Mind Picker: Mind Picking : Happy Halloween VI

Over the past several Halloweens, I have told all of my true-life uncanny stories: creepy tales of werewolves and Oujia Boards; haunted walks and graveyard presences. Every year I keep thinking, "I can't possibly have a new collection of spooky tales to relate", and finally, I thought this was the year that statement would prove to be true. And then I remembered that I have already written here about another strange phenomenon that would be worthy of recalling on this unearthliest of days: haints and hags and the little folk that come in the night to pin you, helpless, to your mattress. As it turns out, I have known several people who have encountered this horrifying presence, and here are their tales:

The following was told to me many years ago by an old friend, and the events happened to his sister. Let's call her Mary. Being young and having moved pretty far from her family, Mary felt trapped in her relationship with an abusive live-in boyfriend. He constantly yelled and put her down, and she started feeling really awful about herself – a situation that changed for the better after they moved into a basement apartment in an old and lovely home. Several times in the new digs, when they would have a fight and the boyfriend stormed off, Mary would be standing in her kitchen, sobbing, and feel a warm embrace enveloping her. She would turn around, hoping to see the boyfriend…but there would be no one there. The hug was so soothing and so maternal that Mary would be comforted instead of scared; she felt that, finally, someone had her back. This went on for some months until the night that the boyfriend slapped Mary during an argument; the first time he had hit her; the only time he would ever hit her.

They went to bed, and in the morning, the boyfriend said that he'd be moving out. When Mary asked why, he said: In the middle of the night, he woke up suddenly as though he had been shaken. He realised he was paralysed, he couldn't move no matter how he struggled, and he couldn't even turn his head or close his eyes – and this last was the most disturbing because above him, hovering near the ceiling, was an evil witchy hag, all swirling black smoke and glowing red eyes. Holding his stare, the figure began to lower itself onto him, slowly squeezing the air out of his lungs as it made its descent, and when they were eye to eye and nose to nose, the thing told him he was to leave Mary and never have anything to do with her again. He somehow, suddenly, fell into a deep sleep after that, and when he woke up with the day's first light, he told the story and left – for good. Mary realised she was happy to see him go and believed that the witchy presence was the same maternal figure who had given her comfort, and she ended up remaining in that apartment for some time alone; but never alone.

Now, I had no problem believing this story because years before that, during an evening of sharing freaky but true stories with my high school friends, Nancy said that she was going to tell us something she had never told anyone before. Apparently, when she was a young girl, she would periodically be visited by "little people" in the middle of the night. She would know they were coming when she woke up in her bed feeling paralysed. Her eyes were the only part of her that she could move and she would scan the baseboards, knowing that that's where they would appear. First a few splinters would fall away, and then a hole would be visible, through which numerous small, gnome-like figures would materialise. Without fail, one would jump up on her bed, climb onto her chest and begin talking to her, chattering away and, according to Nancy, making sure that she couldn't tell what the rest of them were up to. No matter how she tried, Nancy couldn't move or speak, and although the gnome on her chest seemed cheerful and friendly, she was terrified. After a time, the interlopers would finish their business, depart through the baseboard and replace the splinters so perfectly that Nancy could never find their entrance by the light of day. Neither could she ever remember what the gnome on her chest had been chatting about. This was not the strangest part of her story.

As I said, these visits only happened when Nancy was a young girl, and they had not occurred for some years at the telling of this story. However, just a couple of weeks earlier, her older brother had come to her with a strange story of his own. Apparently, Ron had spent the evening before at the drive-in with his friends, and as was his habit back then, he had been drinking heavily all evening – enough so that he had passed out and the friends he came with had left him alone in his truck. Ron woke up just as the second movie was ending, discovered he was alone, and decided he might as well leave right then. But when he went to reach for the key in the ignition, he discovered that his arm was paralysed; soon realising that the only parts of his body he could move were his eyes. As he scanned the interior of the truck, movement caught his attention, and there, on the dash in front of him, was a small, gnome-like creature. It laughed as they locked eyes and told Ron that he'd be a fool to drive home in his condition. Struck with fear, my friend's brother tried to agree, grunting and blinking, and the gnome disappeared. Ron was suddenly able to move again, and, seeing someone he knew in a car nearby, he was able to get a safe ride home.

Obviously, the rest of us were covered in goose bumps as Nancy told this story. She assured us that she had never once told her brother about the visits she had received from the little people, and although the rest of us found the whole story to be more than a little terrifying, Nancy had a different view: she now believed that the gnome that had visited her brother had likely saved his life, and looking back, she couldn't ascribe any malevolent intent to her night-time visitors; that it was all a matter of interpretation, of perspective.

This is still not the strangest part of the story, to me.

Within about six months, the movie Cat's Eye came out, and I saw it in the theater with the same group of friends. The movie is made up of three short stories by Stephen King, and in the third story, a story written specifically for the movie and not previously released in any book, a small gnome-like ogre creature enters the room of a sleeping girl, through the baseboards. First, the wood splinters and then a hole is visible. This nasty creature enters the room, climbs onto the bed, perches on the sleeping girl's chest, and attempts to suck the breath out of her.

I can't describe the feeling of worlds colliding that this caused; the blurring of fantasy and reality and not quite being able to distinguish between the two. My skin crawled, my heart raced, my vision narrowed. And after the movie, Nancy didn't want to talk about it. If I reacted so strongly, I can't even imagine how she felt.

While remembering childhood frights, I should add that my younger brother, Kyler, suffered night terrors and shadowy presences the entire time he was growing up. He told me once of the woman who sometimes came to visit him in the middle of the night – it was always a female presence, he was always helpless and unable to move, and it was always terrifying – and while Kyler said that he'd eventually tell me about it in detail some day, he never did; and now (as a hyper logical Engineer) he believes it was all hallucination and doesn't want to speak of it. And yet Kyler still continues to have the night terrors. He tried once, as a teenager, to remove his ceiling fan in the middle of the night: Mum found him, standing on his bed, turning the blades of the fan around and around as though that would screw it free. He once, as an adult in his own house, grabbed the clock radio from his bedside table and, in his underpants, ran out onto the front lawn to throw "the bomb" away. He described for me once the terrifying presence that sometimes watched him from the corner of his bedroom while he lay paralysed; a smirking cowboy whose shining eyes could only barely be glimpsed from under the brim of a wide hat. Other times, Kyler wakes up roaring and swinging his arms, fighting off something only he can see; and naturally, we always worry for the safety of his sleeping wife, Christine. (They were recently on a cruise, and in the middle of the night, Kyler got up and apologised to Christine, "I'm sorry, lady, but I've got to go and find my own cabin. I don't know how I ended up here, but my wife would kill me if she knew I was missing." He tried to exit the room in his underpants, and my sister-in-law, who had to physically stop him from leaving while their horrified teenaged son looked on from his bunk, was not amused. When he later heard of his midsleep shenanigans, Kyler embraced this as a touching story of fidelity.) For someone with such a focused and analytical mind, Kyler had always seemed to unwillingly invite the uncanny into his life.

To get back to the main thread: When I was at work at the bookstore one night, my coworker, Carrie, said that she couldn't read her book club's pick of the month because of some poltergeist activity early on in the story – she was afraid of "opening that portal again" and had to put the book in the hallway outside her apartment to get rid of it. Carrie then asked if she had ever told me that she once lived in a haunted house. Carrie was training a new cashier, Avery, at the time, and because the high school-aged Avery (chipmunk-cheeked and perkily eager to add to the conversation) said, "Oooh, I love ghost stories. My sister sees ghosts and has a million stories", Carrie proceeded to share hers –

Carrie: We had just bought a brand new house and everything was new in it – appliances and everything – but three times we had to fix the fridge. It would just die. That was in the kitchen, and on the other side of the wall from it, I had a china cabinet full of knick-knacks. In that china cabinet, pictures were always turning themselves around, you could almost watch it happening over the course of a day, and small things would fall over – I was forever straightening everything up in that cabinet, and it started to spook me. One night I woke up suddenly and there was a shadowy man, just huge, standing over me and I couldn't move but I asked, "Daniel, is that you?" Daniel is my son, and nowhere near as big as what I was looking at, but I didn't know who else it could be.

Avery: Sleep paralysis, that happens to my sister all the time.

Carrie: Right! I heard later that that's what some call it – the haint, the haunt, being ridden by the hag – but that doesn't explain the fact that the morning after I saw this figure, there was a giant handprint on the top of my dresser, right beside where I was sleeping. And then things got scarier. I woke up one morning and there were three scratches, like from an animal, across my thigh.

Avery: Evil spirits always leave marks in threes to mock the Holy Trinity.

Carrie: You got that right girl! (They high five.) I was so spooked that I didn't want to tell anyone about it, but when my husband came down from having a shower, he said, "Look at this. Something scratched me, I don't know when. Three scratches on my right shoulder, three on my left." That's when I showed him my thigh and I said, "We need to do something about this." So, Robert's brother's wife is a pastor and we asked her to come over and see what was going on in our house. My sister-in-law walked around and then stopped in front of that china cabinet. She said, "What's going on here?" I told her about the moving pictures and trinkets, the fridge on the other side of the wall. Then she pointed directly up and asked, "And what's going on right there?" I said that right above was our bathroom and that, besides the scratches, Robert kept thinking that he saw shadows flying past him every time he came out of there. She then pointed straight down and asked, "And what's happening right there?" I thought and then remembered that something in the plumbing was leaking below us in the basement – right there – but I hadn't made that connection before.

Avery: Burial ground, burial ground.

Carrie: Right? So my sister-in-law said, "I've never been here before, but I can point out where things are happening because I can see the dark spirits in motion. They're coming right out of a column here and flying into the fireplace over there." That's when I remembered that our brand new gas fireplace had never worked either.

Avery: So did you get the house blessed? Burn sage? My sister wanted to burn sage at our house and my parents said no way.

Carrie: My sister-in-law did bless the house and she had us go around the outside and circle the house in salt. And the hauntings stopped. But they followed me here, you know. One night, the store had just closed, and if you remember Jackie, she had heard all of my stories as they were happening and she asked me if everything was better since the house was blessed. We were standing beside the performing arts bookshelves at the back of the store, and just as I told her that my sister-in-law had blessed the spirits away, three books flew off the shelf and landed at our feet. They didn't fall over or drop off, they flew like someone had thrown them. I said to Jackie, "You saw that right?" And she said, "If we weren't here together, I would never believe that I had seen that." And you know what book it was? It was three copies of that Harry Potter actor's ghost movie book.

Interestingly enough, when our bookstore moved its location this summer, I had a different coworker, Braedon, joke that he thought there was a spirit in the kids section where he works; that there is a specific toy elephant that sometimes giggles (which is one of its functions, if you squeeze its trunk) as he walks by, even though Braedon isn't touching it. I briefly outlined Carrie's story and joked that maybe the spirit that was haunting her has followed us to the new store. And Braedon said, "Oh, don't worry, I've got spirits of my own that follow me." Oh reallllly? Tell me more, Braedon:

I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a house outside the city, all Gothic arches and a spooky iron gate at the end of the drive. If you have a picture of a typical old haunted house in your mind, this is it. One night, my parents were out for dinner and I was sitting at the table doing my homework, and I don't know why – I guess I was just bored or curious – but I said, "If there are any spirits here, give me a sign." And right then, I could hear from the kitchen a sound like a hand slapping against the refrigerator. Again, I don't know why I did it, but I said, "For real, if there is a spirit here, make yourself known by touching me." And right then, I was wearing a short sleeved T-shirt, and the end of my sleeve just kind of turned up on itself against my arm here. And something has kind of been with me ever since.

Have you ever heard of the shadow people? (I said I wasn't sure, and when Braedon said that they were used in old times to explain sleep paralysis, things that sit on your chest in the middle of the night, I said that I did know what he was talking about, but had never heard them called "shadow people" before.) Well, once when I was home from university and sleeping in my bed, I heard a bang and opened my eyes. It was maybe two in the morning, and it really scared me, so I laid really still and just looked around my room with my eyes barely slitted open. And as I looked at my door, I watched as it opened and then a man – I guess it was a man, but it was just made of black shadow – stepped through, turned back towards the door handle, and even though he didn't really touch the door, he reached out his hand as though he was closing the door, and without touching it, the door closed again. I was so scared and didn't dare move, and then the thing came around and sat on the other side of my bed. I could feel its weight there, and I could feel it stretch out as though it was going to go to sleep there, and then I could feel it rolling on its side towards me, as though it was staring at me. I was terrified and couldn't move. (I asked Braedon if he thought he was actually paralysed, or if he was just too scared to move. Braedon said that he thought it was more like he was too scared to move, but he got the sense that if he tried to run away, he wouldn't have been able to.) This went on for a good minute, and then it got up again. I watched it cross my room back to the door, reach out its hand, and without touching the handle, turn it, open the door, and leave again.

Braedon explained that although he never again had an encounter with the shadow people, he often experiences small oddities – pulsing light bulbs, a sound as though someone is flicking the back of his chair or the table beside him, things moving on their own – just as though something bratty is looking for attention. Naturally, I was thinking of Carrie and her story and (half-jokingly) said that Braedon had probably opened a portal when he asked a spirit to come through and show itself and that all he would need to do was find a way to close it again. (And naturally, he then thought I was taking the whole thing too seriously and laughed at the idea of "portals".) Also interesting: Braedon then asked if I've ever seen this ghost-hunting show he named, which I hadn't, and he said it's kind of hilarious because the main guy just walks into supposedly very haunted places demanding that ghosts show themselves to him, and they're always attacking him; leaving scratches in threes, "To mock the Holy Spirit". I'm always extra interested when the stories I hear repeat themselves like that; it's hard not to sit up and take notice; want to type it all out.

I find it particularly strange that both Carrie and Braedon told me their stories at a time when I was mentally gathering tales on this subject for my Halloween post, and while most of their experiences are outside the scope of what I wanted to write about this year, I do want to zero in on what each of them said about sleep paralysis. Sure, sleep paralysis might well explain the in-the-moment experience of everyone I've written about here – this link not only gives the science behind the phenomenon, but many people have added their own frightening personal stories in the comments there – yet because it's Halloween and this is a time to embrace the spooky what-ifs, I also want to point out that there was a truly weird similarity in Nancy's and her brother's stories (not to mention how their experiences prefigured what we would later see for ourselves in the movie Cat's Eye), and Carrie's nocturnal presence apparently left a physical mark behind on her dresser; it was certainly strange to me that another coworker's story would later repeat some of her details. My brother Kyler might insist that he cured himself of his self-diagnosed sleep paralysis by starting to sleep on his stomach, but he still won't go into detail about the feminine presence that so frightened him as a child. Once again, none of these stories happened to me personally, but they were all told to me by people that I trust; by people who believed in the absolute reality of what they experienced. Make of it all what ye will.