Ghost stories

[emjay]

When I was a kid I was in bed and thought I heard my mom coming up the steps, my room didn't have a door, just a gate to keep my baby sister out, and I heard it open. Then she came over to my bed. I had in mind to scare her and was pretending to be asleep. When her cold hand touched my shoulder I opened my eyes to say 'boo!' and no one was there. I spent the next hour or two with my head under my covers.

I was sure it was a ghost then, but I'm not sure what was really going on now. The touch was light and brief, maybe a moth landed on my shoulder for a second or two. Maybe Mom did come up the stairs and opened the gate, but just peeked in, instead of coming all the way over to my bed to check on me; and was extra quiet closing the gate and going back down the stairs (it was only a few stairs).

That loosely reminds me of an experience I had once walking through a field. It was full of cows and I was afraid so I just fixated my eyes forward and just walked on in fear, and had this narrative going on in my head, imagining the cows angrily gathering and following me...so ostrich-style I was afraid to look back, thinking I'd see a mob of angry cows when I did, but when I got to the end and did finally look back, they hadn't moved an inch. So it's amazing what tales your mind can spin while you literally or essentially have your eyes closed.

So in your case, that's what I'd personally guess was going on; an internal narrative both triggered by and susceptible to interpreted outside input (whilst you had your eyes closed) of creaking floorboards and a light touch on your skin, of a moth landing or whatever. Just seems very similar to the sort of expectation I had about that field of cows, kind of like self-hypnosis basically.