Did you know that certain parts of Dhahran are reputedly haunted? One area in particular seems to be a hive of paranormal activity. During the time I’ve lived here I’ve spoken to a number of residents who claim they have seen apparitions or experienced strange happenings in their houses, and coincidentally all these people lived in the same area at the time they encountered the ghostly goings on.
One of my work colleagues was the first to tell me about his experience. He was a bachelor who had a home office setup in his bedroom. Often during the night he would wake and see an old man sitting at his computer desk. He never felt afraid of his uninvited guest and would go straight back to sleep again; often feeling he had dreamed the whole thing. It happened so frequently, however, that he soon came to realize he wasn’t dreaming.
Another resident, shall we call him Sam, living in the same area, woke one night to find a women standing at the end of his bed surrounded by a glowing light and beckoning him to go with her. He replied in the negative and she disappeared. On another occasion Sam woke to find two young women talking together just by his bedroom door. He watched for a while and they gradually disappeared. The first experience really unnerved him but during the second he felt no fear at all.
While Sam was living in the same house, his next door neighbor had her mother to visit. One day when the mother was in the house on her own, she opened a closet door to get a pair of shoes and saw a pair of legs in them. Thinking that someone was hiding in the back of the closet, but also pretty sure no one could be as she had been in the house all the time, she ran outside and called to Sam who was in his yard. When they looked in the closet again there was no one there!
A good friend of mine, currently living in the same road Sam used to, swears that occasionally she feels someone sit down on the end of her bed at night.
These instances all occurred in the same area, but there was another interesting case elsewhere on the compound. One Thursday evening a man and his wife were getting ready to go out and the wife couldn’t find one of her shoes. She looked everywhere as she wanted to wear them that evening, but gave up after a fruitless search and left the odd shoe by the wall in the bedroom, where it remained all weekend. Both worked but on Saturday the man felt unwell with a bad head cold and called in sick. During the course of the day he made frequent trips upstairs and nothing untoward happened, but on his fourth or fifth trip when he got to the top of the stairs, the pair of shoes (missing one as well) were standing on the top step.
Sweet dreams everyone!
Britney
We at Aramco Expats would like to hear from any of you who have had similar experiences in Dhahran or any of the other Aramco areas. Please email Britney at britneyb@aramcoexpats.com, and include the location where the incident took place. We will publish the most interesting, but please be assured that all responses will be treated in the utmost confidence and no names will be mentioned.