Almost every October here on DailyKos, as a break from the usual politics, someone puts up a fun Halloween diary asking people to share any ghostly experiences they may have had. Maybe this year we need a break from politics more than ever. I’ve been looking forward to another such diary, but finally it occurred to me that instead of waiting I might just as well do one myself. Duh.
Then it occurred to me that, traditionally, Halloween is not just about ghosts (whatever ghosts might be). It is seen as the time when the veil between our everyday world and the “Other World” is at its thinnest, allowing more interaction; and traditionally that Other World consists not just of “ghosts” -- i.e. spirits of dead people -- but various non-human creatures as well. It is even related to occurrences of a psychic nature and the invisible forces that tie us together (the “Second Sight”). So …
Have you had any experiences which seemed to point to some kind of invisible, parallel world right under or alongside the everyday one?
I am simply curious and like to hear other people’s stories. I want to emphasize right at the start that my interest in such things is based on experience. I have no interest whatsoever in faith or wishful thinking. I have just had too many strange experiences myself, with too much supporting external corroboration — instances where the subjective and the objective have seemed to overlap — to be able to dismiss the possibility of an “Other World” easily. I’ve also talked with too many other normal, average people who have had such experiences. (They are the ones who don’t talk about their experiences much. The reason they tend to tell me is, I listen respectfully and don’t reflexively treat them like nuts or fools.)
Skeptics and the simplistic media constantly talk about all this as a matter of “belief” -- “Do you believe in ghosts?” -- which grates on me because it implies that it’s all just a matter of preference; of simply wanting there to be ghosts. Or spirits. Or ESP. Or whatever. For some people that can definitely be the case. I live in a city that is something of a capitol of flakey New Age belief. There is no lack of credulousness and wishful thinking here.
But the skeptics always seem to miss that many normal, intelligent, non-flakey people lean toward the possibility of an “Other World” not because of wishful thinking or gullibility, but simply because they’ve had powerful experiences they can’t deny; experiences which seem to go beyond the bounds of “interesting coincidence” or “power of suggestion” or “daydreaming.” When a woman with no face appears in your office while you’re working, on two different occasions, to warn you to get your wife out of your house before it kills her, for example -- as happened to a minister I knew in a small Midwestern town -- you’re sort of forced into considering there might be something to it.
For myself, I don’t want to believe there might be, say, the occasional nasty invisible forces or beings around us. I find the thought disturbing. I would prefer for the world not to be that way. But I’ve had a few experiences which point to that possibility, so I have to be open to it. I’ve also had experiences (and more of them) which point to there being nice invisible things around. I admit I find that more comforting.
So, in the hope of opening respectful discussion, I offer one of my experiences -- a creepy one, in the spirit of Halloween. I could write dozens of pages of others. This is one, though, which strikes me as one of the strangest, not just because it had so much external validation, but because it seemed to encompass a range of odd phenomena in one experience: precognitive dreams … poltergeist-type physical phenomena … ESP …
It was also the only experience I’ve had which involved things happening which clearly should not have been physically possible. Gullibility and the power of suggestion can’t make strings of Christmas lights stay lit after being unplugged. The old “It was just a coincidence” rationalization doesn’t hold up: “It was just a coincidence that your lights defied the laws of physics at that moment, twice, in front of another witness, in a way that happened to match your dream!”
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When I was in graduate school I lived for several years in a hundred-year-old house in which a number of strange things went on. Some were positive. For example, there seemed to be a nice ghost who smoked a cigar and played with my cat. (I even learned the ghost’s name from my elderly neighbor, who had lived in her house for over 70 years. When I returned home from her house and asked the ghost if he was indeed “Mr. Norton” the living room instantly filled with an overwhelming cigar smell.) Some of the experiences, like this one, were negative:
One night I had an eerie, unsettling dream. I rarely have nightmares, so that in itself made the experience exceptional. It went like this:
[The Dream] A friend was in my dining room. She pointed to the telephone table in the corner and told me there was a “Tommyknocker” there, and for me to mind it until she got back with something to take care of it. Then she left. [In reality that friend lived several states away and never visited that house.] I couldn’t see anything and didn’t have a clue what to do with a “Tommyknocker.” I didn’t even know what a “Tommyknocker” was. I had only heard the word in reference to a Stephen King book.
Not knowing what else to do, I acted as if I was taking it by the hand and leading it around the dining room. As I passed the door to the kitchen with the “Tommyknocker” I looked up to see the kitchen light bulb buzz and flicker and make a sizzling sound. Then it popped out and went dark. I then noticed my cat lying on the dining room floor. I rushed over to find its collar had been pulled tight, strangling it. It was then that I realized the “Tommyknocker” was a nasty, vicious thing.
Then I woke up. I went downstairs and the atmosphere in the house just felt thick and creepy, somehow sick and malignant. I attributed the feeling to the nightmare, however, and was relieved when the next morning the house felt normal.
I didn’t think any more about it until later that night. Again, the atmosphere in the house started feeling thick and icky, with a heavy oppressive feeling, and it got palpably worse as the evening went on. I went to the kitchen and when I switched on the light, the bulb fizzled and flickered and then popped out -- exactly as in my dream. I was standing in the same place, looking at if from the same angle. At that moment my answering machine, over on the table where the “Tommyknocker” had been in the dream, started whirring and clicking, with the microtape spinning back and forth. (Yes, answering machines had tapes back then.) It had never done that before.
I kept Christmas lights strung around the dining room year-round, and I thought that turning them on might dissipate the creepy feeling. I plugged the string in and then, for some reason, unplugged it again. The lights stayed on. It took me a moment to grasp what I was seeing and realize it shouldn’t be doing that. I was literally stunned. I describe it as the feeling you might get admiring a nice sunrise, only to realize you’re facing West. I doesn’t fit reality as you know it.
I distinctly remember systematically verifying what I was seeing: I looked up; the lights were on. I looked to my hand; the plug was in my hand, not in the socket. I looked up again; the lights were still on. Just as I was intellectually realizing, “This is impossible” … the lights went out. I then plugged and unplugged them repeatedly to see if it would happen again, but they now went on and off immediately, just like normal. The answering machine kept making it’s occasional whirrings and clickings.
Heading across the dining room, I stepped into a spot where I was overcome by a feeling of tingles. I stepped out of that spot. The tingles stopped. I stepped back into it. The tingles started again. I realized it was the spot where my cat had been lying dead in my dream. Meanwhile the nasty feeling in the house was getting really strong. I didn’t know what to do. I had never experienced anything like this before. I decided to walk to the house of a friend a few blocks away … an older Wiccan lady who was a lot more experienced in such things than I.
I didn’t tell her anything about what was going on, but just said, as neutrally as possible, “Could you come to my house and see what you pick up?” She later told me that as she stepped through the front door she was immediately hit by the sick atmosphere and her first reaction was, “I do not want to go in there!” As I sat in the living room saying nothing, she walked around the house. After a few minutes I heard her say, “Right here. It’s centered here. What’s going on?” I looked over and she was standing on the tingling spot.
I told her the above and when I came to the part about the Christmas lights staying on after being unplugged I demonstrated. Of course I knew it wouldn’t happen again, and especially with someone watching … but it did. I unplugged the lights and they stayed lit for at least five seconds, even though the plug was in my hand. She witnessed it. Then I again plugged and unplugged them, over and over, and they worked normally again.
My friend stayed a while and we ended up sitting in the living room and talking about various things going on in our lives. After I while I noticed the thick, sick atmosphere had lightened considerably. She attributed it to our positive interaction and then, to make a long story short, did a Wiccan purifying ritual with salt and prayers -- (she said the salt was like a prop, used to focus intention, which is what really does the work) -- and herded the little creep out the window. The house felt fine again. The lights and answering machine never did those strange things again. In fact, in the twenty years since then I’ve always kept Christmas lights around my various homes all year round, and I’ve never had any continue to stay lit after being unplugged like that.
A few days later a thought occurred to me, so I decided to follow up with my friend in the other state who had appeared in the dream. I didn’t say anything, but just started with, “What’s a Tommyknocker?” She said, “All I know is, it’s a Stephen King book and movie. But it’s strange you mention it now because I hadn’t thought of it in years, but coincidentally it’s come up several times in the past week. There was a preview for it on a video we just watched, and then within two days two different people asked about it at the video store where I work.”
Go figure. I don’t know what to make of it.
