Several years ago, when I was regularly praying and meditating, I began to sense a presence around me.
Ever since I was very young, I would sometimes notice things around me that I couldn’t easily explain. Most of the time, I dismissed them as imagination—even in situations where, somehow, I knew details I shouldn’t have known. But there’s one experience that has always stuck with me, because I wasn’t the only one who went through it.
This happened around 2022, when I was working as a pastor at a church.
One morning, I was sitting with my coffee, studying and praying, when I suddenly caught a glimpse of something moving quickly from the dining room toward the staircase that led upstairs. It all happened in a split second, but what I saw was a person dressed in white, with long black hair falling past their shoulders.
I immediately got up and headed to the stairs, hoping to intercept whoever had just passed by, but there was no one there. As I replayed the scene in my mind, something else struck me that I hadn’t noticed at first: the woman was unusually tall.
There’s a wide opening between the dining room and the kitchen, and from what I remember, her head nearly reached the top of that doorway. After trying to estimate her height, I realized she must have been close to seven feet tall—about two meters and ten centimeters. That detail unsettled me the most. I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen.
A few weeks later, one of my daughters came to me, clearly frightened, and told me about something that happened to her during the night. She said she was asleep when she felt someone enter her room. At first, she thought it was me, so she didn’t look. Then she felt the bed dip as if someone had sat down on the edge—just like it would if a real person sat beside you. When she finally turned to look, she saw a woman dressed in white, with long black hair falling past her shoulders.
I froze when I heard her description. I had never told my daughter what I saw that morning—in fact, I hadn’t told anyone. After she finished describing the woman, I immediately drew the figure I remembered seeing.
According to my daughter, the woman I drew looked almost exactly like the one she saw in her room. That made it much harder for me to dismiss what happened as just imagination.
Some time later—I can’t say exactly when; it might have been days, weeks, or even months—I was getting ready for bed. I was in that strange space between sleep and waking when I saw the same woman standing next to my bed.
She was just standing there, looking at me. At first, I told myself I must still be dreaming, that my mind was just shifting from sleep to wakefulness. I forced myself to fully wake up, but she was still there.
Panic took over, and acting on pure instinct, I kicked out toward her. My foot swung through empty air, and the woman vanished. Strangely, I later felt regret for what I’d done.
In the days that followed, I tried to reach out to whatever—or whoever—it was I’d seen. I prayed, meditated, read, studied, and tried everything I knew.
But nothing happened. The woman never appeared again, and I never got any answers.
Only one thing stayed with me.
The name 'Sophia.'
