My friend Sam

Sam is a strange man. He is very kind, very polite, very melencholly, and, most strangely of all, very dead. Sam is a ghost. He lives in the upstairs hallway in the family house, though he doesn't go as far as either end of it. He knows where the doors are, and though he can enter the rooms if they're open, he can't otherwise.

Sam is average hight, perhaps somewhat slimly built, wearing a 1930's style black or charcoal possibly pinstriped suit and hat, and very nice shiny black shoes without visible laces. He has somewhat long blonde hair, groomed well. His face, as my brother remarked, looks like someone's from a war movie: somewhat strained. We can very rarely see his face, as he usually looks down with the hat obscuring him. He does, however, have a rather shocking smile sometimes. 

His voice is usually somewhat faded, as if he were trying to hide great sadness. It is the kind of voice that seems to presage a good singer. He is very polite, as I mentioned, and speaks with noticably outdated phrasing. He often stops by my and my brother's door at night to wish us to "sleep well".

He doesn't realize most of the time that he's terrifying.

Sometimes he interacts with the solid world. One time, perhaps two months ago, he entered my brother's room at night. There were articles of clothing hanging on the walls and in the closet; Sam made his rounds around the room, slowly and very delicately lifting the clothes off their hangers and letting them drop, then looking at them sadly when they fell. He turned and looked at my brother (lying in his bed trying not to panic), nodded a goodbye to him sadly, and left. Several times he has found things that I've lost, leaving them somewhere out in the open for me. Very often he would sit with his back towards me on the side of my bed, elbows on knees and face in hands.

When I first met Sam, I was nine. That's when I moved into this house. He called me "little girl" for a long time. He called my brother "young sir". He knows my real name, but now he calls me "milady"; he has addressed my brother by his full long name before, and has at least on one occasion called him using his usual name.

Sam is terrifying when he wanders the hall and stands, butlerlike, beside doorways so that people pass him, though judging from mine and my brother's experiences, he doesn't seem to realize it. My brother walked backwards from the bathroom to his bedroom to keep Sam in his sight once; Sam told him to "watch out", and my brother, terrified, looked over his shoulder to see what Sam meant-- it turns out he was about to walk into the door. He turned back and Sam wasn't there. He jumped into bed quickly, but within a few moments Sam was beside his bed, asking if he wanted the door closed (my brother had forgotten to close it as he dashed in; it was usually shut at night). My brother didn't reply, but Sam told him to sleep well and left with a nod, and the door shuddered sligtly further shut as he left.

My brother has seen him break his posture and run as if the devil were chasing him. He has seen him crying, wearing a strange button-down trenchcoat as if returning from a funeral. He has seen him, most terrifyingly, holding a bleeding figure by the banister, obviously having fatally injured him, telling the figure that it was going to be okay until he died. Sam had bid my brother "sleep well" after even this, though he was crying, and my brother said that Sam had picked up on my brother's horror in his politeness.

Sam doesn't want us to face the bad things he's done.

He never shows his hands. One time he stopped me in the hall to talk to me*, and I asked him to show me his hands. He showed me what was in his right hand-- a torn human ear, a hunk of bloody flesh, a gold ring on a gold chain.

He can put on a horrible face with sharkteeth all around and horrible white/burning eyes; he can make beds spin and rock like on water; once, when I challenged him, he warped my bedroom wall and drew rats into the stars on my ceiling in the absolute most horrifyingly trippy experience I have ever lived through.

The cat, Smokey, won't go down Sam's part of the hallway. The old cat, Rusty, was much bolder and did, though at one point he got into a physical confrontation with him (I don't know who won; I was too terrified to look).

*I had several weeks earlier, the last time I was back from college, been talking to my friend about Sam. My friend had proposed that he come down to my house and we set up an audience for our spectral friend. Sam had thought when I said "soon" I meant the next time I came back; I assured him that I merely meant for my friend to come by during this cycle (something like mid-Ocrober through perhaps March; he does show up during the rest of the year more rarely, though. He also seems to be unable of leaving the hallway unless it's only my brother or I alone. In addition, it must at least be murky out.)