October 26, 2012

Real Halloween Ghost Stories -- Part One

'Tis the season for Halloween, where all through the land, all the creatures were stirring and clapping their hands in hopes a spooky tale would this way come...

Ok, enough with the pathetic poetic satire! Halloween is one super magical season, and it is also the favorite time of year for many paranormalists. Ghostvillage.com put out a request to our readers for October/Halloween themed spooky personal stories. Here are some of the best!

Our first Halloween-themed encounter comes from paranormal investigator, psychic-medium, and theologian, Kristina Davis-Rake. She shares about a Halloween evening with the ouija board when she was 12 years old

Read, if you dare...

A Ouija Halloween

It was Halloween and - joy of joys! - it was occurring on a Friday night. That meant that when hosts and hostesses would no longer answering the door, we could retire to my friend Rachel's house and spend the evening in belly-splitting bliss.

Rachel was an interesting friend. And by interesting, I mean psychotic. She was simply off her nut. She would always pee her pants when she laughed and found that amusing. She would play vicious jokes on her friends that usually ended in clothing damage. She would laugh so hard that she would reel around and fall on you as if she were in some Pentecostal Church service and infused with the Holy Spirit.

I simply thought she was possessed. But, she was willing to be my friend and, God knows, I had a hard time gathering those, so we spent our time together until she did something unforgiveable, like stealing my drawings of original characters and telling her mother she drew them and having her mother show them to me and say they were being entered into a contest...yes, that sort of unforgiveable. I still cannot fathom the meaning and nature of this relationship, but I digress.

I had remanded myself over to the custody of her equally insane mother, wonderful father, and Boo Radleyish younger brother. She lived in a bilevel right on the river marsh in my sea shore town. When you walked in her house, you entered into the physical center and went upstairs to the normal living space or downstairs into what could have been its own apartment. We always stayed downstairs when I was over. downstairs when I was over.

Rachel and I were ready to go to bed. We both had our own bedrooms downstairs and I was extremely tired. That's when Rachel said, "Kristina, wait! My mom bought me this. Remember we played it at your house once?" She pulled out an innocuous Milton Bradley box that held what I know view as a sinister game: a Ouija Board.

Let me just pause to give you some background. I was baptized in the Catholic church by my lapsed Catholic mother and unbaptized, hostile toward religion for a good reason father. But we never went to church. In fact, I didn't understand why they told the same story when we went once a year (it was Easter) and why my mom never let me take a cookie from the man in the dress.

That was my theological knowledge at that time.

So the ouija board seemed like a harmless way to find ghosts. I had studied the paranormal since before I could read (my family read ghost and vampire stories to me and I watched In Search Of rather than Sesame Street). So I was eager. I was telling her about lycanthropy (yes, I knew the word then) and the like and about some of my encounters with the dead.

Second pause - I knew I had angels and protectors with me, but I had recognized as soon as I started school that it was not okay to talk about the things I experienced. A particular angel would come to me at night and tell me about God and how the universe worked. My houses were haunted and I suffered attacks nightly, up to and including being thrown down from a levitated position while asleep so that I woke up in mid fall as I smacked my mouth against the dresser. When I looked in the mirror, I had blood all over my face and in my mouth. I saw the ghost in the room (his name was Bill), but there were evil things in that house and they did not like me. No one else experienced the attacks. I now realize that I am a psychic medium with a very specific destiny and that evil will stop at nothing to stop me. I digress.

At this point in my life, I knew about the world behind the veil. I knew how close it was and how fragile the veil was. I could see the dead, I knew things before they happened, and I could literally read people's minds. I could hear their thoughts a second before they said them. These were not fun skills to have, neither was being of such a high intellect that they wanted to toss me from the school every year. Hence, the not making normal friends problem.

We pulled out the Ouija Board and began to ask questions. At first, it was the normal "You're pushing it!" "No, you're pushing it!" She kept accusing me of pushing the damned thing and I wasn't. In fact, my hands couldn't keep up with it. It was clearly her and I told her so, so she suddenly let go.

And the pointer kept going. On the board. Spelling out name after name after name after name.

"Who are they?" Rachel asked.

Tell her, my guide said in my mind. I said, "They all died in an accident of some kind."

"How do YOU know?" she asked in that 12 year old girl way.

"You asked," I said as I picked up the pointer. "Anyway, I'm done. Good night," I said as I nervously put the pointer on the bar. Then Rachel had a novel idea. "Let's light a candle and make a ghost appear."

I was twelve years old. I was stupid. I wanted to see a ghost because I never could believe that I had.

So I smiled and sat down and we called on ghosts.

The room changed. I had not felt that before, but I have many times since. Recently, this story of my life was brought to mind when I entered a house where the husband was practicing Satanism. Not the hedonist kind. He was PRACTICING. He even had something guarding the place. It told me its name. I never want to know something like that again.

This is what happened that night with Rachel. The room got darker. I wanted to throw up. My every nerve ending was screaming. I ran to the door to turn on the light and saw something huge and black standing over Rachel in the pitch black of the room. I threw the switch up, selfishly begging that it take her and not me.

Nothing. The light had chased it away. Rachel was sitting there, making faces as if she were possessed and just being a little bitch. But nothing else.

We sat on the couch, though, taking turns sleeping. I was certain something was there and I would not sleep unless she was up watching. She took the opportunity to cut a piece of my hair off and glue it to the side of my face, at which point sleeping was over.

I guess it was about 3 am and we were both up. There was a kitchen in the downstairs and Rachel went in there to grab us soda. I walked to the doorway and turned and saw the most horrific sight. Rachel was standing there facing me holding two cans of Coke in her hand.

And behind her was a seven foot tall black entity. It was a black that wasn't just the absence of light - it was light's opposite. As if light could never enter and never existed inside of it before. There was a sheen to it, though, like roiling oil. And yet, it was opaque. It was a physical contradiction.

Play some more, I heard it say in my mind.

"Hey! Let's try the board now. It's like the witching hour or something," Rachel suddenly said.

I ran. I just ran to the stairs and up them and out the front door. She came following me and I told her I was certain something was trying to possess her. She did her exorcist impression again but I was not budging. I wanted to leave. She finally got me to go back downstairs, telling me she had called my parents but there was no answer (she never called). All night I felt that thing with her. I was so scared. I had no protections in my arsenal, only a pleading to God that something with me would keep it from getting me. Then my own angels said in my mind, Get rid of the board.

I turned to Rachel, who was humming eerily to herself, that we needed to get rid of the board.

"NO way!" she said. "It was a birthday present."

I told her about the black thing and she got a little frightened. Then she falsely remembered that she had seen it, too.

"We need to toss it into the water," I demanded.

Rachel's face contorted a little and she said no, she'd throw it in the trash. I told he she'd get it out again and we were throwing it in the water. I took it and began to make for the sliding glass door downstairs that led to their dock and their boat (we all had boats).

Rachel held on to me the whole way, trying to take the board and literally fighting me.

It was about 6 am by now and still dark, but with the promise of grey at the edges of the night. So I jumped into the dingy and began to row out to the tall grass at the enge of the water, where the marshes were. She followed me in another boat. It was surreal. There was a trash bag in the boat and I wrapped the board and tossed it in the water, pushing it down with the oar. Rachel banged into my boat and we had an oar fight with her laugh maniacally.

As I type this, I am stunned by how untrue it sounds. But I swear to you, every word is true as I remember it. I had repressed the memory of this night until I entered that demon house and remembered that presence.

The bag took on water and the board sank. Rachel stopped hitting me with her oar and sat calmly in the boat. She wanted to know what the hell I was doing out in the lagoon.

I asked her what the hell she was doing out in the lagoon. Then we both realized we weren't quite sure how to row back.

We managed. She seemed more calm, back to her psychotic self, and I left as soon as my parents answered my phone. As I recall, I began to walk the three miles home as soon as I knew they were coming.

I have, on one other occasion, seen someone get physically possessed. That time, I saw the entity pushing into her face.

But this was my first brush with a ouija board. Unfortunately, not my last.

Happy Halloween!