The Breather
submitted by Jennifer Crutcher '99

My sophomore year, Marisha Bourgeois and I lived together in Meta Glass 303. She and I both were heavy sleepers and always went to bed at around the same time. We had just finished watching CNN and were tired. It was around 2 a.m. so we hit the hay.

At five that morning, I awoke to a very loud, heavy breathing.

I immediately thought it was Marisha, but as I looked over at her, I saw her looking at me. We were both awake and obviously not making the noise.

She says to me "Is that you" and I say, "No" and she says "It's not me" and suddenly the breathing ceased. We were both so tired we just went back to sleep. We'd worry about it in the morning.

The next morning, we found that both of our hooks on our closets that held our bath robes had fallen off and our robes lay in a crumpled heap in the floor.

So we started talking about the breather.

First, no one could have been in our room because Marisha and I faithfully locked our door every night before we went to sleep. Always. We had both been startled out of sleep by this noise at the same time which was unusual.

We asked our neighbors about it the next day and they had no clue what we were talking about, and the hall had been quiet that night, unusually.

What I remember about the breathing is that it was hard and loud and deliberate. It sounded like a human being, not an animal or an outside noise. I was sure it was coming from inside the room. Whatever it was that was breathing sounded very tall, because the noise came from very close to my bed, and sounded high above me, and when "it" figured out that Marisha and I heard it, it ceased.

It scared us once we started talking about it, and we still remember it, and tell people about it.

We are down to earth and there was no way we imagined that. Something was in there, watching us sleep, and breathing.

Maybe Daisy ran up three flights of stairs and into our room and was panting. But it didn't sound like a woman and it didn't sound friendly, as I have heard Daisy to be. Has this happened to anyone else?

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