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~
