December 6, 2011

Trippy Tales #48..."Childhood Paranormal Experiences"...(Part 5)

Hello & welcome back to the playhouse!

If you've been following my blog this week, then you know we've been discussing "Childhood Paranormal Experiences"...and some of my very own experiences as a young child.

To bring you up to speed, here's a recap from part four:

This frightened me a bit, but it didn't disturb me as bad as the house on Kelsall Avenue...

The house on Kelsall Avenue, has been the source of many of my nightmares over the years, and still gives me the shivers just thinking about it.  It was in this house, that I felt a very real sense of PURE EVIL!!

There was something about my bedroom closet in this house, that really frightened me. 

Perhaps it was because I would see the doorknob turn at night...or because I could hear things sliding across the floor in it...or because I could just feel the evilness coming from it. 

After a while, that evilness came out of the closet, and made itself heard and felt in the room as well. 

I remember hiding under the covers with my fat orange cat Marmalade, listening to my toys moving around in the room, and holding my breath, to try and fool the "presence" in to thinking I was asleep. I know it was silly, but as long as I had the covers all tucked around me, I felt so much safer than if I'd not had them.

Until the night the evil came under the covers with me!
This was a night like all the others.  I was sweating under my blankets with my big orange cat Marmalade, and holding my breath as I listened to the sounds moving around my bedroom.  A footstep here, a bump or a knock there, toys sliding across the floor, something was there! 


But as I peeked out of one small hole in the corner of the blanket, I saw nothing.  But I wasn't fooled. I knew "it" was there.  IT had been there for a very long time. Much longer than I had been there, and somehow, I just knew it was feeding off my fear.  Fear made it stronger. Fear is what it thrived off of, like a vampire thrives off the blood of his victims...It needed fear to exist.


Suddenly, as if it knew I was looking, all the activity stopped...all the noises ceased.

I still didn't dare take my head out from under the blankets, though I was literally dripping with perspiration, and Marmalade wasn't much better than I was...she wanted OUT!
I believe it was at this point, that the entity was trying to lure me in to a false sense of security...to make me think the terror was over for the night.  


And I'll admit, I was very tired. Sleep had become a thing of the past in my house.  My grades were suffering at school and I'd already been hospitalized for a raging ulcer. I needed rest!
Just as I let my eyelids close and attempted to drift off to lala land, I was awakened by the most hideous, blood-curdling, terrifying laugh I had ever heard, and to this day, I can still hear it in my mind... 


And the worst part? 


The worst part, was that IT was under the blankets WITH ME!!  

"MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!" RIGHT...IN...MY...LEFT...EAR!!

I could feel it's breath! 
UP CLOSE...AND PERSONAL!!


At this point, there was no keeping Marmalade under the blanket any longer.  She'd heard it too, and she literally shred that cover to rags getting out from under it, then took off out of that room like a cat out of hell with me right behind her. 
I flew from my bed to my parents' room, and I don't think my feet even touched the floor. I hit my parents' bedroom and pounced on their bed in one big swoop!
Now were it not for me being so terrified, it would've been quite hilarious, seeing my step-father fumbling for his glasses with his hair stickin' straight up like a rooster...but I didn't have time to laugh...there was SOMETHING in my room! 
Daddy was NOT amused, and he quickly informed me that he knew of something ELSE that better be in my room, in about TWO SECONDS!!   


And I'll tell you what folks...the walk back to my dark and foreboding bedroom that night, was the longest walk of my life! I felt like the condemned, walking his last mile to the execution. I stood at the door facing in to my dark bedroom, willing myself to cross the threshold, and when I finally did get up the courage to run back to my bed, as if to mock me, as I threw the covers back over my frightened little head...I heard the knob to the closet door turn...IT was still there. 


Years later, as an adult, I was delivering pizzas one day, and the house on Kelsall Avenue just happened to be on my route.  I had noticed many people moving in and then right back out over the three years that I worked for Dominos.  It was always like that. No one ever stayed for long. But one day, feeling brave, I just had to have a look at my old bedroom, so I stopped.


As I crept up to my old bedroom window, I almost expected something to jump out at me.  But then I felt foolish. I was all grown up now.  It couldn't hurt me anymore.

Could it? 

For a moment, I was confused.  Was this the right house? Sure looked like it! And then I realized...the closet had been completely covered with sheetrock...as if there had never even been a closet there. Someone had tried to enclose the evil!

But I knew better.

I knew there had been a closet there.

And I knew there had been something IN that closet.

And though the closet was no longer there...I could feel that IT was still there.

Watching me...and laughing...FEEDING off my fear.

And by the way...

Marmalade ran away that night so long ago...and we never saw her again.

I only hope IT didn't get her...and I'm very thankful that IT didn't get ME.

But in a way...it did.

And even after all these years, it still comes to visit me sometimes.

 In the dark closet of my childhood nightmares...
~Queenie~




December 5, 2011

Trippy Tales #48..."Childhood Paranormal Experiences"...(Part 4)

Welcome back to the playhouse!

So we've been discussing childhood paranormal experiences, and as promised, I'm gonna wrap up this topic with some experiences from yours truly.

I lived a most peculiar, and haunted childhood. From as far back as I can remember, very strange things happened that I could never find a logical explanation for. I have theories of course, but no solid proof of anything.

One of the very first things I remember "out of the ordinary" was the day I heard my grandad's voice...when he wasn't anywhere around at the time!

I guess I must have been around 4 or 5 at the time, we were living in Tennessee and my parents were divorced.  My mother worked long hours, so I spent most of my time with my grandparents. On this particular day, my grandmother and I (and her chijuajua "lil bit") were sittin' on the couch watching "Hee Haw"...(one of my grandma's favorite shows) while my grandad was at work. Roy Clark & Buck Owens were a pickin' & a grinnin', and everything seemed quite normal. 

That is, until...from the back bedroom...we heard my grandpa's voice calling to my grandmother!  

"PAT?" it called.  I say "IT" because even though "it" sounded just like my grandpa's voice, there was no way it was him...because he was miles away at the time! 

I remember the dog becoming very disturbed, as were my grandmother and I.  And to this day, I still can't explain it.  This was only the beginning of the weirdness...

Fast forward a couple of years...

By now, we had moved from Tennessee to an island off the coast of Georgia, called "St. Simons Island"...we lived in a house that had once been the site of a large cotton plantation.  

 It was in this house, that every night after everyone was in bed, I would hear a small bell ding (like the kind you would see at a hotel check-in desk) and immediately following this ding, I would hear what sounded like people furiously cleaning the kitchen. Sweeping, mopping, washing the dishes, etc.  Never any voices, just cleaning sounds...night after night, after night. 

It wasn't until many years later that my step father revealed that he too, had heard these ghostly sounds...with never a "living" soul actually in the kitchen. 

(Perhaps a few dead ones though!)

This frightened me a bit, but it didn't disturb me as bad as the house on Kelsall Avenue...

The house on Kelsall Avenue, has been the source of many of my nightmares over the years, and still gives me the shivers just thinking about it.  It was in this house, that I felt a very real sense of PURE EVIL!!

There was something about my bedroom closet in this house, that really frightened me. 

Perhaps it was because I would see the doorknob turn at night...or because I could hear things sliding across the floor in it...or because I could just feel the evilness coming from it. 

After a while, that evilness came out of the closet, and made itself heard and felt in the room as well. 

I remember hiding under the covers with my fat orange cat Marmalade, listening to my toys moving around in the room, and holding my breath, to try and fool the "presence" in to thinking I was asleep. I know it was silly, but as long as I had the covers all tucked around me, I felt so much safer than if I'd not had them.

Until the night the evil came under the covers with me!

And I will tell you about that in part five!


 
~Queenie~

December 4, 2011

Trippy Tales #48..."Childhood Paranormal Experiences" (Part Three)

 Hello again, faithful readers! :)

I hope it's ok if I make a slight change in plans for this entry.  I had planned to post my own childhood paranormal experiences on this post, but while writing it, I realized that I had a lot more to tell than I'd originally thought. 

For some reason, typing it all out brought back a flood of memories from that time in my life. So if you'll please bear with me, I promise to share them with you in part four. (And it'll be a lot better post for it as well!:) Thanks!

And now, let's get started...

As I said in part one, I found loads of information on this subject! It seems that paranormal encounters are quite common for children and teens, as you will see for yourself below...

(Copied from about.com...one of the very best sites on the net concerning paranormal phenomena)

"Are children more attuned to the supernatural? Many researchers suspect that children, from the youngest ages and into early teens, are more likely to experience paranormal phenomena because they have not yet developed the prejudices that many adults have against such far-out, "unscientific" ideas. Perhaps they have not yet created their own filters for feelings and experiences that most of society consider irrational or abnormal. Or it could be that young brains or minds are, for whatever reason, physically more receptive to such phenomena as ghosts, near-death experiences, past-life recall and premonitions.

Are children more connected to the world of spirit and psychic phenomena than adults? Based on the sheer number of anecdotal reports, most paranormal researchers would probably say yes. They see dead relatives (often those they’ve never met in life), play with “imaginary friends”, recall details of past lives, and see many other strange things that are invisible to their parents.

The rationalist or skeptic doubts or completely dismisses these accounts from children as the products of vivid imaginations – fantasies spun for the attention they receive. Or perhaps they are just the uninformed interpretations of natural events as filtered though immature minds.

Whatever the reason, here are several true stories from readers that seem to confirm that children can be extraordinarily tuned in to the strange and the unexplained:
"When my little brother was a baby, maybe nine months old, we lived with my grandma. My grandpa had just died. My mom was sitting in the living room around midnight trying to get my brother to sleep, but he wouldn't stop crying. Suddenly, out of nowhere he stopped crying, sat straight up and said, "Hi, grandpa." There was no one else in the room at all. The weird thing is, he said those words so clearly, and he had never spoken before, not even to say "mom"!
"Many of your UK readers between the ages of 45 and 55 will probably remember a TV show called "Watch with Mother". The show was on the BBC in the 1950s and featured a string puppet named "Andy Pandy", he had a sidekick named "Loopy Lou or Looby Lou". One day my brother and sister where playing upstairs in our front bedroom. This room was about 12 ft. x 12 ft. and had a cupboard in the corner, which was directly over the stairs. My sister and brother, both now in their late 40s, swear to this day that Andy Pandy came out of that cupboard in the corner and spent the next hour playing with them both. This Andy Pandy, however, was about four feet high and had no strings attached. I have questioned both of them over the years and still their story remains the same. "
"When I was young I had many experiences I and others believe to be paranormal. This first one happened when I was only one years old. My mom and many others in my family tell me this same story. I had a play tent and I would go in there and talk to someone, and I would come out really annoyed. My mom would ask me who I was talking to. I used to say his name is Ray and he's blue. Why is he blue? Cause his father killed him. And I used to get annoyed at him. So they sold the tent.
Other times I would be sleeping and I would hear this voice in my dreams, I wake up and the voice would still be going on in the hall outside my bedroom for some time. Another time I was lying in bed asleep, I saw this really tall shadow guy lean over me reach out and touch my leg. I woke up startled because I felt someone touch my leg. There was a bruise there. One more thing, I was in our front porch studying. I looked up and saw two older people walking down the road, the guy looked right at me and pointed. I looked down for two seconds just long enough to read one word and looked back up and they were gone with no place for them to go! I walked out into the street but they weren't there.
Since then, I moved twice to two different states, In my first move once in a while I would see black mists that would surprise me and I would jump away before I even knew what I was seeing.
Since my second move, nothing has happened."
"As a very young child, somewhere between the ages of 5-8 years of age, I had three distinct experiences that I would like to share. These all happened while living in a very old farmhouse with my grandparents.
The first strange thing I ever remember in my life, is waking up late one night only to not know where I was and feel that somehow, there was something wrong with my surroundings. I remember the room being very bright and feeling like I could not move. Eventually, I did get up and move about the house looking for something, and to this very day, I'm still not sure what.
The second experience I had still haunts me to this day. I believe this happened shortly after the release of the movie "Teen Wolf". The only reason I bring this up, is because being very young, it may have imprinted on my psyche.
I distinctly remember sleeping with my grandparents that night. For some unknown reason, I awoke in the middle of the night and looked down at the foot of the bed only to see what looked like a very large wolf's head rising from the blanket. Even now as an adult, I can not truly say if this was my imagination or something trying to play a trick on me.
My last experience was probably what started me in building psychic walls around myself. This experience happened during the day. As this house was very old, we had a large window in the living room that was actually made from many smaller windows put together. I can remember playing in the living room and looking at one of these smaller panes only to see a face looking back at me.
I don't mean I saw my reflection, I clearly remember seeing a mans face in this window pane. For some unknown reason, I screamed at the image to leave me alone before putting my fist through the window. I do not know why I punched the window, or even why I thought it would do anything. But I do not recall ever having anything else like this ever happening again after that.
I do know that the house always had a feeling about it, but always assumed it was because it was so old. The only reason I share these experiences now is because I have recently gotten more involved in the areas of the paranormal and supernatural."
"When I was seven years old, one weekend I planned to stay up late downstairs playing video games and then sleep on the pull-out bed. I was preparing to go to bed when, for some reason, I got the impression that something was watching me. I got scared enough to run back upstairs, and while I was running, I could see very short (no larger than two feet tall) and squat figures darting after me. They were very indistinct in features, and appeared as nothing more than inky-black silhouettes. Also, when my aunt was young, she was sleeping over at a friend's house at the end of the street when she said that a "shadow man" appeared at the foot of the bed and began to call out her friend's name. She screamed and said that it disappeared into the floor."
"My mother's family (parents and siblings) lived in Binghamton, New York. My dad was in the Navy and my parents, my sister and I lived in Patuxent River, Maryland. I was six years old at the time. Even though we lived in Maryland, I knew most of my mother's family because we would visit them quite often in Binghamton, and during the summer they all came to visit us. At the time, my cousin, Marylou, who lived in Binghamton, was 11 years old. I got home from school one day and asked my mother why Marylou was crying. She didn't understand what I was talking about. I told her that I heard her crying. She was quite puzzled by my statement and had no explanation. Within a few hours, the phone rang. It was my grandmother calling to say that my cousin had been hit by a car walking home from school - about the same time I told my mother I could hear her crying. I have had a few other premonitions, but this is the one I remember most."

 
"I was 13 and it was quite some time after my little brother had passed away. I had wanted to be with him, because I thought it would be better with him than at home. One night I was sleeping in my bed and I had felt this warm sensation. I saw this large hand come on my legs. It was so warm I had to wake up. To my surprise, there were some men standing around my bed, which was up against the wall. They were dressed in white and chanting in some language I never heard. One looked at me and then they all did and stopped chanting. Then, all in a single file, they walked out of the room. I crawled to the end of my bed and peeked out the door to the living room. There we had a dim light on. They were gone. I was a little scared and crawled under the covers and started to pray. Then my other brother asked me if I was awake. I said yes. He asked me to come to his room. I said, "No way. You come." But I did manage to get to his room, just to find out that my brother had gone through the exact same thing as I did. We were both scared."
"My mom told me this story, and she still cries when she tells it. It has never been explained. My sister, Shirley (the firstborn), died of Downs Syndrome at the age of two in 1961. She had holes in her heart. Almost two years later, my mother had a baby boy, my brother, Steven. One day in 1962, my mom was up in the attic doing some work, and my dad was in the basement in his workshop. Steven was supposedly napping in a playpen (age one) in the den. My mom heard, clear as day, Shirley's voice saying, "Dadda! Dadda!" ... and it was as though she were right there next to her in the attic. Clear as day. My dad heard the SAME THING down in his workshop. "Dadda! Dadda!" They both say it was distinctly Shirley's voice - loud and clear. Dad ran up to tell mom; mom ran to tell dad. They both ran into the den, and there was baby Steven with plastic dry cleaner's sheeting that he had reached for on the couch - and he was suffocating. Mom and dad both told us later on that it could not have been Steven calling them; he called my dad, "daddy" not "dadda," and it was not his voice. They are convinced to this day that it was Shirley warning them that her brother was suffocating."
"It was the spring of 1990 when Josh, his brother Aaron and his mother were living in a mobile home on a farm outside of Laurelville, Ohio. On this night, Josh awoke from a disturbing nightmare. Today he cannot recall the details of the bad dream, but he does remember that it scared him enough that he had to get out of bed to seek his mother’s comfort. “I walked up the short hallway to my mother's room to try and crawl in bed with her,” Josh says. “She told me to go back to my bed, so I walked back toward my room, which I shared with my brother, Aaron.”
Josh was not prepared for what he encountered as he began to enter his room. “I will never forget what I saw. There on my brother's bedpost was a dark figure that looked like a gargoyle or gremlin. I really couldn't make out anything like its feet or legs. It just had a really square, rigid head, like a gargoyle. It was about two feet tall and was hunched over a bit and was looking at Aaron. I stopped dead in my tracks and gasped when I saw it. It turned its head as if it heard me! I couldn't see any eyes, just the outline of its face.”
Terrified, Josh turned and ran back into his mother’s room. Figuring Josh was just in need of a little assurance, she walked him back to his bedroom to show him there was no monster there. And indeed there wasn’t. Whatever Josh saw was now gone. “She didn't believe me, so I just tried to forget it,” Josh says. “I didn't mention it to anyone after that night.”
So it must have been Josh’s imagination, influenced by his nightmare... right? A few years later, when Josh was in tenth grade, he was sitting with a classmate named Ryan. Josh noticed a few large scars on his neck and asked Ryan how he got them. Ryan said that when he was about eight years old, he accidentally ran through a sliding glass door. He claimed the cuts almost killed him due to loss of blood.
But then he confessed to Josh a strange element to the story: "The strange thing was,” Ryan told him, “the night before the accident, my brother saw a little dark figure sitting on my bed watching me sleep." As Ryan described it, what his brother had seen sounded exactly like the gargoyle-like creature Josh encountered."           
Thank you so much for joining me today!
See you in part four!
 
~Queenie~