S.G. Browne

Okay. Maybe not so funny. When you sit up in bed at 5am and say “Mother f@#ker,” ha ha ha isn’t really the first thing that comes to mind.

So, to explain:

I, along with Eunice, happen to be sleeping in the room in which Sephera and Wes took the K2 EMF (electromagnetic field) meter and had the experience where the meter went to red. If you don’t know what the K2 looks like, here it is below:

And if you want to read the post from Sephera (and posts from other writers here for the weekend), you can follow along at the Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat Blog.

Anyway, not long after Wes and Sephera had their K2 experience, Eunice, Dan, and I were in the same room, in the same spot in front of the fireplace, and the meter went to orange and red on two separate occasions seemingly in reaction to random comments we made. This is also the same spot in the room where the K2 went to green and yellow earlier in the night during one of our ghost hunts.

So last night, I had several moments when I was in bed and not asleep, listening to the sounds of the house creaking, wondering if it was the mansion staff or another one of the writers up and about, when I would sense the atmosphere around me shift. Get heavy. Become thick. I can’t quite explain, but it was enough to get me to open my eyes and look around. Whatever it was, I wasn’t asleep and definitely noticed something different. Maybe just my imagination. Maybe not.

Then, just before 5am (I only know this because I checked my cell phone afterward), after rolling over on to my right shoulder because of Eunice’s heavy breathing (let’s not call it snoring), I feel the atmosphere around me change again. Only this time it’s much heavier and thicker. As if the air is condensing around me. And I don’t know if I feel it first or open my eyes first, but the next moment, something is shaking my left shoulder. I can see the air in front of me at the edge of the bed shimmering. Vibrating. Whatever. There’s a shape but I can’t discern it. And I can’t shift my gaze up or down to see more. I also can’t speak. I try. I open my mouth to say “hey” or “help” or another word that starts with “h” but it’s all I can do to get my mouth open let alone verbalize the fact that I’m fairly terrified at this moment.

I don’t know if the shaking stops or if I finally manage to break the moment, but I sit up and say one (technically two) of the words on George Carlin’s list of seven dirty words you can never say on television.

I immediately grabbed the K2 meter and turned it on to see if there was anything, but I could already feel that whatever it was had gone. Naturally, I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. Been half asleep and had one of those in-between dream states where it seems real. But it felt real. And I’m fairly certain I was awake and not dozing. Either way, it was creepy.

Eventually, just as the first hint of sun began to creep through the window, I managed to drift off to sleep.

Okay, so here I at at the Haunted Mansion, sitting on a soft couch with down pillows in a room that’s at least twice the size of my apartment in San Francisco. I could park three cars in here and still have enough space to stage Jesus Christ Superstar.

Picture windows as big as Napoleon Bonaparte’s ego are filled with evergreens, in front of which sits a couch where Kim Richards and Dan Weidman relax and drink wine and tap out their own thoughts on laptops. Loren Rhoads sits on one side of them on a love seat that’s as soft as the Pillsbury Dough Boy wrapped in velvet and Chris Colvin sits in one of the straight back chairs that’s reserved for those who have misbehaved.

To my right, Weston Ochse talks to Sephora Giron and Eunice Magill about teaching writers how to write and Yvonne Navarro walks in to tell us dinner is ready while Rain Graves takes a picture of all of us.

This is how the Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat weekend begins.