Paranormal Experiences (Before This) Part 2 of 2

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Paranormal Experiences Before This, Part 2

December 23rd, 2021

continued...

In the previous episode, I told my family's ghost stories. This time, I will tell you about my own paranormal experiences before this... meaning, before I became aware that I was a haunted individual... before I became a psychic medium.
These stories are very much like the ones I read about all the time in paranormal groups on Facebook. Lots of people are here; at the point I was at when these things happened to me.

That worries me a little because, if you're at this point, you need to know what you're dealing with, because things might progress to the point where you're being possessed and tortured. I'm not saying that's common, exactly; but it could happen.


My Own Experiences

So, all of that, the stories I shared in the previous episode, happened to my family; and I thought, until February of 2021, that I had no psychic abilities and that not too much paranormal stuff had ever happened to me. Looking back... I'm nuts. Actually, quite a bit had happened to me; although, seriously, my entire life of paranormal experiences up until 2021 amounts to about one day's worth of phenomena, when compared with today's standards. But, I didn't pay that much attention to it, I suppose. I think that was partially because I didn't really, truly, believe in ghosts; at least, not for sure. I have made a list of events that stand out, and tried to put them in chronological order. My analysis follows the descriptions of each incident.


The first significant unexplainable thing that happened to me, which I'm absolutely certain I didn't imagine, is that, what I thought at the time was a ghostly dog, brushed past me while I was standing in my yard one night. This was before 2010; I know that because none of my dogs that I've had as an adult had died yet. I don't remember exactly what I was doing; but for some reason I was standing in my yard around dusk, when I heard a sound like a dog panting, and something that felt like a dog ran up behind me and past me, brushing the side of my leg. It felt exactly like it would feel if a real dog had done that. It was so real, in fact, that I was worried for a moment that one of my dogs had gotten out somehow. I spun around quickly and looked behind me, and then spun back around and looked in front of me. There was nothing there. I assumed, after a moment of surprise, that it must have been a ghost dog. I suspected that perhaps it was the ghost of the one dog I had as a child.

But no... actually that must have been a demon playing a trick. I don't believe that there are animal spirits here... and this seems like something that was designed to scare me. Guardian angels wouldn't do that. Earthbound spirits can make us hallucinate whatever they want us to see, hear, or feel; so it was a spirit trick.

In 2008, I worked in a coffee shop that was located in a historical downtown building. We stored supplies in the basement, which could only be entered from the outside of the building. You had to unlock a door on the outside, and then walk down a long, unlit, hallway that tilted downwards, like a ramp. That hallway was weird and a little disorienting, in and of itself. There was a light switch at the end of the hall, just before it finally opened into a large room. I guess some builder had a sense of humor. Anyway, I noticed that every time I had to go down there, when I first opened the door, and sometimes as I started down the hallway, I'd hear what sounded like a lot of rapid whispering. It would quieten abruptly, though; almost as if whomever was whispering thought, "Oh, shit! Someone's coming!"
Sometimes, just before flicking the light switch, I thought I heard scampering, like a bunch of... somethings... had just scattered. At the time, I chalked the scampering up to mice, and the whispering up to my imagination.

The scampering might have been mice; but now that I think about it, wouldn't they have failed their health inspection if they had mice? Anyway, the whispering was definitely not my imagination. That's what spirits sound like when they talk to each other. That was a spirit meeting place! I know that, here again, on the surface, this sounds like a haunted location story; like it was a haunted historic building. But the thing is, spirits want to be around people. Whether or not they're actually trying to win souls for Satan... which I have every reason to believe they are... they want to be around people. We're their entertainment. They wouldn't enjoy hanging out in an old building alone; it'd be more fun to go mess with someone! Therefore, my guess is those were all spirits attached to people who were in the coffee shop... or possibly other downtown buildings. I have noticed that when I'm out in public places, they leave me sometimes. They'll still say something telepathically every now and then; and if I ever think to myself, "Hey, where's that demon?" They'll immediately answer, "You shouldn't understand that!" So, we can still be telepathically linked, and they can be off exploring... exploring other people, or meeting with other demons.

Of the pets I've had as an adult, the first to die was a dog, who passed away in 2010. On the morning of the day he died, I woke up hearing voices. They were speaking out loud. It was as if the voices had woken me. I couldn't understand them. It was like when people are talking softly in another room, with the door closed; and all you hear is that low drone of human voices. You can discern whether it's men or women and about how many people are talking, but you can't quite make out what they're saying. It sounded like 2 or 3 men, and it sounded like they were standing right outside my bedroom window. I got up and investigated, because my first thought was "peeping toms." I looked all around the house, but there was no one. I heard it again, while I was investigating. The second time, it seemed to be coming from the front porch, but no one was there either.

"Peeping Toms" was actually an accurate assessment. It was a group of spirits, a gaggle of demons, as they call themselves; and they knew that a death was about to occur.

After that dog passed away, I heard voices and sound effects through white noise for the first time. I was working on my first degree at the time, and I was up all night several nights a week. I used to sit at a desk near a window unit air conditioner. Several nights when I was up late working, I started to think that it almost sounded like my air conditioner was saying things; but I couldn't understand it. At least once, I thought I heard the dog who had recently died howling, through the sound of the air conditioner. A few times I looked out the window at night... probably because I'd heard something... and thought that, by the moonlight, I could almost make out the ghostly form of a dog, walking around on the driveway, sniffing the ground as if hunting for something. One time, while staring at the computer screen, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Lee walking really fast from the kitchen to the bedroom. It startled me, simply because I thought he was in bed asleep. I went to check, and he was in bed asleep... snoring, in fact. I chalked it up to being stressed out and sleep deprived.

Stressed out and sleep deprived, I probably was. But that was demon tricks. It was probably the same demons who'd been hanging around before the dog died; and were now trying to make me believe that my dog's ghost was outside, and also get my attention or scare me, or whatever else. Oh, and by the way, all the things you see in your periphery... they're real.

There have been a few instances of objects that have "appeared," so to speak; as in, my family and I have no idea where they came from... but there could be a logical, not-paranormal explanation. One of these instances, a jewelry box, you'll hear about shortly. Another time, it was an entire box of old, obscure records, which had supposedly belonged to my grandparents, but these records were nothing that they would have ever bought or listened to. The weird thing about that was, as I was thumbing through them, I said to my parents,
"This is really weird..."
and the very next record in the box was a little-known album entitled Ain't It Weird. But... okay... my grandparents could have bought them at a yardsale sometime and never told anyone. Who knows? So, these things have generally been written off as odd, but not paranormal. This next one, however, is pretty scary.

In 2011, when I was married to Lee, Laney came to visit me for a few days while Lee was out of town. Laney is a book reader, and she had some books with her. After she left, I found a strange book in my bedroom. It was a hardcover that was missing its dust jacket. I picked it up and read the spine. The title of the volume was I See You Everywhere.
"Creepy," I thought, but I assumed that Laney had left it there, either accidentally or on purpose. It's a real book, by the way, written by Julia Glass. Anyway, the title did creep me out a little bit, and the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

I finally asked Laney if she'd left it there. She said that she had not. I knew it wasn't Lee's, but I asked him anyway. He confirmed that it was not his either; and it definitely wasn't mine.

Unless Laney has been shitting me all these years... I have no idea!

At some point, I started to sometimes see transparent outlines of people. I mentioned in "Dancing With The Devil, Part 1" that back in January of 2021, I saw the demon whom I now know as Johnny that way, as a transparent outline. That wasn't the first time something like that had happened. I'd seen them before, sporadically, through the years, at random locations. Once, while driving, I saw a large group of them walking along the roadside. My Dad told me to get an eye exam because it might be floaters. Ha!

Well, that's spirits. Whether it's their true forms or a transmitted hallucination is still difficult to say. I would almost think that the roadside incident is a good indicator that it is their true form, and they didn't intend for me to see them; because, what are the chances, even though they're mind readers, that an entire group of them KNEW that a clairvoyant was about to drive past that particular spot? But... maybe the answer is simpler than that. There may have been a spirit in the car with me, "dreaming me" that hallucination. I did get an eye exam; my eyes were fine.

My grandfather died a few years later; the one from the other side of the family, not the big white house side. I wasn't there at the exact moment; but I was called shortly afterwards. Lee and I went, in the middle of the night, to be with my grandmother. When we returned home early that morning, as we were walking from the car to the house, I saw, for just a split second, what I can only describe as "a being of light." It looked like an outline of a man, like the transparent outlines, except he seemed to be made of flashes of light instead of transparency. I thought it might have been my grandfather, but I wasn't sure. I sort of chalked that one up to trauma and being tired.

My grandfather often stood looking out his window, just watching the world go by, I suppose. If I drove past and saw him there, I'd wave. One day, not long after his death, I drove past my grandparents' house, and thought I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a black silhouette of a man, standing at the window like my grandfather did. Of course, when I turned to look, it was gone. When I told Lee about it, he said,
"I've seen him too."

The being of light was a demon, hoping I'd think it was either my grandpa or an angel. It was trying to prey on the grieving.The black silhouette was also a demon impersonating my grandfather. The interesting thing about that is that Lee saw it too, and Lee doesn't exactly go around seeing things like that all the time... at least, not that he acknowledges. I wonder if acknowledgement makes a difference. Perhaps some people see just fine, but they're such staunch Atheists, skeptics, or scientists, or whatever, that they deny it all away. That's pretty much where I was, too, at that point, in denial.

Not long after that, my grandmother also passed away. The task of cleaning their house out and deciding what to do with it fell to my parents and me. It was a long drawn out process, because we were all busy with other obligations. One day I visited the house to work on sorting and cleaning. Before I even entered, I passed by the window where my grandmother's favorite chair sat. I paused for a minute. The blinds were closed, so I couldn't see inside, and for a moment, I could almost imagine that she was in there, sitting in her chair, just on the other side of that window; and that I was there for a visit, instead of this heartwrenching task.

Then I heard a series of sounds which I did not imagine. In fact, the sounds startled me out of my reverie. It sounded like something crashed inside the house. This was followed by sounds of something being shuffled around. That's the best way I can describe it. It sounded as if someone was inside the house, frantically searching for something, knocking things over in their haste.

Logical me... my first thought was "Burglars!" I quickly unlocked the door, and ran inside, straight to that room. There was no one there, and nothing was out of place. No windows or doors had been disturbed. Nothing had fallen. Nothing was broken or disheveled. There were no rats. There was absolutely no explanation for those sounds.

A few days later I talked to my Mom on the phone, and she said,
"You know, the strangest thing happened when I went to Grandma's the other day..."
She proceeded to tell me about having the exact same experience I'd had.

The really weird thing was, I hadn't told her what had happened to me yet.

The odd occurrences continued for a while at that house, and then eventually subsided. They were relatively small things; calling cards, really. Once we found a light on, which we were all certain we'd turned off. Another time, a door, that had been closed and locked with a homemade latch, was found open.

Demons were messing with us; doing the same thing to me and my Mom, and probably laughing about it as we told each other. We're their entertainment.

Sometime after that, another phenomena began, but it's hard to say when, because I didn't realize that it was a phenomena at first. There were numerous times when I thought I heard cars pulling into my driveway, but no car would be there.

I live out in the middle of nowhere, so it's not as if there are neighbors or businesses nearby. Therefore, if I hear that familiar sound of a car idling, I assume that it's stopped at my house. I think, "Someone's here!" and dash to the window to see who it is. Well, this had probably occurred before; but at some point, I began to notice it happening more frequently. I'd hear a car idling, think that someone had pulled into my driveway, go look, and nothing would be there. I'd think,
"What the fuck? I must be hearing things," and I'd shrug it off...

I didn't pay much attention to it until I was dating Jorge. One day, out of the blue, he casually mentioned,
"You know, I keep thinking that a car has stopped, but there's never anything there. It's so weird."

Another time, Marie was visiting, and we'd been sitting in the living room talking. After a lull in the conversation, she said,
"You know, I love your house and everything, but it is a little creepy sometimes hearing all those cars that aren't there."

These instances were more demon tricks. Maybe this time, they were trying to get me to believe in ghost cars, which would probably fall into the category of residual hauntings.

I've mentioned that I worked for a while as a preschool teacher. The strangest thing that ever happened to me at that job was this:

One of my favorite children ever (whom I would have adopted in a heartbeat) drew a picture one day of a stick man. I mean, obviously, that's what it was; but we weren't supposed to assume to know what their drawings were. We couldn't say, for example,
"Oh, what a nice man you've drawn there!"
Instead, we'd been instructed to say something like,
"Tell me about this drawing."
It's better for them, educationally speaking; and sometimes their responses will surprise you!

So, I asked him to tell me about the drawing.
He said,
"It's a man."
I said,
"Okay. Well, tell me about him. Who is he?"
He said, calmly,
"I don't know, but he's standing right behind you."

Later, he drew (what looked like) that same man, with dozens of other stick men behind him. I didn't ask him to explain that one.

That little boy was a very psychic child; who was very likely dead-ass accurate. Neither of these drawings looked out of the ordinary or alarming in any way. To the average observer, they were "just a man," or "just some men." They were certainly nothing that would have gotten his parents called in for a conference. If I hadn't asked for his explanation, I wouldn't have known. Ask children about their drawings!

Not long after that, I lost another dog. He was dying of old age-related complications, basically; it was the sort of thing where you know that death is imminent, but until a certain point, it's tough to gauge quite when it will happen. I had been scheduled to visit a friend and spend the night on the day that this dog ended up passing, but I'd already canceled. I'd told my friend that morning that my dog was too bad off, and I'd need to be by his side.

Well, he ended up passing early in the day. This sweet angel was a lot smaller than Daisy, so it didn't take nearly as long to build the coffin or dig the grave. My parents helped me, and we got him buried that day. It was dark by the time we finished up at the cemetery, but it was winter, so of course, darkness had fallen early in the evening, by around 6:00 pm.

I went home and cleaned up. After that, I looked at the clock in the kitchen, and it was nearly 10:00 pm already. I thought,
"How the hell?! Damn, I didn't realize it was that late..."

I didn't really feel up to visiting anyone, but I didn't really feel like staying home alone either; so I texted my friend and asked,
"Is it too late to come over?"
She replied,
"Um... no..." as if that was a stupid question.
If the time on my phone didn't match the kitchen clock, I didn't notice; which would be kind of weird, because I'm sort of obsessed with knowing what time it is. Anyway, I got my things together and headed over to her house.

Somehow, I got there at around 8:30 pm. I looked at a clock at her house when I got there, and thought,
"What the hell?!! I thought it was later!"
I guess I didn't look at my phone anymore that night, and actually that's a little weird too. I definitely didn't change any settings on the phone, and I definitely didn't notice anything being wrong with the time on it. I decided that the battery in my kitchen clock must have died, and it had probably stopped just before 10:00 am that morning, and I hadn't noticed because of the day's events.

Anyway, the next day, my phone was showing a different time than my friend's. Mine was something like 3 hours and 13 minutes ahead of hers. We called a third person to verify what the actual time was. That was sort of hilarious. When we asked our other friend what the time was, she told us, and then asked,
"Um... are ya'll on drugs?"

Anyway, it was my phone that was wrong. So, I decided to check the settings. I discovered that the clock feature on my phone had somehow gotten changed to a different time zone. I hadn't changed it. We were still very confused, because even if there was a logical explanation for that occurrence; the phone being set to the wrong time zone should have resulted in the time being exactly 3 hours off --not 3 hours and some odd minutes. Plus, there was still that kitchen clock to consider.

I manually set the time on my phone, and never had the issue again. When I got back home, the kitchen clock was displaying the correct time. It seemed to be working just fine.

Awfully strange things happen sometimes when death occurs. Or, I could have been "hallucinating" some of that; but I doubt that explains all of it...

This next one is a positive experience... Finally!

So, we were cleaning out my grandparents' house. I went there on Christmas Day of that year to do some more cleaning, simply because it was a day I had off work. Mom and Dad had said that if I found anything I really wanted to keep, I could have it; but truthfully, by that point, we were going through their "junk" they had stored away, and thought we'd already picked out our things we wanted to keep.

That day, I found a suitcase that I'd never seen before, and inside it was a jewelry box. The box was filled with vintage jewelry, including rings that fit me; which was a little weird because my grandmother definitely wore a larger ring size than I do. When I showed the box and it's contents to my parents, they said they'd never seen any of that stuff before either, nor had they ever seen the suitcase. They told me,
"Well, we don't know whose jewelry that could have been; but it seems like it was meant for you."
I thought exactly the same thing. I mean, there could be any number of explanations about where the jewelry came from; but my finding it, on Christmas, felt very much like one last Christmas present from my grandparents.

The next time I went to the house just happened to be on February 12th. I was single at the time, so I really had not thought about the fact that it was only a few days before Valentine's Day until...
I found a big cardboard box full of papers; an assortment of newspaper clippings, old Christmas cards, memorial cards from the funeral home, and old letters. Inside that box, amongst all those papers, was a small, red, rectangular-shaped box.

I opened this red box, and found it full to the brim with valentines. They were little kid valentines, the kind elementary school children exchange; cheesey sort of, with, say, a bumblebee buzzing in the shape of a heart, and the words "Bee mine." I couldn't help laughing. They were my grandfather's valentines, that he'd received from classmates in elementary school in the 1930s. They looked almost new. I smiled, thinking how sweet it was that my great-grandmother must have saved these, and also thinking that it was pretty random to find a box of valentines... right here at Valentine's Day.

Suddenly the date occurred to me, and I wondered if it was really random at all. My grandparents always gave me a box of candy and a card on Valentine's Day.

I took the entire box of papers home, to sort through them when I had more time.

Several weeks passed before I sat down to look through the rest of the papers. Most of them were letters that were written to my great-grandmother when she was a young woman, in the 1910s and 1920s. I read several of them, just looking inside the box and selecting the ones that appealed to me; based only on the appearance of the envelope, the stamp, the penmanship of the sender, and seemingly trivial things like that. They were fascinating. There were several love letters, some from WWI soldiers.

One that struck me as oddly significant, perhaps, was from another woman. This friend of my great-grandmother's had a delightful sense of humor. It seems that this letter had been penned when they were both newly wedded wives. The majority of the letter was a funny, if not very poetic, poem:

I remember when we were girls, in the kitchen, washing dishes...
Now we're married women... got to mend our husbands' britches...

stuff like that. It was really cute.

The closing read...

I hope this letter has made you smile today. And who knows? Maybe someday, a long time from now, it will make someone else smile too...

That... made me stop and think a minute...
"Sort of a peculiar way to end a letter," I thought. "It's like she knew that someone else would read this someday; like she was planning for it..."
I had an odd feeling; not bad, just odd. I was starting to wonder if my great-grandmother was somehow sending me messages through the letters; if perhaps, she was guiding me, somehow, to choose exactly the right ones to read.

The very next letter I chose was a small, slightly yellowed envelope which featured beautiful penmanship on the front and an interesting stamp. I opened this envelope, but there was nothing inside.
Concluding that the letter it originally contained must have been lost to time, I thought,
"Oh, well. So much for channeling messages from Great-grandma."
I felt a little bit silly.
Then something made me take another look... I pulled the envelope open wide, to see if perhaps something very small was stuck inside it. That was when I noticed writing on the inside of the envelope. It read,
"April Fool!"

I laughed out loud.
"Good one, Maw!" I said.
I leaned back in my chair for a moment, tickled, and amazed. Then, for some reason, it occurred to me to check the date... was it...
I reached for my phone to check the date, and sure enough, it was April 1st. I hadn't even thought about it.
"Holy shit!" I said, "Really good one, Maw!"

Later, I recounted this story to a friend at work. That was the first time anyone ever called me a medium.

THIS is how THEY... the good people, our loved ones in Heaven... communicate. They have to smack me upside the head sometimes, but they get their point across.

Even though I'd had these experiences, I still wasn't entirely a believer, and I still fell victim to demon tricks... This brings us around to the events of late 2020, just before I started recording EVPs. I had seen a transparent outline of a man... Johnny... a few times... pacing around in my kitchen or outside of my house. I had felt watched; but then again, that wasn't entirely unusual. Then one night, in December, the cats I had at the time acted as though they were afraid to go into the living room. I was sitting at the kitchen table, and they ran to me, crying pitifully; and then ran back to the doorway leading into the living room, and stood peering worriedly into the room, as if they didn't like what they saw there. They repeated this performance several times; and finally, I got up and looked for myself into the darkened living room.
"Is someone there?" I called.
That's when one of the dining chairs tipped over and hit my leg.

Another day, I had heard a man talking in my living room. It was out loud... or at least I thought so. It sounded so real that I thought someone was leaving a message on my answering machine. I was in another room, and I couldn't quite understand the words; but I heard that low drone of a male voice speaking in the distance. I was certain that someone was leaving a message; but I wondered why I hadn't heard the phone ring. But, of course, when I'd checked, there was no message or missed call.

That's why last year, during Christmas vacation, I thought I might try recording EVPs; and that opened a can of worms. Now it's Christmas once again, as I finish this chapter.

So, yeah, I'm nuts... for not understanding what this is, a whole hell of a lot sooner than I did. Do you see how I made excuses for everything?
"Oh, I must not be getting enough sleep... et cetera, et cetera."
I was so skeptical! Skepticism is healthy to a point, but if you have that much going on, it's time to admit that you're psychic; and it's also time to get yourself to church, because you just might end up living in Shaintsville.

I think it's clear that being present when a death occurs is somewhat of a risk; but even moreso than that, losing loved ones places us at risk for being targeted by demons. They'll swoop in quickly, trying to convince a grieving person that their loved ones' ghost has returned... Because they can read our minds, they'll know just what to do to convince their target that they are the ghost of that loved one.

Looking back, I think it's obvious that I was visited... and tricked... by demons several times during the past decade, at least. I don't think that any of them stayed around, or attached themselves, or fell in love, or got assigned to me, or whatever the truth is about that, until Johnny. He took a liking to me, and influenced me to try to make contact. Then, contact established, he tried to sell me a story of undying love; a story which he thought I'd be likely to believe, because he probably already knew my family's story, having read it in my mind.

I feel that I was set up... groomed from birth... and not only by my family, or by any church, but by popular culture as well. Romanticized ghost stories are everywhere. Our folklore is saturated with them; and they've survived into the present day, infiltrating our modern way of life. We live in a world where people pay extra to spend the night in a haunted hotel room, and parents buy their kids ghost-hunting equipment for Christmas.

We need to tell ghost stories; but we need to tell them right. We need to bust ghosts instead of simply hunting them.


Update...

August 31st, 2023

I have one amendment to this piece, which I wrote nearly two years ago. When I was being guided to choose the correct letters to read...
I am no longer absolutely certain that it was my great-grandmother doing that from Heaven. I have been shown since then, through a tarot card experiment which I documented in Saints and Haints, that demons can also guide our selections.

I still believe that it was a benevolent message, however; and that whomever was doing it, was doing it to amaze me and to make me smile.