Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I am 30 years old now, but I have a true story to tell back when I was 17, almost 15 years ago in Seattle.

It was raining heavy all day, darkly overcast and dark early which is typical for a Seattle September. I decided to call one of my friends who lived up north that I hadn’t seen in a while and catch up with him, so I gave him a quick call, grabbed my sleeping bag, some weed and my toothbrush, jumped into my rusted out old bomb of a car and headed two hours north into the woods where his house was.

When I got there, Jake (my friend) who was 18 at the time, had people over, a few people that he knew, Amber, Crissy and Mike. Jake lived in a big house almost 15 miles from a small town on an island. He inherited the house from his late grandfather and his dad lived almost 200 miles away in eastern Washington, so it was just us.

Although the house had a fireplace and wood stove, it was always cold, probably because of the high ceilings, stone and timber floors and open spaces. We hung out in an old wine cellar/basement that Jake had converted into his guitar room and studio under the house, heated by a small blow heater, it was just enough to keep the basement bearable.

We smoked the weed I brought, and drank some red wine Mike managed to get from a guy he knew. We were all laughing and having a good time talking politics and music. Mike was telling us about a really cool band he heard one night in Pioneer Square by the University district that he thought was going to be big. (I won’t name the band, but as it turned out, they became huge.) The conversation turned to more esoteric material, Amber and Crissy were talking about the occult. Mike and Jake were talking sports.

I was getting sympathetic glances from Jacob when he realized I had nothing to say about either topic. He turned his conversation toward me, and asked if I wanted to play a game. “Sure” I said. Amber broke mid sentence and interrupted, “we have a game”.

Mike immediately piped up, “I’m not making out with you Amber, besides, we don’t have anymore alcohol.” Which I thought was a bit rude, because Amber was really pretty and although a bit eccentric in an emo gothic way, but she was nice. “No” she said, pulling a Ouija board out of her duffle bag, apparently the girls had decided to stay the night too and packed accordingly.

I think Mike was really stoned because he sat out of the game, lounging on an old beat up couch Jacob had bought from a thrift shop for 18.00. Curled up in his HS letterman’s jacket, he fell asleep.

We turned off the one light bulb hanging from the basement ceiling after lighting a few candles. Jake always had a lot of candles in his house, (I don’t think he liked to pay electricity bills), besides being only 18, he had a minimum wage job at a pet store, so finding candles in Jacob’s house was never a problem.

We turned off the heater to create a more silent atmosphere. It was eerie down in that dark basement lighted only by candles in the middle of the night staring at a Ouija board in a big old house in the middle of the woods with only the sound of rain and the creaking floorboards above us. But surprisingly I remember, we were not cold, some of which I think was because we were so high.

We all put our hands on the board and closed our eyes. Amber who was the one who studied witchcraft and that stuff was directing us. Telling us not fall asleep, but to relax our minds, to just let go and focus on creating a triangle in our minds where the spirits could come through. (I thought to myself, relaxing my mind will not be a problem, but the rest of this sounds like B.S.)

I said nothing, but just did as she said. I tuned out everything except the sound of her voice, creating a space in the form of a triangle for the spirits to come through in. I felt sleepy, but I did not lose consciousness. Then it happened.

I saw an image of really hot guy. I didn’t know him, I just remember thinking to myself, wow!, this will be easy to look at as he stood in the triangle. I actually began to feel a bit horny, but of course I kept that to myself. I heard Jake make a soft Hmmm, sound to himself too, like he was seeing him too, but dismissed it, because I know Jake was not gay.

Then, this guy reached out and touched my hand, I felt a cold chill run through me like a nervous tingle up my spine even though it was just in my imagination. And the pointer moved! The image of this guy stayed in my head even when I opened my eyes. I did not expect to be able to still ’see’ him and keep my eyes open and watch the board at the same time, but I did. The pointer spelled out the word H-E-L-L-O.

Jacob was smiling ear to ear as was Crissy. I wondered if they had a similar experience, still I said nothing but I wanted to know if they were experiencing the same thing as I was. Amber just sat there, expressionless, and finally said in a flat tone, “they have arrived.” “Who? Who has arrived Amber? and did you move it?” She swore that she didn’t. We all sat there silent looking at each other. “OK, nobody move it this time, for real, let’s ask it something,” Jacob said. “Like what?” Crissy said. “I don’t know, something that only one of us knows.” “Ohh I know,” Crissy said, “that time that you and Mike went to the party and the car got stuck, Mike left and would not tell anyone where he went. Only he knows, lets ask it that”

Amber, directed the question, “where did Mike go on (such and such day) after he walked off?” Much to my surprise, the board did not hesitate, not even for a second. It spelled out B-A-S-E-B-A-L-L-F-E-I-L-D. “Baseball field? Mike ditched us to go to the Friggin baseball field? Are you kidding me?” Jake was a little upset, I could see it in his face.

I tried to calm him by telling him, that it didn’t matter and probably wasn’t true anyway. The board continued to answer our questions for about a half hour before Mike woke up. He jumped off the old couch and yelled something none of us could understand and scared us half to death in the process. “What the hell dude?” Jake said to Mike.

“I just had a bizarre nightmare, I was at a Seahawks game and we won, I was so happy then afterwards I was allowed to go back and meet all the players. It was awesome, we were hanging out in the locker room and everything, then.. their skins began to fall away, and they turned into vampires and crap and began eating people with knives and forks and drinking blood from crystal glasses. You guys. They sat at a table and served you up as platters of food. They’re were about 10 of them and they were digging around inside your decapitated heads, saying that if I wanted to eat the body, I had to eat my brains first, I mean your brains first. You guys were the main course.”

“Knock it off Mike, your not very funny, besides, where did you go that day after the car got stuck? Answer me honestly, its important,” Jake said.

“Ohh yeah, well, your probably gonna be a bit pissed, but I went to the baseball field across town to meet Crystal, sorry man.” He said wiping the drool off his lip.

The room went silent and the pointer began to spell again. Y-O-U-A-R-E-A-L-L-G-O-I-N-G-T-O-D-I-E. Just then two of the four candles we had lit just spontaneously fizzled out and the room got a whole lot darker. A cold chill came over me and all of a sudden, I could feel myself being watched from every corner of the room. I wanted to curl up in a ball, because I could feel something or someone beside my feet under the old card table that the board sat on. I could feel, the presence of something or someone coming through the brick stone walls that lined the old wine cellar basement.

The feeling of being stared at from behind and from the sides was so intense that I had to keep looking around to make sure that nobody was actually there. the board spelled out again and stronger and faster this time, “W-E-A-R-E-G-O-I-N-G-T-O-K-I-L-L-Y-O-U-A-N-D-E-A-T-U.

The image of the sexy guy in the triangle turned into an image of a demon. I could see his dark black pits of eyes that sunk into his skull and dull gray cracked bald head and fangs in my mind. He was licking his lips with a dried out crusted tongue, scraping it across the gaping black maw that resembled his mouth. I felt a wave of nausea and disgust come over me, I closed my eyes but the image stayed there, and even got stronger. Opening my eyes wide did not help, since it was in my imagination I could not get the image out of my head. He reached forward and scooped out a portion of my brains showing me and said to me in my mind, this is your imagination, I’m eating it, and soon, I will have your entire soul.

I felt so alone and scared. other demons with fangs and claws began to emerge from the background in my mind. back in the physical room, it was filled with a thick atmosphere that you could cut with a scalpel. Mike was the only one who didn’t seem to be affected by it, he was just fumbling around in the dark looking for his cigarettes. The rest of them just sat there motionless at the card table, looking around the room, I know they felt it too.

Then, it happened, something slapped me in the back. I whizzed around thinking Mike was playing a joke on us, but he was sitting on the couch lighting a smoke. “Something just slapped me on the back,” I said, looking at Crissy, Amber and Jacob. “I know,” said Jacob, “something hit me earlier too, I just didn’t say anything before.” “Guys, this isn’t funny, I’m starting to get freaked out here,” said Crissy. In a flat tone Jacob just said, “nobody’s laughing, I don’t think this is a joke”.

Being aware that candles cast shadows and that you can see some pretty strange stuff, what I saw that night in the darkness of the wine cellar was definitely not the result of shadows being cast by candles. I saw black misty shadowy things moving in a controlled and very deliberate way around the room out of the corner of my eyes. Some of them very lighting quick, and others seemed to stroll though and take their time, knowing they had all night.

Amber, who was leading the séance before, suggested that we close the circle down, that this had been enough for one night and that we should go upstairs and make a fire and try to get warm. Just then I became aware of just how cold the room was, even colder than normal. Everyone agreed except Mike who just wanted to go back to sleep after his cigarette, but couldn’t because he complained about the cold despite wearing jeans, a thermal top and a jacket.

Amber started out by telling us to grab the planchette and repeat in our minds, spirits depart. But the pointer just kept being drawn to the word No on the board. “I demand that you leave this house, depart, now!” she said. The pointer just spelled out the letters G-O-T-O-H-E-L-L-A-N-D-D-I-E-S-L-U-T-S.

We packed up the board anyway, and went upstairs. The rain was still coming down and in droves. As we walked up the creaky wooden staircase out of the basement together with candles in hand, toward the top of the staircase I thought about putting the light back on, but decided to just get out of there instead. Jacob made a fire, and Mike went outside to pee. When he came back in, he told us that we had better lock the doors because he thought he saw a pack of wolves roaming around the perimeter of the trees, that he wasn’t sure, but that’s what it looked like. I remember him asking Jake if his neighbor owned pet dogs, Jacob said he didn’t really have many neighbors and that he didn’t think they did.

So we locked the doors to the outside and gathered by the fire. I looked at my watch and was really surprised to see that it had stopped on six o clock. I asked Crissy what time it was because she was the only one wearing a watch besides me, she said she didn’t know because her watch had been playing up and was broken too.

Living in the city, I’m not used to packs of wild animals roaming around my house, especially wolves. The whole thing seemed a bit too corny and coincidental to me, but Jacob assured me that it was normal to have wild animals living in the woods by the house, including wolves and not to worry. He explained to me that raccoons and possums regularly go through his trash. I felt a little bit better, but was uneasy about the fact that I could not get the image of that demonic face out of my head and I was stuck out in the middle of the dark woods in the pouring rain in a big old house with the possibility of being surrounded by a pack of hungry timberwolves just beyond the brick and wood walls.

The image of the Demonic face was not going away, it was only getting clearer and I felt as if the shadow creatures I was seeing darting around out of the corner of my eyes had followed us up the stairs and were coming up through the floor. I felt weak and unmotivated to do anything about it though.

I really started to get scared when I went to the bathroom upstairs, turned on the light and went over to the sink. I stared at myself in the mirror, I stood there for almost 15 minutes just looking at myself. I don’t know what came over me, but I definitely wasn’t high anymore. I was as sober as a person could be and for some reason I just stood there in utter silence fascinated at the sight of my own face. I remember poking it and feeling it, as if it wasn’t mine at all. It was the weirdest feeling I had ever had. I felt cold all over, but I was oddly enough able to tolerate the feeling with an ease that I hadn’t before. I felt as if I could just strip down naked despite the fact that I could see my breath when I blew. I didn’t.

The feeling to urinate that led me upstairs and into the bathroom to begin with, strangely passed, as I no longer felt the urge to go. I looked over at the sink and saw one of Jakes razors in an old plastic cup sitting there. I grabbed it, and felt the overwhelming urge to cut myself, I don’t know why, I never had any thoughts like this before and I never, ever cut myself before. But the thought of what it would feel like to run a cold piece of steel over my flesh was too much, I pressed the razor into my wrist, I still to this day don’t know why and I was totally aware of doing it at the time. It just seemed like it wasn’t me, but it was me… this is difficult to explain.

The feel of the sharp razor pressing into me did not hurt as I had expected it to, but instead felt.. for lack of a better word, …good. This was a totally alien concept to me, I had heard of people cutting themselves before, but never in a million years could imagine me doing it to myself. I remember feeling surprised as the warmth of the blood began to flow from my wrist. I instinctually raised my arm to meet my mouth to stop the bleeding, I dropped the razor to the floor and the tinking sound of the steel meeting the tiles for a moment broke the utter silence. The rain outside had stopped.

I began sucking on my wound, at first to stop the bleeding, but the gentle flow of the warm blood into my mouth took hold of me and I began to suck harder and harder. I could smell the iron, that distinctive smell of blood. I felt so strange standing there looking at myself in the mirror with my wrist to my mouth drinking my own blood. Just then I heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs from down the hall. It was nearly 40 feet away and I somehow knew it was Mike.

As I heard him draw closer and closer up the stairs, I began to ‘come out’ of it. I was no longer fascinated by my own image and couldn’t believe I had done such a stupid thing as cut myself! What the hell was I thinking? I quickly picked up the razor from the floor, washed it off in the sink and put it back. The words, ‘cut deep’ came into my mind earlier, and I was now glad that I hadn’t. The bleeding had almost stopped due to my intense sucking, but was still coming through a little bit. I ran it under cold water and started looking around the room for a bandage. Just then, the face re-appeared.

I saw that gray skinned demon with cracked skin and deep black pits for eyes and fangs again. This time his mouth was red with blood. I pulled myself out of it and re-attended my cut. Again, I thought to myself, how could you do this? That uneasy feeling of being watched returned. The sets of eyes that were glaring at me from behind were now so intense I could feel them piercing right through me at the back of my neck. My hair was pricked up and the coldness again returned.

Mike knocked at the door with a loud knock that he has. “Is everything OK in there? You’ve been in there a while.” “Yes, its OK, I’m finished.” I said. He opened the door and looked at me like I was dressed like a freak or something. “What the hell have you been doing? You’ve been in here almost 45 minutes. (silence)

“Well whatever, come with me, you need to come downstairs. now” I was not in the mood to argue and I could not explain what just happened to even myself, let alone anyone else, so I went downstairs with Mike. He can be a little out of touch with the weirder side of human nature, but he is a strong personality and I felt safe with him around. I knew now that whatever came out of that Ouija board did not get put back, and it would not be pulled into line by anyone, especially Amber. Whatever it was, I felt like it was time to acknowledge it.

It followed Mike and I down the hall and down the stairs to the main room where the fire was going. Jake and Crissy were comforting Amber telling her it would be OK. I leaned over and asked Mike what had happened, he didn’t say anything. I asked again, “I don’t know” he said, “she just flipped out.”

Jacob spoke up as we approached them, “that thing in the board, we need to put it back,” he said raising his head to look at us. I could see that Mike was confused, but I knew exactly what he meant, and was in full agreement. I could see the shadow creature images darting around the room again from the corner of my eyes and feel the dark presences filling the room. “Amber is not well, she needs a hospital or something. Mike, you could take her on your bike.”

Mike had a new street bike that he bought after suing a hospital for giving him an infection during a routine operation several years ago, which kept him in hospital longer on IV antibiotics, which led to him being dropped from the Varsity football team, taking up smoking, falling in with the ‘wrong crowd’ (Jake, Amber & Crissy), which ultimately led him to be here, in the middle of the dark woods at night possibly surrounded by a pack of hungry canine predators, in an old house that was colder than Stalin’s crypt, amongst  obviously malevolent and supernatural entities who’s explicit orders were, for us to die.

I would have felt sorry for him if I too hadn’t been in the same situation. At least he had an out. It had rained so much over the last two and a half days, that I’m sure my little car would not be able to make it up the steep dirt (mud) driveway to get out. Not like a state of the art motorcycle.

In the end Mike put the helmet on Amber and took her into town so that she could get seen by a doctor or nurse. Jacob, Crissy and I were left to our own devices. I never did find out what Mike meant by Amber ‘flipping out’.

Later that night, we got a phone call from Mike’s Aunt at the hospital. They never made it to town. Apparently there was an accident, a motorbike carrying two passengers were killed when they hit a fallen tree. Slippery roads, poor visibility and excessive speeds were the official blame. Marijuana was also found in the coat pocket of the female passenger and was thought to contribute to the accident.

I suspect there was another cause of their deaths that night and it didn’t have anything to do with pot or slippery roads. Although those are all plausible explanations, I can’t help but to remember the Ouija boards words about us going to die that night. And it happened. Even as I felt myself up in that bathroom cutting into myself I could hear the words as if an entity was speaking into my ear, “cut deep little girl.” Knowing now that if I did, I would not be here telling you the events of that September day, and if it had not been for Mike coming up those stairs when he did, I know deep down, that a part of me would have taken my own life even though I was not suicidal.

I had seen the image of the gray vampire in my mind and my dreams for years after that. I fell into a deep depression and was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Days had passed where I was so weak, I was unable to even get out of bed. I lost my job and eventually my life (or the quality of my life rather) to this demon/vampire.

Since doctors could not help me, I turned to psychics and alternative healers instead. Some of them just took my money and told me I was going to get married and live a long happy life, but a handful of legitimate ones would take one look at me, or do my cards and give me back my money telling me that they could not help me. Some would be more forthcoming and say that I had a very dark and evil presence feeding off of me, and was taking just enough of my life force to keep me going.

I turned to a pastor but his prayers did not help me, It only antagonized the entity to punish me more and I learned not to go back to the church.

I stayed away for many years, never going outside unless it was at night when it was less crowded with people and only then in certain areas where that were thought to be abandoned. I lived off a state pension after my diagnosis and had food delivered to me in my tiny west end apartment and gradually grew into an agoraphobic.

During my time with the entity, it told me many things that would come to happen, and most of them did, including the election of Barrack Obama before he even ran for president. When the entity inhabited me, I seemed to know certain things about people that when I asked them about it, freaked them out. I lost many friends during this time.

Everytime I would try to free myself from the entity, it would seem to know, and it would punish me harshly for trying. Then one day a young man staring at me one night in a coffee shop in Everett as he was drinking his coffee, just waiting there, doing nothing gave me the strangest feeling that I knew him. I had to walk over to him and excuse myself, but, ask him, do we know each other?

“That is an interesting question and one that is not easily answered.” he said. What a weirdo I thought at first, that was the strangest reply I had ever gotten from a person and totally unexpected. Yet I felt something from him, like an odd familiarity that I could not explain… and it was terrifying to me. I only knew that he represented something that wasn’t good for me, but my curiosity won the day and I sat down across from him watching him close.

“The entity that you harbor see’s me as his enemy, ” he said. He introduced himself as Santa… (something) I forget exactly. He claimed to be a Kabbalist Magician who studied hermetic sciences. Whoever he was or whatever he was, I thank him, he told me that the entity was a psychic vampire by the name of …….-…. and that the entity had overstepped his authority and should release me now, that enough time had passed and my contract with him was finished. I don’t know what he meant by all of that or all the other stuff he said.

I tried to explain to him what had happened and how I tried to get rid of the creature. He said that the spirit no longer had a legitimate contract over me and that he would see to it that it moved on. He warned me about the dangers of dabbling in the occult and emphasized that knowledge should always be the first weapon.

In the end of our conversation I said to him that he was a good person for doing this and was he able to kill the demon? His reply puzzled me, even to this day. He said, no, he wasn’t going to kill the entity, that it was an important part of creation and although I could not understand it, it serves it an important purpose. That he was just putting things back in balance. He also pointed out to me that if I thought he was a good person, what did I feel about him while the entity was in possession of my mind? I never saw him again after that night.

That is where I will end this. I hope anyone who reads this very seriously considers the risk and consequences of playing with Ouija boards or dabbling in the occult without knowing what they are doing. I would not have posted this, but in the last part of my conversation with the Jewish mystic, he told me to tell my story so that others will know. Today I lead a good life again with balance and freedom. The images have stopped and apart from telling my tale about that September night, I do not think anymore of it.

I swear that everything in this is true and not embellished. These events happened just as I have described them and I have nothing to gain by lying. I only wish people to learn from the mistakes we made that night.

I am also sorry to report that Crissy had unexpectedly passed away about 5 years ago from sudden onset stroke at the age of 28. R.I.P.

Written by Shelly Mitchell, Copyright 2009

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