Something happened to my mother.

She told me about it with a thoughtful and confused look, as if she couldn't believe it had happened to her...

That night, my mother spent the night at my sister's apartment. My sister was divorced at the time and lived in the apartment with her small child. My sister worked shifts, so when she worked the night shift, my mother would stay overnight with the child or take him to her place.

This time, the child was slightly ill, and my mother stayed with him overnight while my sister was at work. She put the baby to bed in the bedroom and lay down on the couch in the living room. She woke up in the night (or rather, it was already dawn, and the room wasn't so dark) with something squeezing her chest and finding it very difficult to breathe—as if she had been put into a very tight corset, and it was squeezing and squeezing, preventing her from breathing.  Horror came when my mother opened her eyes and saw hands clasped around her, locked at her solar plexus. They were hands like a monkey's—sinful, with long fingers and knobby knuckles, covered in sparse hair. My mother says that in the dim morning light, she even made out some blue veins on those hands or paws.

You can imagine how wildly my mother's heart pounded. She was a religious person and began silently reciting prayers—all she knew, at first haltingly, as terror made her thoughts race and her words jumbled. She wanted to cross herself, but she couldn't move her hand, and she kept reciting the prayers out loud. The thing behind her, clasping her with its arms, suddenly stirred and gradually began to loosen its grip.  The mother continued to pray, and then something climbed over her somewhere at her feet, climbed off the sofa, and walked into the hallway. The sofa was positioned so that the mother could see the hallway through the glass doors, which were also open. She saw a short figure, resembling a dwarf with an elongated, egg-shaped head, retreating into the hallway. It waddled like a penguin, its lower limbs slapping the floor.

Many strange things had happened in this apartment before: a glass on the kitchen table would suddenly break, and various strange sounds would be heard at night and even during the day—creaks, footsteps, rustling sounds, and so on. They even took the child to a psychic to have his fears "poured out," because one night he was terribly frightened—he screamed that someone was in his crib.  He couldn't really speak yet, he just screamed, cried, and said that either a turtle or something else had jumped into his bed... All this happened before the night Mom saw this something, so they didn't really pay much attention to the strange things that were happening.

After the incident with Mom, they changed this apartment.