Enjoy the Paranormal Day Party!
May 3, 2016
These strange events took place in the
home of one of my friends. The room where the disturbances occurred did have a
history; an older family member, years before, had been convinced there was a presence
in the room. She had never felt comfortable there. Years later, when my friend
“inherited” the room, and the presence began to make itself strongly known, I was
one of the people who experienced it.
I heard the eerie rapping
on the (second-story) walls; it would happen in different places in the room, sometimes
close to where one of us was sitting, and sometimes in response to what that
person had said. I felt the pervasive, unnatural cold that would settle on our
clothes and skin. I saw objects move when no one was near them; once, a pack of
cigarettes slid across a table. And I heard the distinct sounds of thumping and
banging that sometimes came from the closet.
Needless to say, everyone
wanted to stay away from that closet, and my friend decided she felt safer with
a tall, heavy bureau wedged against the closet door. But: when items began disappearing
from all over the house, she had a terrible feeling about where they might be. I
was with her on two of the occasions when she finally looked inside the closet.
I’ll never forget the chilling sense of
shock I felt when I saw what was inside. The missing items from the house were there—plus some additional things that
no one had realized were missing. We found a magazine, a ticket stub, drawings,
photos, plaques, and other objects, tangled up with the old clothing and books stored
in the closet. We also found a recent magazine illustration that didn’t belong
to anyone in the house; we never did figure out where it came from. And a couple
of the paper items were actually crumpled.
After the first
two times we looked inside the closet, we took out the things that had been
missing, and put everything else neatly on the shelf. The third time my friend
opened the closet, she found that the items on the shelf had been tossed onto
the floor.
Was all of this a hoax, or some crazy practical
joke? I don’t think so. I knew everyone who lived in that house; my friend and
her brother were genuinely terrified about what was happening there. I can’t
imagine either of them carrying on a hoax that lasted for over a year and a
half. Their mother, a no-nonsense sort of woman, certainly wouldn’t have done
it. And the other person in the house was too ill to be physically capable of
it.
I can’t find a rational explanation for
all the strange occurrences that took place, either. Even if some of it was
hysteria or exaggeration or a mistake, that wouldn’t explain everything. Having
been there to witness these things first-hand, I knew I was in the midst of something totally beyond normal
comprehension. My view of reality was never the same after that.
I
believe that the spirits of deceased people don’t always entirely leave our
world, hovering between the seen and unseen, with their presence echoing back
to us in what we call hauntings. I also believe that there are other kinds of
non-corporeal beings who were never human, and whose presence occasionally
seeps into our familiar reality. Maybe, sometimes, something in our own
consciousness attracts or feeds or stirs up these “visitors”; I wondered about
that in the case of my friend, who was an experimenter in some of the darker
aspects of the occult. The presence in her home became much more disruptive
after her experimenting started.
So: do I think her visitor was a human
spirit, or something entirely different? I had a feeling it was human, a male. But I’ll never really
know for sure. I think that’s one of the things that intrigues me most.
Author Ann Young
Fantasy,
Paranormal Fiction … and Fact
