True Ghost Stories, Part VII – Do I Believe This Stuff? “You know nothing, Jon Snow”

Tags

Game of Thrones, Ghost Stories, Ghosts, Halloween, Jon Snow, Paranormal, Supernatural

I haven’t experienced any hauntings or paranormal activity since the “demon” sitting on my chest eventually scurried away.

If you ask me or Dale now if we believe in ghosts, in the supernatural, we probably both would say “no”, even after having terrifying, supernatural visitations.

We don’t “disbelieve” in them either. We can neither deny nor explain what we experienced. It falls into that realm between the real and the unreal, the known and unknown.

Perhaps what we experienced has some as yet to be discovered physical or psychological explanation. Perhaps it was merely the thinning of some mist that lies between this world and another. None of us are fully aware of all the phenomena that take place around us, but some are more sensitive than others to certain aspects of it. Our pets have a heightened sense of smell and hearing. A dolphin’s sense of reality is quite different from ours. And who knows what the bird and the bees might think of the comings and goings of people. Let alone those creatures that live but a few hours or days.

We are not consciously aware of what’s happening in our own bodies most of the time, the blood circulating in our veins, the mitochondria inhabiting our cells, or the atoms spinning through our bodies, comprising its very substance.

So are the ghosts, demons, and other supernatural beings that have haunted humans through the centuries, that make brief appearances and then disappear, “real”? I do not know, and I’m not sure if it even matters. They are real enough to those that experience them, as least while they are experiencing them, and then afterwards, one wonders.

Each of us make but brief ghostly appearances in this world we call real. We apparently spring from nearly nothing–a few multiplying cells, and then disappear into nothing as our bodies disintegrate after a short visitation that can last a few days or a few decades. Are we “real”?

“You know nothing, Jon Snow!” So claims the wilding Ygritte in the Game of Thrones series, a saying that has become a popular catchphrase for fans. And rightly so, I believe. It has the ring of truth about it.

Author George R. R. Martin created a soft-edged, constantly evolving world that surprises and delights and dismays us at every turn. And if we become too comfortable in believing we know who the good guys and bad guys are, or who has power and who is powerless, what is real and what is not real, we are sure have it all turn topsy-turvy in no time at all.

It is a world that feels very much like our own, psychologically, emotionally, if we would only admit it.

Perhaps we are all Jon Snows, grasping to know for certain, what can only be known tentatively at best. And this is true when considering the limits of our own private, personal lives, as it is when considering the Big Questions about Life and Death and Reality.

So when people ask me now if I believe all this stuff I’ve written about in this series of ghost stories, I can hear Ygritte’s mocking voice challenge me:  “You know nothing, Jon Snow!”

And I wisely keep mum.

This concludes a Halloween series of true life ghost stories, experienced either by me or by people I trusted. You can read previous posts at the links below.

• True Ghost Stories, Part I – Growing Up in a Haunted House
• True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist
• True Ghost Stories, Part III – When the Dead Refuse to Leave
• True Ghost Stories, Part IV – Resident Evil: In the Belly of the Beast
• True Ghost Stories, Part V – A Demon on My Chest
• True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate

True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate

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Evil, Evil incarnate, Ghost Stories, Good vs Evil, Halloween, Haunted House, Paranormal, Spirit possession, Supernatural

The dark creatures that haunt our dreams and come to us as waking nightmares take many shapes or forms, but none is more evil nor dangerous than that which takes the shape of our own thoughts, and acts out its evil intentions through our own bodies.

When I was a little girl living in that haunted house, it appeared that I had escaped unscathed. I never heard the dragging footsteps across my floor at night, I never saw the ghost of the man who had murdered his wife in my room and hung himself in our garage. I was never attacked as my mother had been by the poltergeist that knocked her to the floor that day.

But something equally frightening and more dangerous visited me one late afternoon as I played dolls with my best friend in my bedroom. I cannot remember the exact details of what happened that day, but it was of such significance that I never forgot its occurrence. It had a profound effect upon my thinking and how I have lived ever since.

It came as a subtle suggestion as I played with my friend. An impulse to say something deliberately cruel and hurtful to her. I knew it was wrong. I knew it was mean. But I gave into that impulse nonetheless.

I was surprised by her reaction. How shocked and stunned she was. How she was physically repelled by my words and backed away. How she looked at me as if I was a stranger. As if she was afraid of me.

But rather than feeling remorse or regret, what I felt was a surge of excitement, of power and pleasure. I struck out again at her verbally, harder this, and she begged me to stop. But I didn’t stop, and as I continued, she began to cry.

The whole time I was doing this, there was no sense of empathy. She was no longer my best friend. She was this creature, a lab rat, and I was performing an experiment. How cruel could I be? How frightened would she become?

Yet beneath all this, another part of me reacted quite differently. It was shocked by my behavior. Mortified. This was not me! I could not believe that I was doing this, and could not understand what had come over me, or why I was persisting in hurting my friend. It was like a dark, evil twin had taken over me, and I was as horrified as my little friend by what was happening.

It was at this point that my feeling of moral outrage and dismay overcame the pleasurable feeling of power that had possessed me, and I shook it off. It was literally as if I had shook my head hard and threw off whatever had come over me. Then seeing my friend trembling and crying before me, I wrapped my arms around her and wept with her, and told her how sorry I was, and promised never to do that again. Sweet girl that she was, she forgave me, and we played together happily the rest of that day and all the days that followed, as best friends should, until we moved away.

But I never forgot that day. I like to think now that it was that sad, angry, stalking presence that haunted our house that tried, unsuccessfully, to inhabit me. And I think what saved me was knowing, truly knowing in my heart, that it was’t me. Even though it came in the guise of my own thoughts, my own actions, I did not identify with it. And because of that, I believe, I was able to eject it as “not me.”

I had a taste of what true evil feels like, with all its sense of pleasure and power, and I did not like it.

I was as repelled by it as my friend was of me that day. And to this day I have never deliberately, gleefully, sought to hurt anyone again.

That is not to say that I have never said or done horrible things that I regret when I was deeply angry, or hurt, or outraged by someone or something.

But never in the calculated, cold-hearted way I had done that day, merely to see how cruel, how hurtful, I could be.

Was I briefly possessed by an evil spirit that day? Or was it something else? The incident could be explained in several ways—religiously, spiritually, psychologically, even from a simple moral standpoint. Good versus evil. Right versus wrong.

I imagine the “mean girls” you hear about today who cyber-bully other girls to the point of suicide, the boys who go out on joy rides looking for someone to hurt, the rapists that feel pleasure and power when they assault others, or the serial killers that stalk their victims—all at some point in their lives felt an impulse to do something quite unlike anything they had ever done before. But rather than rejecting that impulse as “not me,” or “not who I want to be,” they consented to being that person. And the impulse became a compulsion that possessed them.

I write this now because I think it’s important to make a distinction between the supernatural or paranormal appearances that spook us and thrill us and give us those tantalizing chills, and the more “normal” appearances of evil that, if we consent to them, take up residence in our hearts and minds. That make us the “mean girls” and the cruel boys, the heartless con men, the conniving heart-breakers, the stalking predators or murderous madmen. That haunt our hallways and back roads and bedrooms, our main streets and Wall Streets, and all the places in-between.

It begins with a cruel impulse. And if we are alert and vigilant, that’s where it can end too.

What is evil incarnate, after all, but evil manifested, evil embodied, evil given a human heart and mind to haunt? Without that, evil is powerless.

And so ends my series of posts on true ghost stories, or would end here, except I have something further to ponder.

Do I truly believe this stuff?

Do I believe in ghosts and haunted houses and demons and spirit possession? In the supernatural and paranormal? In evil incarnate?

How does an intelligent, rational person explain all this?

How indeed. To find out, you’ll have to wait for my next, and final post, on this topic. On Halloween night.

This is Part V of an ongoing series leading up to Halloween of true life ghost stories, experienced either by me or by people I trusted.

You can read the full series of ghost stories at the links below.

• True Ghost Stories, Part I – Growing Up in a Haunted House
• True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist
• True Ghost Stories, Part III – When the Dead Refuse to Leave
• True Ghost Stories, Part IV – Resident Evil: In the Belly of the Beast
• True Ghost Stories, Part V – A Demon on My Chest
• True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate
• True Ghost stories, Part VIII – Do I Believe This Stuff?

 

True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist

Tags

Ghost, Ghost story, Halloween, Haunted Houses, Murder, Paranormal, Poltergeist

It’s a blessing I think now that I never knew as a child that a woman whose blood still stained the floor had been murdered in my bedroom, or that the man who had murdered her, her husband, had hung himself from the rafters of our garage.

It’s a blessing I never knew when I covered my head at night to sleep, feeling that if I did so I would be safe, that someone or something lumbered across my bedroom floor, waking and terrifying my parents who slept in the room below mine. It’s a blessing I never knew the power of the cold entity that inhabited the small room next to mine where I sometimes played.

Since starting this series, I’ve done some research on spooks and hauntings and all thing supernatural. I discovered that ghosts are entities that are attached to a particular place and can make appearances, can even be heard laughing or crying or running up and down stairs. But they cannot toss things about the room or physically touch and harm humans. The more physically violent supernatural beings are called poltergeists.

That’s what my mother apparently encountered shortly before we fled from our home. We had already decided to move when my mother entered the small room upstairs that had been used for storage because it was “too cold” for human habitation. She was trying to move boxes out of the room when something unseen attacked her.  It threw her to the floor and pinned her down so that she could not move. All she could do is scream for help.

Unfortunately the only person at home at the time to help her was my three-year-old brother. But he came when she called him. She told him to grab her feet, which fortunately lay near the doorway, and to pull her out. Slowly, inch by inch, he was able to pull enough of her into the hallway so that whatever was holding her down lost its power, and she was able to get up. Never to enter that room again.

We never knew if it was the murdered woman that stalked my bedroom at night, or the ghost of her murderous husband who did so. Nor did we know who or what had knocked my mother to the floor and held her there.

But it wasn’t the last encounter my mother had with a ghostly being.

Many years later she was visited in the middle of the night by a crying woman, someone she knew and loved, but whom, unknown to her, had died that evening. Someone who tried desperately to enter into my mother’s body, because she was not ready to leave this world.

This grieving woman was her mother-in-law.

More about that next time.

This is Part II of an ongoing series of true life ghost stories, experienced either by me or by people I trusted.

You can read the full series of ghost stories at the links below.

• True Ghost Stories, Part I – Growing Up in a Haunted House
• True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist
• True Ghost Stories, Part III – When the Dead Refuse to Leave
• True Ghost Stories, Part IV – Resident Evil: In the Belly of the Beast
• True Ghost Stories, Part V – A Demon on My Chest
• True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate
• True Ghost stories, Part VIII – Do I Believe This Stuff?

Related articles

• True Ghost Stories, Part One – Growing Up in a Haunted House (deborahbrasket.wordpress.com)