Of all the weird and unexplainable experiences I've encountered thus far in my life, this is the one that haunts me most:

I was five years old at the time and had six brothers. My family lived out in the country on thirty-nine acres of property--mostly untamed woods--fairly isolated from the rest of humanity. My brother Joe and I slept in bunkbeds; I slept in the bottom bunk and Joe on the top. My brothers Tony and Paul slept in single beds. Altogether there were four of us sharing the same bedroom.

One evening, after having been tucked in for the night--lights off and parents watching television in some distant room in the house--we lay in our beds mindlessly babbling to each other as kids will do. Now the structure in which my brother and I slept was an ancient monster of a thing, made of solid wood and steel, two tiers high. Whenever my mother got the itch to rearrange the bedroom, my father and grandpa were enlisted to inch the massive thing across the floor as it groaned stubbornly into its new position. The single beds in which Tony and Paul slept were of similar construction, with heavy metal frames and springs.

Then it happened: first, the sound of the old steel bedsprings squeaking as they flexed to support the shifting weight of the beds. That is to say, the beds began to move almost indiscernably at first, so that a sense of movement was not striking. It was the "sound" of our beds we first noticed in the dark stillness, so everyone fell silent and listened. My brother Tony, who was dreadfully afraid of the dark and had a phobia about "piggies" (nighttime creatures with glowing red eyes) was the first to detect the strange sound. Thinking some of us were moving around in our beds in such a way as to make them squeak and groan, he commanded that we knock it off.

"Stop it, Paul," he shouted in a warning tone.

"I'm not doing anything! It's Joe!" Paul protested.

Then Tony threatened Joe, and Joe blamed the deed on me. All the while, each of us thought one of the other three in the room was the culprit, until all voices had sounded their innocence. Then we all fell silent and listened. As the groans and creaks grew louder, Tony began to feel his bed being shaken back and forth. Whereupon he leapt out of bed and punched Paul, whose bed was nearby.

"I told you to stop it!" Tony screamed and Paul, terrified, cried, "Something is shaking my bed, too!"

Joe and I were by now paralyzed in our bunkbeds as the monstrous thing shook back and forth, for we clearly realized our two older brothers, whose beds were on the other side of the room, were not responsible for what we had assumed was a prank. All four of us began to scream bloody murder, absolutely frightened out of our wits.

My father, hearing our cries, came to see what the fuss was about. No sooner did he open the door of our room when the shaking stopped.

"What's the matter?" he asked sleepily.

All our voices descended on him in frightened cries.

"Our beds were shaking, Dad!"

My father gazed around the room. Seeing that everything looked normal as pie, not a bedspring squeaking, he concluded, "Everything's fine. Now go to sleep."

In those days, we believed our father had the power of God. If he said "everything's fine," then somehow he had fixed the problem, whether or not we understood how. My father was not a man to be tangled with--we were certain the "bogeyman," hiding in the closet or behind the chifforobe, now understood this. Comforted, we fell asleep, confident all was well.

The next night, it began the same way, only this time, the groaning and creaking of springs and steel frames accompanied a more rigorous shaking of all our beds. Our screams were immediate. Once again, no sooner did my father open the door to our room when the shaking abruptly ceased. We now realized the source behind the shaking was intelligent--certainly intelligent enough to end its deeds the moment my father's foot passed over the threshold of our room. This terrified us all the more, for whatever it was, it was also CLEVER AND CUNNING.

The incident continued for several more nights.

"But Dad," we always cried when the shaking stopped the moment he entered the room, "the beds always stop shaking when you come into our room!"

Did my father believe us? Of course not! My father lived in a predictable world of pasta, Sunday Mass, and evenings watching his favorite TV show, "Death Valley Days." Beds didn't just shake by themselves. Period. So once in a while he'd growl, "Now go to sleep or you're going to get a spanking!" The only comfort we derived from this threat was knowing he had likely scared off the "bogeyman" with his Sicilian growl--at least for what remained of the night.

Then the shaking stopped. Nights went by without incident for a week or two, and we were relieved the "bogeyman" had left us in peace...until one night.

I had the misfortune of waking in the middle of the night when the entire household was fast asleep. I had to go pee worse than anything, but I was too scared to make the long trip to the bathroom, which was located clear across the house. My parents were rather primitive in those days and didn't believe in leaving ANY lights on anywhere inside or outside of the house. Needless to say, one could barely see her hand in front of her face out in the country where no city or street lights illuminated the environment. Always it was a struggle: "willing" my pee to go back where it came from, or garnering enough courage to make the terrifying journey through the house to the bathroom.

While I lay there embroiled in my struggles, the massive bunkbed in which I slept began to shake ever so slightly. Feeble creaks and groans, barely audible, assailed the stillness. There could be only one person responsible for the trick, I thought: my stupid brother Joe, who knows I'm awake.

"Stop it, Joe," I sternly warned him, projecting my voice through the underside of his mattress above me.

There was no answer. The bed continued to creak, shaking gently back and forth.

"I know it's you, Joe," I yelled.

The bed continued to shake. Without a shred of doubt in my mind that Joe was trying to scare me, I leapt out of bed and furiously climbed the wooden ladder that led up to his bed. I had every intention of punching him hard.

For as long as I live, I'll never forget seeing Joe lying there, his mouth hanging open in a dead sleep. Unprepared for the realization that IT WAS BACK, and that I was standing on a ladder in the dark while the bed was shaking without a nearby father to hear my screams, I dove from the ladder into my bed and stuffed as much of what I could fit of my body into my pillow case. My practical mother, in her efforts to whittle down time she spent on laundering, had decided we could do without sheets and blankets in warm weather.

How long I lay there frozen stiff in my pillow, hardly daring to breathe as the bed shook back and forth, I have no way of knowing.

"Melina, are you shaking the bed?"

My brother Joe's head popped over the right side of the mattress above me, his tousled hair a black corona against the pale ceiling.

"No, Joe..."

How relieved I was that he had awakened. I could hear him start to cry as he quickly found the center of his mattress as I had, curling up into a fetal position. Our beds continued to rock back and forth, the groaning and creaking of wood and steel sending up a hideous seesaw rhythm in the darkness.

Enduring this "visitation" to its long and bitter conclusion was what I now can only call a dark voyage of terror. I remember praying for the sun to come up, as if the sun were a god, warm and illuminating, scattering the shadows and setting the world right once more. No sun came, no father, no mother. Joe and I cried in muted sobs, our hearts crashing inside our chests as we clung to our pillows for dear life.

Joe kept trying to get me to see something at the foot of our bunkbeds, but I couldn't bring myself to look; instead, I shut my eyes against the outer world until everything became a muted blankness...until I could no longer feel or hear the beds shaking, my brother's cries, the groaning of wood and metal in the heaving darkness around us...

"Did you see it?" Joe questioned me the next morning as we sat playing with his soldiers on the kitchen floor. My mother was sitting nearby at the kitchen table, folding socks.

"The Devil! It was the Devil shaking our beds--I saw him!" Joe exclaimed.

The thought of the Devil shaking our beds, even at the age of five, was far more terrifying to me than imagining it to be a bogeyman. I accused Joe of making it up.

"No! I saw him!" he insisted.

"How could you see him when it was dark?" I asked.

Joe stood up, puffing out his chest and splaying his arms and legs.

"He was big and powerful," he described, "taller than the bunkbeds--that's how I could see him! He had two black horns and a tail, and he was laughing as he shook our beds, like this!"

Joe proceeded to show me what he saw, and I can still see him clearly to this day: his body postured in a semi-crouch at the foot of our bunkbeds, arms wrapped around the right and left bedposts, feet straddled to provide ample leverage for moving a thing of great weight, and an insane grimace on his face, as if terrifying children were a preferred source of joy and satisfaction.

Within a day or two, my father brought something home which none of us had ever seen before: a "grotto"--or at least that's what my father called it. It was a lovely piece artfully fashioned with stones and seashells, and had been purchased at a store which sold religious items. In the center of the grotto was either a cross or a holy person, as of Jesus, Saint Francis, or Michael the Archangel--how strange that I now can't remember. My father brought it into our bedroom, set it on the mantle, and plugged it in. A small night light within the grotto emitted a soft brilliance. Every evening after tucking us into our beds, my father would turn it on, then say several prayers with us before leaving the room.

Our beds never shook again.


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Copyright 2002 by Melina Costello