The paranormal is often intimidating, confusing, terrifying. But strange knocks, dark entities and growls in the night aren’t always bad. The following are two stories of welcomed bumps in the night.
A mother’s touch
Jo Ann Miller, Texas, visited her family in Independence, Mo., in fall 2009. She went to the cemetery where her parents are buried, and drove by the house she grew up in, the house where her mother lived for 60 years. Later, at a party, Miller watched a family DVD with pictures of her mother, father and baby pictures of her son, who died in 1995.
“After we came back to Texas I was talking on the phone to someone about how nice it was to see those old pictures and how good my mother looked, how good my son looked, and also how nice it was to see a photo of my brother-in-law,” she said. “None of them are living.”
About 30 minutes later, Miller knew she was not alone in her house.
“I felt a hand resting on my right shoulder,” she said. “Such a light touch. It was almost like it wasn’t touching me, but it was.”
No one was there.
She looked for other explanations, such as a breeze from the ceiling fan, but the fan wasn’t on.
“There was no explanation,” she said. “It was just a nice feeling to have that invisible hand touching my shoulder.”
She believed the touch was from her mother. The next morning she was sure of it.
“I woke up in bed, rolled over, and happened to see the digital clock in our bedroom,” she said. “It had the numbers flashing that were my mother’s home address numbers exactly. I believe now that it was my mother – or an angel sent by my mother – that touched me. It isn’t something I would want to happen very often, that’s for sure. But it was a comforting presence.”
The Ghost Watches Over Us
When Krissy Mathers and her significant other moved into their Texas apartment in 2007 they knew they were not alone.
“This wasn’t the first time that my partner and I had ghostly roommates,” she said. “In our previous apartments there were specters. I felt (them) as cold chills and that feeling of being watched. She, however, could see them as clear as day.”
Footsteps from invisible feet began thumping through their apartment. Curtains would blow when the windows were closed, and bursts of cold air would shoot through the apartment.
“We’d have closet doors open and close,” Mathers said. “We’d have pots and pans fall on the floor out of the cabinets after being undisturbed, and picture frames that went flying off the walls.”
Mathers noticed these incidents occurred when she and her partner were discussing emotional issues.
“They get animated when we get animated,” Mathers said. “They especially get worked up when there is negative energy in the house such as in an argument.”
One night, a spirit appeared in Mathers’ bedroom.
“One dark night in a half sleep dosing off in bed, I saw the curtains move,” Mathers said. “I felt the cold winds blow and I heard the steps. My partner was frozen stiff and finally said, ‘Do you see that?’”
Mathers then knew she wasn’t imagining what was happening in the room.
“I clearly could see the figure of a shadow man,” she said. “Long, shaggy, shadow Cousin It-looking shadow man. He was like Cousin It, but with thick, nappy dreads covering his entire body.”
Then the entity spoke.
“My partner heard the shadow man say that someone was trying to break into our apartment,” Mathers said. “And just then there was rasping and noises at our back door. We hit the wall with baseball bats and whatever was there ran away.”
The next morning they discovered someone had tampered with their back door.
“Our back door lock had been unscrewed and almost removed,” she said. “It was barely hanging on, but we probably would not have noticed it before leaving the house for work. This was happening during a wave of apartment robberies and car break-ins in our apartment complex. We felt that we had the shadow man to thank for stopping either an attempt at a robbery or a set up for a future robbery.”
After that, their ghostly roommate has stepped back into the shadows, only occasionally making itself known by footsteps walking through the apartment.
“It kind of makes me smile,” Mathers said. “Now I light candles and incense for it so that the space is cleansed of bad vibes. But I guess our shadow man is still watching over us.”
Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt
Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
The Things Children See
All little Diane Trisler wanted to do was play. As she stood in her aunt’s yard one afternoon, she noticed someone standing nearby.
“When I was three years old I saw a shadow person,” Trisler said. “It looked curiously at me as I played in the backyard of my aunt’s home.”
Alone in the yard – her family was inside – she approached the shadowy figure; it didn’t like that.
“The entity looked at me and when I acknowledged it, it seemed to have feared me,” Trisler said. “I chased it and said, ‘Wait wait. It’s OK. Who are you? Do you want to play?’ As a little child I did not know yet enough that I should have been scared.”
She chased this figure until it ran between two trees, through a fence and vanished.
“Was this entity from a different dimension or a ghost?” she said. “My mother had an abortion a few years before I was born and the shadow looked like it would have been the age of the older sibling if it had lived on this planet and not had been terminated during my mom’s pregnancy. Could it have been my dead brother or sister? Till this day at the age of 26 I am in utter amazement and awe of such a being.”
Children see more than adults. Invisible friends, ghosts, little people. Children often startle their parents by discussing encounters with someone whose description is similar to a grandparent the child has never met. Is it imagination, or can children tap into a part of the world adults can no longer see?
Bill Bryant was one of those children.
“I saw the Hat Man when I was a kid,” he said. “My brother and I shared the same room. Maybe 30 years later I was talking to my brother about it at my mom’s house. He said he saw the same thing.”
The Hat Man is an often-seen type of shadow person that wears, of all things, a fedora.
“Last fall my sister was telling my mom of seeing the Hat Man,” Bryant said. “(Mom) remembered my story and described him to my sister before she could describe him.”
Is the ability to see the paranormal something we outgrow? Or do children experience frequent paranormal encounters because society has yet to tell them there’s nothing unusual under their beds – or up the stairs.
In the late 1970s, Stefanie Woolsey – then four years old – and her three-year-old sister saw something in their house.
“This particular event we experienced together still haunts us,” Woolsey said.
Woolsey’s family lived in an older, A-framed, red brick house in southern Indiana near the Ohio River. In the upstairs room under the peaked ceiling was the Woolsey children’s playroom.
“Our oldest sister was in kindergarten,” Woolsey said. “When she went to school, my mother encouraged my other sister and I to play upstairs while she cleaned the house.”
In the upstairs room, the girls would open a closet door “that looked like a barn door,” take out their toys and play. But their fun would always be cut short.
“We would play until we disturbed the Soldier Boy,” she said.
A young man, angered by the noise the girls made, would emerge from the closet and gruffly yell, “Get out of here.” The Soldier Boy wore a military uniform with big black boots.
“We were so little, as we turned the corner to the stairs we could only see his big, black boots,” Woolsey said. “My sister and I ran so fast we’d land on our rear-ends and flop down the stairs until we reached the bottom with our hearts almost beating out of our chests.”
Hearing the noise, their mother would step around the corner holding her cleaning supplies and tell them to go back upstairs.
“My sister and I answered, ‘We can’t. The Soldier Boy won’t let us,’” Woolsey said.
This happened almost every day for the year Woolsey’s family lived in that house.
“My sister and I collected our toys and played in the middle of the stairs appeasing our mother and the Soldier Boy,” she said.
Woolsey’s mother never saw the Soldier Boy, nor did she believe them, but she did notice strange things in the house.
“Even though my mother’s an avid cleaner, the house became infested with roaches forcing us to move to a wonderful, white house in the country,” Woolsey said. “The closest neighbor lived a mile away in an old church made into a house with a cemetery in the yard. My sister and I continued to have experiences – but not with the Soldier Boy.”
Can children see into an unknown world? It seems adults should not so easily discredit a child who speaks of a “friend” who plays in their room.
Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt
Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.
“When I was three years old I saw a shadow person,” Trisler said. “It looked curiously at me as I played in the backyard of my aunt’s home.”
Alone in the yard – her family was inside – she approached the shadowy figure; it didn’t like that.
“The entity looked at me and when I acknowledged it, it seemed to have feared me,” Trisler said. “I chased it and said, ‘Wait wait. It’s OK. Who are you? Do you want to play?’ As a little child I did not know yet enough that I should have been scared.”
She chased this figure until it ran between two trees, through a fence and vanished.
“Was this entity from a different dimension or a ghost?” she said. “My mother had an abortion a few years before I was born and the shadow looked like it would have been the age of the older sibling if it had lived on this planet and not had been terminated during my mom’s pregnancy. Could it have been my dead brother or sister? Till this day at the age of 26 I am in utter amazement and awe of such a being.”
Children see more than adults. Invisible friends, ghosts, little people. Children often startle their parents by discussing encounters with someone whose description is similar to a grandparent the child has never met. Is it imagination, or can children tap into a part of the world adults can no longer see?
Bill Bryant was one of those children.
“I saw the Hat Man when I was a kid,” he said. “My brother and I shared the same room. Maybe 30 years later I was talking to my brother about it at my mom’s house. He said he saw the same thing.”
The Hat Man is an often-seen type of shadow person that wears, of all things, a fedora.
“Last fall my sister was telling my mom of seeing the Hat Man,” Bryant said. “(Mom) remembered my story and described him to my sister before she could describe him.”
Is the ability to see the paranormal something we outgrow? Or do children experience frequent paranormal encounters because society has yet to tell them there’s nothing unusual under their beds – or up the stairs.
In the late 1970s, Stefanie Woolsey – then four years old – and her three-year-old sister saw something in their house.
“This particular event we experienced together still haunts us,” Woolsey said.
Woolsey’s family lived in an older, A-framed, red brick house in southern Indiana near the Ohio River. In the upstairs room under the peaked ceiling was the Woolsey children’s playroom.
“Our oldest sister was in kindergarten,” Woolsey said. “When she went to school, my mother encouraged my other sister and I to play upstairs while she cleaned the house.”
In the upstairs room, the girls would open a closet door “that looked like a barn door,” take out their toys and play. But their fun would always be cut short.
“We would play until we disturbed the Soldier Boy,” she said.
A young man, angered by the noise the girls made, would emerge from the closet and gruffly yell, “Get out of here.” The Soldier Boy wore a military uniform with big black boots.
“We were so little, as we turned the corner to the stairs we could only see his big, black boots,” Woolsey said. “My sister and I ran so fast we’d land on our rear-ends and flop down the stairs until we reached the bottom with our hearts almost beating out of our chests.”
Hearing the noise, their mother would step around the corner holding her cleaning supplies and tell them to go back upstairs.
“My sister and I answered, ‘We can’t. The Soldier Boy won’t let us,’” Woolsey said.
This happened almost every day for the year Woolsey’s family lived in that house.
“My sister and I collected our toys and played in the middle of the stairs appeasing our mother and the Soldier Boy,” she said.
Woolsey’s mother never saw the Soldier Boy, nor did she believe them, but she did notice strange things in the house.
“Even though my mother’s an avid cleaner, the house became infested with roaches forcing us to move to a wonderful, white house in the country,” Woolsey said. “The closest neighbor lived a mile away in an old church made into a house with a cemetery in the yard. My sister and I continued to have experiences – but not with the Soldier Boy.”
Can children see into an unknown world? It seems adults should not so easily discredit a child who speaks of a “friend” who plays in their room.
Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt
Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.
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