Well, it's Halloween. Share stories you have of personal encounters with ghosts, demons or the supernatural.
"It's here. This is the place. This is it," she tells the Rev. Mario Termini, the official exorcist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge, who awaits her directions. Father Termini and his two other assistants, Florence Delapasse and Mike Dupre, will perform a Mass of deliverance to free the land from what they believe is demonic oppression. "It's here. This is the place. This is it," she tells the Rev. Mario Termini, the official exorcist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge, who awaits her directions. Father Termini and his two other assistants, Florence Delapasse and Mike Dupre, will perform a Mass of deliverance to free the land from what they believe is demonic oppression.
(N.B., I got one fact wrong: the late Fr. Termini was not the official exorcist)
A plantation house in my hometown makes Time magazine's list of Top 10 Most Haunted Places. I once talked to Puddin' Bankston, a friend of my dad's, who grew up in that house. She said that as a girl, she'd be upstairs in bed, and would hear sounds of a party going on downstairs in the ballroom -- laughter, talking, glasses tinkling, etc. But of course nothing was there. There are lots of people with similar stories about that house. The last time I was there, as I stood in the dining room, a vase toppled over with no one anywhere near the mantle. FWIW.
Anyway, I know a lot of you have had close encounters with the supernatural and paranormal. I'd like this thread to be about storytelling, mostly, not arguing, so let's keep it in that, uh, spirit.
UPDATE: OK, here's a personal story about feeling watched...
In the winter of 1993-94, I was living mostly alone in a friend's old plantation house way out in the country. I was basically a housesitter; she would come in on the weekends with her boyfriend. When I moved in, I got my pick of one of the four upstairs bedrooms. I chose the nicest one, of course. I never could have a good night's sleep in it, though. I kept thinking that I was being watched.
At first, I took it to be childish frightfulness. I had been living in Washington, DC, and now I was living in the middle of nowhere, in a creaky old house under an oak canopy, with no neighbors nearby. Ooga-booga! Still, even after I'd gotten used to my new environment, the sleeplessness persisted. It got to where I'd have to leave a light on at night to feel more comfortable about being in the room. And still, I kept waking up, thinking there was somebody in the room.
After about six weeks of this, my friend and her boyfriend were up visiting one weekend, and I told her that I felt stupid admitting it, but that I couldn't sleep in the house, and I thought I was going to have to move out and go live with my mom and dad. She rolled her eyes (she's a rationalist-materialist), but her boyfriend spoke up.
"Why don't you try another bedroom?" he said. "I've always had trouble sleeping in that room, or feeling comfortable in there. It's like somebody's watching me."
That night, I moved to the next-door bedroom, and slept like a log. And slept well for the next two months, until I got a new job and moved back to Washington. As it turned out, a man had committed suicide in the house in the 1920s, in the attic. I have wondered since then if the spooky bedroom belonged to him, but anyone who would have known has long since died.
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Erin Manning, birds superstition might be originally russian, it has the same meaning. The same as when something happens with family samovar. I don't believe in it. We had birds flying in many times. This october a tomtit flied inside our office window. Thiefs stole our old samovar and nothing happened.
As for ghosts, i felt presence of someone in our room in May 1998, not very late at night -windows in the opposite block of flats were shining. It was something that tried to get into brains and read thoughts, as i felt. Some alien substance, not an image which could have any shape. This experience lasted perhaps less than a minute and was frightening.
Birds, especially sparrows, were considered by many cultures to be psychopomps -- they escorted the souls of the recently departed to the afterlife. That's probably the source of the "birds as harbringers of death" thing.
I don't know if I believe in ghosts or not. Most of us evangelicals don't; we tend to dismiss them as your mind playing tricks or as devils. But I remember when I was a little girl I used to sometimes see a man out in our front yard, just standing there; I would think it was my dad but then realize my dad was in the living room watching TV. Then I'd look again and he was gone. My mom saw him, too, a few times. It was always at twilight. Maybe our eyes were playing tricks on us, maybe not. I don't know.
One of my great-great-great-great-great aunts was captured by Indians and carried off to their village where she lived as a slave for over a year. The story goes that one day they captured another white man, who they then executed by burning. My great-aunt claimed afterwards that the dead white man appeared in her dreams shortly thereafter, and told her a series of landmarks to guide her back home. She managed to escape from the village and made her way through fifty miles of wilderness, back to the frontier village where she had lived.
About fifteen years ago, my mother was walking down a street in the small town where she and my father lived. It was one of those Saturday afternoons in the downtown of a small town where commercial activity has largely moved to malls outside of town. My mother was friends with two women who were life partners and owned and operated an antique shop in the downtown area. One of the women had become ill with metastatic cancer and the word was that her condition was quite serious. My mother was therefore quite happy but also puzzled when she saw the woman walking on the street about a block ahead of her, i.e., far enough to think one recognized her but not to be sure. She shouted out the friend’s name. After several shouts, the friend turned halfway around and waved in her direction and then turned down the side street that she had gotten too, which happened to be where her shop was located (which she and her partner lived above). My mother, surprised but delighted to see her friend up and about after having heard about her poor prognosis, hastened to catch up to her, but by the time she got to the side street, there was no one visible on the street.
When she got home that day after running her errands, she learned that her friend had died that afternoon, just about the time my mother saw her on the street.
Our world is so much richer and fuller than our poor senses can perceive. I can't immediately find a reference to confirm my memory proportions, but I once learned that our minds consciously process only about 20% of the "signal" we are receiving in any given moment. I'm a lifelong reader of subjects like non-verbal communication, subconscious, dreams and similar topics related to that other 80%.
That is not meant to debunk anyone's story, but to support my point: we are all potentially open to being confronted with something for which we have no conscious referent, but around which our minds help to put something understandable. Unfamiliar, unidentifiable, or unknown: we have excellent reasons to react to those perceptions with fear set deep in our instincts. Our subconscious is there to (not always) pop out facts and images we weren't aware of.
A night a few weeks after my mother passed away, I was holding my infant son, trying to calm him back to sleep. I was crooning to him a German rhyme about a man on a horse crashing into bushes, something I remembered from my own childhood. The moment remains clear in my mind 21 years later: my son stopped crying like a switch being thrown as I felt a hand on my shoulder. Tears streamed down my face as my son dropped off to sleep in my arms, because it was my mother's hand and her presence that calmed him and gave me a handle on my grief.
August 2007: my daughter and new son-in-law were doing the traditional first dance at the wedding reception, to a recording of "Dream a Little Dream of Me" by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Just as my tears flowed as I began thinking about how my mother loved those performers, I felt again her hand on my shoulder, and as I quietly sobbed in mixed joy and grief I could clearly "see" her standing at my side, smiling proudly at her granddaughter, her hand still on my shoulder.
I have other personal stories, some of them intense and the stuff of nightmare. But it's those two moments that I consider the validation of belief in ghosts, and justification for being open to the experience.
I'm kind of late to this, but here goes. I was at a church in Denton around 30 years ago. I was not a believer, just hanging out with friends who were, in basically a little nondenominational storefront church. People were singing and praying, hands lifted up, all the charismatic atmosphere going on, when a woman came in and sat down in a row behind me. I don't remember much about her after all this time, but suddenly she stood up and said in this weird, flat, lowish voice, "I am not of this religion. My religion is far older than yours." It is that cold weird voice I remember most clearly.
The pastor, who was the soul of love and gentleness, said something like, "That's interesting, we can talk about it later, if you want, please sit down, sister." Then he began to preach. She got up out of her chair, moving stiffly and started toward him and the pulpit, arms outstretched. It was apparent she was going to tear off the metal cross on the pulpit and several men firmly escorted her away. At that point, she fell to the floor and went into some sort of seizure, saying all this weird stuff, hate-filled. Everyone gathered to pray for her. I was afraid, and I left. Later I joined that church, and met this woman. She was NOTHING like the cold baleful creature in the church, she was a young, laughing Hispanic woman. She said her mother was a witch and in raising her, had included her in some rituals. Anyway, she was totally delivered from whatever this thing was.
A week after she joined the church, though, her little boy got a serious case of pneumonia and had to be hospitalized for a week under an oxygen tent.
Through this, I learned that supernatural evil is real and intelligent and present on this planet, but I've since moved far from that starting point, God is so much greater and so much more worthy of contemplation, attention and interest than the devil and his cheap parlor tricks, which is all they are, really.
I even think all these exorcisms go on way too long. I think with faith, the believer who is in Jesus Christ and living right and filled with faith, should just be able to command the demon to leave in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God. And that would be an end of it.
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