It’s my birthday week! So, I’ve decided to be self-indulgent and write about my personal monster—the yellow eyes.
Allow me to set the scene…
I was 8 years old, staring out my doorway as I tried to fall asleep. I could see into my younger brother’s room while lying on my right side, but only the closet area. On the night I spied the yellow eyes, it was too dark to see even the closet, though.
About the closet…
That closet door creeped me out as a kid. The wood has a monster-sized, oval knot with two little points at the bottom. I always thought the blemish looked like a shadowy devil blob. Or an ominous portal. The closest itself is weird, too. It’s massive—the size of a normal bathroom—with one counter-like shelf off to the side and no hanger rod. Bare insulation and lath and plaster form two of its walls.
Here’s what happened
I don’t think the closet opened. If it did, I didn’t hear it. The yellow eyes appeared to pop into existence before the door, though I suppose they could have phased through.
It sounds cliché, but I froze in terror. Fawn in the tall grass frozen. Like maybe if I didn’t so much as blink, they wouldn’t notice me. They saw me, though. I felt like they locked right onto me. They started toward me, bobbing slightly.
The eyes vanished after a few seconds, and I could breathe again.
Until they reappeared much closer. Right in my brother’s doorway. Just a few feet from mine. I threw my blanket over my head and tried yelling for my dad. My voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper. I shook, screaming at myself to scream, sure something terrible would rip the blanket off me at any second. It never did. Or I repressed it into oblivion. I don’t know how long I hid beneath the blankets, trying to holler for help, but enough time passed that it felt hard to breathe under there. Eventually, I fell asleep.
Jeepers creepers
I call them eyes, but the occult orbs had no pupils, irises, or whites. They were big, perfectly round, and glowing bright yellow. Their radiance wasn’t like eyeshine. They didn’t reflect light; they emitted it. Yet they didn’t cast any into the room. I couldn’t see anything near them—no body or shape blacker than the black around it. Only diffuse darkness surrounded them. But hovering as a pair about 6 feet off the floor and moving together, they seemed decidedly eyelike.
The aftermath
I felt cold the next morning. The day brought a hollow light that refused to warm. I don’t remember what I said to my mom, but my first words to my dad were to ask if he’d been in my brother’s room with flashlights. The only non-ghost explanation was if he had snuck in with two lights, held them at the sides of his head, and played a sick prank. But he said no, of course, and I could tell he didn’t know what I was talking about. When I explained what happened, my parents brushed it off. What else could they do? My dad insisted that I’d seen car lights.
I told my friends about the yellow eyes when I got to school. Who knows if they believed me. I remember drawing a picture of the eyes in crayon. I wish I’d kept that picture. Although I don’t recall doing it, I also wrote about them in my school journal. I found the account last year when my mom gave me back some old schoolwork.
After my encounter, I couldn’t tolerate a dark bedroom. I slept with a nightlight up through my first year of college. I’d still have one if my husband didn’t need utter blackness to sleep. For years, whenever I caught a glint, flash, or reflection at night, that heart-stopping terror would shoot through me. I always thought they’d be back for me. But they never returned.
It wasn’t f*cking headlights
The yellow eyes couldn’t have been lights from a car. There was nothing but acres of woods on that side of the house, no road. And the eyes didn’t light up the room or go along the wall. They moved out into space. Never mind that in the 40+ years my family has lived there, they never appeared again. Unless physics allows lights to bounce off clouds and trees under the perfect meteorological conditions and be projected like a hologram into 3-dimensional space in a dark bedroom, they weren’t lights from outside the house. Neither were they from an animal. We had no pets, and I can’t stress enough how little the glow looked like eyeshine. The only mundane physical explanation would be if someone was in there with dual side-clipped headlamps. That would be a whole other kind of scary story.
Not a nightmare
Of course, the simplest explanation is that I dreamed the whole thing, and I don’t blame the folks who will dismiss my account as a nightmare. But I don’t believe for a second that I dreamed it. It’s one of my most vivid childhood memories. I can still feel the blanket over my head and the raspy whispers in my throat that refused to become screams. Nightmares don’t affect you for the rest of your life. You don’t think about them every day. I’ve since had a couple other spooky experiences that I’m perfectly willing to dismiss as hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. But not the yellow eyes. I was wide awake when I saw them and stayed that way for a long while afterward. There was nothing hazy or confusing about it. I wasn’t out of it. I saw something.
What kind of something?
In childhood, the yellow eyes unequivocally belonged to a ghost. At the time, I doubt I had the context for anything else. Demons were red devils with pitchforks, aliens were on the front cover of Whitley Strieber’s COMMUNION, and cryptids were Bigfoot and Nessie. I’ve since changed my mind. If a ghost is the spirit of a dead person or a cosmic playback, I don’t think that’s what this was.
I’ll never know what I really saw, of course. Unless the yellow eyes come back. But I don’t believe they will anymore. Sometimes that pisses me off. It drives me crazy that I don’t know what they were or what they were doing. Other times, I’m terrified that they will return and reveal themselves to my daughter instead of me. She turned 8 last month.
Despite associating them with the closet, I don’t think the yellow eyes were tied to the house. Or there to bother my brother, though they manifested in his room. Maybe it was just a child’s narcissism, but I felt the yellow eyes were there for me. Whatever they were up to, they weren’t minding their own business. The whole blinking out and reappearing closer was a dick move. The maneuver seemed purposeful and threatening. And if their goal was to frighten, then I lean toward the yellow eyes being an ultra-terrestrial—some inter-dimensional entity that gets off on fear.
1800?
The house is old, if you’re curious. Hair in the plaster old. The local historical society has it listed as 1800(?). It was a dairy farm at one point. As far as we know, nothing awful ever happened on the property. My mom still lives there. And I still love it. Even 21 years after moving out, that old farmhouse feels like home. My family and I have had a few other creepy experiences there, and I’ve had times when I’ve gotten some bad vibes, but I don’t feel like the place is haunted.
A supernatural shepherd
Despite how much sleep I lost to yellow eyes, they weren’t all bad. As far as traumatic paranormal events go, they were pretty tame. And they made me believe there’s more to this world than science can explain (yet). If I’d never encountered them, my skepticism might win out whenever I hear a mysterious tale. The yellow eyes fueled an interest in the weird and wild that’s as strong as ever and spurred on an imagination that might have died in primary school. Forever yearning for an explanation, I dreamed up all kinds of monsters and entities to which the eyes might have belonged. In my teens, I started writing about a little girl who wakes up to the yellow eyes of a monster staring at her in her bedroom. That little girl eventually became Sarlona. And the monster morphed into Dagmar. So, if not for the yellow eyes, DRAINED might not exist. An entire (fictional) world might never have been.
So, maybe the next time I’m at Mom’s without the kiddo, I’ll leave both bedroom doors open and thank the void.
K.W. Bernard 