The Footsteps and Opaque Mist

Witness: Jennifer Badnarik
Location: Fraser, Michigan
Date of Encounter: 1972

My brother-in-law, Larry, was killed in Vietnam on September 20, 1970. To say his death left an enormous hole in our lives would be an understatement. To this day, we often speak of him and remember him fondly as a much beloved member of our family.

I have always been very close to my eldest sister. She and my brother-in-law were married only three years when he died. Having been widowed at age 23, she decided to remain on her own and live in the house they had recently purchased. Thus began my frequent visits to stay the night on the weekends and keep her company. 

One night, not quite two years after Larry's death, we had both been in bed for less than a half hour. I was 15 years old — my sister was 25 at the time. Neither one of us had ever had any type of encounter that we considered out-of-the-ordinary, but this one night would change that.

As we began to doze off after our customary chatting between rooms — I slept in her spare room directly across the hallway from her bedroom with our doors open — we both clearly heard footsteps crossing the kitchen floor, not a dozen feet down the hallway from where we slept. The footsteps sounded like someone was wearing heavy, leather boots and when they reached the carpet in the hallway, the footsteps naturally silenced a bit with only the sound of heavy padding and an occasional creak to give away the fact that they were still coming down the hall.

While this was happening, my sister called out from her room and asked if I could hear that and I answered her immediately that I could. By this time the covers of the bed were securely over my head — there was no way I wanted to see what was going to soon pass by my door — or worse, maybe into my room!

The next thing I knew, my sister was reporting a nearly opaque, adult-sized mist forming in her room, just opposite her bed in front of her dark-pine closet doors. The moon was full that night, so there was just enough light filtering through her shutters to softly illuminate the room so she could clearly see what was happening. 

Although I was nearly sweating with fear, I still asked what the mist was doing — of course hoping in part that it would not float my way! Apparently it hovered for a bit in front of her closet doors, than floated around the bed to the other side of the room before it began to dissipate. Her dog, who slept in her room and would bark at the smallest of unfamiliar sounds, never awoke! Needless to say, we slept little for the remainder of the night. Still, we were convinced that Larry had returned for a visit!

After that incident, while she never received such a visit again, my sister did have a lamp shade that would repeatedly turn askew during the day while she was at work. The lampshade was rectangular in shape, so it was easy to spot when "someone" twisted it around. I witnessed this myself. We would go to bed at night only to find the shade askew again in the morning. This went on in spurts off and on until she sold the house and moved nearly 8 years after the night of the footsteps. The shade was twisted tightly down by it's finial. An earthquake couldn't jar it loose unless the lamp fell completely to the floor. The lamp itself stayed perfectly stationary — only the shade was twisted. We always thought this was Larry's less scary way of letting us know he was still around. The day my sister moved into her new home, the lampshade never twisted askew again. The lamp still sits on the same oak desk that she had it on in her former home all those years ago.