Hello all, Aaron the Webguy here. Alexie is busy once again at the writer’s desk, so I’m here filling in with something, a little bit fun. I will be dusting off my writing hat and reclaiming it to tell my own little “true life” paranormal story. I quoted true life because, while I’m not a skeptic, I have no hard evidence of my experience. What I do have is something that I couldn’t rationally explain away that has stuck with me to this day. This will be a brief story of the supernatural that someone else might be able to relate to. I invite anyone reading to feel free to post your thoughts on my experience and post your own story in the comments. So that said, here goes nothing…
It was a dark and stormy night… Ha. Okay, just kidding around there, and off I write in earnest.
The year was 1995. I am a teenager of fourteen years of age. I’m what I hope you could call a normal kid with some troubles at my public high school. Sadly, I was not very popular at school, but hey, at least I belonged to the marching band which gave me something bigger than just myself to latch onto. Looking back, I wouldn’t call it a particular dark point, but it was a time that I wasn’t very happy with my life. While I’m aware that most teenagers my age had their own troubles, my own problems led me to hating to wake up to endure the next day of school.
Freshman year of high school wasn’t kind to me in a lot of ways. A quick example being the time I got punched in the face. The brief violence was delivered by one of my only friends in gym class. The crime he felt deserved a punch in the face was my unwillingness to accept Christ as my personal savior. After listening to his hard sell on the subject for the fiftieth time, I told him to stop trying to save me; I am not interested because I have my own beliefs on God. WHAM. Well, that’s one way to turn the other cheek, I thought as tears welled in my eyes. (Disclaimer, I am not bitter about the incident nor do harbor ill feelings towards anyone’s right to share their beliefs. My “friend” was simply just a messed up kid at the time trying his best, and we didn’t see eye to eye on the subject.)
So it is not hard to figure out that I would manufacture ways to stay up way past my bedtime to prolong the arrival of tomorrow and another disappointing day. So to hell with everything else, I would say to myself.
Still my favorite show. Its on Netflix streaming and you can click the pic to get there. Ya know... just saying. Picture by sciencefiction.com
My escape was Star Trek Deep Space Nine. It would air at 11PM to midnight, and that’s often how I attempted to stave off another day. Passing out to the show was my go-to plan because fantasy worlds were a place where my issues didn’t exist. Waking up for the school bus wasn’t easy at 6 AM the next morning, and for a long time, I was quite sleep deprived. I’m told that sleep loss is cumulative, and there really isn’t a true way to catch up. So maybe I can write off my following experience as one of the sleeplessness and brought upon by hallucination.
During this time, I started hearing noises outside of my bedroom after 10 PM. The sounds were bumps in the night, so one would say. The slight knock on my door or a creak in the hallway outside, I would explain away as normal because I shared the hallway with my sister, whose room was down the long hall across from my bedroom.
I would think to myself, Maybe she’s going to the bathroom, or Mom or Dad is awake. Yeah that’s it, Aaron, relax and lay back down.
The sounds kept coming night after night for about a week, and soon I started getting out of bed to investigate. I’d walk out into the hallway, without turning on the lights to look around, and walk down the long hallway to the kitchen and family room. After checking out the areas from where I swore I heard something and finding them to be normal, I’d maybe grab a soda from the fridge since I went to the trouble to get up and all. Then came the night I did experience something.
There came the knocking noise outside my room again. I’d gone out before many times and never found anything, so my reason for getting out of bed this time was simply an excuse for a late-night soda. As I left my room, I felt I was not alone. Something was different this time, but damned if I wasn’t thirsty, so I slowly walked down that dark hallway to the kitchen.
Suddenly there it was, descending from the ceiling. A Lady in White quickly came at me and stood in front of me for half a heartbeat. She then passed through me and whispered something to me that can’t be called words. Was it a feeling, a thought, a wish for me to go back to bed? I didn’t feel she was malevolent or trying to harm me. It actually felt almost like a hug sped up a thousand times that passed through my body. Paralyzed in fear for many quickened heartbeats afterwards, I stood there. She was gone, my Lady in White, and yet she had passed through me toward the direction of my bedroom. Fight or flight then overcame me.
“Holy shit!” I cried softly to myself as I ran back to my room. Under the covers I went, and there is where I spent that night. I feared I wasn’t alone that night so I stayed under those covers. Somehow, after what felt like an eternity, I went to sleep.
The following day came and I woke with a cry to get showered for school from my mom. I got up, did my normal morning routine, the entire time running my experience through my head over and over. My Lady in White didn’t have this name at the time, but I knew that I wasn’t alone that night. I think that if I wasn’t dreaming the whole thing, my ghost (or angel, who can say) was trying to help me perhaps? It didn’t feel evil, even though, how the hell would I be able to tell the difference? I somehow felt comforted by the experience at the time, and it changed me.
In the following weeks, there were no longer any more noises outside my bedroom. I found myself going to bed before Deep Space Nine because I felt that the lack of sleep wasn’t helping me much at school. I started trying harder to fit in and stopped staring at my shoes so much when I walked to avoid eye contact with people. Things got better for me, to a degree, because of my supernatural experience. I had more friends and confidence and stopped some of my bad habits, like soda near midnight before a school day. It was a start I would attribute to turning around my high school experience.
My Lady in White’s visit didn’t cure my acne. She didn’t possess me and feed me lines to talk with the girls that didn’t want to date me. What she did was much more. She gave me a supernatural hug of sorts that made me feel less lonely at a hard time in my life. I am thankful for her and that scary night in the hallway. Thanks to her, I smiled a lot more than I did before our brief meeting.
All I can say for sure is that a couple of months afterwards, I found myself apologizing to someone I felt I had wronged in some way: my “friend” from gym class who had socked me one. I shook hands as I told him I was sorry if my difference of opinion made him feel that I mocked his beliefs in some way. He is now on my Facebook friend’s list. We don’t talk but seems he really likes the Miami Dolphins.