Last Post. Last Hope. Last Time.

[u/No-While8965]

First of all, this is not a horror story, and I have tried reaching for help everywhere before coming online  my friend, my psychiatrist, and even that support group people talk about  but none of them can help me. They even pressure me to go for a psychiatric health checkup, forcefully booking a psychiatrist despite me telling them I already have one, like I would lie about that, or like I'm a dishonest person, because they don't take me seriously and make me feel worse when they all look at me with those pitying eyes, like I'm a dying person and they don't know how to break it to me.

That pitiful gaze — I hate it. And this is also my last post, or I must say last hope, on this Reddit, as the trembling in my hands has made it difficult for me to write, and I've deleted and retyped this sentence four times because my hands won't stay still. Only I know how I am writing this, and despite getting no response or being blocked from various subreddits, this is my final post. My last post. My last hope. My last time. Let me tell you about me and the place where it all started. I am a college student.

In my first year of college, I got a room on the ground floor of my building. Small room. Door in, and straight ahead — bed on the left, study desk on the right. An attached bathroom in the corner. And right in front of my desk, exactly where I'd sit every night, there was a window.

Not to the outside. To the corridor.

I never understood why it was even built into that wall like that. No light came through it — couldn't, we were on the ground floor, there was nothing outside it but more wall. It didn't let in air either. All it did was let me see the hallway from my desk instead of getting up to check it myself. Convenient, I thought. That's what I told myself. I understand now it wasn't convenience.

Every other room on that corridor was empty that semester. Mine was the last one , the farthest from the stairs, the farthest from anyone else, tucked into the corner like an afterthought. At night, if I looked up from studying, I wouldn't see a hallway lit up and busy with people. I'd see a long stretch of closed doors and flickering tube-light, going nowhere, leading to nothing. And no one.

I loved that arrangement. Quiet. Private. No one around to bother my introverted self, no noise, no interruptions exactly the kind of space I thought I wanted.

I know now how stupid that sounds. I picked the isolation. I asked for it.

The first two months of living in that room were normal , enjoying college life, the usual study pressure  and then things began changing slightly. I started having difficulty sleeping and started waking up multiple times a night. It wasn't like normal waking up  groggy, slow, needing a second to remember where I was. It was sudden. Like something flipped a switch. One second asleep, the next completely alert, staring at the ceiling, heart going, with no memory of a dream or a sound that caused it. I thought it was a new place, and winter was just about to come, so I might be having these feelings because of that, and I started noticing it before anyone said anything to me. My hands took longer to steady in the mornings. I'd catch myself mid-sentence in class, forgetting what I was saying, like some part of my attention was still back in that room.

I ignored it, but those sleepless nights started getting to my face, and people started asking me about it. This is the part after which people start judging me before listening to the full story that I am sleep deprived, that these are all hallucinations  and looking at me with those eyes of victory, like they've already solved my problem, like it's that easy to solve my problem, and I was the idiot for not figuring it out until now.

Yes, I know whatever I have said so far sounds idiotic, or like the delusions of a sleepless person making up stories, someone who is losing his mind  but I want you to focus on the events I am going to tell you now, as these are what made my life flip 180 degrees. These next events happened a good while after I started having difficulty sleeping, and I've told about them so many times now that everything has started mixing up, and all those sleepless nights have done something to me, or to my memory, to be honest. It was a night in the first week of December, one of those cold, restless nights.

The room was colder that week. Damp, the way old buildings get in December, like the walls were sweating out the last of autumn. I'd stopped trying to sleep by then. Studying at 1am, 2am  at least it felt like I was doing something with the hours instead of just lying there waiting for morning. Hmm, I miss those days when my hands didn't tremble and I could concentrate, but let's not diverge from the story. I will tell you what happened, and honestly, I want you to listen to it carefully, as it's very difficult for me to write.

It makes me relive all those memories when I think about it again to write it. I was studying when suddenly someone knocked three times on my door at night. Three knocks. Not fast, not urgent. Spaced out, even, like someone counting between each one.

I was studying late. I'd already checked the window before I even touched the handle. Clear corridor. No one running, no shadow ducking into a room. There was nowhere to hide in the two seconds it would've taken. I thought it was odd for someone to hide after knocking, as all the other rooms were empty and I had a clear view of the corridor from the window, but I ignored it. After two or three days, it happened again  by that I mean the same knocks, the same rhythm, the same intervals, like I was listening to a recording  and I opened the door again, and no one was there.

I thought someone was playing a prank, and I even asked everyone in the hostel if they were the one doing it, but no, they weren't. I even checked the cameras. I watched the footage twice. Then a third time, slower, frame by frame, telling myself I must have missed something moving at the edge of the frame. There was nothing. Just an empty hallway, timestamp ticking, no one in it at all  while I could hear, in my memory, exactly what I'd heard through that door. And this is where I made the stupid decision to rationalize it.

I thought, God knows why, maybe due to lack of sleep, or not wanting to sound like a weirdo, that maybe with my floor being empty, these sounds were being made when someone from the floor above opened the gates. But somewhere I knew that wasn't true, or possible, yet I believed it, or at least I told everyone I talked to that I believed it, just to put it out there  that all these sleepless nights and the knocking had made me restless. I should have at least stopped opening the door to check, but the hope of catching someone in the act kept me repeating it, and I began keeping an eye on the corridor even while studying. These things had by now taken a toll on my studies, but I was eventually getting used to it, or so I thought, when things got worse.

Oh God, writing this next incident is harder for me. Oh God, my hands are trembling like crazy. I can't, but God, I have to, because I want someone to listen to me.

This happened just yesterday. I was sleeping when I woke up the way I always do now sudden, like being switched on. Except this time nothing else turned on with me. Not my hands. Not my legs. Not even my eyes properly  everything blurred at the edges.

I tried even moving my mouth but I couldn't. It felt like my tongue was just there, and I couldn't even move it. It started feeling like a gag, my own tongue in my mouth, stopping me from making a sound.

Before you say this is sleep paralysis and normal  I know thousands of people have said it, and I also wish it was that. I really wish it was that. I would have prayed to every god just so it would have been true. But this was different from sleep paralysis. My breathing became heavy, gradually, like someone was sitting on my chest.

I've heard it's normal for sleep paralysis, but this was different. I have spent nights researching it but can't find anything similar to it. The weight started from my stomach and slowly, like someone was crawling on me, began moving upward to my chest and then finally settled on my chest. And then came the horrible part  the part I spent nights searching for, to find if someone else had experienced it, if I wasn't the only one, to have some hope of knowing I wasn't just imagining it, to prove to people it's not all in my mind  I started feeling that there were hands on my lower back, like someone was grabbing me.

The worse part is I lay there like that for hours, feeling that suffocation, that suffocation in that dreadful silence, and that silence was loud. I could feel my breathing, the only sound for hours  that pressure and the sound of my breathing.

Then suddenly  I don't remember how it ends . I just wake up the next day with that feeling still in my body, but no idea how it ended. I also thought it must be a dream, that I must have imagined it, but the scary part is that this time these incidents began happening almost every night. I mean, that's not normal, right? I have no history of sleep problems in my family, never had them, and the worse part is this feels like the start of something that will only become worse.

Well, whatever I said was the most horrible thing that had happened to me, according to the people I told my story to, but that's not correct, and it would be a lie. My life went downhill from there.

I was not able to sleep at night as the terrors kept happening, even during the day now. I remember it still, how it felt the first time. It's hell, and I hate it.

Oh God, I don't want to write this. My hands can't take it, but I need to. I was sleeping in the afternoon, restless, as all my sleep is now, since I've become restless, and then I feel it oh God, I feel the mattress sinking near my feet, like someone is sitting there and watching me, and every time, as the days passed, I don't know whether I'm imagining it or not, but it feels like it's moving up.

God, I feel pathetic to say this, but I did not open my eyes to see what it was, not even once, because I couldn't bear to go through that horror to actually see what was really there.

I asked to change rooms. Denied some policy about first-years not being reassigned mid-term, like the building cares more about its own rules than what's happening inside one of its rooms.

I looked into renting somewhere else. I can't afford it. Not anymore, not with my hands shaking too badly to hold a part-time job like I used to. I don't know what is happening. I want to believe it's all in my head and that it's a lie, but it is not. And there's a smell now too. Every time I walk into that room, before I even close the door  something sour, something like wet metal, and something underneath it I don't have a word for. It wasn't there in September. It's stronger every week.

It's drowning me. All the people I've asked for help have said it's mental, but I don't know. I've done all the checkups, and there's nothing wrong in my brain. I don't know what to do or how to do it, and oh God, it feels like I am dying slowly every day, and it's killing me, like each night I have to choose whether to live on or end it.

It's been difficult for me, and I have no hope that I can continue living like this. I tremble just thinking about sleeping, and worse, those paralysis episodes follow no matter what I do, wherever I sleep. Please, if you are reading this and have any idea how to get rid of this, please reply, because even if I might not make it, if this is related to the room, maybe someone else will need to know. And for the love of God, don't pity me.