outerheaven
9th October 2014, 17:58
Hi guys,
I would like to share a story with you! I'm compiling some short stories, with the main thread running through them being my awakening.
For the first 28 years of my life, I was one of the most head-in-the-sand "realist" types you can imagine. I wrote religion off at a very young age, concluding that God did not exist, the Spirit World was a sham, and life was merely a random occurrence on this rock called Earth that ended upon death. The very idea of "life" itself was, to me, vastly overrated, as it was a series of electrical and chemical reactions that led to an illusion of something more.
(Might I just point out that I never argued my views with others -- I had no interest in "converting" anyone to my "truths," I wanted simply to be left alone with my views. I had no tolerance for the religious "idiots" that would try to speak to me of the beauty of life. They were weaklings in my perspective. Sorry if I'm angering some of you now, but I'm just trying to give you a picture of who I was and how far I've had to come.)
As a result of these convictions, I believe that my spirit guide, higher self, Source -- whatever you want to call it -- gave me an outrageous number of physical catalysts that were completely unexplainable, in an attempt to budge me off my stubborn ideology and take a look around me. Sorry to say it -- I've hoarded a lot of good experiences -- but apparently I needed them!
One of those earliest catalysts was my next door neighbors' haunted house.
Actually, the story begins with the family that lived there before them. They were a young couple with a single child who was just a toddler. One night, the parents dropped their child off at a babysitter's house, who happened to have a pool in their backyard. Tragically, the toddler wandered out of view, and fell into the pool and drowned.
The parents were heart-broken, and even though this accident hadn't happened in their house, they couldn't stand to live there any more. They moved, and that's when my next set of neighbors -- let's call them the Gibbons -- moved in.
I was 7 years old when they moved in, and they had two children, Nick and Megan, that were in my age group. We played together outside every day, running races, playing sports, getting lost in the woods, you name it. (Man, it's scary to think so much has changed in ~30 years, that parents get arrested for having their kid play outside unattended ... we would ride our bikes as far as we could! lol)
Being that I was 7, I had no knowledge of the tragedy that happened to the prior family. I had no knowledge of "ghosts" as being any more real than monsters under the bed.
Which is why I was surprised when Nick and Megan started asking me if I believed in ghosts a year or so later. They asked if we could form a "Ghost Club" to talk about such matters at regular intervals.
It was then that I started hearing the stories. The kids became aware that something wasn't right when they heard a child's voice calling, "Mommy? Mommy?" and footsteps going up and down the hall, sometimes voices calling from the attic. The Gibbons kids somehow mustered the courage to go looking for the source of the voice, but never found anything.
Their parents, I suspect, knew of these events but did not want to talk to the kids about it, as you can imagine. Thus the need for the "Ghost Club." Perhaps they tried to ignore it? I wonder when they figured out they had a problem?
Well, I know at some point, they did indeed acknowledge that they had a problem.
I heard the following story from my Mom, who was friends with Vicky, the Gibbons' mom:
One night, the Gibbons' Dad was on a business trip, and Nick was sick with a very high fever. Nick slept in bed with his mom. She awoke at one point at 3 AM, and, staring at the ceiling, suddenly saw the Grim Reaper -- with scythe and all -- fly through the wall and hover over the bed.
Vicky, absolutely frightened out of her mind, sat up and screamed. The Grim Reaper then continued on, as if spooked, flying across the bed and through the opposite wall. Vicky turned on the bedside lamp, still screaming.
She then looked at her son Nick, next to her, who had not stirred despite the commotion. He was lying on his back motionless. That's when she discovered chunks of vomit in his mouth. She scooped them out and rolled him on his side and brought him back. She thought he would've died in moments had she not discovered him just then.
There were many more stories before that -- but that was the pinnacle event for the Gibbons, a religious Catholic family, who brought in a Catholic priest to exorcise the house.
The Ghost Club meetings continued, but with new rules:
- Meetings shall never take place on Gibbons property
- No ghost stories, no referencing of or acknowledging any previous haunting, on Gibbons property.
Though our meetings continued, there were no new stories in Ghost Club. Heck, we had enough material to constantly re-hash from the previous years. The exorcism seemed to have worked. But, Nick and Megan warned, they were told that they absolutely had to abide by those rules. Merely mentioning the haunting could bring the spirits back and render the exorcism useless.
***
A year or two later, the Gibbonses went on a family vacation. I was about 10 years old at the time, and had cemented myself as a responsible enough child that the parents asked me to pick up their daily mail, newspaper, and feed the dog while they were gone for a week.
I said, no problem! ... despite being frightened out of my mind at the prospect of being in that house alone.
But every day I did my duty, collected the mail, the newspaper, and with baited breath, entered the house and fed the dog and left as fast as I possibly could.
The week went by without incident.
On the final day, I again dropped off the mail, the newspaper, fed the dog, and hurried towards the door.
I felt a great sense of relief as I stood at the door for the last time, having made it through the week without dying or seeing or hearing anything I couldn't explain. And instead of going through that door, I turned around one last time, surveying that house, which was just creepy beyond words when empty ...
... and then, for some reason, I broke the cardinal rule.
"Haunted?" I asked aloud. "Pft, this house isn't haunted."
The instant I finished that statement, what I can only describe as a raucous party spontaneously broke out, coming from within the kitchen and living room, a mere 15 feet away. Someone on a piano played sloppy ragtime music, bottles clinked together, the sound of chips being thrown on the table ... lots of laughter, lots of talk, everyone trying to shout over each other to be heard.
All incredibly loud -- my parents had thrown large parties, and I knew what it was to be at a party where the decibel level was to the point where you just want to go to another room to get out of it. It was like that. No TV or radio on a timer could achieve a volume or clarity of that level. (Besides which, they hadn't rigged anything up with timers.)
I ran. I ran through that front door, without bothering to lock it, and ran right home to my room where I sat in my room scared out of my mind without telling anyone what had happened. It took me a couple hours to calm down enough to go back and lock the front door, my hand trembling as I fumbled to get the key in the lock.
I felt incredibly guilty for what I'd done, but I couldn't come clean with how I'd been entrusted with responsibility to do a relatively simple task -- and yet retrieving the mail and feeding the dog had turned into me possibly being responsible for spirits returning to haunt the ever-loving $#(@ out of my neighbors. Talk about screwing up a job, eh?
Ghost club meetings continued. Thankfully, to my great relief, no new stories were reported. Months later I finally came clean to Megan, who was seriously angry with me for being so stupid. But years later, and the spirits had not returned. As far as I know, the Gibbons still live in that house.
***
If you're wondering how I managed to explain this experience, while maintaining my "material world" perspective ... well ... I couldn't and didn't!
In fact, it did not seem to have any effect on my worldview. I rather enjoyed having an experience I could not objectively explain. It did not factor in to my physical reality, except to say that the world was vastly more complicated than we knew.
I guess, in retrospect, I didn't write the spirit world off completely. But I figured that if it did exist, it had to be vastly more complicated than any explanation organized religion could offer.
I can only conclude that this experience helped guide me and kept me from completely closing my mind off to an immaterial world.
Thanks for reading! I appreciate the opportunity to share. Do any of you have your own experiences?
I would like to share a story with you! I'm compiling some short stories, with the main thread running through them being my awakening.
For the first 28 years of my life, I was one of the most head-in-the-sand "realist" types you can imagine. I wrote religion off at a very young age, concluding that God did not exist, the Spirit World was a sham, and life was merely a random occurrence on this rock called Earth that ended upon death. The very idea of "life" itself was, to me, vastly overrated, as it was a series of electrical and chemical reactions that led to an illusion of something more.
(Might I just point out that I never argued my views with others -- I had no interest in "converting" anyone to my "truths," I wanted simply to be left alone with my views. I had no tolerance for the religious "idiots" that would try to speak to me of the beauty of life. They were weaklings in my perspective. Sorry if I'm angering some of you now, but I'm just trying to give you a picture of who I was and how far I've had to come.)
As a result of these convictions, I believe that my spirit guide, higher self, Source -- whatever you want to call it -- gave me an outrageous number of physical catalysts that were completely unexplainable, in an attempt to budge me off my stubborn ideology and take a look around me. Sorry to say it -- I've hoarded a lot of good experiences -- but apparently I needed them!
One of those earliest catalysts was my next door neighbors' haunted house.
Actually, the story begins with the family that lived there before them. They were a young couple with a single child who was just a toddler. One night, the parents dropped their child off at a babysitter's house, who happened to have a pool in their backyard. Tragically, the toddler wandered out of view, and fell into the pool and drowned.
The parents were heart-broken, and even though this accident hadn't happened in their house, they couldn't stand to live there any more. They moved, and that's when my next set of neighbors -- let's call them the Gibbons -- moved in.
I was 7 years old when they moved in, and they had two children, Nick and Megan, that were in my age group. We played together outside every day, running races, playing sports, getting lost in the woods, you name it. (Man, it's scary to think so much has changed in ~30 years, that parents get arrested for having their kid play outside unattended ... we would ride our bikes as far as we could! lol)
Being that I was 7, I had no knowledge of the tragedy that happened to the prior family. I had no knowledge of "ghosts" as being any more real than monsters under the bed.
Which is why I was surprised when Nick and Megan started asking me if I believed in ghosts a year or so later. They asked if we could form a "Ghost Club" to talk about such matters at regular intervals.
It was then that I started hearing the stories. The kids became aware that something wasn't right when they heard a child's voice calling, "Mommy? Mommy?" and footsteps going up and down the hall, sometimes voices calling from the attic. The Gibbons kids somehow mustered the courage to go looking for the source of the voice, but never found anything.
Their parents, I suspect, knew of these events but did not want to talk to the kids about it, as you can imagine. Thus the need for the "Ghost Club." Perhaps they tried to ignore it? I wonder when they figured out they had a problem?
Well, I know at some point, they did indeed acknowledge that they had a problem.
I heard the following story from my Mom, who was friends with Vicky, the Gibbons' mom:
One night, the Gibbons' Dad was on a business trip, and Nick was sick with a very high fever. Nick slept in bed with his mom. She awoke at one point at 3 AM, and, staring at the ceiling, suddenly saw the Grim Reaper -- with scythe and all -- fly through the wall and hover over the bed.
Vicky, absolutely frightened out of her mind, sat up and screamed. The Grim Reaper then continued on, as if spooked, flying across the bed and through the opposite wall. Vicky turned on the bedside lamp, still screaming.
She then looked at her son Nick, next to her, who had not stirred despite the commotion. He was lying on his back motionless. That's when she discovered chunks of vomit in his mouth. She scooped them out and rolled him on his side and brought him back. She thought he would've died in moments had she not discovered him just then.
There were many more stories before that -- but that was the pinnacle event for the Gibbons, a religious Catholic family, who brought in a Catholic priest to exorcise the house.
The Ghost Club meetings continued, but with new rules:
- Meetings shall never take place on Gibbons property
- No ghost stories, no referencing of or acknowledging any previous haunting, on Gibbons property.
Though our meetings continued, there were no new stories in Ghost Club. Heck, we had enough material to constantly re-hash from the previous years. The exorcism seemed to have worked. But, Nick and Megan warned, they were told that they absolutely had to abide by those rules. Merely mentioning the haunting could bring the spirits back and render the exorcism useless.
***
A year or two later, the Gibbonses went on a family vacation. I was about 10 years old at the time, and had cemented myself as a responsible enough child that the parents asked me to pick up their daily mail, newspaper, and feed the dog while they were gone for a week.
I said, no problem! ... despite being frightened out of my mind at the prospect of being in that house alone.
But every day I did my duty, collected the mail, the newspaper, and with baited breath, entered the house and fed the dog and left as fast as I possibly could.
The week went by without incident.
On the final day, I again dropped off the mail, the newspaper, fed the dog, and hurried towards the door.
I felt a great sense of relief as I stood at the door for the last time, having made it through the week without dying or seeing or hearing anything I couldn't explain. And instead of going through that door, I turned around one last time, surveying that house, which was just creepy beyond words when empty ...
... and then, for some reason, I broke the cardinal rule.
"Haunted?" I asked aloud. "Pft, this house isn't haunted."
The instant I finished that statement, what I can only describe as a raucous party spontaneously broke out, coming from within the kitchen and living room, a mere 15 feet away. Someone on a piano played sloppy ragtime music, bottles clinked together, the sound of chips being thrown on the table ... lots of laughter, lots of talk, everyone trying to shout over each other to be heard.
All incredibly loud -- my parents had thrown large parties, and I knew what it was to be at a party where the decibel level was to the point where you just want to go to another room to get out of it. It was like that. No TV or radio on a timer could achieve a volume or clarity of that level. (Besides which, they hadn't rigged anything up with timers.)
I ran. I ran through that front door, without bothering to lock it, and ran right home to my room where I sat in my room scared out of my mind without telling anyone what had happened. It took me a couple hours to calm down enough to go back and lock the front door, my hand trembling as I fumbled to get the key in the lock.
I felt incredibly guilty for what I'd done, but I couldn't come clean with how I'd been entrusted with responsibility to do a relatively simple task -- and yet retrieving the mail and feeding the dog had turned into me possibly being responsible for spirits returning to haunt the ever-loving $#(@ out of my neighbors. Talk about screwing up a job, eh?
Ghost club meetings continued. Thankfully, to my great relief, no new stories were reported. Months later I finally came clean to Megan, who was seriously angry with me for being so stupid. But years later, and the spirits had not returned. As far as I know, the Gibbons still live in that house.
***
If you're wondering how I managed to explain this experience, while maintaining my "material world" perspective ... well ... I couldn't and didn't!
In fact, it did not seem to have any effect on my worldview. I rather enjoyed having an experience I could not objectively explain. It did not factor in to my physical reality, except to say that the world was vastly more complicated than we knew.
I guess, in retrospect, I didn't write the spirit world off completely. But I figured that if it did exist, it had to be vastly more complicated than any explanation organized religion could offer.
I can only conclude that this experience helped guide me and kept me from completely closing my mind off to an immaterial world.
Thanks for reading! I appreciate the opportunity to share. Do any of you have your own experiences?