Paranoia or Paranormal?

We often think about and speak about things that go bump in the night, of creatures that live under our beds, of the monster that dwells in our cupboard and is hidden by our old, moth-eaten clothes, but do they really exist...?

Recently I've been hearing a noise in my room at night. It's a sort of scratching/tapping noise yet, whenever I go to investigate with my most heroic adventurer mentality, it stops.  At first I thought it might have been my brother on his laptop. This seemed like a feasible idea due to his keenness in computer gaming on his laptop but, alas, it was not him. I checked. I went up to his bed, but he was fast asleep and his laptop was on the desk next to his bed with the lid closed. There was no way that anything could have been tapping at his laptop. Then I thought, "Maybe it's something on my laptop?" Again, this was not the case.

The trouble was that I could not for the life of me pinpoint the location of the sound. By this time, it was freaking me out and getting me stressed. It was keeping me up at night and, more worryingly, there seemed to be a pattern... The noise would start at 1:30am every night.  This worried me highly. My mind rushed towards thinking of aliens and the paranormal... and those monsters I mentioned earlier. I briefly thought of mice, but I put that conclusion to bed after some daylight investigating showed no evidence of this.

The noise has stopped now. I haven't heard it for a couple of days, ever since I mentioned it to mum. This has lead me to think it was all in the mind. No one else heard it. I even put a recording device on to try and record it however, nothing showed up (admittedly this was the night after the last time I heard the noise).

A lot of our fears are in our minds, from spiders to the dark, from heights to snakes, from shoes to cheese... The human mind is powerful and is responsible for the creation of these monsters under the bed that we need to fight. I just hope my monster doesn't come and... AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!