.Okay, I'll admit right off that I don't believe in any of this mumbo-jumbo. I am a big fan of HP, but that's about it. I don't believe in Cthulhu or any of the rest. It's pretty cool, but it's not reality. Okay, so I've been creeped out from time to time, but that's it. Of course, I live in Atlanta, and you don't get less creepy or eldritch than that. Don't ever try to find a horror setting in Atlanta. There isn't one. I'd like to blame it all on the civil war, but Atlanta wasn't much of a city before then. But I digress.

The first realization that something was, shall we say, not kosher came shortly after I moved in to my dorm room. I went up north to college, to South Hadley, MA, to be exact. After the fall semester of my freshman year I took a leave of absence, to figure out what the heck I wanted in Life. Now I was back, and really psyched about it. I even managed to get a single, which for a sophomore is no mean feat. I ended up in Wilder, the haunted dorm. Nothing unusual ever happens there, but it's haunted anyway. I moved in and went to dinner. When I came back after dinner, my bed looked like it had been slept in and there were chalk marks on my floor. I called Security, but since nothing was missing, there wasn't much they could do. I decided to forget the entire thing and get on with my education. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible. The next few weeks I had really bizarre dreams about R'lyeh, but I put it down to reading too much HP. Then I started to hear things, chants and stuff, whenever I was in my room. I went to the nurse, but she said I was fine. She suggested I drop a class or two and get some rest. After Sept, things calmed down, and I thought it was over.

I was spending Thanksgiving at school, because Mom was on a cruise and didn't want me in the house by myself. I ended up being the only person in Wilder to spend Thanksgiving at school. The first night I heard the chanting again, but louder. I put on some Mozart, turned it up so I couldn't hear the chanting, and went to bed. The next day, everyone kept talking about the weird lights and sounds in Wilder. Several people asked me why I didn't invite them to the party. That got to me. I had been the only person in the dorm last night and I knew it. They said that they had seen bobbing, greenish lights in most of the windows and heard loud, wild, rhythmic chanting somewhere in between African dance, and Native American songs. A girl who lives in 1837, just across the lake from Wilder, told me that she woke up unexpectedly at about 3 am, and the lake was glowing green, and so was every window in Wilder. She said that she saw someone standing at my window, but that she couldn't describe him. She figured it was the ghost or possibly a really vivid dream. I had slept through the whole thing. I told her if she saw the weird lights again or the man, to call Security and me immediately. This was getting majorly creepy.

That night I decided to stay awake to see what was going on. I borrowed a friend's Mace and another friend's lacrosse stick, so I figured I was prepared for anything. The girl in 1837 was also going to stay up, and she promised to watch Wilder very carefully. I set up my computer to record every sound and got my camcorder ready. First was the chanting. It was strangely soothing, and I would have gone to sleep, except for the footsteps. I heard the front door open and close, and then these very loud footsteps started. They were very heavy and stomping. I called Security, and they said they'd be right over. The footsteps went up the stairs and stopped at my hall. I double locked and barricaded my door. I also turned the camcorder on infrared and turned the lights off. I could see green light seeping into my room from under the door. It was not a green traffic light kind of green. It was a weird glowing decaying kind of green. The phone rang, and I picked it up. It was Security. They couldn’t get into the dorm. All the doors and windows were wielded shut. Then the pounding began.

The door flexed inward under each blow. I wasn't about to stay around to see who wanted to get in so badly. I opened my window and climbed out onto the roof. Theoretically, if I could get over the roof to the fire escape I could climb down and run like hell. Of course, I hadn't counted on the roof being so steep and slippery. I closed the window behind me, and hoped whoever it was wouldn't look outside for me. I heard the door break open, and the heavy footsteps crossed the room to the window. Then there was a flash of lightning, not unusual except for the fact that there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Seconds later, there was a huge booming crash, and every door, window and brick blew out. Some of the bricks even managed to make it across the lake and hit 1837. I sat there on the roof, waiting for the footsteps to retreat. Instead, I heard security yelling. Someone had seen me climb out of my window and had told them. They told me that the fire brigade was on their way to get me down.

When security went into the building, they found that my door had shattered inwards, and so had several other doors. One door had shattered inwards, the door on the haunted room, and there was a huge hastily filled in pit in the basement. I watched the camcorder footage later that day, after I got down off the roof. It caught everything. The door shattered inwards, reveling a shadow in human form. The camera picked it up only because it was darker than everything around it. It walked into my room and to the window. Then the lightning flashed, and there was a crash from somewhere in the dorm. Seconds later, a girl entered the room. She was flimsy and insubstantial. She took up my borrowed lacrosse stick, and hit the shadow with it. That was the monstrous boom that had blown every door and window in Wilder out. Inside the room there was a blinding flask of light, and the shadow ran. The green light retreated along with it, and soon there was the sound of a hole being filled in extremely fast. I have no idea what the shadow was or what it wanted, but I am eternally grateful to the Wilder ghost. She saved my butt big time. I've sworn off horror now. It's just too tame compared to what happened, and I don't like being scared anymore. I am extremely nervous about pits, though.