Woman Reportedly Wakes Up to Find "Charcoal-Colored Cloud Shape" Emanating an "Amber Light" Floating in Her Bedroom

*(Emily Wayland / Singular Fortean Society)*

Investigator Mike Lucas recently put the Singular Fortean Society in contact with a woman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who said that she awoke one late summer night in 2009 to find a “charcoal-colored cloud shape” emanating an “amber light” near the ceiling of her bedroom.

The woman agreed to the use of her first name, Jane, in this article.

"It was probably late summer 2009. It was a long time ago, and it only happened that one time. Other things have happened in that house, but this is the one thing I can’t categorize," Jane said in a phone interview with investigator Tobias Wayland. "It was in the middle of the night. I was woken up. I don’t typically wake up at night. I can’t say that it was a noise or anything that woke me up. I just woke up."

I’m a very pragmatic, practical, logical person, and what I saw in the room, I couldn’t put any reason to it. At the foot of the bed, near the ceiling, there’s a corner wall there with built-in dressers and next to the built-in dressers there’s a window that had a window air conditioner in it. There were little cracks of light on both sides of where the window air conditioner fits into the window.
So, up in that corner, on the ceiling, there was an object that, I would say, was probably four feet wide by two or three feet tall, sitting near the top of the ceiling. It was a charcoal-colored cloud shape, but it wasn’t cloud-like. Cloud-shaped meaning it had puffiness around it, but it looked solid, a solid charcoal color. Inside of it, there looked like there was an amber light, kind of trying to emanate from the inside out. You could see gradations of this amber light from the inside to the outside of the charcoal cloud.
If I had a shoe or something that I could have thrown at it, I swear it would have bounced off, because that’s how solid it looked. But the amber light from the inside, that’s what got me.
Immediately I thought, "I’m dreaming. I must have woken up during a dream and that’s still part of my dream. Okay, I’ll just close my eyes and when I wake up it will be gone."
I closed my eyes and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I peeked up and it was still there. I’m rubbing my eyes, pinching myself. I’m awake.
I’m one hundred percent awake and I’m looking at this thing going, "I don’t know what that is."
So, I turned over, and maybe 20 minutes later I thought it’s going to fade away because clearly if it’s not part of a dream it must be a hallucination. 20 minutes go by, I turn over, it’s still there. It’s not moving. There’s nothing about it that’s mobile or foggy or anything. It’s just hanging there solid.
Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, because the next morning it wasn’t there. I wasn’t afraid.
I wasn’t calling anybody saying, "Something strange happened last night."
It wasn’t like that.

Jane was at a loss to explain the event, although it wasn’t the only seemingly paranormal phenomenon she’d experienced in the house.

"I’ve had other occurrences in the house," she said. "I'm the third owner of the house, after it was built in 1948. I learned from the granddaughter of the first owner that her grandfather, who had built the house, had passed away in the kitchen. That much I do know."

"If you want to talk spiritual stuff, I’ve always felt protected in the house," she continued. "I bought the house myself, and a few years later I was married for just a short time. During that time, there was a lot of chaos and drama and psychological problems in the house. A lot of stress and a lot of illness."

Also during that time, during the summer of 2002, a peculiar event involving an electric typewriter occurred—one for which she still doesn’t have an explanation.

According to Jane,

My then husband had an office in the basement, and one day when I was home alone, I heard this noise. I went down into the basement, and here it was his electric typewriter going nuts. It was just typing over and over. It was weird.
I thought, "Well, something’s wrong with it. Why is it on and typing away? There’s no paper in it."
Then I looked at the on/off switch and it was in the off position. It was plugged in, but it was off.
When my husband came home, I said, "You’re never going to believe what happened. That typewriter of yours just started typing by itself."
He asked, "Wow, was there paper in it?"
I said, "No, there’s no paper in it."
He said, "Put some paper in it."
I said, "It’s not going to happen again. It was an electronic glitch. It’s not going to happen again."
He insisted, "Put some paper in it."
I put some paper in it.
Within the week—he was home the second time—I heard it going off again. We both ran downstairs, and it was typing away. I wish I was making this up, because I’m shaking now thinking about it, but at the time I wasn’t afraid. I just thought it was a glitch.
It was typing letters in a sequence, and when it stopped, because he unplugged it, again, it was in the off position. I pulled the paper out, and he’s trying to make a pattern out of the letters to figure out if it says anything. It didn’t have any vowels. He was trying to see if it would make any sense if you put vowels in it. He thought it was saying ‘leviathan’ over and over again.
I said, "I don’t know, it could be."

Jane said that the sequence of letters was LVTNC.

The repeating sequence was in an italic font, something Jane's husband at the time said was impossible.

"I could say that there was something wrong with the typewriter, I could easily accept that, but then again, it happened two times and I’ve always felt this protective spirit in the house," she said. "[My ex-husband] told me that the script it was written in wasn’t in that typewriter. It was a plain, one-script typewriter from the 1970s. It only had one font, and this was a scripted font. I said, ‘It can’t be. You have to have two fonts in here. One italic and one normal.’ But he claimed there was no italic font in the typewriter. I thought maybe he just didn’t know that he had it."

Others have experienced strange phenomena in the house, too, she said, including her niece's now ex-husband whom Jane had hired to work on the drywall in her basement.

"He didn’t like to work in the house by himself, because he said he felt like my house had spirits or something and he would hear them when he was in the basement," said Jane.

As for herself, Jane had only one other strange experience in the house.

"The only other time I can remember was—it's a cape cod style home, so the upstairs is like a double room, like a bunked out dormer style—I was upstairs one night, and I heard some clunking and clanking sounds coming from the bathroom," she said. "I very carefully went downstairs and investigated. It sounded like something metal hitting the inside of the bathtub. When I checked it out, there was nothing out of place."

Jane added that she later found out the house's second owners had a son who passed away in the house.

But these experiences had been with Jane prior to buying the house in Kenosha.

One night at 9 p.m., in the summer of 1992, she encountered an invisible phenomenon in her one-bedroom apartment in Montgomery, Illinois, that would spark continued harassment by unknown forces.

Jane said,

I had spent the evening with some friends from church—it was a summer night—I came home, and I had a laundry basket in the bathroom and I went to toss my socks in the laundry basket. You know how much force and effort it takes to throw something two feet to land in the basket. So, I went to toss the socks and they were going through the air and it hit like this invisible wall. Vertically, the socks dropped short of the basket and my eyes just bugged out of my head. How did that happen? It was like midair they hit a vertical, invisible wall and slid down short of the basket. That was weird.
From that moment on, that night, there was something there. It haunted me until I had to move out. It was an ongoing darkness. It didn’t let me sleep. I just felt kind of harassed. There were other phenomena. The phone would ring many times of the day and night, and there would be no one there. Was that somebody harassing me or was it something else? I don’t know, but there was never anybody else on the other line.

These strange phenomena, it turned out, had been with Jane and her family since she was a child.

One of Jane's younger brothers, Jim, experienced a series of events as a child in their Kenosha home that left him afraid of the basement, despite it being fully furnished, including a rec room.

"There are four of us kids," she said. "The boys’ bedroom has the most activity, even now. My brother Jim, he’s maybe the sensate or intuitive in the home, he took on everybody’s emotional energy. He was the trouble maker and the black sheep. I think he couldn’t handle all of the sensations that he was experiencing all of the time."

His bedroom was—or the boys’ bedroom was—the hub of all the activity, too. He would wake up in the basement in a panic. He was always afraid of the basement, I think a lot of kids are, but he would be running out of the basement, saying he woke in the basement after a man had carried him down there.
My mom and dad were like, "No, you were sleep walking."
I don’t know if they ever had any proof of him sleepwalking, but that would be the only explanation for waking up in a room that you don’t want to be in.
I asked him about this as an adult, not too many years ago, because something else happened to me in the house as an adult. I had to ask him, "What happened? Because everybody was saying you were sleepwalking."
He said to me, "Jane, I’m telling you now, I’m a grown adult and I’m telling you that I was not sleepwalking. A man carried me to the basement."
He had had things happen to him where he’d reach under the bottom bunk of their bunk beds to get something, and I don’t remember if he said he felt a man’s bare arm or a man’s arm grabbed him, but it was one or the other. But he felt a body under the bed.
I know that he said that [the man] was hairless, he didn’t have body hair, like his arms were bare. I don’t know if he had too much of a visual.
Even now, he doesn’t want to be in the basement by himself.

Jane isn’t particularly bothered by the basement, it’s the guest room—her brothers’ former room—that she doesn’t like.

One series of events in the room, experienced while staying there to assist her aging parents, she found particularly disturbing.

"I don’t mind the basement, but what I don’t like is the guest bedroom that used to be the boys’ bedroom," she said.

Without any preconceived notions about anything in the room, because at the time I still believed my brother had been sleepwalking and imagining things, one night while lying in bed I felt someone patting me on the head. Like a loving gesture, you know, pat, pat, pat on my head.
And I'm thinking, "That’s not a fly, that’s not a hair out of place, that is a hand patting me on the head."
I flipped around, and there’s no one there, but my heart is pounding and I’m thinking, "Who is here?"
You don’t sleep after that very well. It happened more than once, maybe three or four times.
Finally, I said, "You’ve got to go. You can’t be here."
One time I was actually sitting on the hide-a-bed—I’ve seen this in movies, I’ve seen this in TV shows, it doesn’t happen in real life, but it did—it was like someone sat down next to me. The mattress went down, like someone was sitting next to me. When that happened, I thought we’d better get somebody in here to tell the spirit to go.

Two live-in caregivers, hired to assist her parents, also experienced the strange head patting, according to Jane.

One of the caregivers was let go after resuming a drug habit, and the other later died in the bedroom of a heart disorder.

Jane also said that at a young age she would experience extra sensory perception (ESP), at times being aware of things that hadn’t yet happened or had happened outside of the range of her normal senses.

Her experience closely mirrors that of Deshunda Johnson, whom Wayland interviewed in September of 2020.

Johnson said she had similarly grown up experiencing a mixture of psychic and paranormal phenomena, although most of her experiences were centered around UFO sightings.

Also similar is the case of Olga, a Minnesota woman who contacted the Singular Fortean Society in November of 2020 to discuss a series of paranormal events involving shadow people had by her and her family over the course of the last eight years at their home in Rogers, a city roughly 10 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

She also described to Wayland certain psychic experiences had in her life, although they didn’t make it into the article later published by the Society.

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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