Paranormally Me

I have mixed feelings about talking about this event. I know it makes people think I’m crazy.

When I was about fifteen, I met this guy. We’ll call him Eric. Eric was into the paranormal, right up my alley. I’d had experiences before, and something about Eric drew me in like a month to a flame as cliche as that sounds. Was the dungeon master for my DnD games as a teenager. Since I had a massive bedroom with a sitting area, my house was chosen for the games so he’d come over and we’d be alone for a little paranormal, before each game, him getting set up and me just being there.

Over time, our friendship sort of grew, even though he was twenty-seven and knew better we became romantically involved. I recall not putting a label on it, I didn’t want him to be by boyfriend, I just enjoyed having him around. Still, as the months went on, we talked about the paranormal. I always just had that feeling, you know? That feeling that there was more out there.

As time went on, and we continued talking about this stuff, he brought me to meet some of his friends. These were all much older people, one was even a professor at a nearby college. They lived in a big three-story walk-up, all red-brown brick with a wrought-iron fence. You could feel the energy coming off the place. Stepping onto the property felt heavy but not unpleasant, sort of like a weighted blanket.

Eric introduced me to Frank and Whitney (Not their actual names) Frank was the college professor, and Whitney was a brilliant woman. They were both some variation of pagan that involved tantric sex. Their entire coven was. I’ve known a lot of witches in my life, my mom is one, I’m one. Beyond that friends, I’ve collected over time and travel and I can safely say these people were the type that you don’t mess around with.

I met them slowly over time, and they all seemed to have that veneer of pleasantry about them. All of them except Mira. Mira was Frank’s submissive, but more than that she held a special place in the group as not only the youngest member at thirty but also as a conduit for their magic. Mira and I met one day when she came by to drop something off and I was there. I was working on learning to meditate with Whitney in the upstairs apartment which they’d turned into a magic space. Imagine if you will an entire apartment, 900 square feet given over to a magical space.

As we spoke she called me a child and told me I had no business being there, but not in a motherly “Girl you’re fifteen what the fuck are you doing here this is suspicious,” but in a jealous, venomous way. She was worried about being replaced, you could see it on her face. You could see the cogs turning in her brain. That meticulous way a person checks all their own thoughts about their age, their worthiness.

I remember her telling me I was in over my head, that I was a minnow swimming with sharks and I had no business being there.

She was right. Not for the reasons she wanted to be right, but because I was a child, in a tantric sex dungeon with a grown woman, meditating after a conversation about energy transfer via orgasm. Still, she was trying to scare me.

My mom used to tell me that magic is a kiddy pool. You get in; you splash around; you get out. Nothing bad. Bad things don’t happen. So, naturally, that logic plus teenage bull headedness lead to my declaration: “I’m not scared of you.”

She gave me a look that reminded me of a cat I’d once seen eating a mouse. The satisfaction of a knowledge of the circle of life and her place in it. I wouldn’t admit it but it scared me.

The haunting didn’t start right away, or maybe it did, and I just wasn’t seeing the signs. It began with an unease, a sense of foreboding I’d never felt in my room before. If I’d known then that this was my froggy ass being dropped into the pot on the stove I’d have run. But that’s the thing about curse-hauntings… They brew slowly over very low heat.

I call them curse hauntings; I don’t know if the paranormal world has a better term for them. A haunting to me is when a ghost or some other spirit attaches itself to a space or place of its own volition, it wants to be there. A curse haunting is when a person specifically sends something malignant to torment someone. Whereas a normal curse depends on intention alone.

Someone can curse you to have bad luck and you’ll find that you’re always dropping cups or tripping over shoe laces, maybe in some worse situations you get sick or maybe your pet dies, but it’s all dependent on so much. Anyone who has ever waited for Karma to do for them what a shotgun could will know what I mean. A curse haunting though, is someone walking a rabid dog into your house and locking the door.

I brushed aside my first sighting. A flicker of something in the periphery of my vision as I lay in my bed. Just a shadow trick of the light. I ignored it and went to sleep. The next night I noticed it again. Maybe it was the way I was moving? Weird.

So a little context for you, my room was at the top of the house which meant it was A-framed room. Think of an over large old-fashioned Triangle tent. There were steps up into the room, and a half wall that hid the steps from view in the room's majority. My bed was against this half-wall. Across the room from the foot of my bed was a floor-length, narrow mirror.

So when I would lie down and notice this odd shadow three nights in a row, I started looking for it. The burners were on now, and the water was heating, Ribbit Ribbit. I noticed now, really notice it, this brief shadow over the top of the half wall. I’d look behind it, nothing there and look back at the mirror, nothing there either.

This went on for a week, this cat-and-mouse game with a shadow I couldn’t find. Then I saw the hand. I was laying in my bed, looking at the shadow in my mirror, and I’d just got used to it. It’s a shadow, it can’t hurt me, it can’t do anything. Then greyish blue fingers crept over the edge of the half-wall. I jumped out of bed and looked around.

Over-active imagination, it had to be! Right? There was nothing there, and it wasn’t in the mirror anymore either. Again, this is what I saw, over and over, night after night. This hand creeping up, then the next week another hand. It happened by inches, slowly, until finally I asked Eric about it.

He felt something was off, but he had figured it was just my stress-level. I was being homeschooled at the time, and I was also a full-time watcher for my younger sister. Mom was going through a messy divorce and my sister’s father hinted that she didn’t have to listen to me, that she didn’t have to do what she was told by me to make mom think she needed to stay home again instead of working and he could move back in.

I told him it was more than that and we went to Frank and Whitney. Whitney said she could feel how tense I was, and she offered me some advice. Burn sage, protective circles, casting the spirit out, that kind of thing. I did everything she told me to do, and it only made it more aggressive. Soon the top of it’s head was poking up. Greenish, stringy hair and the top of a scabby forehead.

The thing about dealing with creatures like this is you have to stop being afraid of it, and start believing in yourself. When you’re a teenage girl with the self-esteem of wet tissue paper, that’s hard to do. It just kept coming, until one night, it reached down its long arm and I felt compelled to sleep elsewhere. It was banishing me from my safe haven, my room. It was making me feel uncomfortable in the place I was safest.

Finally, my mom tired of finding me on the sofa. She made me sleep in my room again. How could I tell her? She believed in the kiddy pool, remember? To her magic was something you put in and got out of exactly the same amounts. It wasn’t this situation, where I’d fallen off a cliff into the deepest part of the ocean, and the ocean looked back at me with malicious intent.

It came for me one night, weeks and weeks after the first shifty shadow danced at the corner of my vision. When I was at my lowest, most frightened point. I remember feeling it, it wasn’t in the mirror anymore it was attached to me, following me so close there wasn’t a hair of space between us in the room. It was trying to crawl into me, climb into my very pores and to what end, I dare not ask.

Finally, I called Whitney, and I said, “It’s here, and it’s trying to take me, I need help, I can’t shake it. The sage isn’t working the bubble isn’t working,”

“All you have to do…” She only got out those words as I heard the phone go dead. Nothing on the other end of the line. This was before everyone had a cellphone.

I felt breath tickle the back of my neck and a sickly sweet scent I couldn’t place, like rotten fruit. It was there, behind me, ready to take me.

“You will not let this happen,” A voice told me.

“Bri, you are stronger than this, you will not let this happen!” It was coming from in me, in my mind. I closed my eyes and felt the radiating heat, it began at my core and pulsed out to the tips of my fingers. This was my space, this was my home. It was not welcome. This thing was not welcome. I felt the energy that radiated off my fingers encircle me, forming a barrier that I could feel on my skin. It was like the sun on me. The sensation radiated outward, breathing with me as I inhaled and exhaled the sudden fresh scent of clean oxygen.

“You have no power over me anymore, I’m not scared of you,” I told the creature, and I felt the glowing barrier between us thrust outward, forcing the creature out and away, out of my home, out of my life, out, out, out!

I have learned to hone my abilities sense then. I’ve pushed spirits out of places they don’t belong and come face to face with things I hope no one ever has to feel. There are some things I still won’t do, there are places I will not go. I know my limits and my responsibility as someone who sees. Someone who feels.

It’ll be years between experiences, but then I don’t go looking for trouble. I’m in my mid-thirties now, and that is still the most terrifying event I’ve ever dealt with. It’s fair to say that I do not associate with Eric, Whitney or Frank anymore and I never saw Mira again after she cursed me.

Maybe I’ll share other experiences with you sometime.

For now, I hope you have a happy October and watch out for shadows in mirrors.