Everyone loves a ghost story, but living through one is a lot spookier than hearing one. I say ghost because I don't know what it could have really been, I can tell you it was some kind of woman, but that is about it.

It was the summer of 2020, I cant remember if it was June or July, but covid shut the world down and traveling wasn't an option unless you had a car and your destination was outside somewhere. My family loves the outdoors, so we wanted to go to a place we haven't been before that gave us the option for outdoor activites. My mom suggested we go to Yosemite and take the Hetch Hetchy trail so we could see where our water was coming from. We live in the San Francisco Bay area near the Crystal Springs reservoir which gets its water from this part of Yosemite, and thought it would be fun to see the source. She found a cabin located in a nearby forest on AirBnB so we could be close to the national park, and it was very cute in the pictures so we booked it and left a few days later.

The cabin was even cuter in person. My brother and I went upstairs and looked at the two bedrooms, one had two twin beds, and the other had a queen. We figured we would be sharing the room with the two beds so we entered it and picked which bed we wanted. The room was rectangular and had a tall, slanted ceiling with a section cut out for a vertical window to the left, on the wall opposite from the door. In the cut-out section, infront of the window was a tall lamp standing at about 5'7. I picked the bed to the left of the door that was facing the lamp and window and my brother picked the bed on the opposite side of the room that was facing my bed. That night we didn't do very much, I played Animal Crossing for hours while my brother scrolled through his phone until it was time to go to bed.

Before summer started, my brother and I got prescribed sleep medication—Ambien to be exact. Since covid made life boring, this was also the summer that my brother and I were using our dab pens (weed if you don't know) every night once it hit 10:30pm, and the combination of the two made the night very fun for us before we passed out.

If you don't know what ambien is, it is a hypnotic sleep drug that warps your perception of reality and memories of that night. Some people eat out of the trashcan, others cover their countertops in peanut butter, if you want to read other examples go check out r/ambien.

The following day we went on the trail and it was amazing, but also very hot so we were exhausted by the time we got home. We had dinner, everything was going according to our schedule, and at the end of that night at 10:30pm, my brother and I followed our night time drug routine and eventually laid down to fall asleep.

This is where it got weird.

I turned to my left so I was facing the wall, and away from my brother. My eyes were heavy and I was blinking myself to sleep, but right before I closed my eyes to fully fall asleep I noticed something dark at the foot of my bed. The room was dark but the window had no curtain so there was a bit of light shining into the room from the moon.

I opened my eyes a little wider to focus on the shape and saw that it was a tall silhouette of something that had what looked like a head. It slowly glided to the right of the bed and out of my line of sight, and I was very curious as to what it was doing. I didn't take any of this seriously because I had convinced myself I was imagining things due to the drugs I was using, even though neither had ever made me hallucinate before, but I still turned my body to lie on my back. I didn't open my eyes fully because I was a little bit spooked since, drugs or not, dark figures in your room are things you see in horror movies. My eyes were lightly cracked open so I could see, but closed enough to look like I was still sleeping.

That's when I looked directly at a black, opaque, and faded around the edges...thing? Almost like a shadow you can't see through. It was bent over my bed at a 90 degree angle directly over my face. I would say I was making eye contact with it, but it had no eyes.

My eyes opened a little wider and I think it noticed me noticing it, because it stood up straight and moved away quickly behind the lamp. It did not walk, it glided, and as it glided towards the lamp its height shrunk about half a foot, and it crouched behind the lamp as if it was trying to hide. I stared at it, imobilized by fear, it was crouching behind the lamp while it grasped the pole, and finally I was able to move and decided that was enough for the night and that I just needed to go to sleep. So I turned back to my side, facing the wall, and fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning and asked my brother if he had seen anything weird that night. I told him about the black figure and his eyes opened wide and he said he saw her too.

Now, before talking to him, I didn't know it was a woman. I had just seen the figure of a person-like thing. I told him everything I had seen before I went to bed and then he told me his point of view:

He was laying there on his bed that faced my bed and he had opened his eyes to see a dark figure, bent at a 90 degree angle over me, next to the side of my bed. Then he saw it straighten up, and shrink/glide/crouch behind the lamp. He noticed I hadn't reacted, thinking I had still been asleep, so he closed his eyes and turned his body away from the lamp—trying to go to sleep because it couldn't have been real.

That's when the floor boards started to creak. Keep in mind at this point I was asleep so I didn't hear or see any of this. He said it sounded like the floor was creaking closer and closer to him, not like footsteps, but if there was even pressure making its way towards his bed.

He kept his eyes closed and his back facing the sounds, when all of a sudden he heard a quiet, "Hey." coming from behind him.

He froze and tried to ignore it.

Another, yet slightly louder, "HEY." was said. That's when he could tell it was a woman's voice. He was still frozen in fear, and didn't move a muscle. He waited a few seconds before he heard the drawer of the night stand being played with, so he mentally counted down from 10, before opening his eyes and turning to look in the direction of the noise.

Nothing was there.

After we had told each other our points of view from that night, we rushed downstairs to the kitchen where our parents were making breakfast. My brother and I love haunted, scary, and horror related things, so with a hint of excitement along side the fear—we told them the cabin was haunted.

"Stop saying things like that, this place is not haunted and you're not scaring anyone," was our dad's response. He doesn't believe in anything that is mystic/supernatural and definitely doesn't believe in ghosts. He is always the first to dismiss these things, and thinks there is always an explanation. Our mom dismissed our haunted accusation as well, with a simple "No its not."

My brother and I tried to explain more and they weren't listening until my brother said the word "woman". The second that word left his mouth my mom dropped the spatula she was using for the eggs on the stove, and looked directly at us, and the color drained from her face. This was followed by her saying "A woman tried to wake me up last night while I was sleeping."

My brother and I turned to each other and just looked at each other in shcok, now that our experiences were being confirmed by someone who had not taken any drugs.

We left the cabin later that day to return home, and it was never spoken of again, until later in the year when my brother and I tried to talk to our mom about it, wanting to talk about ghost experiences, she acted like it never happened.

She chose to repress that memory, but my brother and I choose to relive it every now and then by telling people who haven't heard the story before. It sounds much better when we tell it together because our points of view paint the whole picture, but to this day it still gives me chills, thinking about its eyeless dark face right infront of mine. I've had a few other strange experiences, but this one was the weirdest since it was originally confirmed by three people including myself. I intend to go back to Yosemite again, but I'm sure as hell staying away from that cabin and any one near it.