Under the Bath

I work from home and, until recently, slept with my computer on, as I've been unable to fall asleep without the light on since childhood (only when I was extremely tired). A month ago, I started feeling like someone was watching me. Of course, this feeling had occurred from time to time before (it happens to everyone), but now it became simply unbearable. I could no longer sit in the dark at the computer; I constantly looked around, kept the overhead light on, but it didn't help—I still felt someone's presence. Needless to say, I only fell asleep with the overhead light on. And in the last month, when it started getting light outside early, I couldn't fall asleep with the overhead light on. I waited until morning and only then did I fall asleep. All night, I simply lay in bed, tossing and turning, and when I got tired of that, I sat down at the computer. At first, I chalked it all up to mental exhaustion, but after a recent incident, I don't even know what to think.

That evening, I decided to take a bath. One edge of the bathtub touches the wall, and on the other side, there's a gap of about forty centimeters between the wall and the bathtub. On that side, there are basins on the edge of the bathtub. A clothes and towel drying rack hangs above the bathtub. The ends of the clothesline run under the bathtub, invisible from the bathtub.

At first, I started hearing a tapping sound on the basins. I don't remember what I thought, but given my recent state, I began to feel uneasy. I probably attributed the tapping to dripping water (now I realize there was nowhere for it to come from—the towels hanging on the clothesline were dry). I was shampooing my hair, and then someone tugged (or disturbed) the ends of the clotheslines several times. I could clearly see it, and there was NOTHING on the other side of the bathtub that could have caused them to move like that. They started swaying and banging against each other. I jumped out of the bathroom and ran into the hallway. The bathtub was visible from the hallway—there was nothing underneath. I didn't get back in the bathtub, but I rinsed the shampoo off my head in the sink.

What disturbs me most about all this is that this happened before, when I was a child. There was an identical incident in the bathroom, and once, when I was sleeping in another room near a wall lamp whose cord ran under the bed, someone invisible started tugging on the cord...