Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I have bad dreams before, infrequently and usually only twice a year. The difference between those and these is that those frequented around living scary things – spiders, dolls that talked, cats that multiply (don’t ask).

This week I’ve had ghosts.

I’ve never been one to fear ghosts. I accept that they’re out there somewhere, and that maybe some are not sugar and honey. But I’ve never thought of them as particular to hanging around me, and I subscribe to the belief that if you think they exist they won’t bug you, and if you don’t your doomed (personal mantra I’ve had since I was little).

The first dream was familiar, which suggests I’ve had it before (this often happens to me). I was at a party with what appeared to be a company of firefighters in a warehouse (i don’t know any firefighters, but our local branch held a pancake breakfast recently). Suddenly there were sirens outside, and people announced that a girl had died upstairs.

The dream continued, but now I was at a mall, in line for what appeared to be some kind of theatre or maze. We slowly progressed, chit chatting all the way and a boy I was with showing off. I called him Michael, but I didn’t recognize him. When we got to the last leg of the line we were by a ladies’ bathroom, and my mother, grandmother, and her friend all decided to go in, leaving me with Michael and my friend (who’s recently in town to visit) Kennedy.

As if on cue, people start screaming and pointing to the entryway of the mall, and between the sets of doors is a demon – not a friendly ghost, some kind of monster. People immediately start running, and Michael has disappeared completely. I don’t move at first, but not out of fear for the demon. I’m thinking that this dream isn’t like I remember, and something has gone very, very wrong. Normally I would play out the dream like an Actor with lines, knowing what needed to be done to reach the end, and I didn’t like losing this control. It felt like someone had ripped out a chapter, or perhaps stuffed another in.

I start running however, but now the mall is deserted. My friend is running with me, but when I round the corner, she’s gone, and sitting in front of Claire’s is a little girl. She has blonde pigtails with little bow clips, big blue eyes, pale skin, and a spring dress on, also blue with yellow dots.

“Hello, what’s your name?” she asks, and completely forgetting that for a moment my dream was scary, and very wrong, I’m relieved part of my recognizes her, so I stop to talk.

“Maggie. What’s yours?”
“Lucy.”
“Hello, Lucy.”
“Would you like to look?” She asks, gesturing to the store. She offers her hand so I can pull her up, and the second she touches me she changes. She starts dragging me towards the store, which no longer looks like Claire’s and more like a pit of black nothing. This is not a little kid drag, this is an unfriendly I’m taking you away drag.

I freaked out and started fighting back, and I did pretty well. Then this little boy showed up, and while I’d recognized this little girl wasn’t a ghost, I couldn’t peg the boy. But he didn’t seem to be entirely naturally full human, if you can understand that.

Lucy immediately stopped and started to work wailing on the boy, backing him into the area with the little trucks and space ships kids can ride. I immediately started backing away. I had almost made it when the boy turned to look at me, and I was once again certain he wasn’t a normal little boy. He’s eyes seemed deep, deeper then anything I’d ever seen, which was unnerving. As if by rote response, I mouthed ‘thank you’, somehow with that look he had told me that he was saving me by sacrificing himself.

But when he winked back I turned and started to run, only to trip and end up doing a somersault. And when the world stopped spinning who was at my feet but Lucy.

The boy had disappeared.

“Hello,” She said. “what’s your name?”

She said it with such sweetness and innocence that it reminded me of someone with split personalities.

“What’s yours?” I asked. As if she could possible have understood my thoughts, she said, “Judy.”

Now I was really freaked out.

“When did you die, ‘Judy’?” I asked. Bad question.
“A bit ago.” And that’s all she said, because we started fighting again. Completely forgetting the first monster we’d run from, She was pulling me back towards the store, and I was fighting to get to the doors from earlier. I was progressing well, and yelling all the way. And then-

“A bit ago! HA! You’ve probably been dead years and years, and you just can’t admit that you never got to grow up!”

And she changed. She let go, I stumbled, and when I popped my head back up a grownup Lucy stood before me. She was instantly recognizable. She had a her blonde hair cut short and straight to her neck, a semi-dressy shirt with a black skirt, two gold bracelets on her right arm and black heels. She was a knockout.

Except then she started grinning, and she looked evil, pure evil. And she didn’t pull me this time. Instead, as I backed up she approached closer, stalking me and smiling all the way. I immediately thought something was behind me. I was to scared to look.

That’s where I woke up. I was freaked, but I wrote it down in my journal, got out of bed, and after a few hours was able to put it out of my mind completely.

The next dream wasn’t so lucky. Three nights later I once again had a dream, but in this one I was at a public concert with my family. The concert progressed and we were amused and had fun. But when it came time to go, the stands were deserted immediately, and it was just us. We set off back alone.

I was home in my bed when I thought of some food I had stashed in my cabinet, two bags of chips (which isn’t true in real life, I stopped stashing food months ago). I had an urge to get it out of my room, which I used to do when guilt would set in, or I thought my mother might come accidentally find it. I got out of bed and it was like my neck had been cricked to the side. While it felt like it was on my head proper the world was tilted 90 degrees.

My first thought was of someone who’d told me ghosts like to do this. I have never had anyone tell me this, but it satisfied me, and I just blinked and rolled my neck until the earth returned right side up. I then grabbed the bag and went to leave the room, when the same thing happened in the same spot. Irritated, I repeated my remedy, but it took longer to take affect.

Once in the kitchen however, was a different story. My cat was walking along in front of me, and I kept seeing strange visions, things meant to scare me, everyday things, but that would be impossible at the middle of the night. It was if he was leading me to them, saying ‘get it over with’. A friend’s voice came to me again, “Ghost’s like to play tricks.” I started thinking about telling that person what had happened, and their response, a pretend conversation, a thing I do in real life.

The cat led me to the oven, and I opened it to reveal our new puppy sleeping on the right side of the rack, and flames on the left giving the illusion they’d be moving toward him. I closed the oven door, laughing. There was no way my puppy could have gotten in the oven, I can barely open the door. My mother would never have allowed it, he’s barely three days and we do nightly outings with him every few hours, not to mention he yips like crazy in between. And for the grand, whopping reason – Our oven doesn’t flame. It’s got a heating iron you can SEE.

So I continued on down to my room, but I guess I angered some ghost, because not only did my world shift for the third time, something invisible started fighting me.

We were kind of arm wrestling, gripping each other, but he (i knew it was a he) backed me onto the bed, so I started using my feet. The fight was intense, and I was starting to really, really freak out.

Then the invisible wrestler said “Hey, you’re using your feet, that’s cheating,” in such a normal guy voice that it shocked the hell out of me, and I woke up. Immediately i sat up to make sure I really WAS awake – ever since Inception my brain has thought it funny to give me dreams with multiple levels – but my cat at my feet, the sunlight in my window (my dreams always seem to have bad fake lighting) and my phone buried under my pillow assured me.

I was too freaked out to even write my dream down in my journal, as if the threat in my bedroom, and bed, had crossed the line between “able to deal with” and “I need to go sleep on the couch upstairs”. This is an old remedy for the bad dreams I’ve had previously, and it’s worked well for me.

But I couldn’t sleep, because I kept worrying about the fact that that made two ghost dreams in one week, when I’d probably only ever had two before in my life. I had recently moved my bed, and I wondered if I should look up some feng shui to see if I had angered some natural balance. I also considered if the sounds of the yipping puppy had somehow caused them, except the first one was the night before the puppy came.

If anyone has any ideas, any insight into what the dreams meant, even if you can’t quite figure out the ghost part, I would be glad for suggestions. I like to decipher my dreams and see the warnings I’m being given, and the facets of my personality I don’t always realize.

So, again, if you have any help, ideas, or questions, please comment.

Sent in by Anya Starlite, Copyright 2011 TrueGhostTales.com