The Night It Started
My first unexplained experience happened when I was around six years old. At that age, I didn't even fully understand what fear was yet. I only knew something felt terribly wrong. That night, I was running a very high fever. Back then, medicine wasn't as instant as now — no quick syrup solving everything in minutes. I just lay in bed feeling extremely weak and uncomfortable. Sometime around midnight, I suddenly woke up.
What I Woke Up To
The first thing I noticed was the sound. A loud, high-pitched ringing. Not normal ringing. Sharp. Piercing. Continuous. The kind that makes your ears feel pressured from inside.
. . .
Then I opened my eyes. I remember seeing bright lights everywhere. That part still confuses me today — because I knew it was nighttime. But the whole house looked brightly lit. Not normal room lighting. Everything strangely pale and overexposed.
I looked for my parents. Couldn't find them.
. . .
Then I noticed someone standing near the kitchen area. An old woman. At first glance, she didn't look aggressive. But even as a child, every instinct inside me immediately said: be careful.
Not the feeling where something looks scary. The feeling where something is simply wrong in a way your body recognises before your mind does.
. . .
I stared at her while the ringing in my ears kept getting louder. The strange pale light kept pressing down around everything. And somehow, even at six years old, I knew she wasn't supposed to be there.
I started screaming.
My mother rushed out. The moment she switched on the room lights properly, the old woman was gone. The strange brightness instantly became ordinary household light. The ringing in my ears continued for a while longer.
Whether It Was Real
Of course, as a child with a high fever, it could easily be dismissed as delirium. Fever hallucination. Exhaustion mixing dreams with reality. Those are all reasonable explanations. But till today, decades later, I still remember that night with unusual clarity. The lights. The ringing. The feeling. And especially the instinctive dread I felt when I saw that old woman standing silently in the kitchen — not doing anything, not moving. Just there.
Because that night became the beginning of something that followed me for years afterward. After it, I started noticing more things. Not all the time. Not always clearly. But enough that I eventually stopped dismissing every strange experience as coincidence.
And sometimes, even now, I still wonder — did the fever cause me to imagine something? Or did the fever simply lower whatever boundary usually keeps certain things out of sight?
Additional Field Notes: The First Time I Saw Something
Log Classification: Personal / Childhood Encounter / First Sighting
[HIGH FEVER AND PERCEPTION] High fever in children is associated with hallucinations — but the specific details here (anomalous whole-house brightness, sustained tinnitus, instinctive rather than visual fear, immediate disappearance upon normal light) are not consistent with standard fever hallucination patterns, which tend to be fragmented rather than specific and structured.
[THE RINGING] A sustained, high-pitched tone accompanying the sighting — and persisting after — appears in multiple accounts of unexplained visual encounters. Not consistently explained by fever-related auditory effects alone.
[FIRST ENCOUNTER AS OPENING] Many accounts of long-term sensitivity trace back to a specific childhood incident. This one is notable for its clarity decades later, and for the pattern of experiences that followed.
INCIDENT ASSESSMENT
- Age at incident: ~6 years old
- Context: High fever, midnight
- Figure: Old woman, kitchen, standing still — disappeared on normal light
- Classification: First encounter — followed by years of subsequent sensitivity
