Tocky on 30/10/2008 at 04:26

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A peacock has to be the most audacious spirit guide I've heard tell of. Strange things happen and I've just come to accept they can't all be explained away. I would say our brains make things up to relieve boredom or as a way out of bad situations but the damn things control us and it's hard to dismiss the senses. Particularly when they are validated by others.

I think I've told all of mine. The limbs breaking in the dark woods was most bothersome because it happened again and again with no way to stop the next or convince myself it was my imagination. No noise, no rustle of leaves, no stumbling in the thick brush I knew was there. I spent entire weekends there examining every section, building fences, burning the refuse of long ago logging, making bridges, cutting trails, figuring shoreline once the levy went up and the water filled in, I knew the place. Sometimes knowing things doesn't help. It makes it worse. It circled me without noise and broke limbs too thick for me to break.

Oh well. A small story I may not have told. When I was young I loved my grandmothers big victorian house. The tall ceilings with long dangling light cords that you could swing round in wide circles wheeling crazy shadows in a dizzy dance, the narrow closets, the odd layout and wrap around porches, built perhaps to capture summer breezes but incorporated in a way I would never have thought of and have seen in no other. I played happily in all the rooms save one.

It always felt creepy. There was nothing particularly different, just a room with six tall windows four of which were on opposite sides of a large fireplace. A nice edwardian sort of drawing room. It wasn't dark or cold or odd in any way just somehow univiting in a way hard to define.

All the kids knew it though nobody spoke of it. We just did not linger long there and it never figured into any of the games we played except one. We boy cousins would invite the neighbor girls to hold seances there. We would draw the thick drapes and close the cirlcle of hands to intone the spooky words before some hand would creep up a back and pandamonium erupt. It was fun.

Over a decade later I led my new bride on a tour showing her the kitchen where the most delicious cookies ever baked were eaten and the coal pile where I got the small scar just below my hairline. She walked beside me as I told all the memories each room invoked. We were holding hands as I stepped over the threshold of that room. I found myself pulling against her. She would not enter. I hadn't said a thing about the room yet. I asked what was the matter as I had forgotten the mood of the room in my staunch fear nothing adulthood. "Something in there is watching me", she said. Yes, that was it, that feeling I could not define.

One of my cousins lives there now. It is the only house I can see clearly from mine though it too is distant. I look at it sometimes as I go out and smoke one of the few cigarettes on my porch. I look at the windows that are lit and smell the hardwood smoke from one of the chimneys drifting on the cold air. When he first moved in there would be a light on in that room sometimes but there hasn't been one on there for years now. I sometimes want to ask him about it when we talk but never do.

icemann on 30/10/2008 at 09:27

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lol

All of my freaky experiences are through guardian spirits and strange gut feelings.

As a kid I would ride my bike around the neighbourhood. And there was this one house at the top of my court, where everytime I would ride past it I would always get this instinctual feeling that I should watch where I was going. Years of this passed, and one day riding past that house I wasn`t watching where I was going and a car reversed into me sending me off my bike. By some minor miracle neither I nor my bike got damaged in that. But the cars number plate fell off.

Another similar issue occured this year. For the last few years when driving my car I always got this gut feeling to slow down at a particular intersection incase of a speeding car that would forget to give way. After years of this I thought I was being silly, but after the bike incident I`d learned my lesson so always slowed down there. Low and behold earlier this year, I reach the intersection and a car comes speeding out of nowhere skids and ends up halfway into the intersection remembering that it was supposed to stop there. If I`d not slowed down I`d not be here typing this today. Freaky stuff.

Now lastly I`ll quickly mention the "guardian spirit" stuff. All of my life I`ve been told that a grandfather of mine who passed away a few months before I was born watches over me, by both my family and fortune tellers (my mother goes to see one, once a year). Anyways heres some freaky things that have happened which tend to prove this theory.

1. Fell out of a tree and went head first into concrete. Suffering only a concussion at age 6.
2. A few years later in a tree again this time 2 stories high, tripped on a branch and fell only for my leg to wrap around a branch causing me to miss a tiled ground by a meter.
3. Forgot that we had one couch seat in our lounge room that didn`t have a back to it. This couch being directly infront of a window. And on this day I jumped backwards expecting a back seat to be there, but instead went back first through the window, landing in the garden outside. I came out of that without a single scratch.
4. Four years ago, driving my car home in wet weather. I`m 25 mins away from home driving down a main road when a truck driver doesn`t check the road properly and pulls out from a side street not that far ahead of me. I slam on the breaks, but due to the wet roads my car slides. The truck driver stops in the middle of the road infront of me, watching with his mouth wide open in shock rather than getting out of the way as my car slides fast towards his truck. My car slides further towards the truck and I think, yep thats it I`m dead, and then my car suddenly comes to a stop, a meter or so away from the truck. I to this day cant explain how my car suddenly managed to stop sliding so suddenly, considering how fast I was sliding, and how fast I was going before hitting the breaks. Most scariest drive home afterwards that I`ve ever had. I was that shaken by it, that I didn`t even yell at the stupid dumbass truck driver.

And theres been more than those, but those are the top 4.

LancerChronics on 31/10/2008 at 03:09

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I used to see shades as a kid when I was younger. One evening, I was having difficulty sleeping, so I got out of bed for a glass of water. There was a bright full moon and it was angled perfectly to shine light on an old cupboard my mother's grandmother used to own. As I passed by the cupboard I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye, and looked at it. On it seemed to be the shadows of two people playing cards at a small table. Now I generally think things through, even at that young of an age, so I began to search the room for an object near a window that might create the image I was seeing before me. I tracked the light beam back to the window, and found nothing except an empty glass pane.
Now I was incredibly curious, so I sat down to watch the shadows and think. Each one seemed to either pick up a card, or lay one down at various intervals, but never regular intervals as there was no tempo to it. There were even pauses sometimes as if one seemed to be thinking. Anyway, after staring at them a while, I was stupid and actually tried to say "Hello", very meekly to my dismay, but I was young. Nothing happened immediately, but the top of one of the shadows all of a sudden shifted quickly, as if it were turning its head to look at me. Suddenly, the head flew off spinning past me, but when I looked back at the shadow, the head was still there. It apparently had gone back to playing its game. This freaked the hell out of me, so I got up and ran to my brother's room and woke him up, he came out with me and looked at the cupboard, but the shadows were gone(of course he was an idiot and turned on the lights when he entered the hallway). My parents also woke up from the commotion and asked what was going on, and he told them that I must have been dreaming, even though I knew I had been in the living room, so he then said I must have been sleep walking. For the record, sleep walking is something I had never done before and have never done since, and I was a bit annoyed that no one believed me.
Too scared to go to sleep, my parents decided to give me some valerian root, an herb that tends to knock one flat on their ass, and sent me to bed. A few weeks later my brother confessed to me that he thought he saw the shadow of an old woman with hair sticking out in various places on the front door once, when the moon was angled in that direction instead. He never mentioned it to our parents though.

100% true, at least as much as I remember. I still don't think it was a dream though, since the reason I got up was because <I>I couldn't sleep</I>. Also I had closed my bedroom door behind me when I went into the hallway, and if I had gotten scared and ran from my room to my brother's I would never had thought about closing it. Nor do I think I would've closed it if I was sleep walking.

Mazian on 31/10/2008 at 18:26

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I also live in Des Moines and had no idea that Bigfoot had been sighted so close (relatively speaking). I'm not about to go looking for it, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

Anyway, my personal supernatural experience was a little different than a "typical" ghost sighting. It happened while my family (my wife and child along with my siblings' families and parents) went to visit my grandmother for an annual party she held for her friends and family in Cedar Rapids.

At that time my grandfather had been dead for about 5 or 6 years and never having been very close to him I hadn't even thought about him in a while. So we get to her house and everyone is standing around talking and suddenly I see a framed, portrait-sized photo of my grandfather sitting on the floor against the far wall. I was immediately mesmerized by it, couldn't take my eyes off it, and his picture seemed to be hyper-real and alive. It didn't move or anything like that, but the closest I can describe it was that it was radiating energy that felt like the picture's eyes were looking right through me.

Anyway, a few seconds after I started staring at the picture I was hit with a wave of overwhelming sorrow that surprised me with its intensity. At that moment I chalked it up to having never properly dealt emotionally with my grandfather's death, and it was so powerful that I made a hasty exit for the bathroom to try and get myself together before I started crying in front of everyone.

After peeing I'd calmed myself down a little bit (intellectually, anyway), but the sense of sadness was still just as strong as before and at that point I was suspecting that some external agent was inducing it, or that they were "sharing" that feeling of sadness with me. As soon as I suspected it I got very angry and looked up toward the ceiling for no particular reason (prayer reflex, maybe?) where I ended up looking at the lighting fixture that looked like a mini-chandelier with those little bulbs that are made to resemble candle flames. In my head I yelled, "Stop it!" to who/whatever I thought was working on me, and the the bulbs in the fixture immediately flickered once and the feeling of sadness faded over the next few minutes.

I could have chalked the whole episode up to unresolved grief, or maybe even gas from a bad breakfast burrito if not for the soul-penetrating gaze of that portrait and that fast little flicker of the lighting fixture in the bathroom. Needless to say that portrait's one item I will not be clamoring for at the estate sale.

Tocky on 1/11/2008 at 03:58

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Do tell. No really. Some of the freakiest shit is real and if you can't tell it then that takes the fun out of living it.

I may not have told this one. Me and Elliott used to go swimming and knew all the local lakes and ponds. I recall one spot fed by a spring we called the ice cold swimmin hole for the obvious reason even in the heat of summer. We never worried about snakes at that one. This story isn't about that one.

We found this watershed in January and he dove in first. He tried to tell me not to go in but couldn't form a word from shaking. "Haba ta haba n n na no". I dove in anyway. I don't know how those polar bear club people do it. Last January swim I've ever done.

When summer came we decided it would be a good revisit. At the other water sheds we had been to the intake for the overflow was an open affair and we did stupid shit like " ride the pipe". You see the intake is a concrete box tube thing about fourty feet out from the bank and if you swim out to it when the water is high and pouring in heavy you can enter it and hold your breath while you find the tube that runs under the levy. It sucks you in and you ride the pipe about eighty yards until you get shot out like a cannon ball on the other side at the drain pond. The bottom of the pipe is slick with moss and there is no going back so you better be able to hold your breath. Kevin once voiced the sobering thought that there could be a grate somewhere along the pipes. This story isn't about that.

The intake for this watershed was surrounded by a chainlink fence not to keep idiots out of the pipe but debris from blocking it. It was only on the front though so we could still climb the L shaped rungs along the side. These were even spaced along the sides and would have been easy except the sides sloped outward and you had to hang on good to make the top. Once at the top you could take a running go and clear the spikey top of the chainlink some fifteen feet down and about that out to splash in non cut you in half open water. Dangerous but not a story about that either.

No, we had been doing this for some time without decapitation. The slab concrete top of the thing was full wet from our running about on it. So were the rungs. The inside of them faced inward. I was looking over the edge as Elliott climbed and his feet slipped so that he hung pullup mode from one rung. So he did a pullup.

I don't know if he felt something or why he chose to look over inside the rung but when he did he eased himself back into the water and swam for the bank churning water. What the hell right? As soon as he got there he turned around and told me to look in the rungs. I've never seen so many water moccasins in one place in my life. They were laid out end to end like links of sausages. Dark scaley gray black primevil nightmares. Where we hand bent our fingers and toes less than an inch away for hours.

How did they get there? When the water was high maybe? I could have shit a brick. Elliott was shouting intsructions about the best place to jump and to do it far as possible but I was dumbfounded. I had no choice. I had to come down. Were there others under the water? Would I come up with them hanging off me like dredlocks? It was mind boggling that I would have to jump into that dark water once more. I did. I'm here now. We never swam there again. Damn a bunch of snakes.

It's still halloween if you want it to be. Tell some more. I love stories.