Goblins, Shadows, and Unholy Things

    I regard the paranormal as a big jigsaw puzzle, of which most of the pieces are missing, and the major aim of this blog is to collect and present some of those pieces which are in danger of being overlooked or lost. For this reason, I do not normally report items which have appeared on somebody else's website. Nevertheless, I make an exception when the item is quite at variance with the normal theme of the website, and is in danger of being lost among the other details. Thus, the story of the psychics of Ape Canyon came from the Bigfoot Encounters website. Likewise, the tale of the miniature flying cyclist was discovered in the Castle of Spirits website, which contains literally hundreds of first hand testimonies of ghostly encounters. Nevertheless, a few of them are not what you might call run-of-the-mill ghost stories. Let's have a look at a few.

Goblins
    We shall start with a Texan woman who bears the same name as that prolific writer of folk songs, limericks, and jokes: Anonymous, and her account of the strange events on a long dirt road on which her house was situated. At eight o'clock one morning she went for a walk down the road with her three sons, aged 3, 5, and 12 respectively, only to be stopped about twenty yards from the house by a woman running into the middle of the road.

   She looked odd with a red hooded cloak from head to her bare feet and crazed hair. Her face was painted black with what appeared to be mud and she had about four obedient pit bulls by her side sitting at attention watching as she began acting very oddly. Now mind you it is August in Texas and the closest house for at least ten miles was our own, not to mention the Texas heat and this lady is wearing a full length hooded long sleeve cloak. She suddenly started chanting and sort of jumping around while holding this sort of branch waving it over her shoulders. I just couldn't stop looking at her and without a thought I called out to her if perhaps she had had an accident in the area and needed some help. She only then raised her eyes to look our way but only to my children and lifted her hand with a smile motioning for my boys to approach her.

     The family retreated to their house. Now, admittedly, this sounds rather odd, but the woman may well have been a flesh-and-blood human being with flesh-and-blood pets. As I have explained elsewhere, behaviour which seems completely bizarre may have a quite logical explanation if you know the back story. In this case, I suspect she knew something, and was performing a ritual. It was what happened when the family took a walk later in the day that was really weird. Her youngest son's sandal fell off. Then -

   As I bent down to pick up Manny's sandal I turned quickly when my five year old began to scream one of those hysterical cries for help that make a mother’s blood run to ice. When I saw his pale face I noticed he was also urinating on himself. I turned toward the direction he was fixed on to have a look at the source and there they were. I would never in my wildest believe a soul had I not been there but sure enough. There about twenty feet or so on the side of the road were four small people about two and a half foot tall. One of them was about two foot at the most and they were drinking from the puddles of water that collected during the last rain fall. Then I noticed another one but he was much bigger than the four and he wore all black. He seemed to be a sort of watch out or care-giver as he did not participate in the splashing and drinking. The others were all dressed in white handmade type clothing and wore hats that were pointy like a garden gnome. They were speaking and what appeared like joking and the entire time not once did they look at us until the big one did. I gave a shout from amazement. Then the big one grabbed up the smallest of them onto his shoulders and spoke to the others to go towards the tall grass. Not one word came from any of us as we watched them walk and disappear into the grass. Since then I have seen them on several occasions around my home just watching me although I am scared I am also equally curious as to what they are. They do however cause a little mischief from time to time it is never anything serious only like they want my attention.

     Readers of this blog will be aware that such entities are by no means unique, although they are not normally seen drinking from puddles. But before it is permitted to lead into the next story, a small digression might be in order. Readers will also no doubt be aware of the many sightings of humanoids in connection with flying saucers. However, the earliest of the major ufology organizations, N.I.C.A.P. initially discarded all such reports, judging them too fantastic to be taken seriously. (UFOs were presumably expected to be unpiloted.) The moral of the story: in studying the Big Jigsaw Puzzle, never throw away any piece, no matter how weird. Put it to the side. If it really doesn't belong to the picture, it will stay on the outer, but if it does belong, eventually a similar piece will come by to connect with it.
     Eight months later, the same witness returned with a follow-up story which was truly terrifying. This time she wrote under her own name, Jennifer Lozano. It began with the little people watching her. She went to bed, and in the next morning she found a mass of tiny muddy footprints on the lawn and patio. I shall now quote her own words of what happened next.

     Later that night I was sitting on the sofa with my kids and I caught a quick flash of something run past the large windows in the front of our home. I decided it had to of been one of the many stray dogs in the area and continued watching the movie. It was not even a minute later that I began to feel like something was looking at me. It was nothing like the times I had seen them this was a very evil feeling. I was filled with fear and didn’t want to look but I made myself and what I saw made me give a silent scream and I swear my entire body felt like a bucket of ice was just poured on me. There hovering about three feet off the ground was a little person but this time his eyes were huge and glowing like a cat's. The worst part though was the horrible smile on its face. His mouth was very wide and went from his ear to his other ear and was opened in an evil smile type laugh showing off rows of shark like teeth. I didn’t hear him out loud but it was more like he was putting it in my head and I could hear his laughing and chanting in some strange words that I had never heard of before. I began to close my eyes at this point and prayed for God to help me and to protect my children form whatever this thing was. When I opened my eyes I was sure he would be gone but he was still there and he was laughing even harder at me. I got up and led my kids to the back room to watch the television in there. At this point I was so afraid that this thing was going to find a way into my home and I did not need a psychic to tell me that it wanted to hurt us.
      When it was time for bed a few hours later I had calmed down and was doing a great job of convincing myself that I had seen something else and my eyes were just playing off lights of something. I laid down in bed and just as I began to get comfy I hear something hit my roof hard. Then it sounded like something running across the roof and went quiet. I asked my husband if he had heard it and he nodded that he did and motioned for me to be quiet so we could hear. A few minutes later we were sure it was a small animal until we heard what sounded like evil laughter coming from the air vent that leads to our attic. It began to make scratching sounds on the ceiling and it would whisper my name. This continued all night until around four in the morning and then it would just stop. I went through this every night for about five days and in the meantime my husband had went up into the attic to inspect for animals or birds or any kinds of hole that something could get inside but he found nothing.
     Then after the fifth night it got worse. I fell asleep that night and I was happy to have not heard a peep when I got awakened by something sitting on my chest and choking me. I couldn’t scream for help and I was sure I was going to die. I could smell this thing and feel its skin on mine. It smelled like something does when it is dead and has been lying in the summer heat for a few days. When I realized how strong it was I began to realize that I had no chance of getting it off me and so desperate I began thinking about Jesus and I got an image in my head of him on the cross. At that very moment the thing let go of me for a moment and had a look of pure horror. It began to move backward like someone had just pressed the rewind button on a movie. It went back all the way to my bedroom door and then just stood there for what seemed like twenty minutes staring at mean with a look on its face that was indescribable. It looked just like it had every time I had seen it but this time it was completely naked and had no form of anatomy and its skin looked to be burned all over. At this point I was able to move again and gathered up all my courage and quickly sat up and turned for the lamp beside my bed. When I looked back it was gone but there was a black spot on the floor where it had been. I got up and as I looked closer I realized it was completely burned and still very hot to the touch on the area where it had stood.
     I ran over to my husband and he woke up easily which made me angry how he could not have heard or felt anything at all. I showed him the carpet and he looked at me and said, ’Oh my god Jennifer, what happened to your neck?’ Now before he had said anything I hadn't even noticed any burning or pain at all but as I looked in the mirror I was horrified and I just could not believe how I had not noticed it before. There were deep burns on either side of my neck and were beginning to become painful. Now I’m not sure if it was in my mind since I was seeing it for the first time but I became uncontrollable and was shaking with fear. The next day I went to a local clinic in town and the doctor said it was third degree burns and asked me how in the world had I manage to get burned on the neck in such a pattern that looked a lot like hand prints to him. I had nothing to say and I sure as hell was not gone tell him the truth.

      With this in mind, let us go back to the most popular, and arguably the most fantastic entry in this blog: the Attempted Abduction by Gnomes. Do I believe it? I have been in communication with the witness since that date, and she appears sincere and sensible. What is certain is that she has been telling the same story without variation on several forums for well over a decade, without any of the embellishments typical of the hoaxer or mentally deranged. She is also adamant in her determination not to be identified. Altogether, her behaviour is consistent with someone honestly trying to come to terms with a baffling experience.
     Also, we now have a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the experience of the brother of another informant who wishes to remain anonymous. This person appears to have been a paranormal magnet, and according to the informant, he was near tears when relating what happened to him at the age of five or eight. He used to be visited at night by a "shadow man", who so terrified him that he would sleep with nun chucks and a baseball bat.

    One night he didn’t have the bat and nun chucks and his feet were uncovered. He wasn’t sure if it was due to him tossing and turning, or if something uncovered him. He woke up to a lot of little shadow people surrounding him. They were about a couple of feet tall. They tied a rope around his neck and pulled him out of the bed and through the house. The front door was open, and he couldn’t scream or anything. He was grabbing on to anything and everything trying to stop these little evil people. He saw the rope already leading out the door. He found a pair of scissors and cut the rope. He ran into his mom’s room and fell asleep in her bed. When he woke up the next morning he had an imprint of a rope around his neck. Mom had asked him how he got the rope imprint around his neck. He told her, but she never believed him.

     What are we supposed to make of that? The "rope" couldn't have been physical, because it wasn't on his neck in the morning. But what about the imprint? Could it have been a nightmare so terrifying that it left a psychosomatic mark? Has anyone ever heard of such a psychosomatic effect? The fact that he experienced other paranormal phenomena might suggest that this was another example. What would have happened to him, or the woman attacked by gnomes, if they had succeeded? Is there any record of people vanishing from their bedrooms during the night, never to be seen again?

     Another thing: most of the contributors to the Castle of Spirits appear to be adults, as you would expect. Nevertheless, although I haven't made any count, I have gained the distinct impression that the number of teenagers, or adults describing their childhood experiences, are over-represented. Then again, children are greatly over-represented in percipients of fairies. Furthermore, there are many references to children talking to, or about, entities invisible to their parents, and animals reacting to things their owners cannot see. Are you beginning to notice a trend?
     Here is how 55-year-old John described what happened to him in Kentucky when he was aged 15. He had experienced a strange growling in the upstairs bedroom before, one day, deciding to sneak one of his mother's cigarettes and smoke it in the old barn.

   I walked in and began to feel creeped out but lit my smoke. I had my back against the inside so I was in the barn about 10 feet or so looking out the old barn doors. That's when I heard a voice that sounded a lot like the growling voice from the bedroom. It sounded like it was coming from the top of the barn in the corner. It was daylight so I could see very well. I swear this is true the voice said, 'So you think you’re something don’t you?’ I felt the chills and the hair rise up on the back of my neck with my eyes watering I had to turn and look. I saw a winged large muscular figure of some kind of being. It blended in with the old reddish brown barn color. When we met eyes it left its perch with one leap and a flap. I began to run as fast as my 15 yr. old legs could make me. I could feel it getting closer to me as I got closer to the house for a second I thought it was going to pick me up, but I yelled for my mother and jumped on the back porch as the flying demon thing swooped up. I was still alive!! After I told the family what I experienced we decided to move and did so very fast. A few years later the house burned to the ground. I’m a 55 year old man and still can’t shake the terror when I think about it.

Shadows
     A lot of the stories involve shadow figures. To be fair, although such things may make your flesh crawl, there need not be anything sinister about them. By this time we should be familiar with apparitions which are visible to one person but not another, and those which are not visible to anyone, but can only be heard. Perhaps the entities can only manifest in that manner or, which is probably the same thing, our psychic senses are only capable of apprehending them like that. This would appear to be confirmed by an Englishwoman called Caroline Spencer, who writes:

   But lately, I sometimes see a small shadow on top of the stairs when it's late at night. However it's not always a shadow. Its sometimes occurs as a figure of a small girl. You can briefly see what she's wearing and looks like a long dress and a dirty white shirt over the top.

     But, some are still really weird - like this one, by a woman (? girl) called Alysen.

   My good friend, Faryn just moved into a house in Spokane, Washington. She was text messaging me last night, 11-10-11, when she said to me, "Alysen! There’s something in my room!!!"
   Now at first I did not believe her, thinking it was just a prank she was pulling on me, but I was proven to be very wrong. I challenged her and told her to tell me what it looked like. It was a little dark figure huddled in the corner of her room. She also added that her cat was looking at the mysterious figure as well, and by that point I asked her to send me a photo of the "thing in the corner". She replied with a picture of a little black glowing figure, around a foot and a half tall, slumped over in the corner which was off to the side of her bed. It resembled to me to be a stuffed gorilla or a pair of black boots, but she said she owned neither object.
   I asked for, once again, a photo, but this time a close-up of it. I got another photo, an enhanced image of the first one, it appeared to have a visible left ear. She picked up a piece of candy, and attempted to throw the candy at the thing. She did so, and then she frantically text messaged me saying "It vanished! It vanished!!" Then, she told me she had thrown the piece of candy, and right as it hit the huddled figure it let out a screech, like the one one hears when one drags their fingernails on a chalkboard, and disappeared, making the candy hit the wall in back of it. After this occurrence, her cat, Baby, was staring out her open door, looking towards the direction of noises coming from the hallway. Let me note that she was home alone at the time of the occurrence.

   Unholy Things
     We'll start off with this story by another person called Anonymous, this time from Texas.

   I was about three or four years old but my older brother confirmed my suspicions when I noticed small bruises or scratches that appeared over night. My bedroom door was usually locked but he said that whenever he went to check on the pups my door would open quietly and he would see a dark figure disappear into my room. By the time he was on his way back I was sitting up in bed crying for our mom and saying I was hurt. They would check my body and sure enough there were bruises and scratches covering my back. One was so deep that by the time it healed it was just a giant cross shaped scar on my back.
   It got worse when it was just me and my brother. I could be in the living room and recovering from that night’s attack and I would be shoved onto the hardwood floor on my back. I looked up and there was a demon shaped figure leaning over me. I screamed for my brother and continued to point and scream until he got there. He looked up to where I was pointing and said there was nothing there. But there was something there and I could not stop crying.
   My parents hired a priest to come and cleanse the house and at the same time he baptized me. When he flipped me over to look at the marks on my back he poured holy water on it. I sat in his lap and was screaming for him to stop the burning. When it was over the air in our house felt lighter and I personally felt better. It is an memory I will probably carry to my death. I still have nightmares about the attacks and what I had seen.

    What sort of mundane explanation can be provided for this? Perhaps multiple nightmares with psychosomatic references (is there any evidence for such things?), cured by a ritual he was too young to understand? As with so many of these explanations, it requires results out of all proportion to the alleged stimuli. And what about the "dark figure" seen by his brother?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.
     How would you like to think that They are waiting for you to take your last earthly breath? For this, we shall leave the Castle of Spirits and go to the All Nurses noticeboard, where a member asked for nursing ghost stories and received more than 2,500 responses. Most of these were, so to speak, "normal" ghost stories, but some with quite different. Like the very first response:

   The best I have heard is from a nurse who said that one night she was floated to oncology at the hospital she used to work at. She was given a patient who was passing away and had been unconscious for several days. At one point during the night the nurse went into the room and the patient was at the top of the bed and looked at her and said, "Don't let them take me!", the nurse was freaked out and asked her who was going to take her, and she said that black thing up there and pointed up in the air. This patient died within minutes.

     No. 51 was reply to this from another nurse.

    A nurse who is a friend of mine told me about a patient she had that had been sick for a while, and she had gone into the patient's room to get her vital signs, and the patient was lifted off the bed just a few inches, and she said that there was a black shadow that covered the room and as the patient died it was like the shadow left the room, and a very cold, even spookey draft followed. She says, and I believe, that you can tell a patient has either gone to heaven or the devil himself has come to claim his soul. Nursing gives you a totally different look on death and the higher power.

     Rather like in the movie, Ghost.
     All right, these are second hand stories. However, No. 4 claims to be first hand.

   One night I was caring for a dying male patient. He was scared and I spent quite some time with him, trying to calm and reassure him. Eventually he calmed and I left the bedside and went over to the nurses' station which was about 15 feet away. As I sat down I glanced over to him and there was a black shape standing over the bed, looking down at the patient. I was terrified, and am sure it was something evil.

   The final one (No. 77) was from a South African nurse working in California.

   Another instance, there was a patient who was terminally ill with liver cancer in a private room. I was working days but the night shift people said they hated going into the room because something would blow on the back of their necks and shadows would move where shadows shouldn't be. The man was a Christian, as was his wife, and his wife said she saw this black presence descend above him and his breathing would become labored. She asked myself and a friend to pray for her which we gladly did being Christians ourselves. We anointed and blessed the room and prayed with the family and asked the Lord to seal the room. From that time on the room was filled with peace and love and the man breathed so much more easier. People had no more problems with going in there. This gentle little man eventually passed away, but it was in a place of peace and love.