The Man on the Balcony

My junior year of high school we hosted a foreign exchange student from Brazil named Romero. It was his senior year and he lived in the room right across from mine, here in the second floor of our house. That was almost seven years ago. Crazy how time flies!!

Romero is back in the United State visiting. He spent two weeks in Florida with his parents and is spending two weeks here in Colorado with us. He has been here for a week-and-a-half now and it's amazing to me how much he remembers. His english picked right back up to what it was before, despite not having spoke it hardly at all for six years. He understands humor and slang, although some newer stuff we have to explain to him. He's not afraid to ask questions, like before. But basically, his mind remembers everything!

But I tell you all this because of something else that is pretty prevalent in my life, living here back at home.

I call him The Dark Man.

I believe in spirits, in angels, and demons....and have always been fascinated by the paranormal. It's not something I'm extra sensitive to, just something that I believe is there.

Well we built this house we live in. My parents designed it, we built it, we moved in. There are no previous owners, no deaths or whatever, just us. But about two years after we moved in, I started getting the sense of being watched. I shook it off for the most part, just blaming it on my fear of the dark coupled with my habit when I was younger of watching horror movies. I sorta freak out and get paranoid in the night time. That is...until I started seeing shadows occasionally out of the corner of my eye. I still just rationalized that what I was seeing was me wanting to see/sense something. Until I started seeing a dark cloaked man in the room across the balcony.

I told my mom and she just excused it, saying my overactive mind was getting the best of me. She said that I wasn't seeing anything and there's nothing that could possibly be there. We built this house remember?

So I never told anyone about this dark man with the trench coat and hat that I started to see on a semi-regular basis.

That is until one night when my best friend Gwen was staying the night. She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth and take off her make-up and she came running into my room a little freaked out saying she thought she saw a man in the room across the balcony. I calmly asked her what she was talking about and to describe him to me. When she did, I told her that she wasn't crazy and what she had just seen was my ghost.

Same exact thing happened with my best friend Britt about six months later. Without me telling her. She saw him as well. Each describing the same man to me.

A few times I have awoke to him standing near the foot of the bed, with it freaking me out.

Mainly he just observes. He's not bad but he's not too friendly. He's very curious about me and just watches, sometimes from a distance, sometimes up close.

When my Grams lived here, she saw him and experienced him on a regular basis.

When Britton lived here, I once asked him if he had felt like he was being watched. I asked him this one night while we were downstairs getting food late one night in the kitchen. When I moved back home last January, he came back watching me very casually and becoming even more curious-er and observant. When Britton moved in, I could feel that curiousity coming from him alter into another feeling. He became protective, and jealous almost, as I am the main person he has attached to. He started off being territorial from a distance but had started coming "closer" and "closer" the longer that Britton stayed here. I had noticed but didn't know if B had noticed anything. He said he occasionally felt like being watched and said he had seen stuff out of the corner of his eye but he never thought much about it.

Well funny enough, with Britton no longer living here, the feelings of jealousy have resided. He initially started coming closer, blatantly walking into my room one night and scaring the shit out of me. I rolled over and asked him to leave. And since then he has sorta backed off a bit.

Well I tell all this because the other day, as I was sitting downstairs on the couch with my laptop, Romero asked me casually "do you still see the guy upstairs, the ghost?" Bewildered I looked at him and said "All the time! Why, have you seen him?!" And he said yes, he was here when he lived here six years ago and he has seen him every day since he's been back!! Romero even commented on how at first it had freaked him out but he doesn't get a bad vibe from our in-house spirit. He just gets a really curious vibe and Romero gets the vibe that the man is most curious about me. Romero said he almost always sees him upstairs and the man is almost always in the guest bedroom across the hallway.

Sometimes The Dark Man freaks me out. I don't know what to make of him. In fact, right now he's sitting somewhere near my door watching me, very intently trying to figure out what I'm doing. This sounds weird but I can just feel him. But at the same time, it's kind of comforting to know that it's someone who sorta watches out for me but isn't afraid to make it known to others that believe in spirits that he is present.

At least I know I'm not crazy!!

I don't know why, but I just wanted to share about the man on the balcony. Sometimes I wonder why he's still here, why he just resides here watching....I want to help him and figure out who he is. But how do I do that when he's just a spirit who has somehow attached himself to this house and to me?!