Let me preface this experience by saying that for all the things that have been claimed to have happened in this story, I remain skeptical and agnostic on the issue. Some of this sounds completely bizarre and unbelievable, and I know there's really no way or reason to believe me. This is the first time I really put this into words, and as weird at it is for you to read, I had to live through it. Names have been changed to protect the anonymous.
As I was going to college I rented a room in an upper middle class suburban house in northern California. I mostly stayed in my room studying or working on multimedia projects, as several roommates moved in and moved out, the house was a mostly uneventful abode. Somewhere around the third year of living there, a handful of roommates moved in. First of which, Mark, a personal trainer who had just split from his wife, an all around nice guy with a degree in theoretical physics. After him came David and Jessica. A young newly wed couple who had a few weird quirks, but for the most part were a decent pair. Lastly Victor, who did over-the-phone tech support.
Life was going normally in the house, but conversations would arise about strange happenings, such as the door to the garage locking seemingly on its own, cups of milk on the counter nobody poured, or strange sounds coming from empty rooms. All pretty harmless, and I just attributed it to the recreational weed smoking that went on in the house. However, the reports just got stranger and stranger. Mark claimed to have been sitting at his desk as a bleeding cut seemed to run across his hand as if from an invisible knife. David and Jessica reported finding the stapler resting in the center of the bathtub. Probably the most memorable of all was when I was sitting in my room, heard a loud slam, and the sound of somebody running past my door. I left my room to investigate and found Mark panicky and out of breath. Apparently he and his girlfriend had been lying in bed, and he saw a smokey black shape float above his head, before lunging at him with an animal-life roar. As implausible as this sounds as here-say, the guy did have an advanced degree in theoretical physics, and at least to me, he seemed as honestly spooked by the situation as one could get.
Through all this I maintained skepticism, after all, aside from the part about weird sounds when nobody was home, I personally didn't experience anything supernaturally out of the ordinary. The past roommates never claimed to see anything like this, and again, all those involved partook of a fair amount of marijuana. Here's where it starts to sound a little weird... we called the ghost hunters.
They arrived in a group of about five or six and immediately went about placing surveillance cameras in each of the problem rooms, wiring them to the big screen tv in the living room. I'll never forget all of us hurdled on the couch, watching the 4-way split screen of our rooms in black and white, one of the strangest events in my young life I'll assure you. What struck me about the ghost hunters is how skeptical they seemed, and rationally they approached the situation. The protocol was this: the first group was to gather the information and ask us all about the occurrences in the house. After that, the second group, the group that claimed to be sensitive to the spirits (or something to that effect) would arrive with no prior knowledge and "feel" the house for what they sensed as the paranormal. After the second group made their rounds, we were all told what was discovered.
Apparently the room with the floating black cloud was the worst, filled with all manner of dark demonic energy. In the attic dwelled the spirit of a cloven hoofed goat demon (which explained the locking of the garage door... somehow). David and Jessica's room had it's share of negativity, but was much less a danger. Victor's room on the other hand was described as completely clean, an oasis of joy, a spiritual forest of lemonade lakes and candy cane trees. My room was seen as a dead zone, secluded from the realm of the afterlife due to a sorrowful event. Here's the one point where I almost started to buy it: the spirit medium when explaining my room speculated this was the effect of a traumatizing event, like the death of a parent. The thing is, my father HAD died very recently from Lou Gehrig's disease. A possible ruse, or coincidence? I'm still unsure, but it was enough to get me slightly interested in the precedings.
What happened next is what made the night most memorable. Apparently after the debriefing, one of the mediums was attacked by a malevolent spirit while examining the closet in the black ghost cloud room. She began to convulse, hyperventilate, and had to be carried out of the house by her fellow hunters. Almost immediately the mood of the team turned from lighthearted analysis, to serious business. In came the salt circles, the spoken incantations, the forceful rebuking against the dark forces that had claimed this poor stricken house. They assured us that indeed, the house was awash in the forces of evil, and that we should break our lease immediately before the demons decided to follow us wherever we fled. Much like the ghost hunter in the movie, once the subject turned from friendly ghosts to horrific demons, they decided they were in way over their heads, and refused to return.
There you have it, a pretty strange chapter in my young adult life. We eventually did move out, and experienced much more infamous, though not at all supernatural activities. Mark still claims to this day that what he saw was real, and I still maintain my skepticism on the paranormal.
Topic: I've had a Paranormal Activity experience (Read 1461 times)