunteered to go down and see what had happened. As he descended the long stairway Alex began to feel something very cold and clammy begin to manifest in his core, and then to spread to his extremities, as he approached Rogers room. Startled by what he saw he mounted the stairs in three strides, leaving the eerie physical sensation behind him. Alex stood in the doorway staring at Roger, unable to speak. With Roger behind him he again descended the stairs. There on the floor of Rogers room lay the mirror. It had somehow come loose from the beams and fallen to the floor, but it hadn't simply fallen there. The full-length mirror had detached itself, rotated 90 degrees and landed parallel to the wall. The entire mirror had shattered into slivers, but all of these slivers had been confined within the edges of the frame. Finally, I asked my mom how she had obtained the mirror. "It was your grandmother's mirror." she told me. She confided that my grandmother, who lived alone in an apartment in San Francisco, had been having a tough time at one point. She'd resorted to drinking and had stopped eating properly. One night she suffered a heart attack, fell from her chair, and landed in front of the mirror, where she died. Sometime later I asked Roger, an individual gifted with some psychic ability, what he had sensed about the mirror. He related that there was definitely something "wrong" about it, but that, whatever it was, it never meant anyone any harm. He also said that, by the time the mirror had broken, the lines on its face had completed all the details I had seen with the inclusion of an entire left skeletal ribcage. His take on it was that it seemed only to want our attention &ldots; as if all it wanted was for someone to break it. Failing this, it ended up destroying itself.
J.Teal ©
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