I don't ask anyone to believe this story, but for some reason everyone who has heard it has accepted it as truth, and thus it has become the basis for training at ESPER, the society for Extraordinary Supernatural Phenomena Explored and Revealed. If you can believe what I'm about to say and not go nuts, then you can believe and handle just about anything.

The story opens up in a small town in Virginia. More properly, it begins in a small seminary in a small town in Virginia, neither of which anyone had ever heard of unless they were unfortunate enough to be there. I was in my second year then, along with my friend and colleague Phil. The men's dormitory had recently moved to a newly-renovated building... a building which before its reconstitution had been used by homeless people, drug dealers, and cultists for their various purposes. I was one of the few people on campus who had gone there before it was repaired and reopened, and I can tell you first-hand that the place had already-existing supernatural activity, as well as physical evidence of the three things I have just mentioned.

After not very long in the new dorms, strange things began to happen. It was simple at first; a voice in the night from the hallway which was empty of people, footsteps and banging where the dorm dean said there had been no one, and bedroom doors opening with no one behind them. This escalated to lights flipping themselves on and off, one of the bathrooms having stall doors open and close on their own, including several events where they would all point at a person or follow that person around the room, and almost nightly incidents of people running back to their rooms and jumping under the covers because "something" was following them.

One night, all of this culminated in an event that none of us will ever forget. What you are about to read is not exactly easy to digest, and some of it has actually been cut out to make it more "realistic" (if the whole story were here hardly anyone would believe it), but this is the absolute truth, and there are around thirty eyewitnesses to this event, although almost all of them do not like to talk about it.

Two of the bigger guys were wrestling in the hallway, just having fun the night before a test. There were about five others in the room, including myself. At the conclusion of the fight, when the two were no longer touching each other, one of their arms shattered (as in, every bit of the bone in his left upper arm splintered apart inside his arm with no outside force). He silently blacked out, falling to the floor. At this point in time, everyone in the dorm began to experience what can only be described as "shadow people" running everywhere throughout the dorm, all in the direction of where this occurred. Lights began to flicker, and the overall temperature in the dorm began to drop drastically as we tried to figure out what had happened to our fallen classmate.

After the ambulance came and drove off with him, we retreated to our beds for the night, many of us gathering together to pray for our fallen friend. It was around one in the morning when the sound occurred again... and again... and again... of the boy's arm being broken. The sound echoed repeatedly through the hallway, the same sickening sound of his arm shattering. An uproar occurred, and I got up from my bed to see what was the matter. Before I could get to the door, someone began to bang on it and scream my name. I opened the door to find a student standing before me, white as a ghost.

"McDermott, we need you," he said, "Please hurry."

I arrived to find most of the people in the dorm gathered around a door at the end of the hallway. I arrived and asked what was going on, and everyone flocked around me. I was told that something was in the room at the very end of the hallway, and that it had trapped Phil inside. As I was about to enter, the dorm supervisor strode down the hallway.

"Everyone go to bed!" he shouted. He was appraised of the situation, and decided to take matters into his own hands. He walked into the room. Immediately, he walked back out, his skin so pale it was translucent.

"Y'all do whatever you want," he said. "I'm going to bed." He began to walk down the hall, but when the other students began chanting my name, begging me to go in, he turned around and came back.

I walked up to the door, only looking like I was brave on the outside, but knowing the truth was I was scared to death. I could feel whatever was going on in the pit of my stomach, and knew what I was about to encounter would be life-changingly terrible. I opened the door, turning one last time to my friends and bidding them not to follow me.

The room was freezing cold, so cold that I could all of a sudden see my breath hanging thickly in the air in front of me even at the doorway. I stepped in, and the second thing I realized was that the room was pitch black... even though the lights were all on. You could see the light bulbs burning in place, but there was absolutely no light escaping them. I took several steps deeper in the room, and as my eyes adjusted I began to see what was going on... Phil was cowering in his bed, and a tall, black shadowed figure of a man around ten feet (almost the full height of the room) was moving around in front of him. It was clearly visible, even through the intense darkness, and its eyes were plainly red spheres in its head.

I told it to release my friend, but before I could finish the statement, I was literally swept up off my feet a good foot or so and held against the wall, unable to move. Luckily, several of the other students, including the dorm supervisor who redeemed himself by coming back to my aid, had failed to listen to my command and were right behind me. It took three of them to pull me out of the room.

At this point, what had only been a faint whisper before became louder and more clear, although we never could quite figure out what it meant. The closest we can approximate what we heard to be was "Aboullaboush Abominahere," repeated endlessly.

We regrouped in the hallway, and I organized the students to all come together with me. Many refused at first, but eventually all of us burst through the door, and I commanded the spirit to leave. After about a half hour of this, during which time Phil was able to leap up and join with us, the thing disappeared, the lights slowly coming back up and the room's temperature slowly increasing.

The next morning at breakfast, I (having not been able to sleep the night before) was the first person out of the dorms. One other girl had also arrived.

"So," she said, "what happened over there last night?"

I asked her what she meant. She told me:

"Well, I know something had to happen over at your dorm last night. Something happened at ours. The front door opened wide, and there were these footsteps in the hallway, and as they came down the hallway each of our doors opened, but there was nobody there."

This story has been told a hundred times since then, and almost every time without fail it has been believed even though I normally tell it with all of the things I left out of this version. It has been used to open prospective members of my paranormal society, ESPER (Extraordinary Supernatural Phenomena Explored and Revealed) up to the idea that what they believe about the paranormal is only the tip of the iceberg of truth. I don't ask you to believe it, but I swear that every word of this story is the truth.