I didn’t know what auditory hallucinations were when I was a little girl. I only knew that something seemed to move around my bedroom, mumbling softly—until it reached my head and suddenly became loud.
I gave the voice a name.
Mr. Mumble.
Decades later, I still don’t know whether he existed only inside my young mind… or whether something else was in that room with me!
I Wasn’t Even Old Enough for Kindergarten
Some of my earliest childhood memories are barely memories anymore.
They are fragments.
A room.
A staircase.
My sisters.
The feeling of being very small in a house that seemed very big.
I know I was younger than kindergarten age. My older sister was only 11 months older than me, and my younger sister was two years younger. I can’t put an exact age on myself when these things happened.
But there are pieces of that house that never disappeared from my memory.
Mr. Mumble is one of them.
I don’t remember when I first heard him.
I don’t remember the first time I gave him that name.
I just remember knowing him as Mr. Mumble.
And I remember exactly why.
Something Moved Around My Bedroom
Mr. Mumble wasn’t someone I remember seeing.
He was something I heard.
There would be this soft mumbling in my bedroom.
I couldn’t understand what was being said. I don’t remember recognizable words or sentences.
Just mumbling.
But the strangest part wasn’t the sound.
It was the way the sound moved.
I remember it seeming to travel around my room.
The mumbling would be soft when it was farther away.
Then it would come closer.
And closer.
As it reached where my head was, it became loud.
Then it would continue past me.
And become soft again.
Almost as though someone were walking around me while mumbling under his breath.
Except I couldn’t see anyone.
I was a tiny little girl. I didn’t know about auditory hallucinations. I didn’t understand that the brain can sometimes perceive sounds differently from what is actually happening around us.
I certainly wasn’t lying there wondering whether I was hearing auditory hallucinations.
My little mind came up with a much simpler explanation.
There was Mr. Mumble.
And he was in my room.
The Creepiest Part Was How Real It Felt
Looking back as an adult, I can think of all kinds of possibilities.
Maybe there were ordinary sounds moving through the house.
Maybe pipes, vents, voices from another room, traffic, appliances, or the strange acoustics of the house were being interpreted by a developing child’s brain.
Maybe I was drifting between sleeping and waking.
Maybe I was hearing things that weren’t there.
Maybe what I remember would today be described as some type of childhood auditory experience.
Memory itself isn’t perfect, especially memories formed when we’re very young.
I understand all of that now.
But little-girl me didn’t.
Mr. Mumble was real to me. I heard him so often that I gave him a name!
That’s what I find unsettling all these years later.
When your perception creates something convincingly enough, you don’t necessarily stand outside the experience and question it.
You live inside it.
And that wasn’t the only strange thing I remember from that bedroom.
There Was a Man Standing in My Doorway
This memory has never left me.
I was lying in my bed.
My sisters were downstairs playing Barbies. I remember being able to hear them below me.
And there was a man standing in my bedroom doorway.
I remember looking at him.
He looked angry.
But what I remember perhaps more than anything else was his breathing.
He was breathing heavily.
I was terrified.
I didn’t challenge him. I didn’t get out of bed.
I did what frightened little kids have probably done for generations when something terrifying appears in the darkness.
I pulled the blankets over my head.
I hid.
Under those blankets, I couldn’t see him.
But that didn’t mean I believed he was gone.
Eventually, I looked again.
I remember him disappearing or moving off to the side.
And the moment I thought I could escape, I did.
I ran out of that room!
My sisters were still downstairs.
The normal world was still down there.
Barbies.
Children playing.
My sisters.
And upstairs was the bedroom where I had just been hiding from a man I believed was standing in my doorway.
Me with my sisters around the age when I remember Mr. Mumble. I’m on the left, apparently stealing my baby sister’s bottle while she protests. 😂 This photo was taken in the same house where these experiences happened.
Was I Seeing and Hearing Things That Weren’t There?
As an adult, this is where the story becomes more complicated for me.
Was I hearing voices?
Was Mr. Mumble some form of auditory hallucination?
Was the man in my doorway a dream?
A hallucination?
A frightened child’s imagination?
Was I partly asleep?
Could my young brain have taken shadows, sounds, and fear and assembled them into something that felt like a real person?
I don’t know.
And I want to be careful about that.
I was never evaluated for these experiences as a child, and I’m certainly not going to diagnose my preschool-aged self decades later.
There are many possible explanations for unusual childhood perceptions that don’t involve either psychosis or the paranormal.
But there is one problem with simply filing everything away as my childhood imagination.
Other strange things reportedly happened in that house.
My Mother Heard the Heavy Breathing
Years later, my mother told me that she had experienced strange things in that house herself.
One of them immediately bothered me.
She told me she had heard heavy breathing.
That detail has always stayed with me because heavy breathing was one of the strongest things I remembered about the man in my doorway.
My mother also described experiencing strange fuzzy visuals in the house when she heard the heavy breathing.
Could there have been an environmental explanation affecting both of us?
Absolutely.
Old houses can make strange sounds. Lighting can distort what we see. Exhaustion, sleep, stress, physical conditions, and countless other factors can affect perception.
There may have been completely unrelated explanations for what each of us experienced.
But then there was something else my parents knew about that house.
Something I couldn’t have fully understood at such a young age.
There Had Been a Man Named Shorty
According to the story my parents told me, a man had once lived there.
His name—or nickname—was Shorty.
My parents said Shorty had been cheating on his wife.
And they said she shot him.
In the chest.
She murdered him right in that very room where I heard Mr. Mumble.
My mother later connected that detail with the heavy breathing, explaining that someone who had suffered a devastating chest injury could struggle for breath.
I don’t know enough about the circumstances of Shorty’s death to independently tell you exactly what happened. I’m repeating the story as it was passed down to me by my parents.
And I am absolutely not claiming that the angry man standing in my doorway was Shorty.
I don’t know who—or what—I saw.
I don’t even know whether anyone was physically standing there at all.
But somehow, the story gets stranger.
Because apparently my sisters and I had our own relationship with the name Shorty.
“Get Shorty! Get Shorty!”
My parents told us about something we did when we were little.
We would run around that house with toy guns.
And apparently, while we were playing, we would yell:
“Get Shorty! Get Shorty!”
I don’t remember enough about those moments myself to tell you why we said it.
Maybe we had heard adults talking.
Maybe the name had been mentioned around us, and our little brains turned it into a game.
Children absorb far more than adults sometimes realize.
There could be a perfectly ordinary explanation.
But my parents found it creepy.
Knowing what they had been told about Shorty, watching their little girls run around the house with toy guns yelling his name wasn’t exactly an adorable childhood game to them.
And decades later, knowing the rest of what I remember from that house makes it unsettling to me, too.
Still, none of that proves anything paranormal happened.
And strangely enough, I’m not sure a paranormal explanation is the one that frightens me most anymore.
What If Mr. Mumble Was Coming From My Own Mind?
When I was little, monsters and ghosts would have seemed like the frightening explanation.
As an adult, I sometimes think the alternative is creepier.
What if there was nobody there?
What if Mr. Mumble wasn’t moving around my bedroom at all?
What if the angry man never stood in my doorway?
What if my young brain created experiences so convincing that I saw and heard them as part of the physical world around me?
That possibility bothers me in an entirely different way.
Because if I was experiencing auditory hallucinations at night, unusual childhood perceptions, dreams bleeding into wakefulness, or some other altered state, I didn’t know it.
There was no little voice of reason inside my head saying:
This isn’t real.
Reality doesn’t necessarily feel strange while you’re inside an altered version of it.
Sometimes it simply feels like reality.
This Wasn’t the Last Time My Reality Felt Wrong
This is the part of the story I didn’t fully appreciate until recently.
Decades after Mr. Mumble, something happened to me again.
I was no longer a frightened little girl.
I was a mother.
After having my second baby, while exhausted and recovering from childbirth and multiple medical procedures, I experienced a night when I heard my baby crying in the back seat of my car.
I believed he was there.
I spoke to him.
I stopped the car to comfort him.
Then I opened the back door.
The seat was empty.
Even seeing that empty seat didn’t immediately correct what my mind believed. For a short period, I genuinely thought my baby had somehow disappeared, and I began looking for him.
He had never been in the car!
That experience is something I’ve written about separately because it deserves its own story. You can find it in the link below.
Postpartum Depression and the Lindsay Clancy Trial: The Night My Reality Wasn’t Real
And I don’t believe these two periods of my life necessarily had the same cause.
One happened when I was a tiny child.
The other happened when I was an exhausted postpartum mother.
I’m not diagnosing either experience as psychosis.
But there is a thread connecting them that I cannot ignore.
Both taught me how convincing perception can be.
The Human Mind Can Be a Creepy Place
When we think about hearing auditory hallucinations, we tend to imagine someone recognizing that they’re hearing something abnormal.
But that’s not necessarily how an unusual perception feels to the person experiencing it.
When I was little, I wasn’t analyzing Mr. Mumble.
I wasn’t wondering whether there was a neurological, psychological, environmental, sleep-related, or paranormal explanation.
I was a little girl lying in my bedroom.
And something was mumbling.
Likewise, when I saw that man standing in my doorway, I didn’t think:
My brain might be showing me something that isn’t actually there.
I hid.
Because whatever the explanation was, my fear was real.
That’s something I think adults sometimes forget about childhood fears.
Telling a frightened child that something isn’t real doesn’t necessarily make the experience disappear.
If their brain is telling them that something is standing in the doorway, their reality at that moment may be very different from yours.
So, Was Mr. Mumble an Auditory Hallucination?
I wish I could give this story a neat ending.
I can’t.
Maybe I was experiencing auditory hallucinations.
Maybe Mr. Mumble was an ordinary sound that my developing brain transformed into something frightening.
Maybe I experienced strange sleep-related perceptions.
Maybe the man in my doorway came from a dream that felt completely real.
Maybe years of remembering these events have changed pieces of them.
Those explanations are all possible.
Then there are the things I can’t neatly fit into that explanation.
My mother’s memories.
The heavy breathing.
Shorty.
Three little girls apparently running through the house shouting his name.
Does any of that prove the house was haunted?
No.
And I’m not going to tell you that it does.
But I’m also not going to rewrite what little-girl me remembers simply because adult me can’t explain it.
Something frightened me in that bedroom.
I heard Mr. Mumble.
I saw the man in the doorway.
And at that age, both were as much a part of my reality as the sisters I could hear downstairs playing Barbies.
I Still Think About Mr. Mumble
It’s creepy season as I’m writing this, which probably explains why I’ve allowed myself to wander back into that bedroom again.
There is something deliciously spooky about telling old stories in the fall.
But this one feels different to me.
Because underneath the ghosts, murder stories, dark bedrooms, and things that go mumble in the night is something genuinely unsettling about the human mind.
We experience the world through a brain that can sometimes get reality wrong.
I’ve experienced that frightening uncertainty at two very different points in my life.
Once as a mother standing beside an empty backseat.
And once as a tiny girl hiding underneath her blankets.
I don’t know what happened in that childhood bedroom.
Perhaps someday I’ll stumble across an explanation that makes everything click into place.
Perhaps Mr. Mumble was nothing more mysterious than the strange workings of a very young mind.
Or perhaps those readers who believe in the paranormal will reach an entirely different conclusion.
I’ll leave that part up to you.
I can only tell you what that little girl experienced.
The mumbling would begin somewhere in the room.
Softly.
Then it would move.
Closer.
Louder.
Until it reached my head.
And then it would pass me and become quiet again.
I didn’t have words like auditory hallucinations or altered perception.
I had two words.
Mr. Mumble.
And when the lights went out in that bedroom, he was real to me.
Blessings,
Mindy
The Off Grid Barefoot Girl
