From the Shadows

Shadow People Haunt His Dreams

2012-01-09T19:52:00.000-06:00

A gray sheet of clouds stretched across the sky as 12-year-old Doug ran to the corner store to buy snacks. Andre was coming to his house to watch movies and he wanted to be ready.

“It was overcast but not raining, and in the middle of the afternoon,” Doug said. Since the day was shadowless he didn’t understand what he saw on his way home from the store.

“As I approached the corner to turn onto my street, I saw something black sticking beyond the bushes in the front of my house,” Doug said. “I yelled, ‘Andre,’ and started running toward my driveway where the bushes are.”

But the dark figure wasn’t Andre. A black, man-shaped shadow rose from behind the bushes in this gray afternoon and began running toward Doug’s house.

“After a few steps I saw the shadow running down my driveway toward the back yard,” he said. “I ran up the driveway to the gate that leads to my back yard. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I watched a pair of legs running through the yard and through the fence at the far end.”

Doug stood at the gate, staring into the now empty yard.

“I was not afraid, I was just shocked,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This thing. What could it be? Why was it black when most stereotypical stories said that ghosts were white? Could this be demonic? Could it be like me, just a person?”

The questions from his first encounter with shadow people haunted him for years. But this encounter wouldn’t be his last.

Eight years later, at the same house, Doug woke from a deep sleep and lay in the gray room, staring at his bedroom wall.

“I woke for no reason, had no weird dreams, and I wasn’t groggy or half asleep,” he said. “My room was dark other than some stray beams coming through the blinds, and I could see a man, darker than the night like a void.”

The figure, shrouded in a cloak, stood at the end of the bed.

“I could only make out the silhouette of his head and shoulders. The rest of him just went straight to the floor,” Doug said. “There were no legs or feet. No red eyes, no facial features whatsoever.”

Terrified, Doug slid low in bed, pulling the covers slowly over his face, watching the black, man-shaped figure standing over him until his blankets hid the horror from his view and Doug fell back to sleep.

Doug is now 29, and although he doesn’t know what these shadow beings were, he knows he saw them.

“These are the two instances where I specifically saw shadow people,” Doug said. “Only in the past couple of years have I been able to find anything on the subject matter. It’s almost like re-victimization when reading stories from other people that describe experiences like mine. I never knew it could be so widespread and am still dealing with the shock.”

But the shadow beings haven’t left Doug. They visit him in his sleep.

“I have dreams of floating black heads with red eyes and extremely bright, tiny white teeth,” he said.

In these dreams, the shadow beings stare at him. In 2011, he realized these shadow figures might not be just a dream.

“Last summer, the first night I slept in my last apartment, I woke up in my old bedroom in the dream,” he said. “I thought I saw a shadow go past the doorway, and as I turned and stretched enough to be able to check, the most ungodly deep voice breathed my name in my ear and down my neck. It was so real.”

Doug is convinced his dreams of shadow people are more than dreams, and that these shadows are torturing people’s minds.

“That’s the thing with shadow people, I think they confuse people when appearing to them, make them question their sanity, only to show up again and make the person go through that whole process again,” he said. “They’d leave long enough for one to question themselves, only to reinforce their existence a few years down the road.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Return of the Wicked Priest

2011-12-17T16:58:00.003-06:00

Author’s note: This is a follow up to a story I wrote for Mysterious Universe and one for this blog about encounters with a bizarre, threatening man dressed as a priest.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train system covers 104 miles around the San Francisco Bay area, and may be home to a monster.

Elaine Steele lived in San Francisco for about 10 years and often used the train to commute to and from work, usually sitting quietly in her seat, as is the norm on the BART, aware of, but rarely interacting with her fellow passengers.

Then one Saturday, her BART experience changed.

“It was June 10, 2006,” Steele said. “I remember the exact date because it’s my birthday.”

Steele didn’t normally work on Saturdays, but boarded the train around 7 a.m. to fill in for a sick coworker. However, something was wrong.

“When I got out of bed that day I felt this bizarre feeling like something bad was going to happen,” she said. “I was going to ride my bike to work but saw that it was kind of gray outside and although not cold, was worried that it could rain. So I decided to take BART but felt a little sick to my stomach at the thought.”

Steele dismissed this feeling because she was going to work early, not only on a Saturday, but on her birthday.

“I went in but even remarked to my boyfriend that I had a strange feeling about today,” she said.

Only four people sat in Steele’s car when she walked on at 24th and Mission and sat with coffee in hand. As she texted her boyfriend about birthday plans, someone sat in the seat behind her.

“I didn’t turn around to look,” she said. “Who does that?”

Seconds later, her new companion’s presence commanded her to look.

“I felt this chill travel up my spine,” she said. “While not fully summer yet, it certainly wasn’t cold in the train. I looked in the window next to me to see the reflection of who was sitting behind me. I saw a priest.”

Steele relaxed at the image of a man of God – but that feeling did not last.

“I actually felt like turning around and saying ‘good morning,’ but I did not,” she said. “Instead the priest tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘good morning.’”

She froze. Unless a BART traveler recognizes a frequent traveler and just says “hi,” or flirts, “generally, people keep to themselves. This type of behavior is not normal.”

Steele looked over her shoulder to return the priest’s greeting, but the words stuck in her throat.

“This guy was so scary looking,” she said. “He looked sweaty even though it wasn’t yet hot and he had this big birth mark that took up one side of his face and it was dark pink. He had incredibly thin lips and large teeth, and he had freaky, basically colorless eyes.”

As she stared at the priest, with his sweaty, pasty skin, and milky eyes, he moved – but she didn’t see it.

“It was like he didn’t take up space like a regular human,” she said. “His hand was resting on the back of my seat and I stared at it, then it was gone and he was adjusting his robe – but I never saw his hand move.”

The priest’s hand was in one place, then in another.

“It was like he just removed his hand from that place and decided it was going someplace else but didn’t actually move to make it happen,” she said.

As she watched, the outline of the priest’s body shook like a bad TV signal.

“It seemed like he was vibrating,” Steele said. “It was like the outline of his body hummed with vibrations, kind of like an animated cartoon.”

“Good morning,” she said back to the priest, then turned quickly away, inching forward on her seat to get as far away from him as she could.

“I felt bad but the guy was really freaky, so I didn’t want to be sitting close to him since he was leaning forward in his seat,” she said. “I kept hearing him say things under his breath that I couldn’t make out, which at the time I thought ‘chanting.’ He was also breathing like in a really forced way, like taking these deep breaths and exhaling in a loud and obvious way.”

He breathed heavily enough to move her hair. Steele wanted to bolt to another seat, but didn’t want to offend the holy man. Then she felt his hand.

“He reached out and touched my hair,” she said. The priest’s touch wasn’t normal. “It was sort of like having your hair stick to something when he touched it. Not like he pulled it, but like my hair got wet and that heavy feeling after.”

Steele pulled her hair over her shoulder and turned around.

“Please don’t touch my hair,” she shouted, but the priest was gone. He was no longer in the train car.

“It was like one second he touched my hair then he vanished,” she said. “I looked around at the other people on the BART as if to say ‘did you see that?’ and no one paid me any mind.”

Terrified, Steele shot from her seat and looked everywhere. The priest wasn’t in her car, or in the next.

“I know that people probably wondered who is this nuts lady running around and yelling at a priest? But I didn’t even care,” she said. “I was distraught, very shaken. I sat back down near the door as I was almost at my work.”

When the train pulled to her stop and Steele stepped off, the morning still was not right.

“It was so creepy,” she said. “I kept feeling as though someone was watching me.”

Steele’s job puts her into daily one-on-one contact with drug addicts and violent criminal offenders, but she said she has never felt afraid like she did on that train.

“I shake hands with these people, help them, travel alone in cars with them and not ever have I felt fear for myself,” she said. “This priest thing scared the crap out of me. I want to make sure that you know that this isn’t a man. There is no way.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Dreams of the Harlequin

2011-12-01T10:01:00.000-06:00

Author’s note: This is a continuation of encounters with an entity known as the Harlequin. The entity began visiting Dan Mitchell of Wisconsin when he was five years old (follow my three-part story about Mitchell’s encounters at http://mysteriousuniverse.org). He’s not alone.

The Harlequin came to Kevin Brown of Portland, Maine, when he was a child – it came in the night.

“Like Dan I’m also 35 years old and remember seeing the Harlequin – this figure, person, spirit or demon – at around five to six years old,” Kevin said. “It started as a very lifelike dream.”

The Harlequin came to Brown with the ringing of bells.

“I remember laying in bed and I could hear the jingle, jingle of a bell and it’s coming closer,” Brown said. “That when I see the Harlequin come into my room. The Harlequin is dancing but never says anything.”

This thin, androgynous creature, its large, wide-open eyes glaring at him like lanterns, danced in the darkness. It smelled like summer rain – all like Mitchell’s encounters.

Then the horror began.

“While it’s dancing I can hear what sounds like two knives or metal scraping together,” Brown said. “As the Harlequin dances around my room I see blades at the end of its fingers.”

Terrified, Brown pulled his blanket over his head, but the jingle remained. So did the metallic scraping.

“It’s only after hiding that I hear the jingle, jingle of the Harlequin’s bells moving off into a different part of the house and the sounds fade away,” he said. “After waiting what seemed like forever I peeked my head out from under the bed covers.”

The Harlequin was gone – but it left something for Brown to see. Red footprints dotted the floor of his bedroom and lead out his door. Brown gathered his young courage, slipped out of bed and stepped into the hallway and followed the red footprints.

“I raced to my sister’s room,” he said. “I saw what looked like someone leaning up against the wall.”

It was his sister. He called her name, but she didn’t move. Brown slowly stepped into the room and saw the blood.

“Her face was cut at the cheeks so you could see all her teeth in some grim smile and at the end of the cuts were little blood red circles,” Brown said. “As fast as my little legs could carry me I ran back to my room and under the protection of my blankets.”

The sound of the Harlequin followed him.

“The jingle-jingle danced around my bed,” he said. “I could hear the Harlequin’s bells and I remember the smell of summer rain fresh off the pavement, and I could also hear a giggling. As fast as it came it went away.”

When Brown was sure the Harlequin had left his room, he looked from a small opening in his covers. More red footprints.

“They led off to my parents room,” he said. “In a panic I jumped out of bed running to my parents room. I found them in the same condition, the same terrible smiles with the blood red circles for cheeks.”

But the scene was from an even worse nightmare.

“The Harlequin slit the arms from elbow to wrist and pulled out the veins of my parents and pinned them to wall making them look like marionette’s puppets,” he said. “Scared to holy hell I ran back to my room and under the covers of my bed, one last time and it came – the jingle-jingle.”

Shaking in stark terror, Brown lay curled under his blankets shaking as the Harlequin’s bells and giggles danced around his bed. He lie there, crying until he felt liquid soak through the sheets and sat up, throwing off the blankets only to see the darkness of blood soaking into his sheets and the Harlequin standing in the middle of the room laughing.

“That’s when I woke up,” Brown said. This wasn’t the only time. “I’ve had these dream or visions all my life.”

But Brown doesn’t think these terrifying graphic visions are just dreams. He’s sure they’re something more.

“Like Dan my family has had some strange things happen as well around the Harlequin,” he said. “Like (Dan’s) family (mine) dismissed it as a child’s wild imagination. However, after a few years of not having the dream my family and I were sitting down at dinner and we all could hear in the upstairs bedroom a jingle-jingle sounds after looking for the source of the noise we never found it. I had the same dream that night.”

The jingles occasionally haunt his family.

“My mother was alone in the house and she swears she heard what she said was the jingling of bells upstairs,” he said. “Not scared of anything my mother went upstairs to find the source of the noise. Once upstairs she heard the noise coming from downstairs in the kitchen.”

When she went back to the kitchen, something sharp poked her shoulder and someone – some thing – screamed her name into her ear.

“She ran out of the house to my aunt’s next door and told her what happened in the house,” Brown said. “In the excitement of her story my aunt noticed and stopped my mother to show her a cut on her shoulder thin like a razor blade.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Of Ouija Boards and Missing Records

2011-11-11T16:48:00.000-06:00

The house Mike grew up in was always strange.

“In this house, furniture would lift up off the ground or you would hear someone calling you from another part of the house when no one was home,” Mike said. “There have been times when witnesses saw curtains open and close of their own accord. One summer, while we were away, the local kids sat across the street from the house and saw the living room windows open and shut on their own.”

Their pet dogs avoided certain parts of the house, especially the attic where the bedrooms were.

“There were times when things that were lost would fall from the ceiling out of nowhere,” Mike said. Although his family was convinced the house was haunted, “the ghosts that were there never made any attempt at harming us,” so they had no desire to move.

But the idea of ghosts in the house didn’t keep Mike from playing with them.

“When I turned 17, I had an accident in gym class requiring that I stay off of my feet,” he said. “My friends came over to visit and we started to play with the Ouija board.”

The friends immediately hit on something. The planchete skittered across the board under the light touch of their fingers, spelling out a name.

“A man named Irvin Cobb came through who claimed he was the guardian for my sister,” he said. “At the time, my sister had a diamond ring that she couldn't find and he told her to go to her room.”

She went into her bedroom and turned on the light, but didn’t see her ring anywhere. She went back to Mike’s room and said the board was wrong.

“The board was emphatic that she go back to her room,” Mike said. “When she turned on the light, she looked around and the ring just popped up from the floor of its own accord.”

Mike’s friend Patricia remembers that day well; she kept notes during the Ouija board session.

“It was 1979 I was a senior in high school,” Patricia said. “We actually got hooked. I remember the year since I asked what I got on a test and the response was, ‘you should have studied harder.’”

Although other “spirits” spoke to the high schoolers through the board, Cobb was the most active, and the most curious.

“He told two cryptic comments that we have not as yet determined,” Mike said. “The first was ‘the noise of silence’ and the other was ‘the reddening of the blood.’ For the blood comment, after many years, we assumed it meant caesarian births because all the young ladies present at the time ended up having.”

The silence warning is still a mystery.

After the teenagers packed up the board and left Mike’s house, Patricia went to the library and looked into Irvin Cobb.

“She did a search and learned that Irvin Cobb was a writer,” Mike said. “He had an autobiography and when she went to take it out, it was not available. When it finally came back to the library she was amazed to discover that the book had last been taken out in 1945.”

Another cryptic message, written by Cobb, appeared in the back of the autobiography.

“There was a comment to the effect that rather than say goodbye, he would say, ‘until we meet again,’” Mike said.

Cobb (June 23, 1876 – March 11, 1944) was an American humorist and at one time the highest paid newspaper reporter in the country.

Patricia took her notes of the Ouija session home, locked them in a box and slid it under her bed.

“Years later after we grew up, went to college and moved on, we happened to get into contact again,” Mike said. “She went into the box to locate the papers to see if there were any predictions that came true.”

But something was wrong.

“All the notes that were locked away had disappeared,” Mike said. “The lock wasn't broken and she was the only one with a key.”

Even though the Ouija board session didn’t frighten Mike (he didn’t find the experience negative at all), it, and the missing records, did frighten Patricia.

“I had all the notes and kept them under my bed and one day they just disappeared,” she said. “I have never touched a Ouija board since. I rarely talk about that experience except to say I do believe that board does work. While I was very curious it did scare me.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Stalked by 'The Priest'

2011-10-21T20:10:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is a follow up to a story I wrote for Mysterious Universe about a woman’s encounter with a bizarre, threatening man dressed as a priest. After the article appeared, I discovered this woman wasn’t the only person stalked by “The Priest.”

The stranger took Jared Thompson by surprise.

As the public train rumbled closer to Thompson’s home in San Francisco in April 2011, a male voice asked Thompson for the newspaper that sat next to him. Thompson looked up from his thoughts and saw the stranger.

He wished he hadn’t.

The man was dressed as a priest, but Thompson didn’t find that comforting.

“He was probably six feet tall,” Thompson, who stands 6’3”, said, “and he just felt wrong.”

The priest, balding with thin, “brittle” hair, stood before Thompson, his waxy, chapped complexion stained by a birthmark covering one side of his face.

“My gut reaction was that he was sick with something terminal,” Thompson said, “but then (the feeling) grew into something darker.”

As the man loomed over Thompson, terror grew in his chest.

“This guy was giving off the scariest vibes, and I am in no way sensitive to that sort of thing,” he said. “I thought it was weird that he was asking for the paper because at first glance I thought he was blind.”

The priest’s eyes were milky, but as Thompson studied the man, he knew the priest could see.

“His eyes were alert,” Thompson said. “He was tracking my movements visually.”

Thompson handed him the paper.

“When he reached to take it, the train lurched and he stumbled closer to me,” Thompson said. “I almost gagged. This man smelled. If you’ve ever had a rat die in your wall or cleaned up a mousetrap, it was the same kind of smell. It was sickening, sweet, rotting and oppressive.”

Thompson gagged at the smell, tears rimming his eyes. The priest took the paper and sat on the seat opposite him.

“But he was not reading the paper,” Thompson said. “He was staring at me with a huge grin on his face. In my entire life I have never felt the sick fear that I had when that priest was staring at me.”

Terror running through him, Thompson looked out the window, the city clicking past, and thought how much he wanted to see his wife waiting for him at home.

“The priest leaned over the aisle and said, ‘she wants to see you, too,’” Thompson said. “And then he gave me another awful smile. This was not friendly – it was horrible.”

Who was this man? Thompson wondered. A lunatic? Or something else?

“There was something about him that told me he had literally just heard what I was thinking,” Thompson said. “It’s not as if I was looking at a photo of my wife or texting her or something. I was just staring out the window, minding my own business.”

Thompson didn’t respond. He kept looking at the scenery speeding by, counting the seconds until he reached his stop.

“The train went for a few more stops and the whole time I was sweating, nervous and sick to my stomach,” he said. “I was so relieved when we came to my stop.”

Thompson shot up, grabbed his bag, and all but ran from the train.

“I turned around and saw that the priest was still on it when it pulled away,” he said. “I actually kept my eyes on the train until it was well past the station. As soon as I was standing outside in the fresh air, I began to feel better. I told myself it was just some creepy old man and that I was overreacting. Isn’t that what people always tell themselves?”

Thompson walked toward his car in the parking lot, relaxing more with each step. He climbed inside and pulled out of the lot, taking his eyes off the pavement for a moment to adjust his seat belt. When he turned his attention back to the road he slammed his foot onto the brake pedal.

“I saw a figure standing about 10 feet from my car, right in the center of the driveway,” he said. “It was the man from the train. Same priest robe. He waved at me.”

Thompson threw his car in reverse, spun its nose around and gunned toward the second exit.

“I have no clue how he got there,” Thompson said. “But I know for a fact that I wasn’t hallucinating. It was the same guy from the train. I would recognize him anywhere.”

Thompson hasn’t seen the “priest” again. He doesn’t talk about his experience. He hasn’t even told his wife.

“This guy left me rattled,” Thompson said. “If I think about him to this day I get a nervous creeping feeling inside of me. I haven’t the faintest idea what he is only that I don’t believe he is a human being.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Memories of a Past Life in WWII

2011-10-12T09:03:00.001-05:00

The book on past-life regression Dave Bercaw of West Fork, Ark., read in the 1980s was, by many contemporary accounts, unconventional. To arrive in a state in which to “remember” a life you may have once lived, it didn’t advocate undergoing the widely-accepted practice of hypnosis, it recommended suffering.

“I had read a book pooh-poohing the use of regression hypnosis in past life recall,” Bercaw said. “Instead, the author had recommended concentrating on the most negative emotion one could summon.”

Doctors and detectives trained in regression hypnosis had at various times tried to hypnotize Bercaw, and failed. So Bercaw tried the suggestion of this book*, concentrating on the first things to come to mind – sweat, thirst, and exhaustion.

Images began to race.

“I recalled events taking place in North Africa and Italy wherein I was a British infantryman during World War II,” he said. “The memories were vivid and graphic, even unto today, 20 years later.”

Bercaw lie on his bed and focused on these feelings. Soon, sensory input began swimming through his head.

“The first result was the sound of a diesel engine being gunned, followed by a very vivid scene,” he said. “In that scene, the sound of the diesel engine was coming from a truck on the road in front of me which was driving past. It was an old type of truck, olive green, which was used to transport troops and supplies.”

Gunfire and artillery-damaged palm trees dotted a land of sand around the military truck, a column of black smoke rose from the horizon. From Bercaw’s perspective, he stood in a line of soldiers dressed in khaki shorts, shirts, and doughboy helmets. Looking down at his hands, he held a carbine with a wooden stock.

But his focus was on his immediate superior.

“In front of me was a guy, dressed the same way as the rest. He had a dirty face and was sweating,” Bercaw said. “He had chiseled features and was shouting at me. I don’t know exactly what he was saying because I was tuning him out, but I do recall him saying something about how worthless I was. He also had a strong British accent.”

Trucks rolled past as the officer berated the soldiers, kicking up clouds of dust and sand that Bercaw tasted.

Then the past-life event was over.

“That was all,” he said. “Afterwards, that feeling (thirst, heat, sweat) has never bothered me again.”

Thoughts, memories of a past life as a British soldier during the bloodiest conflict on our planet, haunted Bercaw to the point he had to go there again.

“Having had some success with the technique, I cast about for some other negative emotions,” he said. “Another one that I came up with was the feeling of guilt whenever I saw a third party do something wrong or embarrassing. This was a completely irrational emotion, but one I suffered with through childhood and into young adulthood. It was a very strong emotion and in a sense, disabling.”

Over a number of days, Bercaw lie on his bed and remembered being in Italy during the war.

“What it recalled, overall, was that another guy and I were running up an enclosed stone spiral staircase,” he said. “It was wet with dampness or dew, and I kept slipping and was having trouble not falling. The other guy was running in front of me, and he was dressed in the same khaki shorts and shirt and doughboy helmet. I had my carbine in front of me again running up the stairs. I was in a blind panic.”

Bercaw’s WWII British self knew he ran toward someone about to be executed – and it was because of him.

“The spiral staircase went on forever it seemed, and my panic just kept rising,” he said. “Finally, we burst out onto a plaza. My partner was on my right, and directly in front of me, another British soldier was seated on a wood chair in the center of the plaza.”

The man on the chair had been tied down – he wore a black blindfold.

“In front and to our left was a firing squad made up of British soldiers,” Bercaw said. “As we reached the plaza and I opened my mouth to scream at the squad to stop, the order was given and the squad opened fire.”

The man’s body jerked as bullets tore through his torso. The chair rocked backward from the impact and dumped the body onto the stone plaza.

“The feeling of horror and guilt was overwhelming,” Bercaw said. “To my shame, I said nothing, which compounded my guilt. That was the end of what I saw.”

Bercaw wants to know the identity of his WWII self.

“I was curious as to who this British soldier might have been, whether I could trace back to see if any of this was real, and what British military executions took place during the North Africa and Italy campaigns,” he said.

Bercaw has tried to discover who this person may have been. He thinks the man’s name was George James Miller, but has found no proof.

“To date, I haven’t been able to trace back to see if there was a George Miller in the British Army who soldiered through North Africa, Sicily and Italy,” he said. “At any rate, George didn’t seem too keen on soldiering and, as I was born nine years after the war, apparently he didn’t make it out of the situation.”

Much later, during a high school trip, Bercaw’s son traveled to Italy and came home with more than either expected.

“He brought back pictures of the monastery which I had been in,” Bercaw said. “Looking at the pictures, I could visualize the location in the monastery where he was when he took the pictures.”

*After more than 20 years, Bercaw did not remember the title of the book.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Encounter With a Golem

2011-10-01T18:32:00.000-05:00

A cool, crisp breeze, the remnant of a summer storm that had blown through Hot Springs, Ark., earlier in the evening, chilled this summer night in 1970.

Roger Shuffield, now from Azle, Texas, and friends Bob and Terry, pulled into the parking lot behind the Hot Springs Boys’ Club that overlooked a complex of four baseball fields used for Little League and softball games. The fields sat lower than the lot, so when these college sophomores on summer break stepped out of the Bob’s car, the entire complex spread out before them.

“I went with two friends to the parking lot for a few hours of wine and chilling out,” Roger said. “Having grown up there, and having worked there one summer, I knew it to be a perfect spot for wasting an evening with friends.”

The boys reached the parking lot around 7 p.m. and spent the next two hours drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes on the hood of Bob’s car.

“It was still daylight and we hardly noticed the transition from day to night as we joked and carried on, only moving from the hood of the car to answer nature’s call,” Roger said.

At 9 p.m., the boys, staring out at the Hot Springs city lights, decided it was time to leave.

“We basically spent the evening in random conversation,” Roger said. “The entire time was as mundane as any evening when friends get together.”

That changed quickly.

“When we decided to leave the place, we all got into the car and we passed the rear security light, one of those lights that seem to make everything appear a lavender color,” Roger said.

At that light, Roger and Terry talked Bob into stopping the car for a bathroom break before they left the parking lot.

“The two of us got out and walked the few feet to the south wall of the building,” Roger said, the night now complete, the boys backlit by the security light.

“We stood a few feet apart and watered the wall and pretty much finished at the same time,” Roger said. “As I turned around to face the direction of the trail, which crested the driveway from below near a 15-foot lone pine tree next to the light, suddenly a very large form rose from the lower fields coming up, not as if walking or stepping, but more like floating up from below.”

Roger froze.

“This thing looked like someone had concreted a very, very large man in a diving suit,” he said. “Bell helmet and all, and contoured the head into the shoulders as if there were no neck, no facial features, only smooth gray, but lavender tinted from the guard light.”

The creature stopped; Roger felt because it noticed he and Terry standing at the top of the hill.

“It appeared that I was only looking at the thing from the waist up,” Roger said. “It was almost a third as tall as the 15-foot tree next to the trail and at least three feet across at the shoulders. The thing appeared to be potentially some 10 feet tall.”

Roger shot a glance toward Terry. Terry looked back at him, eyes wide, and the boys knew they were seeing the same creature. This snapped them out of their shock and they ran for Bob’s car.

“He hadn’t seen a thing,” Roger said about Bob. “We drove away and never looked back; and lived to regret it.”

For the past forty years, Roger and Terry have discussed what they’d seen, and still don’t know what the hulking, concrete-like figure could have been.

“We’ll never know what that thing was,” Roger said. “The only description I’ve had for it all these years is Golem, a mud man. Because that’s exactly what it looked like, an enormous clay-like figure rising up from the dark before us. Featureless, massive and unlike anything I’ve ever seen since that night.”

From European tradition, the Golem is a giant humanoid molded from clay and animated by magic.

“Occasionally, I see drawings made by those who have been abducted (by extraterrestrials) or have had close encounters of some kind and ever so rarely I’ll see something akin to what we saw that night at the Hot Springs Boys’ Club,” he said. “If anyone can shed any light on this, feel free to comment.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Incubus Attack in the Night

2011-09-22T11:52:00.002-05:00

Author’s note: This is the story of a woman’s terrifying sexual assault by a demonic figure. Read with caution.

Snow fell outside Tsura’s Birmingham, Ala., apartment on the cold January 2011 night terror came to visit.

“I awoke to what I thought was my husband having a bit of fun with me,” she said. “I was very, very wrong.”

Tsura, just showing her pregnancy, and Adrian had been married a month and had only recently moved into the apartment. Tsura felt something was wrong there from the start.

“I was not alone in my apartment, even though my husband was gone,” she said. “I had the company of my kitten, and something else.”

Talking with other residents in the apartment building, Tsura found that people who moved into that apartment usually moved out shortly after. Long-time residents of the building hinted at something odd there, but Tsura could never pin down from them what it was.

It was an entity.

“I could never tell what it was, though it knew me well,” Tsura said. “It was mocking me by leaving standing water in my tub and sink. I would also feel it watching me.”

But not all the time.

“The strangest thing, sometimes it was gone. Just gone,” she said. “That was the worst sign. I knew of no spirit who could leave the shackles of its past. This entity was something else.”

On that snowy night in January, it showed itself.

“Adrian was working that night, which was unusual, but we welcomed the extra money,” she said. “After all, I was, and am, a stay at home wife. It had snowed several times, and I was mostly trapped indoors. How I loathed it.”

Tsura fell to sleep cradling the kitten she’d gotten for companionship when Adrian worked nights, and woke to someone pulling open her legs.

“I thought it was Adrian, but, there was no dawn light coming in from the window,” she said. Adrian didn’t come home from this job until the sun had already risen. “It was pitch black (outside).”

Tsura opened her mouth to scream, but the sight of her attacker in the dim light of the apartment stopped the voice in her throat – she knew it wasn’t human.

“He was ugly and beautiful, a strange mix of Adrian and something else,” she said. “Suddenly, he fell on top of me, knocking the air out of my lungs.”

Then this entity sexually assaulted Tsura, laughing as she screamed.

“Eventually, I became so weak I lost consciousness,” she said.

The chirp of a car’s electric locks from outside her window dragged her awake. As she got up, hoping to find Adrian home, she saw a large, red stain on the sheets.

“My stomach clenched,” she said. “I was calling an ambulance as Adrian opened the door.”

Adrian held his crying wife, trying to comfort her as she recounted the attack, tears streaming down her face.

“I lost my child,” she said. “I explained to Adrian what happened, but he just shook his head. He said it was just sleep paralysis. That I was just trapped, trying to make sense of what was happening as my body miscarried. But I knew.”

Tsura is convinced she was attacked by something unholy.

“My research has led me to believe that I was attacked by an incubus,” she said. An incubus is a demon, present in cultures worldwide, that sexually assaults sleeping women with the intent to father a child. “But why? I was obviously pregnant, and could not bear his demon children.”

Tsura never went back to the apartment.

“When I was released from the hospital, I moved back in with my roommate,” she said. “I refused to step foot in that apartment. Eventually, Adrian was swayed, and we moved.”

She hopes the demon, or whatever attacked her, stayed behind.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

'From The Shadows' Is Asking, Um, A Little Help Here?

2011-09-15T16:22:00.001-05:00

During the week of Oct. 15, I will have written this blog of original, true paranormal tales for five years. I appreciate each of you who visit “From the Shadows.” Your time spent reading my weekly offering, and your kind comments, mean a lot to me.

Unbeknownst to most of you, these stories appear in print before they make it to my blog.

I recently received notice the newspaper in which “From the Shadows” appears each week is cutting its paid columns – including mine. We all know the newspaper industry is suffering and I understand this business decision. Unfortunately, this was my main source to fund the research and time involved to produce “From the Shadows” (telephone expenses, travel, etc., ain’t cheap). I receive donations from time to time, but I can’t continue the blog on the occasional donation alone (I did receive a nice Christmas 2010 present from Australia’s amazing paranormal podcast “Mysterious Universe.” Thanks, Ben and Aaron. You guys are awesome).

I’m not begging for money (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge), I’m asking for a print forum for “From the Shadows.” I work for a living, you know. If any kind reader would recommend this column (print gets first-run) to their local newspaper or magazine, that might mean I could still bring you these weekly strange, and sometimes down-right creepy, stories about the world around us – a world that is much more mysterious than it seems.

Thanks for reading.

Jason

There's Something In Our House

2011-09-05T08:37:00.002-05:00

The house in Metropolis, Ill., felt heavy. Rod Morgan and his wife moved into the house in 2007 and soon realized they’d made a mistake.

But it was a good deal.

“We rented from a friend so we cleaned it up and painted for the deposit and a break on the rent,” Rod said.

Shortly after moving into the house, the Morgans found they were going to have a baby. Joyous news, to be sure, but not in that house.

“The house had a very close feeling,” Rod said. “It was kind of depressing no matter what we did for decor.”

The Morgans lived in the house about three weeks when Rod began to hear and see things he at first tried to ignore.

“Little noises and knocks around the rooms and see darker shadows move and hear what I thought to be footsteps,” he said. “Especially late at night – I sit up late.”

Not wanting to alarm is pregnant wife, he kept quiet about the sounds and the shadows, but the tension between him and the house grew.

“I started to feel things around the house, especially in the basement where the washer and dryer were,” he said. “I would do laundry late at night, and after putting clothes into the washer and dryer I swear I could feel something trying to overtake me as I walked up the stairs.”

Rod would stop and look over his shoulder, but nothing was there. Nothing visible.

“Later, it got to where I would race up the stairs jumping two or three at a time and gain the top and shut and lock the door behind me,” he said. “There was a very heavy presence in that basement. I am getting goose bumps rethinking it again, no joke.”

He knew his wife felt it, too. The heaviness. Especially down the stairs.

“My wife would not go into the basement at night and didn’t go by herself anytime,” Rod said.

The Morgans lived there three months when the oppression became physical.

“My wife worked days and I worked nights so I slept late,” Rod said. “Sometimes my wife would come home for lunch and bring me food. One particular morning really got my attention.”

Rod had woken up and lay in bed, stretching his arms and legs before relaxing onto his side, facing the wall. Then he heard the door to the living room close.

“I know this because it had an old plate glass window in the door and it made a distinct sound,” he said. “Then I felt my wife sit down on the side of the bed.”

“Home for lunch?” he asked into the room. “What did you bring me?”

She didn’t answer.

“I turned over and no one was there,” Rod said. “No one.”

He sat up, looking around the room for his wife that he knew – he knew – sat on the bed next to him, but she hadn’t.

“I was not asleep, nor was I in between sleep,” Rod said. “I had been laying there stretching out.”

Rod didn’t tell his wife about the incident. He didn’t want to alarm her.

“The coup de grace happened one night when I was in the backyard, late,” Rod said. “I am a kung fu practitioner and did a lot of my training outside at night.”

Rod’s wife, now five months pregnant and often sick, had gone to bed early with a stomachache.

“It was about 11 p.m.,” Rod said. “I had finished and I saw a person I thought was my wife walk by the kitchen window and go into the bathroom.”

He stood in the yard, looking toward the house, but his wife never walked out of the bathroom.

“I went into the house to check on her,” he said. “She wasn’t in the bathroom so I went into the bedroom and she was laying on the bed facing the wall.”

Rod sat on the bed.

“Sick again?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t move.

“Sick again?” he asked again.

Nothing. He poked her.

“What?” she mumbled groggily. “I’m sleeping.”

“I saw you go into the bathroom and wanted to check on you,” Rod said.

“I haven’t been to the bathroom,” she told him. “I’ve been asleep.”

Rod got up and searched the house. No one else was there.

“That was the last straw for me,” he said. “The next day I told my wife everything. She then told me she had been hearing things since the first week but didn’t want to tell me because she thought I wouldn’t believe her.”

The shadows, footsteps, knocking. She’d experienced everything, too.

They soon found a place to rent in Kentucky and they left. But the house wasn’t finished with them.

“My last experience with that house happened after getting everything out,” Rod said. “I was going back into the basement one night to make sure we didn’t leave anything.”

His wife stayed in the car. She was finished with that place.

“I opened the door to the utility room just above the basement and I heard a deep raspy breath, audible and kind of loud breathing out,” Rod said. “It actually startled me and I expected to be confronting someone in an instant.”

No one was there.

“I slammed the freaking door, ran out and never looked back,” he said. “My wife asked what was up and I told her, ‘we don’t own anything that is worth another trip to that basement.’”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Black-Eyed Kid Encounter in Ireland

2011-08-27T00:30:00.002-05:00

It was warm the night Carris Holdsworth walked to her apartment from a friend’s house in Lisburn, a city of 71,465 in Northern Ireland near Belfast.

Then 18-year-old Holdsworth didn’t know terror waited for her at home.

“It was about 10:45,” she said of that night in 2009. “I was only 18 and had a small flat in a very rough part of the neighborhood. That’s why it unsettled me when I saw two boys standing in my small patch of grass which I called my yard.”

The boys one about 16 years old the other 13 or 14, stood with their backs to Holdsworth.

“I edged around the corner, and as if they knew I was there, both turned around to face me at the same time,” she said. “They were just merely boys.”

As the teenagers turned to face her, she felt more than just unsettled.

“I felt raw fear when I laid eyes on them,” she said.

Holdsworth stopped a few yards from them, a fist in her handbag wrapped around a tin of pepper spray.

“I was ready to defend myself if one of them made any sudden movements,” she said.

But they didn’t. They seemed to know what she was thinking.

“No need for that,” the older one spoke, calmly and maturely. “We just want to borrow your phone, miss.”

Her knuckles began to turn white as her grip tightened on the pepper spray.

“They looked like any other teenager around these parts,” she said. “Hoody, jeans and grubby trainers (running shoes). But while the older one spoke I zeroed down on his eyes – they were pitch black. No trace of white or pupil at all.”

Further depths of terror rushed through her.

“I made a silent gasp,” she said. “It was as if I was in terrible danger; that I had to get away. My heart rate went off.”

All she knew at that moment is that she had to get inside her apartment.

“I didn’t know exactly what to do, so I marched towards my flat door, ignoring the two boys,” she said. “I fiddled around quickly in my bag trying to find my keys.”

“Please miss,” the younger boy said from behind her. “My mother won’t be happy if she doesn’t know where we are.”

Something pulled at her mind, to let them in, to help them.

“I wanted to obey them at first considering that they were young,” she said. “But seeing their eyes took me away. I just had to get away from them both and I knew if I obeyed them I was going to seriously regret it.”

“No. I, I, I …” she stammered.

“I couldn’t get my words out,” she said. “My hands hit my keys and I swiftly opened my door and slid in. My heart was banging against my chest.”

Shaking, Holdsworth fixed a cup of coffee, sat on the sofa in her living room, turned on the television and tried to calm down.

“I didn’t bother to check if they were still there in case I stared into those soulless eyes,” she said.

A knock sounded on her front door.

“I ignored it. It knocked again,” Holdsworth said. “I felt in real danger.”

She stood and padded to the front door. Everything was silent for one second, two, three, then knuckles on the other side of the door rapped out three loud knocks.

“It scared me, making me jump back a few steps,” she said “I was grateful that my door was completely made of wood. I looked through the peep hole and almost died.”

The boys’ faces filled the peep hole.

“Both of them staring at me with those pitch-black eyes,” she said. “The horrid feeling of dread completely overwhelmed me.”

“Miss, we won’t hurt you. We promise,” one of the boys said.

Anger momentarily overwhelmed Holdsworth’s fear and she threw open the door. The boys stood in the doorway, grinning at her.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“We want to use your phone,” the older one said.

“No,” she yelled.

“Just let us in to use the phone,” he said. “We won’t hurt you. We have no weapons to hurt you with.”

“Get away from my flat,” she shouted, then slammed the door in their faces.

Safely behind her solid wooden door, Holdsworth looked back through the peep hole. The boys still stood there, but they were no longer smiling.

“That feeling of utter terror and danger ran through me,” she said.

She went through her apartment, made sure every door, every window, was locked, then picked up the telephone.

“I called my friend to come around that it was an emergency and I needed her help,” she said, calling a friend other than police because she didn’t want to draw attention to her apartment.

Holdsworth’s friend arrived 10 minutes later.

“When I opened the door I couldn’t help but hug her,” Holdsworth said. “She told me two boys were standing in my yard but they left once she arrived. She said they made her feel in danger.”

Holdsworth has since moved to a different neighborhood, but the terror of the night of the Black-Eyed Kids stays with her.

“I always check through that peep hole before I go to sleep,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what those boys were, but I do know they meant me harm and that they weren’t human in any way. I still get scared thinking about it.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Terror of the Evil Little Man -- Part Three

2011-08-20T10:19:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: Last week I gave you the second of a two-part story of a California family terrorized by an evil, gnome-like creature. It was the same story I had reported two years before – with a different family. Last week I asked the question, did they live in the same house? This week I have the answer.

The evil, little man only came at night, and although its origin wasn’t clear, its intention toward Charlie Thomas’ family was – it meant them harm.

Thomas, her husband and their two-year-old twin girls moved out of the two-story country house in Porterville, Calif., by the Tule River in 2010 to escape the cackling imp. Thomas’ story seemed familiar, because it was. I had heard the story before, in 2009 from a woman named Tammy who moved to Porterville, Calif., into a two-story home nestled amongst a few other houses by the Tule River. A gnome-like creature terrorized her and her family as well.

I asked both women if they had lived in the same house; Thomas wasn’t sure.

“It does sound like the house we lived in, only there were no other houses close to us,” she said. “But the description of that barn and everything else sounds just like it, and the Tule River runs behind the house. I don’t know what to think about it all.”

But she wanted to know. Her experience was too terrifying for her be at peace.

“It’s too creepy to think that there are more of those creatures,” she said. “I would like to speak to those other people and find out if we were in the same house or close to it. Thanks for not telling me that I lost my mind.”

I put Thomas in contact with Tammy. Tammy didn’t think it was the same house, either.

“Charlie sent me an email and she described the house that she lived in but it didn’t sound like the same place because the place where I lived had other houses on the property,” Tammy said. “But then she started naming some of the side streets and then I knew it was the same house or really close to it.”

Overwhelmed with curiosity, the women met and drove to the property.

“We decided to go over there to make sure that we were talking about the same place,” Tammy said. “It definitely was the same place. I guess whoever bought it from my landlord had had all the other homes moved off of it.”

As Tammy stood, looking at the house where a three-foot tall man with pointed teeth and an evil cackle stalked them in the night, something seemed wrong – the barn was gone.

“We thought that we might get the nerve up to go and take pictures of the barn to send to you but it was gone,” she said.

Someone had torn down the shed – a place of refuge for the gnome-like creature. Thomas was happy of that.

“We had talked about the possibility of looking inside the shack,” Thomas said. “I really don’t think I would have been able to get close to it; forget about going into it. Even with that shack gone the whole place still had an eerie feel to it and I don’t know if that is because of what we dealt with while living there or just the place itself. I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.”

Before they left, the women approached their old house and knocked on the door. The current resident was not happy to see them.

“I’m not trying to be nasty or anything but the lady that owns it now could very well be an old troll,” Tammy said. “She was just hateful and when we tried to ask her about the barn she pretty much told us to get lost and not in those nice words.”

Thomas was equally taken aback.

“We tried to ask the woman who lives now there about the shack and if she had ever experienced anything while it was there but she didn’t want to talk to us,” Thomas said. “In fact, she told us to leave the property. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I was happy to get away from there.”

The visit brought back other memories to Tammy – memories that rang of the gnome.

“One of the old houses that were on the property when I lived there; the people that lived in the smallest of the houses had some paranormal things going on,” she said. “They would get up in the morning to find huge piles of feces on their kitchen and living room floors and they didn’t have dogs in their house.”

They would also hear their names called when no one else was home, and televisions and radios would come on in the night.

“When they turned them off they would go right back on only louder and when they tried to turn them off again they would hear a really nasty creepy voice yell at them to ‘leave it the F word alone,’” Tammy said. “Could it be that creepy gnome thing in the house? It was just too weird.”

Thomas just hopes the evil little man is gone.

“Hopefully that creepy little creature didn’t move to another barn or shed or shack and is not terrorizing someone else,” she said. “One thing I would like to know is where did it come from and why was it there other than to terrorize everyone who lived near that old shack?”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Terror of the Evil Little Man -- Part Two

2011-08-12T11:08:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: Charlie Thomas contacted me in July 2011 with a story of a gnome-like creature that terrorized her family in their two-story Porterville, Calif., home by the Tule River. I had heard the story – at least a similar story – before, in 2009 from a woman named Tammy who moved to Porterville, Calif., into a two-story home by the Tule River. A gnome-like creature terrorized her and her family. I’m investigating to see if they lived in the same house. My guess is they did. This is the second of two parts.

The noise outside the Thomas’ window may have been singing, or chanting, but whatever the noise was, it was terrifying.
“It was 3 a.m. and we were woken up by a sound that I can only describe as a raspy gurgling sound,” Charlie Thomas said. “It was without a doubt the most hideous sound I have ever heard. It freaked us out.”
Thomas and her husband looked out their bedroom window and saw something that froze their blood.
“Standing by my pond holding one of my garden gnomes was what I can only describe as something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale,” she said. “The thing that was standing in our yard was hideous and grotesque.”
The “thing” stood illumined under the motion detector light. It was less than three feet tall, had a long gray beard, wore maroon pants, a baggy yellow shirt, brown vest and a dark waistcoat.
“I couldn’t tell if it was wearing shoes or not but it was wearing a reddish brown pointed hat,” she said.
Thomas stared at a gnome.
“The thing that made this creature really hideous was its eyes and teeth,” she said. “It looked like it was grinning and its teeth were jagged and pointed. The eyes were little beady and dark and mean.”
And it knew they saw it.
“That thing, gnome, troll, whatever it was, knew we were looking at it and it reached into the pond and grabbed a coy,” she said. “Right there in front of us it dropped it in its mouth and swallowed it. We had noticed that every time we put fish in the pond they disappeared and we thought it was cats or raccoons eating them. After seeing that I think that creepy little creature was the guilty party.”
Her husband pushed the window open a few inches and screamed at the creature, telling it to leave their yard or he’d call the police. The gnome simply grinned, laughed and shot them the bird.
They called 911.
“We just said that we had an intruder in our yard but we honestly didn’t think he was going to be there when they arrived,” she said. They didn’t tell the police what they’d actually seen.
When lights from the police car shown down their lane, the gnome simply disappeared.
“We told the officers that the person ran off when it saw the lights coming up the drive but they looked around anyway,” she said. “When they were satisfied that it was gone they came to tell us they had only found some small shoeprints like a kid’s. We knew it was no kid.”
The gnome came back night after night, holding a yard ornament and eating their fish.
They eventually moved the ornaments and put the fish into a tank in the house, then realized they’d made a mistake.
“One night after we had removed the fairies and gnomes and fish from the yard the creature showed up at the usual time, 3 a.m.,” she said. “When it showed up and found that the yard ornaments were gone and the fish were gone it went crazy. It was yelling and screaming something that we couldn’t understand – but we did understand that this thing was pissed and wanted us to know it.”
The gnome ran around the house again and again, screaming and gurgling, its feet hardly touching the ground. Then Thomas realized something terrifying.
“We had put a doggy door in the back door and it was big enough for our dogs to go through and it would be big enough for that creature to go through as well,” she said. “I took off running down to the kitchen and as I got there the dogs had started barking like crazy at the doggy door.”
She shut and secured the dog door, then realized the upstairs windows were open.
“If that creature can half run/half fly around the house it was probably capable of flying up to the windows,” she said. “A fear hit me than like nothing I had ever felt and I ran back up to the twins’ bedroom where they were both sound asleep in their cribs.”
Neither parent slept that night. They soon realized their days in Porterville were short.
“The last we heard of that creature was a very loud screeching cackling sound,” she said. “It was under one of the living room windows and when my husband went to check it out he saw the top of that creature’s hat under the window. Right then we decided that we were out of there. We couldn’t stay there with that creature.”
They soon moved.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Terror of the Evil Little Man -- Part One

2011-08-06T08:26:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: Charlie Thomas contacted me in July 2011 with a story of a gnome-like creature that terrorized her family in their two-story Porterville, Calif., home by the Tule River. I had heard the story – at least a similar story – before, in 2009 from a woman named Tammy who moved to Porterville, Calif., into a two-story home by the Tule River. A gnome-like creature terrorized her and her family. I’m investigating to see if they lived in the same house. My guess is they did. This is the first of two parts.

The house seemed perfect. Charlie Thomas, her husband, their two-year-old twin girls and two golden labs moved into the two-story country house in Porterville, Calif., in March 2010.

“The house was perfect for us,” Thomas said. “Exactly what we were looking for, and we couldn’t wait to move in. There are three bedrooms, a huge kitchen, dining room and living room and lots of windows all around it.”

The deck that poured from the back door opened to woods and the nearby Tule River. A deck in the front overlooked a pond. Thomas placed fairy, gnome, and toadstool yard ornaments around the pond, and stocked it with Japanese koi fish to make it more like their home.

But they would soon find it wasn’t their home.

Thomas began taking her daughters and the dogs to the river in the afternoon. The dogs loved the water, and the girls enjoyed throwing in sticks for them to fetch. One day at the river, Thomas heard her husband shouting for her.

“I heard my husband calling my name from the house,” she said. “He sounded kind of frantic and it worried me so I hurried the girls as much as two-year-olds can be hurried and started for the house.”

As they approached a rickety structure on the property Thomas calls “the shack,” the dogs grew defensive.

“As we got even with that shack the dogs went crazy,” she said. “They were barking and snarling and the hair on their backs was standing up and something told me to run so I grabbed a twin under each arm and ran for home.”

In the house, she slammed shut the door, locking it. But her husband wasn’t there.

“He was nowhere in the house,” she said. “I called his phone but he said that he hadn’t been home.”

Thomas’ thoughts went to the shack.

“There are two sheds on either end of the house,” Thomas said. “The shed on the west end is newer and we use it for storage and the one on the east end is just an old shack that looks like a strong breeze would blow it down. Something about that shack gave me the creeps, especially at night but I don’t know why.”

Thomas served in the Army, her husband in the Marines. They were both engaged in firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan and didn’t frighten easily, but something about the shed terrified them.

“After we had been here for a week or so I started noticing that none of the animals would go near that shack,” she said. “Our dogs, the stray cats and the wildlife gave that shack a wide berth when walking past it.”

Doing yard work one day, Thomas and her husband heard a fight coming from inside the shack.

“It sounded like a cat was in a fight with something way bigger than it was,” she said.

Her husband went into the house, grabbed a flashlight and ran to the shed.

“Just as he got to the door the noise stopped,” she said. “He went in and looked around with the flashlight. Just as he turned to go back out of the shed something in a corner caught his eye. There was something moving and sounded like it was struggling to breathe.”

He shone the light in that corner. It was a cat.

“He ran out of the shack and thought he was going to be sick but after a few deep breaths he was OK and told me what he had seen,” she said. “There was a cat and it looked like it had been in a fight with a meat grinder. It was totally skinned on one side and its neck looked as though some thing had taken a huge chunk out of it.”

Once he caught his breath, he ventured back into the shed – the cat was gone.

“There was no way that cat moved by itself,” she said. “We were standing right there. Where did the cat go?”

Next week: The evil little man.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

More Tales of the Ouija Board

2011-07-31T09:20:00.002-05:00

Author’s note: After last week’s story of a Ouija board encounter gone wrong, a “From the Shadows” reader contacted me with a story of his own.

Kindred walked into his older sister’s house one weekend night in January 1979, his senior year in high school, to find his sister, her boyfriend, and a few cousins around the kitchen table, some sitting, others standing.

He had no idea what the night would bring.

“All (cousins) were female, all in their early and late teens,” he said. “No real significance, although I now wonder if an overwhelming female presence influenced events that followed.”

Kindred’s cousin Dianne waved him toward the table.

“Check this out,” she said.

As Kindred stepped to the table, he saw something that sent fear through him.

“I was taken a little aback,” he said. “Coming from a Christian background we were all told not to mess with Ouija boards.”

But they were, and Kindred joined the game.

“Are you dead or alive,” someone asked, the plastic, triangular planchette skittering across the board. The group asked the question again and again as the planchette indicated a different spirit had joined the conversation.

“It would go to each letter, stop at each letter, and spell out ‘dead’ or ‘alive,’” Kindred said.

Cousin accused cousin of moving the planchette, but everyone denied it. The group would soon find no one in the room – no one living – had moved the triangle.

“A whimsical remark angered whatever was there and one leg of the widget caught on the end of the board,” Kindred said. “Everyone lifted their fingers off the widget and (it) quickly moved across the table top.”

Although frightened, no one wanted to stop the session.

“Curiosity had gotten the best of us all that night,” Kindred said.

Simple yes or no questions made way for more complex queries, like “what are you?”

“We would get answers back such as rabbits, cows, snakes and people we knew that said they were asleep but communicating with us,” he said.

Then whatever communicated with them began to get too close.

“One upsetting moment when going through the list of questions, it said it was by the cliff,” a landmark on the property, Kindred said. “Then by our corrals, then crossing the creek. The procession was towards us – and fast. Finally it said it was outside in the yard, wanting to come in.”

As the group hovered over the board wondering what to do, someone stood, peeled back the kitchen curtain and looked outside. A dog stood in the yard, staring at the house. It was Kindred’s parent’s dog Choco, who would have had to cross those landmarks to reach the house.

“That was pretty freaky,” Kindred said.

Fueled by tension, imagination and adrenaline, the group continued to work the board – then something happened.

“These routine sessions of questions and answers were suddenly broken,” Kindred said.

The board randomly spelled out “purple,” which confused everyone in the room. But when the board spelled “Newtown ND” and “Samantha,” Kindred realized the board targeted him. An ex-girlfriend named Samantha he’d always associated with the color purple lived in Newtown, N.D.

“It was all very startling to me,” Kindred said. “It was as if this universal conscience or entity somehow focused on me and brought up knowledge only I knew, and these were things that were not on my mind at all, at the time.”

The most disturbing event while the group sat in that kitchen, watching the plastic planchette skitter from letter to letter by its own power, didn’t occur in that house.

“While we used the board, my cousin’s mother kept getting phone calls from a little boy claiming he was her abandoned son,” Kindred said.

The voice told her he was calling from a pay phone from nearby Lander, Wyo., and wanted her to pick him up at the 7-11 there.

“Of course, she was clueless and took it as prank calls,” Kindred said. “She would know if she had a baby and had abandoned it anywhere.”

As soon as she hung up the telephone, the little boy would call back – then the “prank” turned into horror.

“The most terrifying thing for her was on the last of these several calls when the little boy’s voice morphed into a man’s voice as he was talking to her,” Kindred said. “Very, very, creepy.”

Although the telephone calls stopped after that, and the group put up the board and everyone went home for the night, the Ouija board experience has stayed with Kindred for 32 years.

“I do not encourage any one to experiment with a Ouija board,” Kindred said. “That night was the only and last night any of us ever engaged in (one).”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Ouija Board Spelled 'Join Me in Hell'

2011-07-23T11:22:00.002-05:00

The night of terror began with a few drinks.

“It was just another night out with our group of friends,” Toni said. “We had all been drinking so we decided to go to our friend Brittny’s house.”

The idea of using a Ouija board had picked at Toni’s mind for the past three days so, as the group of friends sat at Brittny’s house, she brought it up.

“I had been wanting to play around with a Ouija board just for the hell of it,” she said. “Since we were all drunk and my older brother knew how to make a pretty nifty homemade Ouija board, we all thought it was a great idea.”

The friends soon discovered it was not.

After an opening prayer, the friends began their Ouija session.

“We started off with me and my brother’s hands on the triangle (planchette) we had cut out,” Toni said. “We warmed it up by spinning it in a circle for about 40 seconds.”

Once they stopped spinning the planchette, Toni’s brother asked the first question.

“Is there any spirit with us now?”

Tense moments past and nothing happened. Toni’s friend Taylor shouted something sarcastic and the planchette shot to the word “yes” on the top corner of the board.

“At first, I truly believed it was my older brother,” Toni said. “I was wrong.”

Very wrong.

Toni and her brother took turns with others in the room, and eventually the messages grew dark.

“We switched people maybe about eight times before it really started getting frightening,” she said. “All together, we had let nine spirits into the room.”

Messages from the board claimed the spirits of six women and three men were in the room. Then the questions began to flow, like, “Did any of you kill yourselves?”

They did.

“It answered with a ‘three,’” Toni said. “We then asked them how. G for gunshot, H for hanging.”

For the first answer, the planchette moved to X, but the next rested on H. Then something happened that pulled a blanket of fear over the group.

“We heard soft banging as if someone had just hung themselves and their feet were gently hitting the wall,” Toni said. “We asked the spirit who had made the banging noise to speak. We asked him why he killed himself and he spelled out ‘wife.’”

Had his wife been murdered?

“No.”

How did she die?

“Devil.”

“We asked if the devil made him do it and the triangle moved to ‘Yes,’” Toni said. “We asked if he hated women and he spelt out ‘all of them.’”

The room grew silently tense as the planchette skittered across the homemade board, broken only by heavy breaths and the occasional brave question.

“We asked if he wanted to harm any of the girls in the room and the triangle moved to ‘yes,’” Toni said. “We asked how and he spelt out ‘fire.’”

Then the planchette quickly moved from letter to letter, repeatedly spelling “maim.”

“Then one of the candles we had fell to the floor and hot wax got on my leg,” Toni said. “Or at least I thought it was hot wax. It turned out to be a pretty deep cut. I don’t know where it came from.”

Despite the injury, the friends kept playing.

“There were a few people in the room who were scared,” Toni said. When asked, the Ouija board identified each one.

The last people to use the board were Toni’s brother and Brittny. Facing each other, the two spun the planchette and began asking questions.

“I wasn’t scared until the last session with the board,” Toni said. “This time, we were dealing with a demonic spirit; an angry demonic spirit.”

Toni’s brother asked, “are you evil or good?”

The board signified evil.

“We all laughed and my brother began asking more questions,” Toni said.

Taylor screamed, “We needed to put it away and stop (messing) around with it.”

The group, focused on the spinning planchette, ignored him.

“We asked the demonic spirit if it wanted to hurt anyone in the room,” Toni said, and the planchette spelled “HAT.” Taylor was the only one wearing a hat.

“My brother asked him to point the triangle at who he wanted to hurt and it went straight to Taylor,” Toni said.

Taylor shot from his seat and screamed an expletive; then he moved to another part of the room. The point of the planchette followed him. The board spelled that Taylor was cursed.

“We asked more questions but the answers were too confusing for us to understand,” Toni said.

The next few answers weren’t.

“The Ouija board spelt out my father’s name,” Toni said. “This part made my heart stop because my dad truly is a (messed) up being.”

Toni’s brother asked why the board was interested in their father.

“It slowly spelt out ‘deal with devil,’” Toni said. “My brother asked to be more specific and it spelt out ‘no work.’”

Their father is technically disabled and “gets free meds and money from the government.”

Then the planchette started spinning, resting briefly on the board’s roughly written letters.

J. O. I. N. M. E. I. N. H. E. L. L. P. A. D. …

“My brother flipped the board before it could finish spelling our last name,” Toni said.

Toni’s brother and Brittny released the board, and destroyed it, along with the paper they used to write the messages. Then they burned the remains.

“After that night, I will not touch a Ouija board,” Toni said. “I now know how serious the Ouija board is.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Eyes of the 'Wolf Boy'

2011-07-16T12:17:00.002-05:00

A small orange flame sparked in the night as Travis White lit a cigarette. White stood outside the Maryville, Mo., house on that night in August 2010, the air fresh from rain, nearby streetlights casting a yellow glow over the neighborhood.

“It was 3 a.m.,” White said. “I’d just gotten off shift.”

Smoke rolled from his mouth and he noticed something move in the yard near a copse of trees.

“Out of my periphery I thought it was a dog,” White said. “A really big dog; but when I looked at it straight on I was scared. Not one of those immovable scareds, just a little freaked out. I just didn’t want to be there right now.”

The dog, “about as long as a horse,” loped across the lawn as a dog would. Its tail long, tan and bushy “with a white tip. Like a fox.”

However, it was the eyes that frightened White.

“I don’t remember much about its facial features, but I remember the eyes,” he said. “It had glowing green eyes.”

The “dog” stopped next to a neighbor’s fence and watched White; its eyes glowed the entire encounter.

“It stared at me until I finished my cigarette and went inside,” White said. “About three to five minutes; just long enough to smoke a cigarette. I was little freaked out. I didn’t want to move. I just maintained eye contact.”

The “dog” disappeared between two houses and White went inside. White, who lives with his father and step-mother, took his father outside to look for tracks the next day, but they found nothing.

But, when White saw how tall the fence was, he knew something was wrong.

“I didn’t realize how tall it was,” he said. “I just thought it was a big dog or a wolf. The next day Dad went out there and stood where it was.”

The “dog” would have come up to the middle of White’s chest – he’s 6’2”.

That wasn’t the last time White saw the “dog.” He saw it twice more, and always at night.

“I saw it a couple of weeks later. Very briefly,” he said.

White parked his car on the street behind the house after work around 3 a.m. He sat inside the car smoking cigarettes when he saw eyes staring at him through the darkness.

“The street light back there flickers,” he said. “I was sitting in the car smoking a cigarette. I saw those green eyes.”

When the streetlight flicked on he saw the “dog.”

“I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me because of the green glow,” White said. “But it was the dog. It was lying down, just staring at me,”

In the intermittent flickering the “dog” inched closer.

“It was freaky as close as the dog was when the light flickered back on,” he said. “I wanted to go inside. It was one of these, ‘in need to go inside,’ but I was frozen. I’ve seen big animals that freaked me out back when I lived on the farm and I just ran.”

But that night he couldn’t. Eventually, the “dog” stood and loped away. There were no footprints the next day.

“Dad calls it ‘Wolf Boy,’” White said. “We joke around about it being a werewolf.”

The third and last time White saw the creature was in April 2011, “It had been months since I thought about the ‘Wolf Boy’.”

White had fallen asleep in a chair watching television when something strange pulled him from sleep.

“I woke up to my name whispered in my ear,” he said. “As I started looking toward the door, the lights came on and I heard this scratching from Dad’s speakers. Nails on a chalkboard.”

White yelled at whoever had turned on the lights and stereo, but no one was in the room.

“Then I saw a figure standing just outside the door,” he said. “In my just woken-up mind someone had broken into the house and I caught them so I, of course, got my gun.”

When he stepped outside with the gun, the dark figure he’d seen looming outside the door was gone – but he wasn’t alone.

“I searched outside and I see the green eyes,” he said. White stood outside the door, armed, and watched Wolf Boy back off into the shadows between two houses. “That’s the last time I saw it.”

Through those three encounters, White’s still not sure what the beast could be, something normal, or something paranormal.

“My first impression was it was a big dog,” White said. “But the eyes. These eyes glow in the shadows. That’s the only inkling I got it was supernatural. The eyes and the first time I saw it, it was wet and there were no tracks in the mud.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Shadow They Called 'The Cowboy'

2011-07-08T14:28:00.002-05:00

The Cowboy has followed Cody Lilly for years, a black, human-shaped figure, featureless except for a hat – a fedora with a wide brim.

“We called him the Cowboy because he kind of looked like the Marlboro man,” Lilly said.

The Cowboy stepped into Lilly’s life his sophomore year of high school in Clarinda, Iowa, and visited almost nightly for two years, pacing about his room, waiting for something. What, Lilly didn’t know. Then the visits stopped.

Until 2011.

“My girlfriend that is now my fiancée is in Kansas City and I’m in Omaha. I was crashing with friends here,” he said. “My car started acting up, I’m in the process of looking for a job, finding an apartment, buying an engagement ring. I had a lot of stuff on my plate, which might have brought on what happened.”

What happened was the Cowboy.

“I’m sitting in my car on the phone with my mom,” Lilly said. “I’m a horrible man because I don’t know much about cars, but my mom does.”

As Lilly described the car’s behavior to his mother, he noticed a movement in the corner of his right eye. Lilly turned toward the passenger side window and saw it – the shadow man that once tormented him in the night. The Cowboy.

“It was full on. A shadow person in an old fedora,” Lilly said. “It was standing there. It leaned over like it’s bending to look at me.”

As Lilly stared in horror, the Cowboy reached out it’s arm and knocked on the car window.

“It knocked two times,” Lilly said. “After it knocked it dissolved in my vision. It just showed up, knocked on my window and was gone.”

Lilly wonders if the Cowboy wanted to let him know it was still around.

“It’s been quite some time that I saw him,” he said. “I’m just kind of thinking he just showed up. I was feeling stressed out and I think he showed up just to feed on that.”

The first time Lilly saw the Cowboy was almost eight years ago when he moved into his older brother’s basement bedroom.

“The room we stayed in was kind of long and there was a lot of room between the dresser and the bed,” he said. “When it showed up it just appeared by the dresser. It had red eyes. It was darker than the darkness around it and it would just pace back and forth. Those red eyes were on me all the time. Then it would just dissipate.”

He later discovered his brother had seen the red-eyed shadow entity as well, but the thing never approached him either.

“Our Cowboy, he never really came any closer than that,” Lilly said. “He just paced and watched.”

Lilly said he believes the shadow man was there for another reason – it hungered.

“It was feeding,” Lilly said, convinced the Cowboy was absorbing energy from his emotions. “The first time I saw it I was completely incapacitated by how scared I was of it.”

At first the nighttime visitations paralyzed Lilly with fear, but something eventually changed.

“The first times I saw it I stayed awake all night scared to the point I would not move,” he said. “When I realized it didn’t do anything I didn’t get scared, I got interested in it.”

Lilly got relaxed enough around the Cowboy, one night he spoke to it.

“I said, ‘hey, I don’t care if you’re here, but if you’re going to do something to me, do it to me in my sleep because I don’t want to lose any more sleep over this,’” Lilly said. “He stopped coming so often after that.”

Lilly and his brother aren’t the only people to see the Cowboy. During a New Year’s party at the house, they used Lilly’s bedroom as the coatroom.

“One of my brother’s friends was over. He went in to put his coat in the room and he came back out with it, pallid white,” Lilly said. “He said, ‘there is someone in your room.’ He wouldn’t say anything else. He just left. We think he saw it, too.”

Other odd things happened to Lilly in that house over the years, but he only places one at the feet of the Cowboy.

“Mom sleeps with a box fan. Every once in a while she’d hear the music of Glenn Miller through her box fan,” Lilly said. “Oddly enough, Clarinda is home to Glenn Miller.”

A few years later, as Lilly attended Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Mo., about 45 miles south of Clarinda, he heard the music, too.

“The one time I saw the Cowboy in Maryville, I heard Glenn Miller coming from my box fan,” he said. “I looked up and there he was.”

Although Lilly grew comfortable with the Cowboy, the daylight sighting in Omaha brought the terror back.

“I got scared again,” Lilly said. “I had never heard one make noise. I was pretty shaken up about the thing. It had this feeling of anxiety and tiredness, like it was feeding off my emotions. Maybe it was letting me know it found me again. Maybe it’s been looking for me, which is kind of creepy.”

Even though the thought of a phantom lurking in the shadows of his life is a disturbing one, it has also piqued Lilly’s curiosity.

“(Shadow beings) have never tried to hurt me,” he said. “I kind of want to see more of them so I can maybe figure something out about them. So I can figure out what they want and why they’re here. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or bad thing.”

Regardless, Lilly is leaving Omaha. He wonders if the Cowboy will follow him.

“I’m moving to Kansas City,” he said. “I’ve kind of had weird stuff happen to me no matter where I’ve been. I’ll see what happens to me once I get down there.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Encounter with a Mara

2011-07-02T08:50:00.000-05:00

Mikk of Estonia knew something was wrong when he looked down and discovered he was floating around his house.

“I knew my body was asleep,” he said. “It was night time but I could see in the dark.”

Mikk often slipped into a lucid dream state, but this time he traveled outside his body – and encountered something terrifying.

“Some bad entity was around my house and my spirit fled,” Mikk said. “I was hovering along the main road from my house, away from the entity who was unpleasant.”

Turning back to see if the dark entity was following him, Mikk looked into the face of horror.

“I passed a house where a neighbor had died of cancer several months ago and with it I passed a shadow of a person,” he said. “It was standing in front of the neighbor’s house and as I sensed it, it was the most awful feeling. It was an unholy terror.”

Mikk stared in horror at the entity that simply stood at the neighbor’s house, seeming not to notice Mikk at all. However, Mikk got close enough to feel it.

“I past by its field, I think, and it was horrible,” Mikk said. “It wasn't evil; it was just inhuman, incompatible with the human mind.”

Mikk, an atheist, isn’t sure why he did this, but he recited the Lord’s Prayer and made the sign of the cross. Then he was back in his room.

“I heard a loud bang, like a car had hit our house or a piano had been dropped into our living room,” he said. “I was awake in a split second and stared into darkness listening. No one in the house had heard it. The sound came from my head.”

The event had ended, but Mikk wanted to know what he had seen.

“I asked a woman I know about it,” he said. “Her grandmother was a healer or seer in the older community here in Estonia. She said, ‘oh yeah, my grandmother told me about those things, they're called the maras.’”

A mara, the woman said, is a negative energy a person who hates or envies someone sends to that person either intentionally, or subconsciously. The mara then slowly drains the person’s happiness because the one who conjured it wants the target to be miserable.

“When I asked how to get rid of the thing she said it doesn't matter if you are religious, just say the Lord's Prayer,” Mikk said. “You have to mean it when you say it.”

That’s the key – conviction. When confronted by a dark spiritual being, she said you have to banish it with authority.

“When the shadow attacks or is menacing you are likely to be afraid and you can't get that much conviction or will power behind what you say so the Lord's Prayer is a healthy alternative,” Mikk said. “It almost doesn't have religious connotations in that context.”

Mikk only recited the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer, but it seemed to work for him.

“I don't know the rest from heart but I’m planning to print it out and hang it next to my bed,” he said. “Also making the sign of the cross was that way. It was some sort of survivalist reflex. It felt like the right thing to do.”

Although this experience hasn’t changed Mikk’s spiritual beliefs, he thinks negative entities exist.

“To be honest, I’ve done lots of mushrooms and met with various entities there and I never made up my mind if they were hallucinations or something that the drug enables you to interact with,” he said. “If you are afraid, ignorant, negative, etc., the entities can get to you like rats can get into a shabby household and nest there. The evil ones are so bad they don't resemble humanity in any form except shape. They invoke such primal terror you can only scream like a caveman would.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Ghosts, flies and scratches

2011-06-24T16:20:00.000-05:00

The smell roused five-year-old Caitlen Crotts’ mother from sleep. It was the smell of death.

Caitlen’s family had just moved to the house in Galax, Va., a house once occupied by cousins who dabbled in the occult. The Crotts immediately found their cousins had left something behind.

“On that first night, I was asleep on the pull-out couch,” Caitlen said. “My sister, having just been born, was in the bedroom with my mom and dad.”

It was then the stench wrenched her mother awake.

“She smelled something awful,” Caitlen said. “Awful and strong enough to wake her up from a deep sleep, and trust me, my mom sleeps deep. It smelled like decomposing bodies and burning.”

As Caitlen’s mother snapped awake, she moved her eyes toward the open bedroom doorway and saw a man.

“A tall man was standing there,” Caitlen said. “She woke up my father and he jumped from the bed and chased after the black shadow man.”

Caitlen’s father chased the tall, dark man into the kitchen. The intruder ran toward the back door.

“The black shadow man disappeared through the back door,” Caitlen said.

Her father threw open the door and ran outside, but the shadow man was gone.

The Crotts family soon discovered there were more spirits in the house than the shadow.

“A few months later, I remember getting up in the middle of the night and going into the kitchen,” Caitlen said. “I don’t remember why I went in or what woke me, but there was a man in the kitchen cooking. He looked normal to me and I was not afraid.”

The man asked Caitlen if she would like biscuits.

“I told him no,” she said. “I went back to bed in my baby sister’s room that night.”

That wouldn’t be the last night Caitlen slept in her sister’s room; it happened more frequently after she began to see the blonde man.

“It was summertime and I had just gotten my own bedroom in that house,” she said. “My bed was against the wall and I had a big vanity right on front of the bed at the foot. I remember waking up one morning and, still laying in my bed, looking into the mirror. There was a man there, in a purple turtleneck sweater, with long blonde hair.”

The blonde man didn’t move; he just stared at Caitlen through the mirror, his expression blank.

“I quickly pulled the covers over my head and huddled there. I didn’t scream,” she said. “A short time later, I looked in the mirror and the man was gone.”

He would be back – often, and Caitlen wasn’t the only one to see him.

“He frequently appeared in my mirror when I was in bed,” she said. “Once, my cousin stayed the night. She woke me up crying and said someone had just hit her.”

She claimed the attacker was a blonde woman in a purple shirt.

“I know it was the same man,” Caitlen said. “She thought it was a lady because the man had very long blonde hair, but he is a man. I remember that ghost the most because of how often he was in my mirror in the mornings. Even now, 14 years later, I’m afraid of mirrors.”

There was also something wrong with the bathroom. It attracted flies.

“That bathroom was filled with flies at least once a month,” Caitlen said. “It would randomly just fill with big, black flies. My mom would go in with a vacuum and, frustrated, clean out the flies. She did this so many times.”

No matter how her father tried to plug possible entry points in the bathroom, the flies returned. Caitlen thinks the flies may in some way be connected to an event that happened the next day.

“One night, a night that preceded a fly-filled bathroom morning, I woke up to a pain in my foot,” Caitlen said. “I screamed and called for my mom. When she turned on the lights, we saw that my sheets and blanket were covered in blood and my foot and ankle were netted with long scratches.”

She never stayed in her bedroom again.

“After that, I had to share a room with my sister beside my mom and dad’s room,” she said. “My room stayed vacant for the rest of the time we lived there.”

Caitlen’s family is certain the former tenants attracted the spirits.

“It was a fairly old house and before we lived there, my cousins had lived there,” she said. “They frequently partied and had a somewhat crime-filled lifestyle. My mom lays the blame here for the things that happened there; she says they were into black magic.”

Although Caitlen said her cousins weren’t educated in satanism, they dabbled in it, and used a Ouija board “almost nightly.”

“They decorated the house in skulls and things like that,” she said. “And they listened to music that scared me, even now it gives me a disturbing feeling.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

There's Something in Our House -- Part Two

2011-06-17T07:55:00.002-05:00

Author’s note: This is the second of a two-part story about something wicked that has invaded the Liberty, Mo., home of Kim and Mike Smithmeyer, and their seven-year-old twin boys.

Three years after the Smithmeyers moved into their newly constructed home in Liberty, Mo., strange occurrences slowly appeared in their lives. After four years of unexplained bumps and slamming doors – things started targeting the children.

A child-sized body hit the bed one morning, rousing Kim Smithmeyer from sleep. She expected one of her twin boys, Dan or Randy, trying to sneak into bed with her. She prepared herself, then snapped up to surprise them, but no one was there.

This wasn’t the only childlike event that crept up on Kim. Small voices have called “Mommy” in the night, although when she checked on her children, they were asleep.

Then things began to talk to the twins.

“Randy has mentioned how come sometimes when Dad isn’t home he’ll hear (Dad) say, ‘hey, fellas,’” she said. “Randy has also said ‘I’m really tired of doors shutting and no one comes through them.’”

Kim is sure her experiences in the house haven’t influenced what her children have told her, because they don’t know what has happened to her.

“I have not talked with my kids about any of the stuff I’ve seen. They’re seven,” she said. “He’s hearing doors shutting. They came down one night and said, ‘can we sleep with you? We’re tired of hearing scratching sounds in our room.’”

Although she hasn’t heard the same slamming doors or scratching sounds the children have heard, Kim said the twin’s room feels different than any other room in the house. And they feel it, too.

One day Dan, who’s been diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety disorder and often acts out in anger, misbehaved and Kim sent him to his room.

“If he doesn’t do something right the first time he gets angry with himself,” she said. “I took a glass of water up there and said, ‘what can we do about your anger?’”

That’s when darkness wiped itself across Kim’s life.

“I’m just tired of the voices telling me to do bad things,” Dan said.

Calmly, Kim asked, “What do you mean?”

Dan looked at his hands.

“Well, I don’t want to say because they’re bad words and they might hurt your feelings,” he said.

“You can tell me anything,” Kim told him. “If it’s bad, you don’t need to deal with it anyway.”

Dan looked at his mother.

“The voices tell me to kill you,” he said.

Kim sat looking at her son, trying not to let Dan know how much these words disturbed her.

“They tell you to kill me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Anything else?”

He looked back down.

“To hurt the cats and to do things to my brother,” Dan said.

Kim stood and said she was going to get Daddy. When Mike came to the room, they sat, Dan on Kim’s lap.

“I don’t want to say it,” Dan said abruptly.

“Did someone just say something?” Kim asked.

“Cut the bitch’s head off,” Dan said in a weak voice.

Kim looks back on that moment in horror.

“He said the voices said they killed Jesus,” Kim said. “We don’t watch scary movies. I can’t imagine him saying he wants to kill me.”

They took this normally polite, friendly boy to a psychiatrist the next day. Kim said they’re open to therapy, medication or a paranormal solution – anything to help their son.

Dan spent the next weekend with his grandmother. “He was perfect,” Kim said.

But when Dan came home, bedtime was not so perfect.

“When we brought him home from Mom’s, he was in a great mood, but when we took him to his room his whole demeanor changed,” Kim said. “He just said, ‘can I just sleep with you?’”

“You don’t want to sleep up here?” Kim asked.

“No, I don’t want to sleep up here.”

Kim could see the fear in the boy’s eyes.

“I said, OK.”

As Kim and Mike watched the boys walk down the stairs toward the master bedroom, muffled knocks thudded in the room.

“I heard three knocks from the closet,” Kim said. “I said to my husband, ‘I know you heard that. That was three knocks, Mike. That was from the closet.’”

Mike, who had held the door the entire time, looked at Kim, his face ashen, and shook his head.

“Kim,” he said. “I felt it in the door.”

At this point they decided to do something about whatever lurked in their home.

“I feel like a fool. I talk to the house,” Kim said. “I say, ‘I know something’s here. Please just don’t scare my family leave my children alone.’”

Although Kim and Mike are interested in the paranormal and watch various ghost hunting TV programs, they don’t talk about it with the boys.

“I am intrigued, but I’ve never done Ouija boards or anything,” Kim said. “I just think everything is possible. I think we’re going to keep the boys in our room for a while.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

There's Something in Our House -- Part One

2011-06-11T12:18:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: This is the first of a two-part story about something wicked that inhabits a Liberty, Mo., home.

The 2000s looked promising for Kim and Mike Smithmeyer. Steady jobs at the Ford Motor Company’s Claycomo, Mo., plant, construction of a new house in Liberty, Mo., and the birth of identical twins, Dan and Randy; all by 2003. In 2006 Kim took a buyout from Ford to stay at home with the boys and go back to school.

Then things changed. Something dark came into their lives.

“The first thing was in 2006,” Kim said. “Dan was three. I was just holding him and he was looking at the stairs and said, ‘Mommy, who are the people coming down the stairs?’”

Kim looked, but the stairs were empty.

“Honey, I don’t see them,” she said. “Could you describe them?"

Dan ignored his mother, intently looking at the stairs, moving his head as if he was following something.

“Then he said they were gone,” Kim said.

Although she dismissed this incident as a three-year-old’s imagination, she soon discovered it wasn’t.

“A couple of months later, it was late at night, my family was sleeping and I was going to do laundry,” she said.

She reached toward the laundry room door and the door handle moved.

“I went to grab the laundry room door and the door just literally, like you were opening the door handle, it moved on its own.”

Kim stood before the door, not believing what she’d seen, put the laundry basket on the floor, walked to her bedroom and went to sleep, leaving the dirty laundry until tomorrow.

“I know what I saw and I know I heard it, but I tried to explain it away,” she said. “I just kept trying to dismiss it. I just could not come up with an explanation. I thought I did not see that. I told my husband, and he said, ‘yeah, no.’”

Then things escalated.

“We started hearing the sounds of footsteps above us,” Kim said. “Then it would sound like when our kids would run down the stairs and we’d look, and there would be nothing. The kids would be asleep.”

Kim was asleep one night when something in the house got personal.

“One time I was taking a nap on the couch and I woke up and to what I thought was my husband coming home from work,” she said. “I laid there because I just wanted to sleep. He tucked me in. I felt the tuck in. I (went back to sleep and) woke up 20 minutes later and it was not near the time for him to come home.”

Kim called Mike at work.

“I said, ‘did you come home?’ He said, ‘no.’”

Mike has downplayed the occurrences in the home, Kim said, although they’ve all experienced electrical problems, like a television changing volumes and lights turning on and off.

But his opinion changed with the banging.

“The last four months has been the worst,” Kim said. “Things have kind of changed.”

Kim came home one day in April to find her husband had taken the children to a pizza restaurant.

“I was so excited I was home alone,” she said. “I had taken my clothes off and was going to the bathroom.”

She found she wasn’t alone.

“My bedroom door slammed so hard that I have some knickknacky stuff on top of our armoire and everything shook,” she said. “I thought someone had broken into my house.”

She called Mike to see if he’d come home, but he and the boys were still at the restaurant.

“Someone is in the house and I’m naked,” she told him.

Mike said he would call 911, but Kim had second thoughts.

“I looked out the door and nothing was there, so I locked the door,” she said. She took a rifle out of the closet – a rifle with no ammunition, hoping the cocking noise would scare an intruder.

“I went out and everything was secure. There was nothing in my house – human,” she said. “All my doors were locked, nothing had been disturbed and my cats were sleeping.”

She ran back to the bedroom, locked the door and waited for her husband to come home.

“That’s the first thing that’s been scary to me,” she said.

It wasn’t the last.

Next week: Something talks to the children.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

What was that Thing in the Sky?

2011-06-03T09:27:00.002-05:00

Author’s note: The following story may or may not be of paranormal origin. The story is, however, about something unknown, and that puts it firmly in the realm of “From the Shadows.”

The city glow of Sedalia, Mo., lit the night around the state fairgrounds as a crowd gathered for the coming July 4, 2010, fireworks show.

Paul Michaels stood in that small crowd when, at about 9:20 p.m., before the fireworks show began; something appeared in the evening sky he couldn’t identify.

“There was what looked like a plane about 150 feet off the ground,” he said. “There was a cloudbank right on the edge of the fairground, all along 16th Street. I saw it pop out of the clouds.”

As Michaels watched the craft, he became convinced it wasn’t a normal airplane.

“What I saw running south to north was a plane 150 feet above the tree line. It looked exactly like a plane,” Michaels said, but it didn’t behave like an airplane. “You couldn’t hear it coming. It came right over the top of us. The fireworks hadn’t even started yet.”

Little traffic drove past the area, most people there to watch the fireworks show had arrived, so city din was light.

“(The craft) was just as quiet as a balloon,” Michaels said. “It looked like a military plane.” But, at the same time, it didn’t.

Michaels, who had done electrical work at an Air Force base in Texas and had observed many military aircraft, noticed it didn’t act like any craft he’d seen.

“It didn’t have any blinking lights,” Michaels said. “And the canopy didn’t look like a canopy.”

The craft had an orange-yellow glowing “observation dome” in the front – and it was slow. Too slow.

“If you moved your hand through the air, that’s what you were experiencing,” Michaels said. “This thing was floating.”

Living in Sedalia, Michaels has had many chances to watch military aircraft in flight. Whiteman Air Force Base in nearby Knob Noster is home to the 509th Bomb Wing, the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber and many other aircraft that do training runs across the area.

“Mom lived out in the county on a 40-acre lake and (military aircraft) would shoot out over that lake,” he said. “They were buzzing all the time. They’ll come in at an angle, from southeast, not from south to north like this one. But you hear them coming and going.”

He stood and watched this craft fly slowly out of sight; then another appeared, floated slowly and silently until it was out of sight. No one else seemed to notice.

“Fighter jets will shoot through Mom’s yard at 8:50 at night,” he said. “But (with these craft) you didn’t hear any swoosh or anything. It was doing a steady speed. It was doing faster than traffic, but I’ve seen trucks going down the street faster than they were going.”

The craft had no markings, insignia or writing.

“They just baffled the hell out of me,” Michaels said.

One day Michaels spoke with a man who worked at Whiteman Air Force Base and described the craft to him. The man had an answer.

“A-10s,” Michaels said. “He said they can be quiet.”

So Michaels looked into the A-10 Thunderbolt fighter jet. Even though the craft Michaels saw looked like a military plane, “it didn’t look like an A-10.”

“Talking to people from the airbase, they said the A-10 can do that (fly low and silent), but you can still hear them,” he said. “It still makes noise. These were quiet as a church mouse. I’ve got an old ’63 Dodge that makes more noise than that.”

Michaels asked if what he saw could be an advanced military craft not released to the public. The people from the airbase said yes, but the base didn’t have it.

All Michaels wants to know is what he saw.

“I’ve seen some things I don’t know how to explain,” Michaels said. “I’ve talked to several different people who can’t explain them either. I don’t believe in things until I see them myself.”

And he has.

The question is, what did Michaels see slowly cruising low over the state fairgrounds in Sedalia, Mo., on July 4? A known military craft, an unknown military craft, or something from beyond this world?

“I’d be interested if someone out there has seen something like what I saw,” Michaels said. “I don’t want someone to try and explain it away. I know different.”

If you have an idea what might be flying slowly and silently through our night sky, please comment on this post or contact me by email.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Haunting in the Czech Republic

2011-05-27T15:43:00.002-05:00

Author’s note: The following story is from a man to whom English is a second language. Forgive the grammatical errors in the quotes.

Leo, of the Czech Republic, first saw a shadow person when he was five years old.

“I saw a shadow going around the ledges of a room, around me,” Leo said. “I was at this old house and Nazis used to hide there back in World War II and do who knows what.”

The house, Leo said, was a magnet for paranormal activity.

“Ghosts, shadow people and other stuff was on daily there,” he said. “There was also this huge clanging annoying sound at nights in the cellars.”

His mother’s boyfriend, who didn’t believe in the paranormal, once went to the cellar to investigate. He took a gun.

“He thought those were robbers,” Leo said. “But when he went down there and turned lights on, the sound stopped. As soon as he went up, it started again, and the whole cycle
repeated. Anytime he got too near it stopped.”

Although strange things have followed Leo most of his life, in 2008 the paranormal became terrifying.

“It was very early in the morning,” Leo said. “I woke up, but noticed it’s so early so I was just resting in the bed, but I was not asleep. I was fully awake, with opened eyes and all.”

He heard footsteps in the kitchen.

“I thought it was my mother,” he said. “I was not really worried about that, as it
seemed normal except it was maybe too early for her but I was sure it was her. I did not expect anything else, I really can tell you that.”

Leo looked toward the door, expecting to see his mother walk by, but something else appeared. Something wicked.

“I saw something foggy,” he said. “I thought it is something in my eye, so I closed my
eyes and then reopened them afterwards. But what I saw next was pure terror. I saw a fog-like disjointed shadow figure. It had no stable shape. In fact, it didn’t even resemble a human.”

But the thing had a face.

“I next saw its face in front of my face,” he said. “It paralyzed me and I couldn’t
move even an inch. I could not do anything, not even close my eyes.”

Fear engulfed Leo as the entity took charge of his body.

“The fear was overwhelming, it is not natural fear at all,” he said. “I felt it was induced
by the creature. I have never felt that much of fear at once. It was pure fear, pure fear, not stopping. Nothing compared to this.”

Leo stared through his locked-open eyes as the entity attacked.

“I watched in terror as it struck its para-hand – that’s the only description I can think of – through my chest and it started cracking my ribs,” he said. “I could feel the immense pain and the sound was really loud, too.”

As Leo felt this beast break open his chest, he knew he was going to die.

“It literally kept me in sitting position staring at it – it wanted me to. I had almost no energy left,” he said. “I watched it suck all life from me, but because of the exhaustion I managed to close my eyes.”

Even though Leo could no longer see the entity, the attack continued.

“It wasn’t gone,” he said. “It was still sucking me out and I still felt the pain, but at least I wasn’t visually stuck into it. When I closed my eyes I felt the fear and paralyze going away a bit.”

Leo mustered all his energy that remained and rolled out of bed. When he hit the floor, he opened his eyes and saw the creature still there, in his room.

“I started screaming out loud, running and crawling away across through the
kitchen and hall, up to the room where my mom was sleeping,” he said. “She was
sleeping there entire time, but something woke her up and she heard me screaming and heard strange sounds, too.”

When they inspected his chest, it was fine.

When Leo later moved out of the house the paranormal activity that had plagued him throughout his childhood stopped.

“It was pretty intense and I don’t want something like that happen to me ever again,” he said. “That was when I thought I experienced everything. It is something I cannot forget.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Nine Gates of Hell

2011-05-17T14:14:00.000-05:00

The Nine Gates of Hell wasn’t the real name of the crumbling cemetery in Franklin County, Va. Its true name wasn’t posted, and the teens that visited the old yard in the dark of night didn’t care enough to find out.

TJ, of Ft. Worth, Texas, host of The 13 Skulls paranormal podcast, grew up in Virginia and visited the cemetery twice as a teenager.

“I dared not go back a third time,” he said.

The L-shaped cemetery is on the slope of a hill, surrounded by thick trees. At the lowest point of the cemetery sat the house of the caretaker.

“The old man that owned the property would sit out on his porch at night,” TJ said. “He had a shotgun loaded with rock salt and would shoot anyone he noticed in the cemetery that did not have permission to be there.”

The first time TJ visited – during the afternoon – he brought two friends. As they drove toward the caretaker’s house, fear gripped the boys.

“After quite a while of talking he eventually agreed and we were allowed to walk through the cemetery,” TJ said.

However, it wasn’t the meeting with the caretaker that clawed their nerves – it was the cemetery.

“The cemetery was broken into nine separate sections each separated from the other by small iron gates,” he said. “The ground was eroding and sinking around the caskets which made them stick out of the ground at odd angles. Most of the tombstones were either leaning or fallen over. It was like no other cemetery I have ever seen.”

As the boys wandered the cemetery, surrounded by gnarled and leafless trees, they pushed open gate one.

Gate two.

Gate three.

Then they lost their nerve.

“We only went through the first three gates and nothing happened other than a few feelings of being scared, cold and getting goose bumps,” TJ said.

But goose bumps enough they left. When May rolled around, they returned.

“The second time was around 11 p.m.,” TJ said. “After getting permission to be there we went in.”

The cemetery was different at night.

“We walked through the first two gates taking in the overall creepy nature of it all,” he said. “I started to feel like someone was watching me.”

As the boys walked further into the cemetery, their flashlights the only illumination in the moonless night, they heard footsteps in the trees.

“As we approached the third gate I began to hear noises like something was walking in the woods,” he said. “At first I thought it was just an echo, but it continued until we got to the fourth gate. Once we crossed through the gate the noise stopped.”

Silence dropped like a hammer. Moments later, a voice drifted through the cemetery.

“It sounded like someone talking in unintelligible words,” he said. “We could not tell where it was coming from. It seemed as if it was all around us.”

They started moving again. Fourth gate. Fifth gate. Then something screamed.

“It sounded like the mixture of the scream of a small child and what you would think a banshee would sound like,” TJ said. “It was ear piercing and continued sporadically.”

One of TJ’s friends ran back to the car.

“That left two of us to keep looking around,” he said. “We headed to the sixth gate with the screaming continuing as we walked towards the back of the cemetery.”

A deep growling rose into the night as the boys stepped through the sixth gate. As they went into the grounds beyond the seventh gate, the world went deaf.

“We looked at each other not knowing what was going on,” he said. “We figured that if the sounds stopped then we were safe and could keep going.”

When TJ shown his flashlight ahead of him, he knew they weren’t safe. They weren’t safe at all.

“We saw a black figure standing directly in front of us,” he said. “The figure was the darkest black you could imagine, almost like looking into oblivion.”

The boys couldn’t move.

“This black figure was the darkest, most evil looking thing I have ever seen,” TJ said. “We stood there for what seemed like 10 minutes when the dark figure started to move towards us.”

TJ’s friend grabbed his arm and urgently hissed, “we need to leave.”

The words snapped TJ out of his trance and they turn and ran, occasionally chancing a backwards glance only to see the figure getting closer.

“The screaming started again only this time it was louder and seemed to come from many different places,” TJ said. “My heart was beating 120 miles per hour and I kept looking back at the black figure that was now gaining on us and was about 20 feet or so behind us. It was beginning to feel overwhelming, like I was going to pass out.”

When the boys burst from the first gate running toward their car, the screaming stopped and the black figure disappeared.

The caretaker sat on his porch, waiting for them.

“The old man walked off of his porch and yelled to us that now we know why we were to never come back and that we should tell everyone we know to stay away,” TJ said.

They dove into the car and tore away from the cemetery.

“Our friend told us on his way back to the car the old man met him half way and told him that there is evil in this place and that his friends would be lucky to make it back,” TJ said. “He said he just sat in the car trembling, which we all were.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Lurking Dogman

2011-05-10T12:31:00.002-05:00

Thick trees surrounded the property where seven-year-old S. Costea met the strange dog, a dog with red, glowing eyes – a dog that sometimes walked on two legs.

Costea lived in a Romulus, Mich., farmhouse with his mother, his uncle, and his mother’s boyfriend. They raised chickens and rabbits, with farm cats roaming the crumbling old barn on the small acreage. But it was the woods that separated the house from a nearby major road, woods that kept the house and the family hidden, that marred Costea’s childhood.

Those woods harbored something dark.

“We had this really strange dog creature that would hang around the property,” Costea said. “I say dog creature because this thing was far too big and intelligent to be a stray dog.”

The dog, as big as a Great Dane, seemed to have the upper part of a German Shepard and the lower part a Doberman pinscher. However, its eyes are what haunt Costea.

“It had very pronounced red eyes,” Costea said. “I’m not saying it was a werewolf or a dog-man but it was very werewolf-like.”

Everyone who lived in the house saw the beast.

“The dog would frequently stalk the edge of the woods on our property in the day,” Costea said. “It seemed to have no fear. My uncle would yell at it or throw things towards it to try to scare it off but it would simply rear up on its hind legs like a ram and charge at (him) for a short distance.”

The dog never reached Costea’s uncle, or anyone else who lived in the house. However, it did reach other things on the farm.

“We would frequently find dead chickens or rabbits after thunderstorms,” he said. “We knew it was that dog thing because it would leave huge paw prints in the mud and claw marks on the window ledges.”

The thing eventually turned its attention to the house.

“Sometimes we would find the screens ripped from our screen doors and windows,” Costea said. “It would never outright attack us, but it did seem to enjoy taunting us and harassing us.”

The taunting quickly became dangerous when the “dog” spoke.

“One summer night my mom had left the window open in my bedroom to cool the room off so I could sleep,” Costea said. “She was on her way to the bathroom and went by my room and heard me talking to someone.”

Stopping by her son’s door, well after his bedtime, she thought he was playing. She opened the bedroom door, turned on the lights, and saw the dog.

“When she opened the door she saw me standing in my bed and I had apparently wet my pajamas,” he said. “I was talking towards the window. I wasn’t screaming or freaking out but seemed to be transfixed and talking in a low voice towards the window.”

Costea didn’t notice his mother, nor did he notice the tungsten light that suddenly poured a yellow glow through the bedroom. His focus was on what was at the window.

“When she looked towards the window the dog had its two front paws pushed through the screen and was looking through the window at us and making a low growl,” Costea said. “Its eyes glared red.”

Costea’s mother threw the beer bottle she carried into the beast’s face. Startled, it backed out of the window. She slammed the window shut and closed the blinds.

The dog-thing’s presence, however, was not gone.

“My mom told me that for about a week or so after that I acted very strange,” he said. “Like the way the kid acted in the movie, ‘The Shining’. I would say things like, ‘we don’t want you here,’ ‘our ghosts are food,’ or ‘God thinks you’re bad.’”

The housecats would run, terrified, when Costea entered the room for that time of madness. That wasn’t the only thing wrong.

“For some reason I would take sewing needles or anything sharp I could find and prick my fingers till they would bleed then finger paint all over the walls with the blood,” he said. “The house also had a very strong septic tank smell to it for a few days. Lights would burn out and pop and weird things would just happen.”

Two weeks after the dog tried to coax Costea out of his room it all stopped.

“My uncle was out back working on his truck when he saw the dog at the edge of the woods making its way in towards the rabbit pen,” Costea said. “At this point he was tired of dealing with it and went into the house to get his .22. Apparently he fired at it and hit it in the rear. The dog turned and ran into the woods. We didn’t see it anymore after that and everything cleared up.”

But the dog-thing will be with him forever.

“I always recall its eyes,” Costea, now 40, said. “You could see its eyes out in the woods sometimes at night. I have bad dreams about it from time to time.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Demon With a Boy's Face

2011-05-02T09:33:00.000-05:00

The preschool boy was menacing.

Terri Clevenger worked at the southern Missouri Christian Learning Center in 2003, and a four-year-old boy named James terrified her.

“He was just different,” she said. “He had dark brown eyes and always had a mischievous grin on his face. He had a temper, too. I always was on him for his behavior.”

James knocked over his food at lunch, hit and bit other children, and did things that, on the surface, appeared to be tools to grab attention. They weren’t; something was odd about the boy.

“He was always different. He would play different,” Clevenger said. “He usually played by himself because he was mean and the other children didn't want to play with him. He usually wanted to play crazy things; violent things that really didn't interest most of the others.”

James didn’t want to participate in the learning activities. He just wanted to play violent games.

“As far as skills go, he was behind the other kids. He scribbled and didn't even try to do the simple worksheets I had for them to do,” Clevenger said. “He was the youngest of three, so I think he was exposed to other things at home. (When he played violently) he knew what to say and what to do, if that makes sense. His eyes always had the glimmer of mischief.”

James’s mother, who worked at a local hospital, dropped the boy at the Baptist Learning Center earlier than anyone, and always picked him up after every other child had gone home.

“His mom worked at the hospital and always seem frazzled,” Clevenger said. “It was common for her to get a bad report about her son, but I really tried to find something positive he had done during the day.”

During those pickups, James’s mom would sprinkle in details about the boy’s home life.

“She would say things about how they couldn't control him,” Clevenger said. “That when he got home he'd strip down to his underpants and run around like a crazy person. He'd never go to bed; stay up until 11p.m. or later. She'd even asked if I could keep him up at naptime, which we couldn't do, because bedtime was hell at her house.”

Every time James’s mother picked him up, he ran to embrace her, but there was something more.

“He always would hug her, but he would sass her, too,” Clevenger said. “It was pretty clear that he ran the show.”

The reason became apparent every time James got into trouble; there was something dark about the boy.

“It was always a struggle and I usually had to physically hold him back because he'd hit and scratch me,” Clevenger said. “I was pregnant at the time, so I had to be careful around him. I didn't want him to kick or punch the baby.”

Then one day, Clevenger heard the Voice.

“One time, he was horrible,” she said. “He was in our time-out square and he was just hateful. Since it was a Christian preschool, I made a comment about how Jesus likes us to make good choices and he about flipped.”

James screamed in a different voice, “Don't say that name to me.”

“I swear, it was a hiss,” Clevenger said. “He then began to spit at me. I was just shocked.”

The Voice was much more than a hiss. Something about James had changed.

“He seemed older,” Clevenger said. “When he was mad and used his evil voice at me, that was an older, more mature, tone. That's one of the reasons it creeped me out so much. I spoke with my pastor about this odd behavior and Pastor Dave took it very seriously.”

The preacher told Clevenger to be careful around James.

“In the next few weeks, whenever James would get in trouble, I'd be sure to let him know that Jesus loved him, which almost always got a negative reaction,” she said. “He would yell, spit, and even cry every time I'd mention Jesus' name to him.”

One day James was in the time-out square when Clevenger couldn’t stand the threatening feeling anymore.

“I remember looking him square in the eyes and telling him that I wasn't afraid of him,” Clevenger said. “It was strange because James only had this horrible reaction to the name of Jesus when he was mad or in trouble. In normal conversation or play, if I told him Jesus loved him, I got a smile. It was when he wasn't getting his way that he turned into Damien.”

Was James just an undisciplined child, or did something dark have an unholy influence on this little boy?
- - -
LOOKING FOR STORIES

Have you met someone like James?

I’m looking for stories like this for my next book "Dangerous Entities." Have you encountered a being that appears human, but something about it cannot be “human.” Did this being seem out of place? Did it terrify you for no obvious reason? Was it a human possessed by evil? Was it extraterrestrial? Was it Fae? Was it your imagination? Or something else?

My chapters include encounters with:

• Strange men: such as Men in Black and other out-of-place people.
• Dangerous men: people who evoke a feeling of terror from you.
• Evil children: children who seem to be anything but children.
• Little people: menehune, gnomes, etc.
• The Fae.
• Extraterrestrials.
• Time Travelers.
• Shape shifters.

If you’ve had an encounter with an entity like this, I’d like the opportunity to share your story in “Dangerous Entities.” Contact me at: jasonoffutt@hotmail.com.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Fae Girl

2011-04-25T12:59:00.002-05:00

Gary Donaldson couldn’t find his glasses. He woke and reached to his bedside table as he did every morning and put his hand on nothing but the table’s surface.

This wasn’t the first time he’d lost his glasses.

“I later found them in the kitchen, upstairs bathroom, or in the middle of the living room floor,” Donaldson said. ”My glasses? I can’t do that. I am blind without them. I wear them 100 percent of the time and simply cannot leave them someplace accidentally, much less on the floor.”

Strange things like this began to happen once he met a Fae girl.

“We met online at a social networking site,” he said. “During this three-week period while we were getting to know each other online it felt like my house had been invaded.”

The television remote control would disappear, only to be found in the garage, laundry room, or in the kitchen freezer. Pencils would vanish from the house, and his dogs started barking at an “intruder” neither Donaldson nor his nine-year-old daughter could see.

“We had the general sense of being watched at all times,” Donaldson said. “My daughter woke up with nightmares. Keep in mind none of this was terrifying or oppressive. Nothing like the Poltergeist movies or anything. More like wacky or mischievous.”

As the “invasion” continued, so did the online relationship between Donaldson and the girl claiming to be Fae.

“By Fae folk I mean human/fairy hybrids whose grandparents had sex with spiritual beings, nominally fairies but possibly other little people,” Donaldson said. “This woman claimed to be one-quarter Fae, which I discounted as delusional. Fairies are those little Disney Tinkerbelle flying people, right? But she was adamant and I so smitten that I shrugged and went with the flow, and eventually came to recognize and fear what she was capable of.”

These Fae, Donaldson said, live and work among us, operating in the wee hours at jobs like janitors, waitresses, and motel clerks – jobs that don’t draw much attention.

Once Donaldson drove the 900 miles to meet this “Fae,” he knew she told the truth. She was “beautiful, mesmerizing, strange, terrifying.”

“This is important because of my mental state when I met my Fae,” he said. “They are fascinated with emotions, especially strong ones. This is because pure Fae have no emotions and are jealous of ours. There was an aspect of her that was cold and inhuman and when it peered out at me it was soul chilling, and it gave her pleasure to see me flustered when it happened.”

Once he met her in a south Missouri motel, they spent the weekend in bed.

“We literally spent 10 to 12 hours a day having sex, going out only for meals,” he said. “I slept maybe four hours that weekend and felt like a train had run me over by the end. She, on the other hand, seemed energized when we parted ways.”

That weekend was also the time she talked about her origins.

“It began my education in how to conduct myself around her kind,” he said. “It was all laid out as a matter of fact, no winking or giggling. This was serious business and if I wanted to see her again I needed to know the rules. I dutifully filed it away, but the whole weekend was like a dream. I did not reflect too heavily on it until my return home and a good bout of introspection.”

When he returned home, the mischievous activities had stopped, but he couldn’t stay away from her long. He drove the 1,800 miles round trip to see her four times in four months.

“The intensity never let up once,” he said. “Every time we met, usually the same motel, it would be damned near continuous sex, broken up by meals and her work. It was nothing like a date. I have never had a relationship like this before or since. The whole thing seemed impossible.”

Strange things – lucky things – happened while Donaldson had this relationship with the Fae. He’d hit all green lights and always find a parking space, but it was the medical recovery of a close friend with a terminal disease that made him realize his new girlfriend might be telling the truth. Donaldson told her about his friend’s medical condition and shortly received word his friend was cured.

“I call my Fae to tell her the good news and she is so smug it’s unbearable,” Donaldson said. “‘I know,’ she says, ‘isn’t it wonderful?’”

Their relationship ended abruptly.

“I made my final trip there, without a clue anything would be different,” he said. “Instead, the girl I met seemed cold, distant, distracted. We fell into each others arms as before, but she said she had to be someplace and hurriedly left. Things felt horribly awry.”

They met the next day and Donaldson knew the relationship was over.

“I begged her to talk to me, but she simply said ‘goodbye,’ hugged me for an extended period of time, then left,” he said. “That ‘goodbye’ was final. I never saw her again.”

Donaldson suspects her “Fae” side took over.

“The Fae component within had grown bored of me and yanked her chain,” he said. “A part of her was upset, perhaps, but the creature inside maintained control with a steel fist. It had gotten enough sex-energy or whatever it wanted from me and was done. Experiment concluded; send the human home.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Shadow Army in the Czech Republic

2011-04-16T10:24:00.000-05:00

Something dark visited the village Bystrá nad Jizerou in the Semily District in the north Czech Republic in 2007 – something that still terrifies Lucie Gore.

“My parents, my son and me were spending some time at our weekend house,” she said. “The house is about 150 years old. It used to be a pub.”

As Gore’s son slept in an upstairs bedroom, Gore and her parents sat relaxing in the downstairs living room when she saw something that couldn’t be – there were people in the room; people her parents couldn’t see. Gore thought them an army.

“In the evening, about 9 p.m., I had a vision,” she said. “I saw one or two leaders, normal height of a man, not too tall, about five to six feet tall. I understood they were the leaders of this army of small little figures.”

These two beings, both hooded, stood in front of Gore, ignoring her and motioning orders to the entities behind them – tiny entities.

“This army was standing, lined up and waiting for a command from the leaders,” she said. “There were 10s and 10s of them. They were somewhere between one to two feet tall. The army was small, like midgets.”

Gore could do nothing but sit in the living room, staring gap-jawed at these diminutive, hooded beings forming ranks before her. But the encounter quickly turned wicked.

“They didn't do anything,” she said. “They just stood there and with that vision I had a sharp feeling inside of my body that someone was killing me. I really thought that I was dying suddenly right there, surrounded by my family.”

Pain shot through Gore’s chest, but she was powerless to move, powerless to speak.

“I felt the worst fear and badness,” she said. “I had a real evil feeling from them.”

She sat, staring at the army of small entities and their commanders, until something snapped within her and the beings were gone. Her first thought was of her child.

“When I ‘got back’ and was able to walk, I went upstairs to check on my son,” she said. “I was worried about him. I was thinking that there might be something wrong with him.”

The boy lay in bed sleeping peacefully. Gore was relieved, but hesitant.

“I didn't get close to him, because I didn't want to put this evil feeling around him,” she said. “I didn't know what to think at all.”

But she did know one thing – she wasn’t going to talk about this incident.

“The experience was very frightening and I never wanted to talk about this with anyone else,” she said. “I feel that they wouldn't understand anyway and I would look like a total freak. Also, I don't want to think about this because it’s too scary.”

Gore wouldn’t tell her parents, even though this event occurred in their house.

“They are atheists and they would say that I am going crazy and would make me go see a doctor,” she said. “I believe in God, respect nature and I am interested in new age science. I’ve never experienced anything similar to that before or after.”

She eventually told her husband from Louisiana, and a Catholic friend.

“This Catholic friend is very religious,” she said. “My Catholic friend told me to pray and she thought I was haunted. My husband supported me and believed me.”

Gore knows of a similar incident to hers, but she doesn’t want to know more about it.

“I have heard about one more lady here in the Czech Republic that saw them too, but I never investigated it,” she said. “I didn’t want to. I think it definitely changed my life and the way I think.”

Gore has only experienced something paranormal one other time – in Greece.

“I also had a strange experience with my husband 15 years ago while we were on vacation,” she said. “While in our rental apartment, I was in the shower and he was in bed reading a book.”

When Gore stepped out of the shower and walked into the bedroom, she saw chocolate milk on the floor, but it was not pooled as spilled liquid usually is.

“I saw a line of chocolate milk on the wall,” she said. “That line was around our bed on two walls around the bed. The line was made with chocolate milk from a glass we had on the night table by the bed. The line was perfectly straight.”

The milk went two ways around the bed, something Gore can’t explain.

“We never figured that out,” she said, but thinks maybe a ghost was in the room. “It’s interesting to note that (Gore’s father-in-law) had a heart attack in the USA during the exact time that this happened.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Ominous Man

2011-04-07T22:46:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: In the March 2 “From the Shadows,” I wrote about a 2006 encounter between Kalie Ulriksen of Saskatchewan, Canada, and a man she wasn’t sure was human. The individual radiated evil and danger. After reading Ulriksen’s story, a Southern California man recalled his similar dangerous encounter.

The woman was intriguing. As Tim Davis sat the bar of the Miwuk Indian’s Black Oak Casino in Tuolomne, Calif., in 2009, he turned toward the pretty lady who sat next to him, smiled and flirted.

“I had been having a few drinks and hitting on a woman sitting next to me for about an hour,” he said. “We were hitting it off wonderfully.”

Then the air around them changed; it grew heavy, ominous.

“I felt something coming. That’s the best I can describe it,” Davis said. “The sort of uneasy feeling I always have when there is something about to happen that can possibly
injure me, kill me, or ruin my life in some manner.”

Davis stopped and looked around him. Older people smoked cigarettes and cranked slot machine arms behind him. A live band played from a stage on the other side of the bar. Life in the casino seemed as normal as casino life can be.

“Nothing struck me as odd,” he said. “I turn back to my bantering partner and continue the conversation.”

The person on the other side of Davis paid for his drinks and left. The seat didn’t stay empty long.

“Suddenly, a man sits down next to me,” Davis said. His uneasy feeling grew unnerving. “I glance over and have an overwhelming feeling of danger and evil coming off this man.”

The man was a giant.

“He was wearing flannel, appeared to have just come out of the woods,” Davis said. “He stood easily 6’8” and was built like a linebacker. Easily one of the most dangerous men I have ever encountered.”

It wasn’t the man’s size Davis felt as dangerous. It was something else.

“I’m certainly not small and have nephews and brother-in-laws 6’5” to 6’7”,” Davis said. “But they do not exude this sort of danger vibe.”

Davis turned back toward the woman he had been hitting it off with. She was getting up to leave.

“The woman I have been chatting with takes one look at the man gets up and walks away,” he said. But not Davis. “Being slightly buzzed I stay there to finish up my drink.”

He wished he hadn’t.

“With no prompting the man turns and looks at me and says the name of the town I am from,” Davis said. “The town has about 20,000 people and is a bedroom community about 400 miles away from my current location.”

This statement took Davis aback; he had never met this man. Then things became stranger.

“We chat for a couple minutes and he then says, ‘you are all right Tim,’ using my name which I had not given him,” Davis said. “The comment had the feeling of a decision on his part. Like he had decided not to kill me.”

A few minutes later, Davis stands up, excuses himself, and leaves the bar.

“I go see if I can find the woman I had been chatting with,” he said. “I find her across the casino at a slot machine and ask her why she just got up and left.”

The woman looks Davis full in the eyes and says, “Didn’t you get the, ‘I will kill you and stuff you in a van’ vibe from that guy?”

Yes, he had.

Who are these people? The ones who wander amongst us, radiating terror through no means other than their mere presence? Are they human, or something else?

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Case of Time Traveling Tourists – Part Two

2011-04-01T19:01:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is an update from the March 9 “From the Shadows” column* on a man’s encounter with people he’s sure were from the future.

It’s been five years since Ken Helbling, 40, went to Barnes and Noble and walked into the future.

As Helbling stood in line for coffee, he noticed two out-of-place girls and their out-of-place “guide” observing him suspiciously.

“The (girls) were wearing designer jeans and hairdos that were 25 years out of date,” he said. “They looked about 17, but seemed older.”

The girls also looked similar to girls he knew in high school. Maybe their daughters – or maybe their granddaughters.

When he saw the same trio at the same time in the same place wearing the same clothes the next Sunday, he knew something was wrong.

“When I walked past them they gave me a weird look,” he said. “I’m thinking this is really strange.”

Helbling bought the book he’d gone to the store to buy the week before and thinks it may have something to do with his encounter. The book was “The Keepers” by Jim Sparks.

“It may well be the first book in modern history that mentioned time travelers taking tours as a fact,” Helbling said. He’s sure that’s what he encountered in the bookstore – time traveling tourists.

But since the publication of Helbling’s original story in “From the Shadows,” the future hasn’t left him alone.

When a link to Helbling’s story appeared on the popular late-night paranormal talk show Coast to Coast AM’s website, Helbling called his older brother in Connecticut to tell him – only to discover he already had.

“I called as I had a true story I’d never told (my brother) about written up online,” Helbling said. “And he said, ‘yeah, you emailed me and sent me a link to ‘From the Shadows.’ I read it on Friday.”

Helbling did no such thing.

“I said that’s not possible because I didn’t email or call you,” Helbling said. “And you’re the first person I mentioned this to.”

Helbling’s brother recited the text of the email and the address it came from. The email was from Helbling; but it wasn’t.

“There has been no correspondence by phone since March 1,” Helbling said. “And I have not emailed or had an email from my brother since June 22, 2010. He swears he got an email from me on March 11, 2011. It wasn’t me, and I can prove it.”

Helbling’s brother, who has worked in the computer industry since 1979, confirmed his brother’s suspicions.

“My older brother sent me this email,” Helbling said. “And I quote; ‘OK, I’ve gone back into the server logs. There is no record of an email to me from you or anyone that would have linked me to ‘From the Shadows,’ or anywhere else for that matter. Still, I wouldn’t have known where to look, and all I did was click a link and get there. The link is in my browser history. I recall sitting on the couch reading it – three days before you called me. Curious and more curious.’”

Helbling’s story appeared on the blog “From the Shadows” at 6:58 p.m. March 8. Coast to Coast AM posted the link March 14. Helbling’s brother read the post March 11.

Who sent the email? A future Helbling?

“Things are getting very curious,” Helbling said. “I feel that I need to back off and get a better perspective on what’s going on.”

*Find the original story at http://from-the-shadows.blogspot.com/2011/03/case-of-time-traveling-tourists.html.

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Ghost in the Shower

2011-03-25T16:26:00.002-05:00

The shower felt wrong.

Derika Lawrence and Jaclyn Kunkel, both 22, moved into the ground floor of a two-story house converted into apartments, and realized quickly something shared their Maryville, Mo., apartment with them.

“I’ve been here at least two years, maybe two and a half, three,” Lawrence said. “Time goes by so fast.”

On the first days of the move in, Lawrence being the first to arrive noticed something odd whenever she’d take a shower. The water would get cold.

“I understand the water randomly gets cold and I disregarded it the first two times it happened,” she said, but the third time, she looked at the faucet knob. “The handle had moved to someplace I didn’t put it.”

Kunkel soon moved in and noticed odd things in the apartment as well.

“She experiences stuff when I’m gone,” Lawrence said. “She’s called me when I’ve been gone and said, ‘stay on the phone while I check out the house.’ My roommate and I like to joke about it. We named the ghost Loraine.”

When the women are alone in the house, they hear loud banging on the second floor, although their upstairs neighbors are gone. Then there are the doors.

“It just happens randomly every so often,” Lawrence said. “We have a room that’s on the side of the house. Nobody lives in there.”

The roommates avoid the room because the door won’t stay shut.

“We have to tie the door shut because it randomly comes open,” Lawrence said; although the door drags on the thick carpet and it’s tough for the women to pull it open. “We just store the Christmas tree and stuff in there. We tied it shut because it creeped us out.”

Moving doors aren’t limited to the storage room.

“I’ve been laying here in bed before and I’ll hear the door to my bedroom being pushed open,” Lawrence said. “I’d think it was (Kunkel’s) cat, but her cat’s laying in the living room when I go and look. I also feel like there’s somebody in the bathroom trying to get my door open, but I haven’t seen any (ghost).”

Although Kunkel hasn’t seen Loraine either, she’s experienced things moving on their own.

“I was sitting in the living room and I heard a noise like it sounded like someone threw something,” she said. “I go in the kitchen and check it out.”

She knew the only unwashed dishes in the sink were a pan with a wooden spoon resting inside; she’d put them there.

“When I got up to look the spoon wasn’t in the pan anymore. It was a lot of noise like someone had thrown it into the sink,” she said. “I stood there and tied to figure out how it happened. I picked up the spoon and threw it back in the sink and that’s what it sounded like.”

Another noise that frightened Kunkel was the sound of a door opening, however no doors in their apartment sound like that.

“I was again sitting in the living room,” she said. “I had my laptop on my lap. I heard a noise from the kitchen again. It sounded like an old creaky door opening and closing really fast. None of our doors creak at all.”

The noise came from the adjacent kitchen.

“I jumped up and I went into the kitchen but nothing was different at all,” Kunkel said.

She’s heard a disembodied sneeze in the same room; something she attributed to her cat until she saw it was not in the room.

Lawrence and Kunkel aren’t the only two residents of their apartment who know they have an unseen, unwelcome visitor – the cat reacts to it.

“Sometimes it’s like she’s playing with someone; chasing something,” Kunkel said. “She’s kind of old and pretty fat and lazy. She’s not that playful kitten, but sometimes it’s like she’s playing with something.”

The cat will stare at a spot in the room for “a long time,” Kunkel said. “She seems to go a little crazy about midnight and one. She’ll have a spaz attack and run through the house.”

Can the cat see Loraine?

Lawrence and Kunkel hope the cat stays the only one. Especially Lawrence – she’s seen a ghost before, in the home where she grew up.

“I was five years old. I would see this old guy. I could describe him to a tee,” she said. “My dad asked the neighbor and he said it was the man who died there.”

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Field Trip to the Villisca Ax Murder House

2011-03-18T17:54:00.002-05:00

The town of Villisca, Iowa, rests just off U.S. 71, a sleepy, friendly town of 1,344 that in 1912 was the site of seven brutal murders.

The Moore family and two of their children’s friends staying the night were killed by someone swinging an ax. Someone who’d paced the attic smoking cigarettes, waiting for the family to come home from a June church picnic and go to sleep.

The murders have never been solved.

Darwin and Martha Linn bought the murder house years ago, worried a piece of local history may be torn down. They’ve since found they bought something with the house – ghosts.

“I haven’t been pushed or my hair hasn’t been pulled,” Darwin said, but he knows spirits are in the house. Too many visitors have told him so.

In the 2009 fall semester at Northwest Missouri State University, I taught the one-time offering “Paranormal Journalism” and took 22 students on a field trip to the ax murder house. It was only a 50-minute drive. I would have felt guilty if we hadn’t gone.

A little about the class; the mainstream media has frustrated me for years with the terms “little green men” in stories of UFO sightings, “who you gonna call?” in reports of ghost sightings, and references to “Harry and the Hendersons” with Bigfoot stories. Each reference turns the story into parody. I proposed this class to my university as an effort to teach young journalists to report on the paranormal as seriously as they would a city council meeting or a car wreck. The university said OK. The field trip was just a bonus.

In 1912, the two-story ax murder house sat on the outskirts of town. It’s now just a few blocks away from downtown. We pulled up to the house at dusk in two university vans, a light mist promising for a chilly night.

The house spread in front of us, seeming larger than it was. Maybe the oval sign that spelled “Ax Murder House” in bloody letters had something to do with that.

Pie-shaped windows from the attic of this white building – the same room where the murderer waited with an ax (the Moore family’s own ax) – stared into the coming dusk like angry eyes. A few students were a little tentative. Cool.

One student, Karra, was a little more than tentative. She seemed unnerved.

Weeks before the trip, Karra related a dream about the ax murder house. In the dream she was in the second-floor children’s bedroom and a doll – a Raggedy Ann-type doll – lay on the bed. As she approached the bed, the doll turned its head and smiled. She awoke screaming.

Before we arrived at the house, I assured her everything would be fine.

I was wrong.

As tour guide Johnny Houser led us into the structure horror swept through 97 years before, we broke into groups, one going upstairs, the other exploring downstairs. Moments later, terror-filled screams rang throughout the house from the second floor. I rushed to the stairway and met Karra pounding down the steps screaming.

“The doll,” she screamed.

Although nothing unexpectedly moved or smiled when she’d walked into the children’s upstairs room, the wallpaper, the bed, the comforter, and the Raggedy Anne-type doll sitting on the bed were the same as in her dream.

That wasn’t the only thing strange on that field trip.

A student, Logan, carried a Franks Box, asking the device random questions as a group followed him into an unnaturally cold cupboard.

A Franks Box is a radio receiver that randomly tunes to spots on a radio dial with the thought that spirits may be able to communicate through this white noise, much like they do with EVPs, but in real time.

I have my doubts about any electronic device that’s “supposed” to detect ghosts, but something happened with the Franks Box.

In the van, before we pulled up to the Ax Murder House, I instructed my students to be respectful and to not – under any circumstance – be a jerk. Even to something they couldn’t see.

One student, Stratton, didn’t follow my advice. He walked throughout the house shouting things like, “Coward. Come face me. If there’s a ghost here, show me.”

Crowded in the cupboard with six people, Logan began asking questions.

“Is there someone here with us?”

Static, followed by a distinctive male voice, “yes.”

This device was scanning radio frequencies. I discounted that “yes” as naturally random.

“Do you want us to leave?”

Static again, followed by the same voice, “yes.”

Odd, but still accounted for.

“Is someone making you angry?”

Static, “yes.”

Still within the realm of normalcy. Although repeated three times, this was just one word. I wasn’t reading anything into the Franks Box.

“Are they here in this room?”

Static, “no.”

Hmm. A different word.

“Who’s making you angry?”

Static, “Stratton.”

Stratton? A device randomly scanning radio signals came up with the name of the only person on the field trip who was trying to make something angry. Bill, John, Aaron, or Dave, I could have brushed off easily. But Stratton? The box answered the question, and the answer was correct.

I’ll never be convinced something like a Franks Box is legitimate, but I can’t say it’s not.

Students also reported a planchet moving on a Ouija board and a ghostly finger tapping a girls’ shoulder.

You can see some of these accounts, and more stories of the paranormal, at paranormaljournalism.blogspot.com.

For more information on the Villisca Ax Murder House, or to schedule a visit, go to http://www.villiscaiowa.com.

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Case of Time Traveling Tourists?

2011-03-08T18:58:00.002-06:00

Wind-driven rain pounded the pavement on a mid-October Sunday in 2006 when Ken Helbling, 40, walked into Barnes and Noble.

“It was a miserable morning, so I thought I would go have a coffee and look at the books,” he said.

As Helbling stood in line for coffee, he was amused by the conversation with the barista and the man in front of him.

“I was standing behind a tall, rather large man who looked about 65,” Helbling said. The man wore a red-checkered flannel shirt and blue jeans. “When his turn came he said he didn’t have his discount card but could he use his sister’s number. He then rattled off about a 17-digit number off the top of his head. I was impressed.”

Then Helbling noticed two girls, one blonde, one brunette.

“Two girls were waiting for their drinks and looked strangely out of place,” he said. “I looked closely because they were wearing designer jeans and hairdo’s that were 25 years out of date. They looked about 17, but seemed older.”

They also seemed familiar. The girls looked like friends Amy and Alicia he knew from high school. He initially thought they may be his friends’ daughters, but quickly dismissed it.

“While they looked young and attractive, their faces seemed more defined and mature. More like 35 years old,” he said. “In the blonde girl’s case, she looked strikingly like Amy. In the brunette’s case she looked like Alicia but six inches taller.”

Helbling wanted to ask the girls where they got their seemingly brand-new retro clothes, but didn’t.

“I didn’t want to seem like a creep,” he said.

Helbling paid for his coffee and browsed books, picking up one that interested him. “I didn’t buy it, though. I just went home.”

He didn’t think any more of the man in line who’d memorized the long account number, nor the out-of-place girls – until he saw them again.

“Next Sunday, the exact same kind of day, the exact same time, I decided to go back and buy that book,” he said.

Helbling stood in line for coffee behind the same 65-year-old man in the same red flannel shirt and blue jeans who spouted the same long account number.

“Both times he did it he had to do it like three times because it was so fast the (barista) couldn’t keep up,” he said.

The man in the flannel shirt wasn’t the only element in play from the previous Sunday.

“I look over and the same two girls in the exact same clothes are standing in the same spot, but this time they had their drinks,” he said. “When I walked past them they gave me a weird look. I’m thinking this is really strange.”

Helbling bought a coffee and walked to the far corner of the two-level store to find the book he’d browsed the Sunday before. The girls followed him.

“This store is their flagship, two floors and enormous,” he said. “The book was as far away from the coffee shop as you could get. When I got the book and turned around the two girls were sitting on the floor right behind me, staring at me.”

When Helbling noticed the girls, they quickly moved books in front of their faces like they’d been caught spying on him, he said.

“I was so startled I couldn’t say a word,” Helbling said. “I just went down the escalator and went home.”

At home, Helbling began to read the book and found the plot twist revolved around time-traveling tourists.

“I started to wonder if I had experienced something of that nature,” he said. “Were they waiting for me to buy that book? Was the tall man the tour guide? It was something I’ll never forget. I never really thought of time travel ‘til I got to that part of the book then it all clicked.”

Helbling said he thinks the girls he saw at Barnes and Noble on those rainy October Sundays were related to his old friends Amy and Alicia, but were not their daughters – maybe their great-great granddaughters.

“Were the girls were descendents of people I knew, and were they taking a school tour of the past?” he said. “The checkered-shirt guy was possibly the teacher. Or did I slip into an alternative timeline? If you slipped into a different timeline would you ever even know it? And even if you knew it, would it make a difference?”

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Dangerous Man

2011-03-02T11:49:00.002-06:00

The man seemed out of place.

Kalie Ulriksen took the provincial bus from La Ronge, Saskatchewan, to Saskatoon in 2006 when the bus made a scheduled stop in Prince Albert.

“It was the middle of July and hot. I’m talking 30-plus Celsius (near 90 degrees Fahrenheit),” she said. “So I wandered around and went to grab a coffee at a nearby shop.”

As Ulriksen sipped the coffee, she walked back to the depot and found a crowd had gathered in the waiting area of the small bus stop waiting for departure. Then she saw the man.

“I look around the room and there is this guy standing in line waiting to board the bus,” she said. “His clothes just don’t fit. He is in knee-high, jet-black boots, extremely dark glasses, a large cowboy-style hat, gloves, and this takes the cake – a huge trench coat in a tiger skin pattern.”

Sweat rolled off Ulriksen as she stood in line, staring at the man in the tiger-skin trench coat.

“I was melting in a tank top and shorts,” she said. “Strange dressing people, even in the middle of Saskatchewan, doesn’t stand for anything. I know some crazy people. Dressing like it’s Halloween in the middle of summer doesn’t shock me. I know people who go to the bar wrapped in Saran Wrap.”

But there was something about this man beyond his clothing, something strange, something Ulriksen was not alone in noticing.

“It was the attitude of this guy. Like he was a predator,” she said. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘This guy could blow up the entire bus and kill us all and not think twice about it.’”

Ulriksen watched the man as the driver gave the signal for passengers to board the bus.

“I’m staring at this guy. He stands in line to board the bus and everyone gives him a wide berth,” she said. “No one is standing close to this guy.”

At all.

A large group of people crowded in front of him, another group stood as far behind him as they could in this small room. Ulriksen, who returned late for boarding, stood near the back of the line.

“There is something about him; something hair-raising,” she said. “Literally the coolness runs up the nape and I can’t stop staring at him. He was clean-shaven, handsome, but deadly.”

Then the passengers board the bus. When Ulriksen stepped on, she found the man sitting in one of the middle rows. Seats around the man were empty, other passengers staying as far away from him as possible.

“Yes, he is dressed strange but it’s the air around him. I don’t like to label things ‘evil’ lightly. I would imagine I would have the same feeling standing before a wild animal on the hunt,” she said. “The heebie jeebies doesn’t describe the feeling this dude is giving me. It’s suddenly everyone around me is no longer on the top of the food chain. Something is very not right about this guy.”

As Ulriksen stood at the front of the bus, she felt an urge to get close to the man.

“The little voice in my head speaks up, ‘Sit with him why don’t you?’” she said. “It’s the same one that says, ‘have another smoke’ ‘play with that Ouija board.’ The little voice I don’t listen to.”

She walked past the man and sat two rows behind him.

“I keep glancing at the back of his head,” she said. “I think, ‘What’s this guy’s deal?’”

As that thought ran through Ulriksen’s head, the man turned and grinned at her.

“My heart stops,” she said. “Pure fear drops through me; the electric kind. The pulsing, I’m-going-to-die feeling. Pure primal fear. I can’t explain it in words. It was screwed up.”

Ulriksen stared in terror at the strange man’s close-lipped grin, his eyebrows rising above the rim of his sunglasses. She knew she was in danger.

“I swear this guy wasn’t human,” she said.

But nothing happened. The man turned around, the bus eventually stopped at its scheduled destination, passengers got off and went on their way.

However, the terror of that moment has never left her.

Reports of strange, out-of-place “people” are common, littering online message boards far away from the mainstream media. Men in Black, hybrids, Black-Eyed Kids; there are many human-like entities that walk our earth, insert themselves into our sense of reality, and stalk us in broad daylight.

What did Ulriksen encounter? Simply a strange man, or something more sinister?

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Time Slip in Oregon

2011-02-23T17:37:00.001-06:00

Wedding guests at the Troutdale, Ore., resort Edgefield in the summer of 2006 had an urgent request for the catering staff – more wine. Michael Reed worked that wedding and didn’t expect this moment of celebration to burn terror into his memory.

“I had not worked there long, maybe two months,” Reed said. “We were catering a wedding at another building off the main one when a coworker asked that I retrieve more wine from the main building’s basement.”

The main building, a historic three-story brick structure built in 1911 as the county poor farm, is a National Historic Landmark. The structure has been a winery, hotel, restaurant, and for many years abandoned. Reed approached the expansive building that sits on 74 acres on the edge of Portland, and walked into the kitchen.

“The basement had a few entrances but the main one that we used was off the main house kitchen,” he said. “There was a stairwell as well as a small elevator for carting food and beverages.”

The chef scowled at Reed as he went through the kitchen, descended the stairs and began his trip into the unknown.

“I entered the central hall in the basement and began looking for the room where we kept the wine,” Reed said. “It was two rooms down the hall from where I exited the stairwell, so not a long journey in this massive basement.”

Reed counted the rooms and turned into the second room from the stairs only to find it empty.

“I thought, ‘Oh boy, I miscounted the rooms or something,’” Reed said. “So I checked the next one, but not before making a mental note that the room I checked looked quite run down. I just figured that was why it was empty.”

In the next room, water slowly dripped from a stained ceiling and into a dented, rusty bucket on the floor. The rest of the room was bare.

“I thought (dripping water) was strange considering the floor above was immaculate,” he said. “But I didn’t over-think it and proceeded to the next room.”

But Reed knew something was wrong at Edgefield, in this basement. His heart beat heavily in his chest as he stood in the doorway to this damp, deteriorated, abandoned room beneath the busy, modern resort.

“I had always had a very powerful fear of getting lost,” he said. “I was afraid of being erased.”

Panic pulled at Reed as he stepped into the next room, almost a quarter through the basement. It was just as empty, dark, and dank. He had to leave.

“I turned around to go back to the staircase,” he said. “I was terrified to see that the steps leading up to the kitchen were rotted and many of them were broken.”

Those were not the steps that took Reed into this empty, moldy basement.

“I looked around in growing fear, opening rotten doors that should be much newer,” only finding age and disuse, Reed said, “raced toward the darker half of the basement where I knew there were doors to the outside. The whole time afraid that at any moment someone would jump out and grab me.”

Reed’s race through the basement showed no signs of the restored Edgefield – only decay.

“I never saw anything remotely familiar as having any newness to it and to be quite honest, I thought I had fallen back in time to when the hotel sat abandoned,” he said. “I yelled out a couple of times thinking that this couldn’t be and maybe to prove to myself that I still existed.”

No one responded.

Reed ran through the basement toward a set of doors he knew should take him outside to safety.

“I found the door I was looking for and pushed it open,” he said. “I walked into a sunny normal world. People were walking here and there and all was fine. The door closed behind me, but even if it hadn’t, I had no intention of going back in the same way.”

Reed walked back to the wedding reception and told the coworker who sent him on the errand that he couldn’t find the wine.

“She looked at me with this strange expression,” Reed said. “I knew why. It was not hard to find. She asked if I used the kitchen stairs and I told her I had. She explained where it was in the second room on the left and I trotted off again feeling like a fool for returning empty handed and feeling embarrassed because I could not tell her what really happened.”

Reed walked slowly back to the main building, through the kitchen, down the stairs and to the second room. Crates of wine sat waiting for him.

“I grabbed four bottles and ran back up the stairs to the kitchen,” he said. “I was so scared that it might happen again that I nearly dropped the wine on my way up. I ran into one of the kitchen wait staff at the top. She looked at me as if I were an idiot. I smiled dumbly playing the part of (the) dumb new guy.”

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Time Travel Reporting Center

2011-02-16T15:08:00.001-06:00

The light in the sky shown white, far from the greens and reds Jake saw during the great Aurora Borealis of 2004.

Jake, 15, stood outside his parents home in the Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., around 10 p.m. May 28, leaning against a truck and looking into the night. He’d been to the local premiere of the climate change disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” with high school friends and just wanted a glimpse of the northern lights before going to bed.

He didn’t know his life was about to change.

“A bright white glow suddenly filled the northern horizon,” he said. “This looked nothing like the northern lights, nor did it behave like them either.”

The white light moved “almost like a light on a photo scanner.” The single bar of brightness moved from west to east over Jake’s head and disappeared.

“I thought that I should maybe go inside at this time, and found myself unable to move,” he said. “I felt the control of my arms slowly fade out of my body.”

As numbness grew in his arms and legs the world began to grow black and he crashed to the ground. Jake awoke disoriented.

“The next thing I remember I am standing on the front steps of my house, some 500 yards away,” he said. “I felt woozy and almost sedated, and I couldn’t think clearly. Time seemed muddled in my head.”

He walked into the house to find he’d been outside an hour – and he’d been injured.

“While I was unconscious the left side of my face was covered in small, precise cuts; my left ear, it was almost severed,” he said.

But Jake felt something else was wrong, something he couldn’t understand.

“It took most of the night for me to tell my parents what happened, and most of the time I kept telling them that I thought the calendar was wrong, it should at least be after 2008,” he said. “To this day, my mother remembers bits of this, mainly because I looked at her and asked point blank, ‘Is the black man president?’”

What happened to Jake? Seizure? Psychological phenomena? Or did Jake accidentally take a brief, four-year step into 2008?

Time slips, like Jake believes occurred to him, have been recorded numerous times in history. English women vacationing in France in 1901 reported stepping into the French Revolution, and two English couples traveling in Spain in the 1970s claim to have stayed at an oddly archaic hotel that was simply gone on their return journey.

Physicists like Albert Einstein, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking have all said time travel is theoretically possible; our science just can’t achieve it – yet. But what if nature can?

Patricia Griffin Ress, author of the book “Dangerous Information: The Further Time-Travel Experiments/Studies of Steven L. Gibbs,” is sure of it.

Ress met Gibbs in 1989 and when Gibbs turned on his “time machine” – clouds forming on the ceiling and sparks dancing on the chandelier – Ress became a believer.

Although no one time traveled, something life altering happened to Ress that night. She later caught her favorite movie on TV, “Shane.” However, it wasn’t the same movie she’d seen dozens of times. Dialogue she’d memorized was altered or spoken by different characters. It was the same movie, but it wasn’t.

“It scared me to death,” she said. “If you ask me to see the movie ‘Shane,’ I’d say no thanks.”

She thinks that night Gibbs’ machine somehow altered the past … and the present.

Because of people like Jake and Ress, “time machine” inventors like Gibbs, and my lifelong fascination with time travel, I’ve set up the website “Time Travel Reporting Center.”

If you believe you’ve traveled in time, or have encountered someone seemingly out of time and place, please post your encounters at: timetravelerreportingcenter.blogspot.com. This will hopefully become a database of time travel events and a forum to discuss the validity/reality of time travel.

You also may discover you’re not alone.

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Little Boy in my House

2011-01-31T11:30:00.000-06:00

Author’s note: As regular readers of “From the Shadows” know, I rarely write about my own experiences. This blog is about you, not me. However, after the umpteenth radio talk show host (I can’t blame them; it’s their job) asked me why I’m interested in the paranormal, I thought I’d share it with you.

The day was bright; I remember that; and a Saturday – the greatest day of the week to a 10-year-old boy.

If I’d been asked to design a day to best suit my needs, I couldn’t have come up with better. A morning full of Quisp cereal while watching Ultraman, Bugs Bunny, Superfriends, Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, and Isis (yowza. Even at 10 I wasn’t immune to actress JoAnna Cameron’s charms), then a black-and-white science fiction movie at noon. Perfect.

But by 2 p.m., the fun was over and I had to find something to do until The Love Boat and Fantasy Island after supper. So I decided to read.

I remember walking from my bedroom in our 120-year-old house toward our back hallway bookshelves. As I entered the hallway, I knew something wasn’t right. I don’t remember a fight-or-flight response, nor do I think the hallway was at all cold. What I know is that I saw something – someone – in the hallway with me.

It was a boy of maybe six years old. He just stood there, looking at me.

The problem with a six-year-old boy standing in our hallway was the fact that this was a farmhouse, and I was the only little boy within six miles of anything.

The boy just shouldn’t have been there.

But he was – and he stared at me. He had tousled brown hair and a blue flannel shirt. My eyes didn’t go any further, not because of his vacant, somewhat lonely eyes, but I suddenly realized I could see the bookshelves through him.

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at the boy. It seemed like hours, but it must have been more like seconds. Then the transparent boy blinked and broke whatever spell of surprise I was under. I turned, walked back to the safety of my room with its NFL comforter on the bed (28 teams), and shut the door.

When I finally came out, the transparent little boy was gone.

I didn’t talk about my experience for 30 years. When I did, I was finishing an interview with psychic Joyce Morgan (she died Oct. 29, 2007, about a year after the interview). Morgan, a member of the Missouri-based Miller Paranormal Research group, often assisted police in missing persons cases and was featured twice on Court TV.

I’d only told Joyce I saw the ghost of a little boy in my house as a child. She filled in the rest.

“The little boy’s name was John. His last name was like Petry or Petty. The little boy died in 1912,” she said. “They either rented the house or were landowners there.”

“John” died of pneumonia, or diphtheria, Joyce said. But what she said next frightened me almost as much as the encounter.

“He had light brown hair,” she said. “He had on a pail blue shirt with puckers on the sleeves. His britches were those kind of bloomy-out britches.”

That was the boy I saw. The same color hair, the same color shirt.

“His father’s name may have been George,” she continued. “I don’t know if he was the landowner of this property or if they were trying to rent it to live in it.”

But, she said, “George” owned cows and sold milk.

“I sat here and it just started unfolding in front of me,” Joyce said. “He had two sisters, Catherine and Nelly or Nell.”

And that was it. She’d described what I’d seen, and filled in as many blanks as she could. I’m quick to say I don’t trust anything someone purporting to be psychic tells me. There are way too many charlatans out there. However, Joyce was different.

During our conversation I mentioned a light my wife kept seeing over our newborn’s crib around 2 or 3 a.m. I’d seen it too, on one occasion. Joyce frankly said, “Oh, it’s just your grandfather (she gave his correct name) looking over his namesake.” I’d never mentioned the baby’s gender, the baby’s name, or my grandfather in our conversation – but she was right. Joyce was the real deal.

I never investigated Joyce’s claims of John or the history of the house because I don’t want to know. As I’ve said in many of my radio interviews, the paranormal’s fun as long as it happens to somebody else.

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Phantom Jogger

2011-01-23T09:45:00.004-06:00

The first members of John Markway’s family who noticed something wrong were the twins.

John and his three sons, the twins 17, the youngest 12, moved into the house in Bothell, Washington, with John’s new wife, but not until the twins started running track in high school, did any of them notice the darkness in the neighborhood.

“They were putting in practice time running the roads around our house and they soon discovered that this area has some eccentricities,” John said. “The area of strangeness seems to parallel a road, now called a street, that runs not far from our house. It appears to be a typical ’20s-era farm road that is fairly common in these parts.”

When John’s family moved into the area, they heard stories about that road, stories of a local “peeper, which was creepy, but probably just kids right?” John said.

It wasn’t just kids. Kids wouldn’t go anywhere near that road.

“An area on the road perhaps two short blocks from our home was simply unpleasant,” John said. “Everyone avoided that stretch of road except for car use. Hell, blackberry vines were out in the road, and kids used a detour through a field to bypass the place.”

When the twins took that road on their evening running route, they sensed a phantom jogger ran behind them.

“After consulting with other neighborhood runners they discovered that that area was avoided for that reason,” John said. People, including the twins, “would hear footsteps mimicking theirs behind them, breath upon their shoulders, hear breathing and upon a couple of occasions had things thrown at them.”

Although the twins didn’t believe in the paranormal, they had no explanation for what was happening to them on that road.

“What really got my attention was the incident that ended their nighttime running in that direction,” John said. “Number Two twin encountered a green fog in a sort of cloud about a block away. He said that it glowed.”

A few nights later, John decided to go out in the dark and look at this road himself.

“It was probably late September to October. There was a full moon, about 42 degrees and absolutely clear, something not common here,” he said.

John’s youngest son, 12, accompanied him.

“We got up onto the road and got our bearings,” he said. “No green fog; life is disappointment.”

But John wasn’t to be disappointed.

Father and son walked down the lonely road toward the spot John’s older son encountered the fog. A narrow shoulder separated the road from the field and thick trees on the left.

“I had a flashlight but do not remember using it,” he said. “I looked in back of us for a second, and saw a shadow rapidly approaching us from the south.”

The shadow seemed to be caused by something in the sky. John first thought it may be an airplane, cloud, or some kind of balloon, but he saw nothing that could have caused the shadow.

“This was no small shadow, this literally encompassed everything,” he said.

Immediately the dim grayness of the night turned noticeably darker – but the moon and stars still shone through a cloudless sky.

“We continued to walk, making for a streetlight that seemed to mark the end of the affected area,” John said. “When we got there, a crossroads, there was what looked like a wolf grinning at us under the light pole. Too weird. We took another way home.”

Neither John nor his son encountered anything else strange on their walk home, but after that night, everyone in the house began to have strange experiences.

“Other phenomena afflict our lives,” John said. “At times we go through 20 light bulbs a month, and sometimes we know ahead of times that they will blow. We have repeated phantom visitors – the sound of someone coming in the front door, footsteps, phantom dog scratches, and things falling from walls.”

The darkness John and his youngest son experienced outside may have followed them inside.

“My wife and I both feel that the house is too dark,” he said. “And sometimes feel as if we are being drained. We both have medical retirements and we spend a lot of time here. We were ready to move when the housing bubble popped. We have a lot of equity but no one is buying, or we'd be long gone. Something is wrong with this place.”

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Haunting of Hillhaven

2011-01-17T11:11:00.002-06:00

Hillhaven Nursing Home in Marceline, Mo., sits vacant, a haven for vandals and skittering rodents.

However, in the dark of night, this three-story, crumbling brick edifice is not quiet.

The building, constructed in 1923, has housed the Putman Memorial Hospital, St. Francis Hospital, Hillhaven, and finally Meadowbrook Nursing Home.

Ryan Straub, founder of the mid-Missouri paranormal research group Tir Firnath, is familiar with the building – his mother, Patty Cruzan, worked there for 10 years.

“My mom says death comes in threes,” he said. “The reason she says that is because of this place.”

At least 10 people died in the building while she worked there.

Dust and plaster coat parts of the floor that aren’t covered with broken furniture and boxes of books and other forgotten refuse. Crossword puzzle pages dot the ground along with puzzle pieces nursing home residents once used to build landscapes. In one room, former St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire’s smiling face perpetually stares from the Oct. 5, 1998 issue of “Sports Illustrated.”

When Meadowbrook closed, the owners left everything. Pots and pans sit on rusting stoves that will never again be lit to cook. Desks and chairs huddle in offices. Beds and equipment – still recognizable after all the vandalism – lay broken in patient rooms.

Cruzan worked at Hillhaven from September 1988 until August 1992 when Meadowbrook bought the building. Meadowbrook closed in 1995 and the company hired her to “maintain the grounds and handle inventory,” she said.

She worked there alone until 1998.

One night she received a call at home about the empty building – a light was on. She asked her then-teenage son to drive to the building and turn off the light. He did, but discovered he wasn’t alone.

In a room on the second floor, Straub saw an old woman sitting in a chair looking out the window. As he watched her, the woman turned her head toward him.

“I was a witness to an entity that was in the shape of an elderly woman who, when she recognized my presence, turned her head 180 degrees and smiled,” he said. “Her smile literally went from ear to ear.”

Straub quickly left, but he’s been back. As a paranormal researcher, he has investigated the building a dozen times and always encounters something strange.

“There have been times I’ve been down here and all the doors in the hall were open and when I got to this door,” he said, placing his hand on a door at the end of the second-floor hall, “they’d all shut.”

Cruzan was with her son one day when this happened.

“We went through that building, the doors were open,” she said. “We went back, they were closed.”

She also knows of things she can’t explain that have happened in the building.

During its years as a nursing home, Cruzan said third-shift workers occasionally reported hearing people walking upstairs, but when they checked, every resident was asleep.

One worker said tasks she’d turned away from would be complete when she returned to them. And Cruzan experienced something herself while she was there alone.

“At one time I thought I heard something down in the kitchen,” she said. “Something was going on down there, like somebody was there. I didn’t find anything. I didn’t stay long.”

People have reported being unable to breathe in certain parts of the building and have heard footsteps running down the second floor hallway. Many people who worked there said they never felt alone. Straub said his mother was familiar with the feeling.

“She always felt like there was somebody here,” he said.

But Straub knows the strangeness of the building isn’t because of people. It might be the building itself.

“At night, it literally sounds like the building was growling,” he said. “It feels like the whole building was growling. It almost feels like the building wants to mess with you a little bit.”

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

UFO Crash Recovery in the UK

2011-01-10T11:15:00.002-06:00

The light sank into the forest near Farnborough, Hampshire, UK, as Hilary Porter and her family drove home.

“In 1977 July, whilst traveling through a military wooded area, still open to the public at that time, we were convinced that something had downed at the edge of the woods,” Porter said.

As they neared the area where the light would have landed, the military was already there.

“We were met with many blacked-windowed Army buses, accompanied by loads of soldiers in combat gear with rifles, all spreading out over the land,” she said. “We had no choice but to turn back and get out of there.”

As they turned to retrace their steps away from the armed soldiers, Hilary and her husband noticed a large, round burn mark on the ground.

After a short drive they realized their encounter wasn’t over.

“After going back down the road for about quarter of a mile suddenly we saw two very thin humanoid beings about six feet or so tall, dressed in all white with helmets, looking on at the soldiers,” she said. “The beings suddenly ran down into a clearing, which both my former husband and I saw, and then they dematerialized right in front of us.”

Hilary turned to her husband.

“Get the hell out of here,” she shouted.

As they drove home, shaken, they discussed what they’d seen and were sure they’d been witness to extraterrestrials and a UFO crash retrieval.

“The big round burn mark in the ground was the giveaway to what was going on,” she said. “This area alone has had more than its fare share of UFO sightings.”

In 1977, Farnborough was the home of the Royal Aircraft Establishment and Hilary is convinced was also the site where the military took the craft she and her husband saw downed in the woods.

Hilary also thinks something followed them home.

“Within a few weeks, my family and I suffered much poltergeist activity,” Hilary said.

Activity such as the sound of buckets full of stones poured down their roof late at night, appliances turning on and off, cups exploding, and the sound of dirt clods thrown against their windows.

“And yet next day there was nothing on the ground,” she said.

Then they saw the light again.

“In early September, a smoky gray/blue craft was hovering in the sky,” Hilary said. “From my house, which is up on a hill overlooking this site, I could see what was happening clearly and watched this with a telescope.”

After observing the craft for 45 minutes, she asked her husband to look through the telescope.

“Suddenly the craft changed color to blood-red and twice it’s initial size, then it suddenly zoomed over into marshland, which is still part of the ground of the Farnborough Airfield,” she said. “My husband took the telescope and dashed over to the airfield, two hours later the craft was still there, I had been watching it with binoculars.”

Her husband returned after those two hours, and had seen the craft close up.

“The craft was at least 20 feet across, self-lit and glowing red,” Hilary said. “It was either on the ground or hovering just above it; there seemed to be zero activity on the ground. No one got out or entered the area of the landing.”

Hilary is convinced the craft she saw go down in the woods was at the airfield, home of the British government’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and the glowing red craft was searching for it.

“This place is on a par with your Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in its own way, and possibly Europe’s answer to Area 51,” she said. “All downed craft, be they planes or UFOs, come to this above place for re-assembling, as this is the British crash retrieval site.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Baby’s Voice

2011-01-02T21:07:00.003-06:00

When Myra Thom and her mother stepped from a corner bakery back onto the streets of Sikatuna, Philippines, Myra expected them to walk to the next store for their weekly shopping trip.

She didn’t expect a paranormal encounter to burn itself into her memory.

“The encounter happened quite a long time ago, back when I was 18,” Myra, a 38-year-old book editor and transcriptionist from Cainta, Rizal, Philippines, said. “But it stands out vividly in my mind, just like it happened a couple of hours ago.”

As the women walked out of the bakery and turned to their left, Myra heard a tiny voice.

“We both distinctly heard the voice of a small child calling my name,” Myra said. “My name was pronounced clearly, as if by an adult, but when my mother and I turned, we saw that it was a very small child, not even two years old, maybe just a little over a year old. He could not walk on his own yet.”

Two women walked toward them, each holding one of the child’s little hands.

“(They were) two seemingly identical women,” Myra said.

The boy, with chubby cheeks and curly light brown, almost blonde hair, was “rather unusual in this part of the world,” Myra said. “It wasn’t entirely Caucasian. You could say he was a mestizo, but at that time I remember being struck by his appearance for some reason.”

The women, dressed in identical blue jeans and white shirts, didn’t seem to notice Myra as they approached, but the child did.

“The little boy was looking straight at me with a knowing, absolutely unchildlike gaze,” Myra said. “It was as if he knew something about me that I did not know.”

The baby smiled faintly at Myra, never moving his gaze from her.

“The most unusual or strange thing about him was the expression on his face. It was definitely, absolutely not something you would expect to see on the face of a child that young,” Myra said. “It was a knowing look, almost malicious, and it was made even stranger by the fact that it was coming from a child that looked like the very depiction of the cherubim in the church.”

The women Myra calls the “nannies,” both appeared to be typical Filipino women, but she didn’t get a chance to see their faces. As the “nannies” walked past, chatting about something indiscernible, Myra’s eyes were fixed on the child.

“They both had their backs turned,” Myra said. “The baby was twisting its head and body all the way around just to stare at me, and it stayed that way all the way to the corner until they disappeared from our view.”

Although the encounter unnerved Myra, her mother’s account of the events reassured her the odd baby lead by the strange, identical “nannies,” had said her name – and something was wrong with the child.

“My mother corroborates this,” Myra said. “What really struck her about the child is that weird look on its face that was very unchildlike and the fact that it did not remove its gaze from me while we were within viewing distance of each other.”

This encounter has occupied Myra’s thoughts for 20 years. The identical “nannies,” the blonde, curly-haired baby not yet old enough to walk by himself, and her name spoken from this strange child’s lips.

“I do not know why I did not rush up to him and ask him how he knew my name,” Myra said. “I have always wondered at my reaction. My mother and I just stood there and watched the child and its ‘nannies’ walk away and round the bend. I guess we were both in shock.”

Although the encounter still baffles Myra, it does provide her with some comfort.

“I consider it a gift from the universe, for it gave me what I consider to be my first real proof that there is something out there beyond what we normally believe to be absolute reality,” she said. “But at the same time it has also always worried me. Was the child an angel, a demon, an alien, a ghost, an elemental? What was its purpose in calling my name?”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Strange Case of the Toy Monkey on a Stick

2010-12-26T15:56:00.001-06:00

Author’s note: The following account of a Texas woman’s fear may not be a paranormal story, but it has disturbed her nonetheless. If anyone knows of the custom described below, or has had an encounter similar to Dana’s, please e-mail me at jasonoffutt@hotmail.com.

Screams of laughter and the rush of the Tilt-A-Whirl and mini-roller coaster filled the usually vacant lot on the outskirts of Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1964.

As seven-year-old Dana Talley’s mother walked her down the midway to the carousel, nothing seemed awry in the early Texas evening.

Until Dana boarded the merry-go-round.

“I was riding on the carousel and a group of 10 to 15 oriental young men, early 20s, student types, were watching me and waving to me and smiling,” Dana said.

Young Dana watched the men as one of them approached her mother. The man asked her mother something, and she nodded.

“They asked if they could take pictures of me,” Dana said. “She agreed.”

Flashbulbs flared with their blue light as Dana went round and round on the carousel. Minutes later, the carousel slowed and Dana stepped off.

“When my ride was over and I was back on the ground near my mother, one of the men came over and handed me a little plastic monkey on a stick and thanked me profusely,” Dana said.

Then the men were gone, blending in with the carnival crowd, and Dana didn’t think about the incident again – until 18 years later in 1982.

“When I was 24 I took my seven-year-old son to a little carnival near our home in San Antonio, Texas,” she said. “It was evening and a group of 10 to 15 oriental young men, student types, were watching him on the carousel.”

As Dana stood by the carnival ride, one of the young men approached her.

“One of them came over and asked me if they could take photos of him,” Dana said, not thinking anything more of it. “I said, ‘yes,’ and they did.”

When the ride slowed and her son leapt off to rejoined her, one of the men stepped up to them, knelt, and handed the boy a little monkey doll attached to a stick. The men turned, and disappeared into the street carnival crowd.

Dana’s childhood experience came rushing back.

“Every once in a while I think about the similarities and wonder is it really a coincidence or is there more to it,” she said. “The men were friendly, overly so. There were no bad vibes. It’s just odd.”

The coincidences are too much for her to think they’re wholly separate incidents.

“Each time at a carnival on the merry-go-round. Each time they asked the mother if they could take some pictures. Each time it was a large group of young men. Each time prolific thank yous and meeting the child and the monkey toy,” she said. “Part of me says it is just coincidence; another part of me says, ‘oh, hell no.’ It is just too bizarre.”

Dana has spent years searching the Internet for similar encounters, but has found nothing. She wonders if she’s alone.

“You know, where my mind goes sometimes is wondering if it was some kind of cult thing where they kept tabs on me all those years,” she said. ”Foolish and highly unlikely I know, but it was just so strange. It has bothered me ever since it happened to me with my son.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Ride of the Phantom Car

2010-12-18T16:51:00.001-06:00

The heat of the June night was oppressive as 20-year-old Christian Hackett drove home.

“It was really hot. One of those hot nights when it’s 90 and the sun’s down,” Hackett, of Parkville, Mo., said.

He sat at the stoplight at Riss Lake Drive and Missouri 45 in Parkville just after midnight, preparing to turn right onto the highway, when he saw a car.

“I pulled up at a red light; there was a car in the lane I was going to turn into,” Hackett said. “I let it pass.”

As the car sped by, Hackett noticed a second car in the distance.

“It looked different than a regular car,” Hackett said. “It was low to the ground. It looked old. When cars get older the headlights don’t look bright.”

Hackett judged the distance between the oncoming car and his own to be safe, and pulled out from the stoplight.

“I saw I had space,” he said. “We were the only two cars on the highway. The car I let pass, I couldn’t even see it.”

As he pulled onto the highway, the lights of the old car quickly filled his rearview mirror. It was closing on him.

“I’m driving and the car that I saw started coming up a whole like faster than what it had been before,” he said. “It got closer and closer.”

After about a half-mile, Hackett pulled into the turning lane at the next intersection, the car in the rearview mirror closing on him uncomfortably fast.

“I heard the car as it was coming,” Hackett said. “I had the radio on, but as the car came closer, I could hear it. I could hear the car over the music.”

As the car’s headlights began to fill Hackett’s cab, he tried to catch a glimpse of the vehicle bearing down on him. He couldn’t see the car, just its lights. Now the fear that had been eating at the corners of Hackett’s mind now sat along side him.

“I was slowing down to turn and as I was turning, the car was getting closer and closer and closer,” he said. “It looked like it was going to hit me and right as it would have hit me, it just vanished.”

Hackett had just pulled into the middle of the intersection when the car disappeared.

“I was driving, but I was like, ‘oh, my God.’ I looked back and there was nothing,” he said. “I swear the car was in the rearview the whole time. It was just gone. I looked behind me, in front of me, on the side road, nothing. It was as if the car just vanished into my car.”

When Hackett regained his bearings, he simply continued driving.

“I double checked, I triple checked and there was no car,” Hackett said. “I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. At the time I was just thinking, ‘what the hell happened?’ I was just really, really confused and scared. I had no idea what had happened.”

Hackett had traveled that section of M-45 often since his family moved to Parkville in 1990 – nothing like this had ever happened to him.

“I’ve probably driven that road a million times and never seen anything,” Hackett said. “I took that to high school every day. It’s a road I can never avoid. I have to take 45 Highway anywhere I need to go. I was probably on that road the next day at 9 or 10 in the morning.”

Although Hackett didn’t talk about this incident to his family, he knew something unexplainable had happened to him. A friend’s childhood stories confirmed to him something was amiss on that road.

“The intersection where I was taking a left on, on the right my friend lived in a farm house there,” Hackett said. “He said he used to see (ghostly) things.”

Legends of phantom cars – vehicles that appear, drive at high speeds, then disappear – have been reported over the past century from Georgia, to Hawaii, to Germany, to South Africa.

However, according to the Platte County Missouri Historical Society, there is no record of phantom car stories from that stretch of road. This news doesn’t deter Hackett.

“This is my first paranormal experience ever. This is the first thing that ever scared the crap out of me,” Hackett said. “But I don’t care if people think I’m crazy. I know what I saw.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Little People in the Night

2010-12-09T08:00:00.000-06:00

Legends of little people dance at the periphery of societies around the world. Elves, gnomes, goblins, trolls, ebu gogo, makiawisug, menehune – some of these entities are said to help humans, others kidnap, rob and devour.

Modern tales of these little people come from places like Iceland, Hawaii, the Midwest, Sweden, New Zealand and Colombia, South America. These stories have one thing in common – they are all terrifying.

Fabian Hernandez knows. He’s seen the little people.

Hernandez, 30, a veteran of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, and his brother, an aircraft engineer, were born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the 1980s.

“We lived in a small apartment in Brooklyn with our parents,” he said. “I have Native Indian blood from the natives of Colombia, South America, from my mother’s side.”

Due to financial struggles, the family soon moved back to their mother’s home country, Colombia. There, Hernandez saw little people in his room.

Hernandez and his brother were sleeping when a vibration woke Fabian. He wasn’t prepared for what he saw.

“I can recall seeing a group of small men working around my bed, silently,” Hernandez said. “It was like if I was looking at characters (from another) dimension.”

Hernandez lie in bed, staring at the little men.

“These creatures got the most of me and I started to be more curious,” Hernandez said. “I observed them walking around like if they were working in a mine of some kind, like digging or something.”

The little men were three inches tall and bright white.

“They were minding their own business,” Hernandez said. “The following day I told my parents and I just simply got brushed off. At that time I got a little scared and did not know what to do, so I simply forgot it as time past.”

Four years later, the Hernandez family moved back to Brooklyn.

“I was around the age of nine and my brother was just a few years older then me,” Hernandez said. “We lived in a small apartment where we shared the same bed in our parent’s room.”

One night Hernandez went to sleep early because of the flu. When he woke in the early morning, he saw something he’d seen years before, a continent away.

“I slept against the wall and my brother towards the edge,” he said. “I think it was around two or three in the morning when I noticed a white, long bright light, like when window blinds close and the light comes in.”

Something moved in the light.

“I had awaken my brother laying next to me to see what I was seeing,” he said. “This long, bright light transformed, and my brother said ‘look, it’s moving.’ I said, ‘what is that?’”

Both Hernandez and his brother saw little white figures, about three inches tall, moving in that light.

“They were talking amongst each other, moving around rapidly in a (different) dimension sort of way,” Hernandez said.

The light drew across the ceiling and onto the wall next to Hernandez before it disappeared.

Since this incident, Hernandez hasn’t seen the little people, but the thought of them still frightens him.

“I get the chills talking about it, as (does) my brother,” Hernandez said. “This has been something that has been bothering my brother and I for many years, thinking that it was just my mind or eyes playing tricks on me, but I know it wasn’t a child problem, since my older brother had confirmed it.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

An Encounter With A Time Traveler?

2010-11-30T10:09:00.001-06:00

Jake Kell, a student at Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Mo., pulled his 1999 Chevrolet S-10 next to a Git-N-Go convenience store gas pump in May 2003, stepped out of the pickup and started pumping gas.

A few minutes later, sweat rolling down Kell’s back in the humid late spring Missouri air, the nozzle handle clicked and the tank was filled. It was only 11 a.m.; he knew the day was going to only get more uncomfortable.

He didn’t expect it to get weird.

“I went in to pay for the gas,” Kell said. “The humidity made me weak, so I just wanted to pay for the gas and leave.”

After paying, he stepped from the air-conditioned store onto heat-radiating asphalt and the day quickly got strange.

“As I left the gas station, some large melon-headed man dressed in a business suit yelled, ‘What year is it?’” Kell said.

Kell stopped near his truck and turned to look at the man. The stranger’s stature was imposing.

“The large man was 6’ 7”,” Kell said. “He could have been taller.”

The “melon-headed man” stood in front of the store at a spot Kell would have noticed when he walked out to the parking lot – but he hadn’t. The man wore a dark black suit “with a rough fiber texture,” Kell said. “Along the lines of the things Teddy Roosevelt could wear.”

“What year is it?” the man yelled again.

The man, white, about 35 to 40 years old, wasn’t just tall, he was big, “not too thin, but not fat.”

“He was just a big man who was acting strange,” Kell said. “He was clean-shaven, no mustache or beard. He just looked like an average tall American. If you saw him in a large group of people you’d just think he’s tall.”

But he’d asked an odd question. Kell answered it. “Two-thousand three,” Kell told him.

The man’s face contorted in anger. “What year is it?” he screamed at Kell.

“Again I said ‘2003,’” Kell said. “I was starting to get ticked off.”

The large man screamed again. “What year is it?”

“I said ‘2003’ so he could hear me,” Kell said. “Then he quit asking.” Kell tried to ignore the man as he slid into his truck. “I said to myself, ‘is this guy an alien?’”

But when Kell turned to get another look at the large man, the man was gone. “He disappeared from the front of the gas station,” Kell said.

The only place the man could have gone that quickly was inside the store, but when Kell looked, the man wasn’t there.

“When it happened I thought nothing of it,” Kell said. “It’s only afterward that I happened to listen to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (the nation’s top late-night radio talk show) where I heard about a time traveler sighting by a truck driver in Texas at a truck stop. Someone kept asking ‘What year is it?’ to the truck driver. The driver was annoyed and left.”

There are documented reports of time slips throughout history, such as RAF pilot Sir Victor Goddard who encountered airplanes in 1935 that didn’t exist until 1939, a 100-year-old Swiss watch found in a Chinese Ming dynasty tomb, and a man named John Titor who purported online to be from 2036 and made some accurate – and not so accurate – claims about the near future of mankind.

Although stories of out-of-place humans are common, what did Kell and the truck driver who called into the radio program experience? Lunatics? Pranksters? Or someone who was lost in time?

“These stories are not so rare as people think,” Kell said. “There are many people who have seen them. But the stories are so bizarre that I don’t think anyone would want to come foreword to tell it. Who would believe you?”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Black-Eyed Woman in Australia

2010-11-08T12:00:00.001-06:00

New faces at the disability health care center where Janita works in Melbourne, Australia, aren’t uncommon.

“We have lots of part-time workers and casual workers. Every day of the week there is different people helping us,” she said.

But one day in October 2010 a woman came to work with Janita – a woman who terrified her.

“This day was very busy,” Janita said. “We had a new worker with us. She was a female from Sydney. Petite blonde, long-haired lady, green eyes.”

The new co-worker, Sophie, “seemed nice,” but something about her struck Janita as odd.

“For some reason I didn’t feel comfortable being around her,” Janita said.

During Sophie’s first day on the job, Janita was assisting a disabled child in a wheelchair when she needed help.

“My manager asked me to get Sophie,” Janita said.

Someone had last seen Sophie in the break room, but when Janita walked in, the room was empty.

“She had just disappeared from the lounge room,” she said. “My manager went into the other rooms to find her and I went towards the bathrooms.”

Janita made her way to the back of the building to the bathrooms and found Sophie. She wished she hadn’t.

“I will never forget what I saw,” Janita said. “She was standing in the middle of the bathroom. She turned around and looked at me with huge black eyes.”

There were no irises in Sophie’s eyes and no whites – just black voids that burned themselves into Janita’s memory.

“She was staring at me,” Janita said. “It felt like she had no soul. It felt evil.”

Janita shot out of the bathroom and ran toward a room she knew would have people – the kitchen. Her manager was there.

“My manager just looked at me,” Janita said. “Then Sophie appears from the back room towards the kitchen like nothing happened. Her eyes were back to green.”

But Janita knew what she saw, and she knew the evil she felt radiating from that woman.

“I didn’t want to be around her,” Janita said. “I had to leave work that day. I told my manager I would be taking a couple of days off.”

When Janita returned to work days later, Sophie had returned to Sydney (598 miles) – but Janita couldn’t dismiss her fear.

“I found out that Sophie kept asking my manager about me,” she said. “It was scary. I never want to see her again.”

Sophie also chilled one of Janita’s co-workers, Emma. Emma said she didn’t feel at ease around Sophie either and suspected something sinister about the woman.

“She felt uncomfortable being around her, too,” Janita said. “When I told Emma what I saw she said, ‘I believe you. But keep away, she might be a lizzie.’”

This comment confused Janita.

“I said, ‘what do you mean?’” Janita said. “That’s when Emma said, ‘You know, reptilians. They’re supposed to run the world and have invaded this planet and they can shape-shift into anything. They’re evil.”

Conspiracy theorists, such as author David Icke, claim all the world governments and major financial institutions are secretly controlled by a race of reptilian extraterrestrials that can appear human.

“After she said that to me, I started reading about it,” Janita said. “It has actually scared me and I don’t want to look into people’s eyes anymore. I try and avoid the eyes.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Ghosts of the J. Huston Tavern

2010-10-30T16:29:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: This is my fourth year and 208th installment of “From the Shadows.” I just wanted to thank you, my friendly readers, for your support.

The two-story brick building has stood in the tiny town of Arrow Rock, Mo., for 176 years. The J. Huston Tavern, once an inn and mercantile for frontier travelers, is now a state historic site and restaurant – and home to visitors who never leave.

Chef Liz Huff, proprietor of the J. Huston Tavern since January 2009, has seen these ghostly visitors often.

“A ton of them,” she said.

Her first encounter was of a woman wearing a white gown Huff saw reflected in the glass of the dining room door. As the woman’s reflection moved across the glass, Huff looked into the dining room; no one was there.

“That scared me because that was the first thing I saw,” Huff said.

Huff and restaurant employees have ghostly experiences in the Tavern up to six times a day. Shadow figures dancing through the air, the sound of shuffling feet, and phantom whistling.

Cody Hedrick, Marshall, Mo., works at the tavern and has heard the whistling.

“At first I brushed it off, but it got louder,” he said. “It freaked me out.”

Coats move on racks, hanging pots bang in the kitchen, and doors swing on their own. But the most visible are the people.

“There’s a couple who likes to sit in the parlor room,” Huff said.

Huff first saw the couple in June 2009 as she walked past the hostess station and wondered why no one had filled their water glasses. As she looked at the couple, they vanished.

“No one was there,” she said. “I just started laughing.”

Although most entities encountered in the Tavern seem to be friendly, the basement isn’t the same story. Employees have developed the “Basement Buddy” system because they don’t like going into that oppressive atmosphere alone.

“It’s not pleasant down there,” Huff said. “It’s scary. There’s a heavy feeling down there like it’s harder to breath.”

A green light occasionally shoots through the basement, and employees have heard someone moving boxes when no one else is there. But one day, the oppressiveness followed Huff upstairs.

“I thought the scary part was just down there and that’s why I don’t mind being (in the tavern) at night myself,” she said.

But in the summer of 2009, Huff was closing the restaurant for the night when she realized she wasn’t alone.

“I felt someone behind me, literally a half-inch away from my body,” Huff said. “I was so scared to look back; I knew something was there but didn’t want to see it. I just kept walking faster. I made it outside and was trembling.”

But she hadn’t locked the cooler. Huff slowly pulled open the door, went back inside, and flipped on every light she could reach. Then she locked the cooler and bolted from the building.

“You know those horror movies where people can’t get the door locked because they’re shaking?” she said. “It was just like that.”

As she stood outside the door trying to put the key into the lock, the sound of someone banging pots together rang from the building. She finally slammed the key in, locked the door and drove to her father’s house. She couldn’t be alone that night.

“I think whatever’s in the basement came upstairs a minute,” she said. “I want him to stay in the basement or go away. I didn’t like it.”

Bunny Thomas, manager of the Tavern from 1976 to 1979 and proprietor from 1981 to 1986 and 1993-2000, has seen both faces of the Tavern – the friendly spirits and the dark ones.

One of her first nights on the job, a “very male, very sexy” voice said “hello there.”

“I looked around and no one was there,” she said. “In the ’70s, it wasn’t unusual to hear your name called.”

Although restaurants have plenty of turnover, Thomas said some of the turnover during her management directly related to the restless spirits.

“We had this kid who cleaned at night,” she said. “He said, ‘Bunny, I can’t do this anymore.’ I said, ‘why?’ He said, ‘I hear tables and chairs scooting across the floor and somebody called my name.’”

Thomas got a taste of the darkness when she lived on the second floor of the tavern during her divorce in the 1980s.

“The very first night I moved in, everybody came down and played cards,” she said. “When everybody left I got undressed and got in bed.”

Things quickly turned terrifying.

“I heard the stairs squeaking and I heard the floor squeaking and the next thing I knew the floor at the foot of my bed was squeaking,” she said. “I sat up in bed and there was nobody there. I put a table over that spot after that.”

The radio next to her bed would move through stations by itself, and a strange smoke occasionally floated through her room – although it wasn’t smoke.

“It was a ghost,” she said. “It was just like people described it being. It was wispy and you could see through it.”

Thomas’ fellow proprietor during the 1980s and 1990s, Clay Marsh, also experienced a few ghostly encounters in the tavern. But after Marsh died from cancer in the mid-2000s, he may have been come one of the tavern ghosts himself.

While Huff was on vacation in November 2009, Hedrick saw a man he didn’t recognize.

“Cody had a box of stuff and was walking upstairs and he walked to the top of the stairs and looked up and saw a man standing in the ballroom,” Huff said. “It was a solid human being.”

The figure wore a late-1700s to early 1800s black jacket, ruffled shirt, knickers and hat. Hedrick looked away and when he turned back the figure was gone.

But Huff had seen that outfit before – on Marsh

“It was exactly like Cody described,” Huff said. “It was the coolest thing. I thought wouldn’t that be neat if it was him.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Something evil in the house

2010-10-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

Something in the house in Auckland, New Zealand, seemed to glare at little Lydia Brooks as she lie in her room, trying to sleep.

“I grew up in a house with no discernible history as far as I know of,” Brooks said. “But the place just never felt right, never felt like home. I would feel watched all of the time. I was paranoid, for as long as I can remember, that someone was watching me.”

This feeling was so real, so oppressive, Brooks only slept a few hours a night, and always showered in her underwear. The house began to take a toll on her health.

“Scores of doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong,” she said. “I would go pale and pass out. My mother said you could see it happening. I would walk into the room, with my eyes big and glassy, my skin would turn white, and I would collapse.”

Then, in 1995, the feeling of being watched and her illness went away.

“Once I hit about 11 years old, I seemed to be able to turn off whatever part of me was sensitive,” Brooks, now 26, said. “This was a huge relief.”

Her parents, however, began to experience strange things in the house.

“My father doesn’t believe in anything paranormal, but admits to having dreams that have saved his life,” she said. “My mother believes in – I suppose you would call them ghosts. She never liked the house I grew up in.”

One day, Brooks’ mother found her feelings were justified.

“A family friend came over after-hours to polyurethane the floors in the front room,” Brooks said. “He was an older Maori man, very straight and raised Christian.”

The man later called Brooks’ mother to tell her he’d finished the floors, but had left a light on in the house.

“He mentioned then that the house had some strange vibes going on in it, but Mum just dismissed it,” Brooks said.

The next day, Brooks’ mother couldn’t dismiss it anymore.

“She picked me up from school very excited,” Brooks said. “She had arrived at the house after dropping me off in the morning, and not only was the light switch that had been left on in the off position, but the bulb itself was lying unbroken on the other side of the room. There is no way that the bulb could have survived a fall from the high ceilings, let alone ended up where it did.”

When Brooks was 17, her family moved into a new house.

“The change was amazing. The new house felt like home,” she said. “It always seemed sunny, the entire family got along better, I kept my room tidy.”

But they didn’t stay long, moving to a nearby house built after World War II.

“The woman who we bought the house from was pitiful, suffering from emphysema. She lived in the two front rooms, and ended up being moved into a hospice,” Brooks said. “I hated the house from the moment I moved into it. It was very oppressive.”

Being a teenager, Brooks was excited to move into the house a few days before the rest of her family, but the excitement quickly turned to fear. Something was there with her.

“I hated it,” she said. “I had forgotten that watched feeling while I had lived in the previous house.”

Her family felt it too, blaming the “watched” feeling on the house being so large and open.

“But it was more than that,” Brooks said. “I was constantly twitching curtains to make sure they were closed properly, I slept fitfully, and I never felt comfortable being there alone.”

Brooks’ mother would often smell perfume in the kitchen and laundry area – but the scent was nothing they’d brought with them.

“Even after living there for years, this waft of scent would just drift through the rooms,” Brooks said. “It wasn’t a scent any of us used, and it certainly didn’t appear at our last houses.”

Brooks’ cat also knew something strange was in the house.

“I was sitting up in bed one night in 2007, the cat was curled up next to my leg,” Brooks said. “I was just reading and everything was silent, when she suddenly went berserk.”

The cat leaped into the air, jumped backward, and started hissing and spitting. Brooks grabbed her cat, and it began to thrash about, clawing at Brooks to escape.

“Her body was twisting wildly, but the worst thing was her head was straining to stare at a spot in the dead center of my bed,” Brooks said. “She was screaming like I have never heard before or since, and just staring with massive eyes at a spot just by my calf.”

Brooks released the cat and it ran toward the door, continuing to look back at Brooks’ bed, ears pulled back, its hair on end.

“It was hideously frightening,” Brooks said. “As soon as I opened the door for her, she was fine, back to her normal, placid self.”

When Brooks took the cat back into her room, it fought to get away. She put the cat on the bed and it arched its back and took a swipe at the middle of the bed before diving off the bed and running out the door.

Brooks slept on the couch for three days until her cat felt comfortable in her room again.

“I have lived in older, ‘creepier’ houses than that one,” Brooks said, “but I have never since felt that irrational, unexplainable, unshakable fear.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Man Who Never Feels Cold

2010-10-12T10:37:00.000-05:00

The town of Lawson, Mo., sat under thunderclouds on July 26, 1969, when Harold Deal, then 31, worked in a house as an electrical contractor.

Deal’s son Larry, 10, shook at every thunderclap.

“My son begged me, ‘Daddy, let’s go home,’” Deal said. “I did.”

Rain pounded the windshield of Deal’s truck as he drove to his home nearby.

“When I was about a block and a half from the house, I happened to look at my watch,” Deal said. “It was 9:12 in the evening.”

Most of the next six hours were impossible to remember.

Deal pulled his truck into his driveway and parked. He sent Larry to the front door to make sure it was open before grabbing some important papers and stepping out of the truck. Then the night exploded in light.

“Between the third and fourth step I felt like I was (riding) something real fast,” he said. “It felt like my head was being sucked down between my shoulder blades.”

Lightning had struck Deal, knocking him out of his work boots and slamming him to the ground.

“I felt like a pincushion was inside of me,” he said. “And I could not see.”

When Deal’s sight and senses returned it was 4:20 a.m.

For the next month Deal couldn’t walk, and every movement sent stabs of pain throughout his body. To relieve the pain, he underwent back surgery at St. Mary’s Hospital in Kansas City.

“They ended up taking two vertebrae out of my back,” Deal said. “I was about five feet, eight and a quarter inches and I ended up after surgery two and a quarter inches shorter.”

After surgery, the pain was gone, but doctors told him he would never walk again. Deal did walk, but the lightning strike left Deal with a strange ability – he’s impervious to cold.

“The way this lightning has left me, I never get cold,” Deal said. “I’ve been out in seventy-two below zero temperature (in Hell, Michigan). I don’t wear a jacket. I don’t wear long sleeves, I don’t wear long pants.”

Dr. Mary Ann Cooper of the Lightning Injury Research Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said lightning strikes could affect the body this way, but it’s unpredictable.

“Most doctors tell me it’s impossible,” Deal said. “It’s medically impossible.”

But it’s still true.

News photographers have shot Deal sitting in a bathtub of ice and bathing in a snowdrift. He stood in only a pair of shorts for four hours at minus 70 degrees for a television news program in Hell, Michigan. Heat bothers him, but pain, taste and the sensation of cold are gone.

While recovering from lightning strike, Deal has also dealt with emotional trauma. His first wife divorced him a few years after the strike and his friends seemed to disappear. He contemplated suicide in 1991 – but something happened to stop him.

“I was tired of living,” he said. “I was just through with it.”

That’s when Deal said God spoke to him.

“He said, ‘Harold, you feel you have to explain you’re the way you are,’” Deal said. “He said, ‘remember, there’s two types of people out there. There’s gossipers and there’s sincere people. The sincere ones will ask you questions. The gossipers don’t want the truth; they’ve got their mind made up. I don’t know how to explain it. I just felt it.”

After that experience, Deal has not only accepted what happened to him after the lightning strike, he’s used his experience to help others.

“I feel my life today is so much richer so much fuller,” he said. “The Lord has shown me how to appreciate life. I don’t take it for granted anymore.”

This lead Deal to the group Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors International, where he councils people who have also been struck by lightning.

“I call into seven or eight states a week when I hear someone has been struck by lightning or electricity,” he said. “I talk to them to give them psychologically what to expect.”

Deal’s life isn’t really about his life, or his inability to feel cold. It’s about how he can help others.

“It’s not what Harold Deal has done, it’s what the Lord has done through Harold Deal,” he said. “I can’t explain it. All I can do is share it.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Missouri Men In Black? – Part Two

2010-10-05T10:07:00.001-05:00

Author’s notes: 1) This is the last in a short series on encounters with strange men in Missouri. 2) Witness Lynn Graves has provided me with a picture of one of these strange men, however, since the man is identifiable, I cannot publish the picture.

Lynn Graves saw the first strange man in Jefferson City. Thin, mechanical, and mumbling to the point of buzzing, the man followed Graves through a department store and a bookstore on two separate occasions.

Since those encounters, different men – although with the same robotic, soulless mannerisms – have followed her to work in the Lake of the Ozarks.

“I really think these guys are taking interest in me. These men I believe are non-human people of some sorts,” she said. “I know that they know I'm noticing them and talking about them to certain people.”

About three weeks after she first encountered the odd person with a false male voice, she heard that voice at work – 45 miles away.

“I was working on a day that was kinda busy,” she said. “I heard that same deep low voice that came from the man in Target, but from a different man.”

She looked and saw a fellow employee talking about the hotel with a thin man wearing a beige, button-up shirt and sunglasses. The man shortly left, but he would be back.

“A couple weeks after that I saw him again,” she said. “He asked me about rates. He was very weird the way he spoke and behaved.”

Graves started to tell the man the hotel rates when he interrupted her.

“Oh well,” the man said. “We got some place to stay down the road.”

Then he turned and walked away.

“The way he talked and moved reminded me of the guy in the first ‘Men In Black’ movie,” Graves said. The ‘guy’ in the movie was an alien who behaved robotically. “That’s what these guys would remind you of.”

The movie, “Men in Black” (1997) was loosely based on a character in ufology that resembles the men Graves reports.

When the man walked away, although still in the lobby, two fellow employees approached Graves and asked about the “weird guy.”

“I acted like I didn't suspect anything,” Graves said. “I just agreed that he was very strange.”

The man looked around the hotel’s gift shop before taking a decade-out-of-date cell phone from his pocket and pretended to have a conversation.

“He walked outside around the corner of the building where the parking lot is,” Graves said. “I watched and watched to see what car pulled out, but I didn't see anything.”

Later that night, a hotel guest complained his iPod had been stolen from his locked vehicle, but Graves didn’t think much about it until later.

About a week later, a boat explosion seriously injured a family at a dock near the hotel. Later that day, she saw two of these strange men.

“These guys were a little thinner but also wore sunglasses,” she said. “One of them was dressed like an obvious tourist. I think they try too hard to fit in.”

One of the men – who all appear to be between 45 and 55 – walked through the door and approached the front desk.

“He gave me en evil look out of the corner of his eye, but approached the other woman I worked with and asked her if we had rooms available,” Graves said. “She said, ‘no, we are full.’”

This seemed to be what the man wanted to hear and walked out.

“This guy was like, OK, and just walked off,” Graves said. “My lady friend that I work with made a comment that he was very, very strange.”

Later in the evening, she saw the second man walking back and forth from the hall to the lobby. The man also held an older-model cell phone to his ear, but didn’t speak.

“He looked at me out of the corner of his eye,” Graves said. “That guy gave me such a bad feeling of dread. The feeling I get from them paralyzes me.”

During Labor Day weekend, 2010, another boating accident near the hotel killed a young woman. Soon after, another of Graves’ strange men appeared.

“There were some young guests in the hotel that came up to me concerned about a very suspicious man down on one of the floors that was in shorts, a T-shirt and sunglasses,” Graves said. “Indoors in the evening? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was one of my guys.”

She called security on the radio and asked them to look for the man. Security couldn’t find him. Days later, one of these men showed up again.

“We had a group of business people in house,” Graves said. “I was standing at the front desk on a computer (when) all the sudden out of nowhere there was a guy standing by the fireplace on a cell phone, but not talking.”

The man wore layers of clothing and did not fit in with the hotel crowd. Graves reached to the desk and grabbed her camera, but when she turned back he had vanished.

“I was gone for no more than six seconds and when I came back he was not anywhere,” she said. “He was not standing by a door or hallway to where he could have escaped my view.”

Minutes later, a cab pulled up to the hotel, the cab driver steps out of the car and “falls flat on his butt.”

“These men I've seen are not guests at the hotel. They seem to only stick around for a short while,” Graves said. “Every time I see one of these guys at the hotel something bad, big or small, happens.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Missouri Men In Black?

2010-09-29T18:40:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on strange encounters in Missouri.

The man in the Jefferson City, Mo., Target seemed out of place. As Lynn Graves walked to the checkout line, she saw the man, dressed in an out-of-date business suit and thin-framed sunglasses, quickly approach her.

“I saw him walking in like he was really on a mission,” Graves said. “I was checking out and he comes up right behind me with one item.”

The man stood close enough to Graves to make her uncomfortable and began to mumble, although Graves couldn’t understand what he said. She purchased her items and stepped forward.

“After I paid I was still fumbling with my money while he was paying for his,” she said. “He told the lady, ‘Thank you’ in a very deep voice. It sounded like me when I try to make myself sound like a man. So it was kind of a fake voice.”

Graves’ daughter and a friend were standing a nearby and noticed something odd with the man as well.

“When we got in the car, we waited for him to walk out and he did,” Graves said. “Very straight and with a mission like he did when he walked in.”

The man got into an early 1990s model Crown Victoria and drove away. But the three got a look what the man purchased – adult feminine diapers.

“After we drove off down the road we were talking about how strange that guy was,” Graves said. “I told my daughter and her friend that he reminded me of an MIB.”

Men in Black, first reported in author and UFO researcher Gray Barker’s 1956 book, “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.” are reported as thin men, often exhibiting behavior like they don’t fit in with society. They wear sunglasses, old fashioned black suits or out-of-place clothing, and harass people who have UFO encounters. Some MIBs tell abductees they are government agents, others claim to be aliens, and still others just make their presence known.

Graves thought the man might be a MIB because of a dream.

“I had a very realistic dream only a couple weeks earlier about me, my daughter and one of my friends seeing an alien craft that ended up abducting us,” she said.

Like many who claim alien abduction, Graves can’t remember anything past the initial encounter, and woke up some time later feeling disoriented.

“(Graves’ daughter and friend) kinda took me seriously because he was that weird,” Graves said.

Graves might have brushed off the encounter with the strange mumbling man in Target if she hadn’t seen him again.

“I decided to just go to Jefferson City to Barnes and Noble to look for any book that related to this (MIB) subject,” she said

She took her daughter and two male friends on the trip and, during the drive, told them about the similar men she saw while at work at a Lake of the Ozarks hotel (more of this in Part Two).

"I told them about these men after they told me about a strange call they got on their cell phone from a man with a very low voice that asked if they called his phone,” Graves said. “I got a cold chill when they told me this, because I got a call similar to that at work on our work line. And the voice just cut right through you. It was scary.”

Pulling into the Barnes and Noble parking lot, Graves told her passengers she hoped they saw one of those men – not knowing they would.

“We were in the bookstore for a while looking at all different kinds of books,” she said. “After we all went to the new age section and started looking at the books about the government, aliens, and such, the same guy that I saw in Target comes up and starts looking in the same area that we were.”

And the man became intrusive.

“It’s like he kept buzzing around us and getting in our way,” she said. “He was doing that mumbling thing again, and I still couldn't make out words. I turned around to one of my friends and mouthed to him ‘that was one of those guys.’”

The thin, mumbling man never looked at Graves or her companions, but Graves felt he was monitoring them. Graves said the mumbling began to sound like a bee’s buzz as the man looked at books about 2012 prophecies.

“We all walked to the front of the store, I watched him over the shelves,” she said. “My daughter took a picture and a video of him. He was wearing the same sunglasses, and kinda dressed the same.”

The man also carried a cell phone, noticeably older than cell phones used today.

“We saw him walk straight over to the corner of the store and sit with a book across from a lady,” Graves said.

When Graves glanced back, the man was gone.

What did Graves see? A man simply out-of-tune with society, or do MIBs monitor her after an alien encounter that may not have been a dream?

“I want someone out there to know about these men I've been seeing lately,” Graves said. “The first ones I noticed in public, and the rest have been showing up at my job. These men I believe are non-human people of some sorts. The weird thing is I really think these guys are taking an interest in me.”

Next week: Encounters at work.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Night of the Howler

2010-09-23T10:47:00.000-05:00

Lightning flashes filled the bedroom, followed seconds later by booming thunder, rousing 10-year-old Dave Barsalow from sleep. The autumn storm rolling through New York State’s Hudson Valley engulfed the 100-year-old farmhouse, a strong, moaning wind piercing the night.

As Barsalow lie in his bed on the first floor, his parents and sister asleep upstairs, he realized something was outside his window.

“With the wind there came this other sound,” Barsalow said. “It made goosebumps race over my body. It was an ungodly howling. A wailing that didn’t, couldn’t have come from human lips. No animal I knew could wail like that.”

This noise, from what Barsalow later called “the Howler,” came from outside his first-floor bedroom window. His parents and sister slept in bedrooms upstairs.

“I was terrified,” Barsalow said. “I jumped out of bed and raced to my grandmother’s bedroom.”

When Barsalow reached her first-floor room, his grandmother was sitting up in bed. He climbed in next to her and pulled the covers tight.

“What is that, Grandma?” he asked.

Barsalow’s grandmother assured him the noise was just the wind.

“I knew it wasn’t the wind,” he said. “And I knew she knew it wasn’t the wind.”

The wailing came around the house, its scream sounding even closer.

“It had to be right on the front porch, right outside Grandma’s window,” Barsalow said. “Grandma put an arm around me and held me tight. The howling was right outside her window now, just a few feet away from us. I buried my face in her shoulder.”

Eventually the sound moved away, merging with the storm that worked its way down the valley. Barsalow finally dropped into sleep. When he woke, sunlight streaming through the window, his grandmother was already up.

“I climbed out of bed and peeked out the window,” he said. “I saw her outside already with a mop and a bucket, cleaning the porch floor.”

Barsalow ran to the front door and stepped outside.

“From there I could see what my grandma was cleaning,” he said. “There were muddy footprints all over the floor.”

The muddy footprints were small – like those of a toddler.

“They were little, tiny footprints,” Barsalow said. “I got goosebumps again. I asked Grandma what made the footprints. She didn’t answer and she kept cleaning.”

Barsalow’s nine-year-old sister walked from the house and onto the porch. She saw her grandmother erasing the tiny prints.

“She saw the footprints, too,” Barsalow said. “Thirty years later when I was telling my wife this story, my sister was able to confirm seeing those tiny footprints.”

However, Barsalow’s sister didn’t hear the Howler in the storm. Barsalow hasn’t heard that howl since, but two years after the first encounter, he saw the footprints again.

“It was a bright, clear morning after a nor’easter had dropped close to two feet of snow on us,” he said. “I was out walking around the yard, thigh deep in the fresh, cold powder. I noticed something odd. There was a set of footprints in the new fallen snow.”

The footprints surprised Barsalow. They were tiny – like the footprints of a child. There were no other marks in the fresh snow.

“This was the morning after a major winter storm,” he said. “There was little or no chance that anyone would have been out roaming in the snow-filled blackness of the previous night.”

The tracks came across an open field, through Barsalow’s yard and into the woods.

“I got a chill when I got close to the footprints because I realized that they were small, like a toddler’s feet,” he said. “I knew those tracks. They were the same ones that were on the porch on the morning of the visit of the Howler.”

Barsalow followed the tracks down the hill.

“There I stopped dead and my heart jumped into my throat,” he said. “At the bottom of a small rise the tracks seemed to split. The left foot went in one direction and right in another. That scared me just looking at it. The tracks, each foot on its own path, disappeared into the woods.”

Barsalow just stood in the woods dazed, looking at the tiny footprints.

“I tried to puzzle out what I was looking at,” Barsalow said. “I was 12 at the time, not a small child. I could think. And I couldn’t find an explanation for what I was seeing. Soon enough, I ran back to the house and went inside. I never mentioned the tracks to anyone. They scared me too much.”

Although Barsalow hasn’t seen similar footprints since, knowing the Mohegan, Pequot, Mohawk and Iroquois tribes that lived in and around the property all had legends of little people – some of which were tricksters associated with storms – makes some sense to him.

“Both times I encountered those small footprints it was the morning after a major storm. One in winter and one in summer. Coincidence?” he said. “I never did ask my grandmother about the Howler again. I think part of me was afraid to know what it really was outside the window that night.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Flying Thing

2010-09-16T13:52:00.001-05:00

The summer afternoon beckoned Wade M. to stop in Del Mar, Calif., on his way home from San Diego to San Marcos. He stopped at the beach and spent the rest of that June day surf fishing.

He got home after dark, around 9 p.m.

“I relaxed, had a beer or two and went to my covered drive to clean my catch,” Wade said. “I completed that task and looked to the north at the rocky mountainside in the near distance.”

He didn’t expect to see what was there.

“Above my neighbor’s homes across the street something was shimmering and moving rapidly side to side in a space of maybe 60’ at 20’ altitude,” Wade said. “I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me from the time earlier in the day when I spent time on the beach in the bright afternoon sun. I was wrong.”

Wade saw two shimmering, nearly transparent parallel lines about three-feet wide in the air moving silently and quickly side to side in the faint glow of a streetlight.

“It was just wings and eyes,” he said. “The wings didn’t flap like a birds, it was more like a dragonfly, but dragonflies don’t grow three-foot wingspans, fly at night, or display what seemed to be some kind of intelligence like this thing did.”

The entity’s side-to-side movements encompassed about 60 feet in what Wade estimated was only a few seconds. When the thing noticed Wade had seen it, it stopped in the air across.

“Whatever it was, it halted its side-to-side movement and seemed to focus on me,” he said.

As Wade stared at the creature, he realized it was aware of him, too. Fear gripped Wade and he felt his hair rise from his scalp to his ankles.

“I was sure it was a real thing, then I noticed the thing had big black eyes,” he said. “It sounds silly but it actually looked like the stack of money with eyes in the Geico insurance commercials that have run on TV recently. But they weren’t friendly eyes at all.”

Then the thing quickly shot across the street toward Wade. He dropped and it swooped over his head.

“The thing was interested in me,” Wade said. “It was staring me down when it was across the street and either attacked or was trying to intimidate me, or who knows what, when it came at me.”

Wade moved from under the covered part of his drive to get a better look at the swooping thing. It was directly above his head.

“I felt great fear,” Wade said. “I said to the thing out loud,’ I see you.’”

It moved again.

“It zipped back into view from the direction it had gone, and was looking directly down at me with the weird unblinking eyes,” he said. “It realized I was looking right at it, and it took off in a flash.”

The next day, Wade asked neighbors about the entity.

“I talked to the lady across the street,” he said. “I told her what happened. She didn’t see anything, but told me of an encounter she had in a grove with something similar.”

A week later, Wade saw it again.

“It may have been at my bedroom window in the night,” Wade said. “But it’s gone. This time for good, I hope.”

Author’s note: Do you know what Wade saw? Let me know at from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Fight for a Man’s Soul

2010-09-06T18:36:00.001-05:00

Bob Higgins went for a rebound in a Mormon Church gym when someone cut out his legs and he fell to the court, his head bouncing off the hard wood floor.

“I suffered an extremely hard concussion and lived,” Higgins said.

Higgins, a Catholic, had twisted his ankle playing in that gym before, and after his teammates dismissed his injury, he vowed to God he’d never play there again. But he did – and as Higgins lie on the floor unconscious, he felt his spirit leave his body.

“I was out and floated up through the hoop looking down at myself as my teammates carried me off,” he said.

Higgins said he could see a clear silver strand connecting his spirit self to his physical body as his teammates moved his body onto a stage adjacent to the court. Then they left his body there and resumed the game. His spirit self stood, watching the game until he saw people approaching.

“A group of what I think were angels began walking my way,” he said. “Then out of the group a small man came having been directed by a taller bearded man from a group of robed men.”

This small man reached out to Higgins and carried him up a tunnel of light.

“We arrived at a large glass-like temple with black and gold flakes in the shiny floor, mostly black,” he said. “The purple curtains were very tall all around.”

Higgins’ guide took him up steps to a throne holding a bearded man.

“He had dark black hair and bore scars on his hands and feet and face,” Higgins said. “I am sure it was Jesus. He looked like a biker, not menacing but authoritative and in control.”

This man Higgins believed to be Jesus wore sandals of gold and jewels. He looked at Higgins, then, unsmiling, gave commands to the small man who had brought him there.

“I felt kind of ashamed to be there because I really didn't want to be there,” Higgins said. “I knew he knew all about me, but it went so quickly and I felt like it as a blur and I really had no control of myself at this point. I could think and see, but I didn't breath or feel anything; I was just an it.”

The man on the throne gestured to a person Higgins felt was an angel. The angel took Higgins by the arm and led back to the tunnel. Higgins didn’t like what waited for him back in the gym.

“We descended swiftly and I found myself sitting up still out of my body and I saw around me large men in bright robes; large blonde men with backsides like ‘he men,’” Higgins said. “Very big guys fighting with fierce looking scraggly men trying to reach around savagely at me with long nails; dirty desperate looking men who I could barely make out in the darkness.”

These unkempt men in rags fought with Higgins’ angels, trying to grab Higgins, then one angel touched Higgins and he woke.

“Whoa, I had a headache,” Higgins said. “I had to be carried back to my apartment with a concussion and off work for a week.”

Higgins believes his experience has to do with breaking his promise to God.

“I think I let the devil in,” he said. “I had not kept my vow not to play ball with the Mormons because I had been hurt before playing ball with them and they just left me there. Mormons aren’t bad, it was just a failure on my part to keep my vow.”

Something happened to Higgins after his concussion – something that lets him see future horrors.

“I got warnings of attacks in my sleep about terrorists, through the first Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing,” he said.

His most terrifying premonition was on Sept. 10, 2001.

“A spirit tried to wake me the night before 9-11 and told me, ‘Wake up young man, your nation is under attack,’” Higgins said. “I asked in my sleep, ‘Where? Where? By whom?”

The spirit told him Washington, D.C., and New York.

“I was so disturbed to see rubble and smoke as if I was propelled in time to the scene,” Higgins said. “I was choking.”

Higgins kicked in his sleep and woke his wife who asked what was wrong.

“I told her what the spirit said to me and she remembered it later that morning and was astonished,” he said. “I was sorely confused. I thought about it all morning and I couldn't decide what I should do.”

He realized there was nothing he could do.

“I felt bad knowing this and not doing anything to this day,” Higgins said. “Watching in horror as the planes hit the second time then people jumping to their deaths.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Something in the Basement

2010-08-30T09:42:00.000-05:00

Tommie Martin’s family moved into a green house with a big yard in Taylorsville, Utah, when he was five years old.

“My parents were really excited because this was the first house that they actually owned,” Martin, now 20, said. “When we moved in, there were five of us. I was the oldest, my sister was three, and my brother was one. A year later my youngest sister was born.”

The upstairs held the kitchen, living room and his parent’s bedroom. The children slept downstairs in the basement – and none of them liked being there.

“There was something very, very evil about that basement and all of us kids could feel it,” Martin said. “None of us knew what is was that made it feel that way, but we did not like to be downstairs at any time, but especially at night.”

Martin and his siblings felt so uncomfortable in their rooms, they slept upstairs whenever their parents would let them.

“We would sleep in the living room instead of our own rooms,” Martin said. “That is how much we hated it down there.”

It took a few years, but Martin finally discovered why he and his siblings were scared.

“One night, I found myself awaking on the floor of my room,” he said. “I don’t know how I got there, but that was the least of my concerns. As I focused on the room around me I found a dark figure in front of me.”

Martin couldn’t make out the features of this figure; it was simply the black shadow of a man looming in front of him.

“I have never felt such an evil feeling before in my life, or after for that matter,” Martin said. “I was unable to move, to speak, or do anything, but cry in my head for my parents to come save me, which didn’t happen.”

Martin switched his inward cries for his parents into prayers to God, then he blacked out.

“I don’t know what happened after that,” he said. “I just woke up the next morning not even sure that it really happened.”

Martin found in the ever-darkening nights while his family lived there, that this shadow man left its mark on his room.

“The evil feeling the spirit released in my room never went away,” Martin said.

Martin’s family stayed in that house five more years before moving to a house in South Jordan, Utah. After the move, Martin and his sibling’s fear of the dark faded away.

“One thing I always wondered was why I had that experience at that house and nobody else had,” he said. “I shared a room with my little brother, and he never knew anything happened.”

But sometime after Martin turned 18 and started talking with his siblings, he found just how much that house terrified them.

“I talked to my brother and sisters and about that house,” he said. “Even my little sister, who was only three or so when we moved, said that she had not liked being in that basement."

His oldest sister later told him she hated the entire house – especially the downstairs bathroom.

“She was so scared at night to leave her room, that she wet her pants for years instead of using the bathroom,” he said. “She told me that of all the places in the downstairs of that house, that bathroom had always scared her the most.”

Although that house is long gone from Martin’s life, its mark will never leave.

“Looking back, my mind felt clouded, almost like it wasn’t functioning right, for the time that I lived at that house, when I moved, that clouded sensation in my mind went away,” he said. “This was my first encounter with a spirit of some kind, and to be honest, I really wish it hadn’t happened. I hope I never see another spirit for as long as I live, but I have a feeling that isn’t going to happen.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Black-Eyed Kids in Ohio

2010-08-22T10:59:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is a story about a man’s encounter with Black-Eyed Kids. “Noetic” is not his name; he asked for anonymity.

Although Noetic saw the teens as he stepped outside the Ohio data center where he worked, he wasn’t ready for what happened.

“It freaked me out,” Noetic said.

Noetic works as the weekend computer engineer from 11:30 p.m. to noon. While he works, he’s in the building alone, but has never felt uncomfortable until the weekend of July 31, 2010.

“Our building is pretty secure,” he said. “I have a camera display of our parking lot, both front and back, as well as the front doors and back which is all displayed on one of my monitors.”

However, he was outside when he saw the teens.

“There is a bar and a small plaza directly to the right of our building, and a small apartment complex across the street,” he said. “So it is not out of character to see someone walking through our lot going to the bar, or crossing the street to get to the apartments.”

But it was 5 a.m. As he stood outside the building and lit a cigarette, the smoke curling into the morning sky, he saw two teens around 14 to 16 years old standing in the parking lot of the plaza; the boys immediately frightened him.

“I had a bit of a unnerving feeling from them because from the moment I walked out from of the building all they appeared to do was stare me down,” he said. “I am sure this is a bit normal, five in the morning and a guy suddenly coming out of a quiet, empty building, perhaps I scared them a bit.”

Noetic stood at the door, smoking his cigarette, birds beginning to sing as the light of dawn grew around him.

“I smoked my cigarette while keeping a eye on them,” Noetic said. “I finished up and went back into the (building).”

Ten minutes later the intercom buzzed.

“I look over to the monitor and it's these two kids,” he said.

Noetic hit the intercom button and asked them what they wanted. One of the boys looked into the camera and beaconed Noetic to come to the front door.

“I hit the talk button and tell them I am busy I don't have time for games, they need to leave the property,” Noetic said. “Instead they just sort of hang on right in front of the door.”

Noetic tries to ignore the boys staring at him from the TV monitor, but he can’t. He goes to the lobby and looked at the boys through the front glass; the type of glass where people in the lobby can see out, but people outside can’t see in.

The boys were dressed like normal teens; shorts, dark hoodies, and tennis shoes.

“The one thing that set these kids apart from other kids, they had deep, completely black eyes,” he said. “This really set me back. I felt like as if they actually were able to see me.”

Noetic pushed open the lobby door, ready to tell the boys to leave or he would call the police. He never got the chance.

“One kid looked at me and said almost instantly, ‘That will not be necessary sir, we simply need to use your phone, can you let us in?’” Noetic said. “I do not let anyone in.”

When Noetic told the black-eyed teens to leave, they didn’t behave like normal teens.

“The one talking to me didn't like that one bit and went on to tell me, ‘No, you’re going to invite us in,’” Noetic said. “By this time, the other kid is just giving me this weird twisted little grin. Something was off. I almost instantly felt this. ‘Threatened’ is the best word I can use.”

The black-eyed teens stood their ground, waiting for Noetic to invite them in.

“I have never been at a loss for words, but at this point I actually was maybe even a bit taken by the kid’s bluntness,” he said.

Noetic again tells the boys he will call the police, pulls his cell phone from his pocket and closes the lobby door. He walks back to his desk and watches them on the monitors.

“The one ended up going to the back door and just stood there staring at the camera in the back while the other, who was talking to me, stared at the camera in the front,” Noetic said.

By this time it’s near 6 a.m. Noetic hit the intercom button and told them the police are on their way.

“He just smiles and tells me, ‘I need to use the phone, let us in,’” Noetic said.

Then the boys moved. They met behind the building and stepped into a blind spot in the security system, a spot from which there is no exit. They had disappeared from Noetic’s monitor.

“If you go in this blind spot, there is nowhere to go. You have to end up back on camera again,” Noetic said. “If they would have jumped the fence, I would have seen them on camera. I saw nothing.”

Noetic didn’t move from that spot until the police arrived. He sent the officers around to the blind spot, but the boys were gone.

“The few things that still stand out in my mind is those freaking eyes, how he talked and carried himself as well as just that weird, weird feeling,” Noetic said. “I best quoted from the movie The Crow, at the time talking to that kid, ‘I felt like a little worm on a big (expletive) hook.’”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Voice in the Night

2010-08-15T08:08:00.001-05:00

Donna Letzig walked through her house, a house her family had lived in for 17 years, and checked on her daughters before she retired for the night.

Her daughters, who shared a room, lie in their beds watching television, both ready to drop into sleep. Satisfied her family was safe for the evening, Letzig went to bed herself and cuddled next to her husband preparing for the 30 minutes to a hour it took her to fall into sleep.

But a few minutes after she rested her head on the pillow, Letzig noticed something was wrong.

“I was lying next to my husband on my side with my back to him. Our legs were touching,” she said. “I was still wide awake, but getting comfortable and relaxed. After about 10 minutes I felt a strange sensation by my legs.”

Startled, Letzig tried to pass off the feeling as her husband moving his legs.

“I laid there and as the shock of that started to wear off it happened again,” she said. “This time, I realized (my husband’s) legs are touching me, and they are not moving.”

Letzig felt something like a cat walking on top of the blankets. The Letzigs had a dog, but they didn’t have a cat. And whatever walked on the blankets wasn’t a dog.

“At this point I am terrified,” Letzig said. “I have my eyes squeezed shut as tight as possible. There was no way I wanted to look and see what was touching me. I was frozen in that position.”

Then came the call for help.

“Suddenly the movement stopped and directly in my ear I heard my older daughter’s voice shout, ‘Mom,’” Letzig said.

Despite the movement of something unseen on her bed, at the sound of her daughter’s voice Letzig bolted from bed and ran out of her bedroom door, through the dining room and almost tripped over their dog.

“He never lays in (the dining room),” Letzig said. “He sleeps in a dog bed in our room.”

Avoiding the dog and running down the hall, Letzig reached her daughters’ room. Her youngest daughter was asleep and her oldest daughter lay in bed watching TV, barely awake.

Everything looked fine.

“She (her oldest daughter) looked at me and muttered, ‘what’s up?’” Letzig said. “I said, ‘Did you call me just now?’”

Her oldest daughter looked at her in a sleep-induced haze.

“No,” she said grumpily. “I was almost asleep.”

Letzig went back to her bedroom, but she didn’t fall asleep for quite a while. She was so frightened by her daughter’s disembodied voice she left the bedroom light on.

“The thing that scared me the most was that whatever it was, it mimicked my daughter’s voice so well,” Letzig said. “Why? I have no idea. It wanted me out of bed, that was for certain, but for what reason, I will never know. It also scared my dog, which is another odd thing.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Terror of Black-Eyed People

2010-08-09T08:26:00.001-05:00

The killer stared down nine-year-old Jordan Williams seconds after he shot his 10th victim. It’s something that’s been burned into the young Williams memory forever.

Cabbie Derrick Bird, who’d terrorized Cumbria, UK, drove by Williams and his mother in the small resort town of Seascale, when Bird pulled alongside 64-year-old cyclist Michael Pike, leveled a hunting rifle out the window of his cab and fired. Bird was less than six feet away from Williams as the shot tore through Pike.

“There was blood everywhere,” Williams told the UK’s Daily Record on June 4, 2010. “It was horrible.”

As the cabbie drove slowly by, staring at Williams, the boy noticed something odd about the man – something unnatural.

“The crazy driver stared me in the eyes, and my mum,” Williams said. “He looked a bit mad. He had his eyes like a hawk staring at something. His eyes were black.”

Dead black.

“We were like that for seven seconds but it felt a lot longer,” Williams said. “I didn’t run. I don’t know why.”

Bird killed two more people before turning the gun on himself.

Stories of Black-Eyed People – whose eyes are voids with no iris, no whites – are always threatening and always terrifying. However, these stories are usually not reported in the mainstream press, unlike this story of the cabbie in the Daily Record.

What are these human-like beings whose eye sockets reflect nothing but darkness? Monsters? Extraterrestrials? Something more sinister? Most people who see them don’t want to find out. Susan from New Orleans is one of these people.

As Susan stepped through the doorway of a grocery store in 2004, a man in his late 20s or early 30s dressed in an old-fashioned black suit stepped past her. She immediately knew something was wrong.

“This all happened in a second’s time,” Susan said. “As my head raised up my eyes made a direct contact with a man coming out of the store going the opposite way. There were no eyes, just deep black holes of space. A total void where sockets and eyes should be.”

The man was not blind. He walked confidently and directly.

“Oh man, did my radar go off,” Susan said. “My inner voice told me to get the hell away so I hurried my steps into the grocery store.”

Inside the store she looked to see if anyone else reacted to the black-eyed man, but everyone seemed normal.

“For many years now I have tried to put this behind me, only discussing this with my husband,” Susan said. “I didn’t want to give much credence to this being because this was the most profound evilness I have ever experienced. It was too terrifying for me to think about.”

That terror has also visited Stephen Dawson of Manchester, UK.

Dawson moved from his mother’s place into his own flat in the mid-1990s. The flat was the bottom floor of a converted house owned by his mother’s boyfriend.

“Which meant no deposit, which was a bonus,” Dawson said. “I have always been very independent and finally having the opportunity to have my own space and freedom kind of went to my head as I settled in for the first night there.”

Dawson sat reading in bed, the doors to the front room closed and the sound of urban traffic playing in the background, when he felt something wrong.

“Without warning, I began sensing someone at the bottom of my bed,” he said. “I gently placed my book down and looked directly in front of me. I could see nothing and the more I looked at the emptiness the more intense the feeling got.”

As Dawson turned back to his book, he realized all he could hear was his heartbeat. No horns, no music from passing cars, nothing.

“I was no more then a couple of sentences into (the book) when the temperature dropped considerably followed by a feeling of dread and almost terror,” Dawson said. “I was frozen with fear for what seemed like hours but in reality was probably only seconds.”

When Dawson dragged his eyes from the book and focused on the end of his bed, he saw the bedroom doors slowly open.

“I don’t mind saying it was squeaky bum time for me, but try as I did I couldn’t help but look,” Dawson said. “The doors continued to slowly open, but instead of seeing my front room all I could see was total darkness.”

Then he saw the girl. A pale girl dressed in black stood at the end of his bed.

“I was transfixed on her face watching as her mouth opened and shut but with no sound coming from it,” Dawson said. “It was then I was drawn upwards to what was by far the most terrifying part of the night.”

He looked into her eyes and saw nothing but darkness.

“It wasn’t an impression of darkness, but was literally darkness,” Dawson said. “No pupils, no whites of the eyes, nothing just a blackness.”

As Dawson looked into that blackness, he felt those dark voids pull him toward sleep.

“It took one hell of an effort to break myself away from it,” he said. “As I did I shut my eyes and kept it that way till I felt (the entity) dissipate and then go.”

When the feeling of oppression left his bedroom and the noise of urban life began seeping back into the night, Dawson opened his eyes and the black-eyed girl was gone.

“I didn’t get any sleep on that first night,” he said. “I stayed there for just over a year and in all that time I never saw the girl again but was aware of the same presence. Years later I went back to show a new tenant around (which) was followed by the return of the same feeling of dread and heaviness of the atmosphere. I decided to bravely wait outside.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Terror in the Shopping Mall – Part Two

2010-07-30T10:44:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is the second of a two-part story of Susan Smith’s experiences managing a haunted store.
Ten boxes sat on the storeroom floor as store manager Susan Smith sorted through them.

Another employee helped a customer at the cash register in front of the store, behind a shut door and out of earshot of Smith. These were the only people in Smith’s store, but that didn’t mean she was alone in the storeroom.

“I stopped to use the restroom, which was also in the storeroom,” she said. ”I heard nothing while I was inside but as soon as I tried to leave, I found that the door wouldn’t open.”

She pushed firmly on the door several times, but it wouldn’t move.

“Finally, I pushed again with full strength and got the door to open part way,” she said.

When Smith squeezed out, she found the shipment boxes stacked against the door.

“I ran out to ask my co-worker if anyone had been in there and she replied that no one had. She had been helping the only customer at the register for awhile and no one else had come into the store.”

Terrified, Smith slowly retreated to the storeroom and quietly said into the empty room, “If anything is in here that has a problem with me, please know that this is my job and I have to be here. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t trap, bully or frighten me ever again.”

Her plea only incited whatever stalked her store.

“From this point on, which was about a year after I had started, it was like a circus in that store,” she said. ”My employees and I also began to feel the toll of this in our personal lives.”

Smith and two employees in their early 20s began to develop benign tumors and all three were sick with a cold virus that wouldn’t go away.

“Of course these symptoms could just be a coincidence but I have never been sick for as long as I was in that store,” Smith said.

Smith’s assistant manager asked if she could bless the store. Smith agreed and the activity stopped for a few weeks.

“When they started up again, it was different,” Smith said. “The voices were louder, the storeroom more menacing than before and two of my employees even reported seeing a man, who we named ‘Harry.’”

Although Smith never saw “Harry,” employees reported seeing a man in a suit browsing through merchandise and when they approached him, he disappeared.

Smith knew it was time to call in an expert. She contacted a local paranormal investigator who worked on high profile cases. The investigator agreed to come by, but she wasn’t what Smith expected.

“From the time she entered the place I was uncomfortable with her and so were my co-workers, both seen and unseen,” Smith said. “I don’t know how else to explain this except that after a year or so of dealing with these ‘presences’ we were all very aware of their mood changes. We could all feel that this woman’s presence was not welcome.”

The investigator said she felt something “dark” in the fitting rooms and storeroom. Smith felt it, too.

“You could literally feel the change in the room,” Smith said. “It was oppressive, kind of like the feeling in the room when a fight is about to start. It was still and vicious. I had never felt it like that before.”

Before the investigator left, she politely asked the entity there to leave.

It didn’t.

Near the end of summer, with everyone in the store preparing for the approaching holiday season, Smith received a personal message.

“One morning I was talking with my assistant manager about the goings-on and she suggested, maybe, that this entity was particularly interested in me,” Smith said. “I looked at her and said, ‘This has nothing to do with me.’”

As the words left her mouth, a 120-pound fixture mounted in the wall flew off its mounts and landed on the floor.

“These things were a pain in the ass to get into the wall, let alone out, and typically required two people and a lot of cussing,” Smith said. “They don’t fall out. We exchanged a look and didn’t have that conversation again.”

Then came the breaking point for Smith. At 7 a.m. one morning in late July, Smith sat at her desk in the storeroom filling out paperwork when she heard the now familiar sound of hangers rustling.

“With a sigh, I got up to check just to make sure no one was in the store,” she said. “Of course, the place was empty.”

But as she returned to her paperwork, she noticed a light in one of the fitting rooms had burned out. As she began to replace the bulb she realized something was in the small room with her.

“I heard the sound of someone sucking in their breath, like an inward gasp,” she said. “This sound was centimeters from my ear. With shaking hands, I replaced the (bulb) and calmly left the fitting room.”

When she stepped out of the room, the door slammed shut behind her with enough force to crack the hinges. Smith ran through the store, past a supply closet where items began raining from shelves onto the floor. She paused only to grab her purse, then bolted out of the store into the nearly empty mall.

“A woman came running from the store next door and asked me what happened,” Smith said. ”She was white-faced. All of the power in her store had just gone out.”

As Smith sat with her back to her store, she saw the woman’s eyes grow large.

“What?” Smith asked her.

“Look,” the woman whispered, pointing behind Smith. Signs firmly affixed atop floor displays in Susan’s store were swaying back and forth.

“I sat in the mall on a bench until my co-worker arrived at 10 a.m.,” she said. ”I told her what happened. We entered the store and examined it for signs of entry. Everything was fine, apart from the broken fitting room door and mess of supplies which had been neatly organized in the closet until that morning.”

Two weeks later Smith quit and never returned to that store.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Terror in the Shopping Mall – Part One

2010-07-24T08:42:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: This is the first of a two-part story of Susan Smith’s experiences managing a haunted store.
The shopping mall in Southern California didn’t look ominous. Built in the late 1970s, it resembled shopping malls scattered throughout the country.

Susan Smith took a job as assistant manager of a retail store there in 2005 and discovered the mall was much different, much darker than what it seemed.

“The incidents around my experience grew worse and more intense over the two years I was in this position,” Smith said. “They started off very innocently and progressively became intelligent, reactionary and ever present.”

Smith worked in the store for six quiet months when store management brought in a new manager and several new employees.

“I began to notice small things, such as hearing the clothing hangers move when the store was empty and the ventilation systems were turned off,” Smith said.

She dismissed these noises as vibrations throughout the building until the noises began to get more distinct.

“I began to hear the sounds of running down the hallway where the dressing rooms were located,” she said. “But found the space to be empty.”

Smith ignored the sounds, not discussing them with coworkers. A month later, the lights started going out.

“The store’s lights (began) burning out two or three times a week,” she said. “I don’t mean one light bulb, I mean at least half of the lights in the ceiling track lighting would burn out on a weekly basis.”

Smith called in the mall’s maintenance people who couldn’t solve the light problem. Neither could electricians or the power company.

“We were not having any surges and no wiring was faulty,” she said. “After nearly eight weeks of this we had the system partially replaced and still had lights burning out.”

Around this time, the manager moved to a different store and Smith was appointed manager, which brought her to the store earlier in the morning.

“I would come into the store around 7 to 7:30 a.m. several days a week to do
administrative tasks,” Smith said. “At this time, the entire mall was closed and usually empty.”

Sitting in the store office, Smith often heard hangers moving and footsteps, but when she investigated the sounds, the air conditioning was off and the store was locked and empty.

“I wasn’t calling this paranormal although I did think it was creepy,” Smith said. “I still had not spoken to any of the staff about it but that soon changed.”

At the monthly staff meeting, everyone confessed to hearing these noises – and more.

“One employee said that she felt as though she was being watched when she was alone,” Smith said. “As the conversation progressed, it began to be very clear to me that something strange was happening in our store.”

As the months unfolded, the hangers, footsteps and burned out lights continued. Then came the voice.

“We all began to hear a very firm voice that was entirely sexless say a few words such as ‘hey,’ ‘excuse me,’ or ‘hi,’” Smith said. “I specifically heard this voice on three occasions after the store had closed and the assistant manager and I were doing paperwork. It was so clear that we both turned at the same time to the source of the voice to see who was there.”

Employees began to notice the store take on different personalities. A “playful” entity with scampering, childlike footsteps would place pens, notebooks and tools in odd places in the front of the store. A cold spot lurked in the back corner, a spot employees and customers alike described as “sad.”

“When I would be working in that area doing stock or merchandising, I would have my eyes well up with tears and not know why,” Smith said. “It could be explained by something natural but I couldn’t figure out what would cause that. Whatever was in that area was miserable, verging on angry.”

Something ripped off signs fixed on the walls so often Smith had the signs removed permanently.

But it was the fitting rooms that bothered employees and customers the most. Fitting room doors would open and shut with no one inside of them, and many people reported feeling someone inside the fitting room with them, watching.

“In the fitting rooms and store room, which were separated by a hallway, the presence was angry. Definitely, positively, completely hateful,” Smith said. ”Customers often said they felt watched and uncomfortable. I had several customers ask me who had been banging on their door while they were in the fitting room and I could only shrug, as no one had been there.”

Next week: The presence gets physical.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Haunting in Canada

2010-07-17T11:19:00.000-05:00

St. John’s, a small, old city in eastern Canada, is known as “The City of Legends,” and like all old places with legends, this region has a long history of hauntings.

Dean Lundrigan’s first exposure to his region’s haunted history was as a child in a place he, until that time, felt safe – his home.

“The house in which I was raised was one that was built on the foundation of what was once a cemetery and it had a history of supposed hauntings,” he said.

At nine years old, Lundrigan shared a bedroom with his older and younger brothers. His younger brother would often crawl into bed with Lundrigan or their older brother because he was afraid to sleep alone.

“On one particular night, I awoke to what appeared to be my little brother standing at the foot of my bed staring at me as I slept,” Lundrigan said. “I immediately asked him, ‘What are you doing standing at the foot of my bed watching me sleep?’”

The figure at the foot of his bed didn’t respond, so Lundrigan called his little brother by name. The figure stood still, quiet.

“Finally I sat up in my bed only to discover that my younger brother was sound asleep in the other bed with my eldest brother,” Lundrigan said.

Terrified, Lundrigan slammed his eyes shut and when he found the courage to open them again, the boy was gone.

“I did not know if (my little brother) was sleep walking and somehow managed to jump back into the bed without me noticing, or if it was the spirit of a young boy who happened to resemble my brother,” Lundrigan said.

But over the years, Lundrigan has become certain what he saw wasn’t his younger brother.

“This is the very first time that I saw an actual apparition in this particular house but all the years leading up to that moment were as horrifying as that moment itself,” he said. “The house itself just had an exceptionally unnatural feeling to it.”

The next day, Lundrigan told his mother of the visitation and received an ominous warning.

“She told me that if you saw the spirit of someone who was still living, it was a symbol of death,” Lundrigan said.

If this was the case, Lundrigan is certain the death omen didn’t involve his still-living brother. But this wasn’t the last time something strange came looking for him.

“During the summers of my childhood I would spend a lot of time at my grandparent’s home which was located about half an hour away from my house,” he said. “On one occasion there when I was about 17, I was walking up the steps to go to the washroom and I felt the presence of something or someone ahead of me which I assumed was my grandmother.”

But when Lundrigan rounded the corner he saw a black shadowy figure leave one room and enter the bathroom.

“It didn’t strike me right away what this figure could have been because I just felt a presence that I assumed was human and I was in shock,” he said.

Lundrigan looked into the bathroom still expecting to see his grandmother, but the bathroom was empty.

“I knew that this figure I saw had to have been real and not a figment of my imagination because it was no ordinary shadow on the wall,” Lundrigan said. “It was in mid air gliding three dimensionally across the hall.”

The next summer, while Lundrigan slept at his grandparent’s house, he awoke to find something on top of him.

“I couldn’t move even though I was trying so desperately,” he said. “It felt as though I was awake but I could not open my eyes no matter how hard I tried. It felt as though some sort of force was holding me down.”

The force released Lundrigan once he regained control over his eyes and fingers.

“I moved my eyes from left to right while my eye lids were still closed and twitched my fingers back and forth,” he said. “I could not work up the courage to move anything but my fingers and eyes. When about five to 10 minutes passed, I jumped up out of bed, turned on the light and grabbed a Holy Bible that was in a desk drawer, all the while my heart was pounding rapidly.”

Lundrigan had to report to work at a local fast food restaurant at 5 a.m. and it wasn’t close to 5 a.m.

“Let’s just say that I was there a tad early because I was too terrified to stay in that house any longer,” he said.

Although Lundrigan hasn’t had a paranormal experience for a few years, he knows it’s inevitable that something else will happen to him because something strange has always followed him.

“My whole life I have always felt the sensation that I have been under some sort of watch,” Lundrigan said. “I have been constantly looking over my shoulder because I’ve felt an eerie sensation.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Black-Eyed People in Texas, Nebraska

2010-07-08T07:58:00.000-05:00

The early July sun beat on 19-year-old Dallas Adams as he pumped gas into his car at a convenience store in Lucas, Texas.

A man and his son stood at the pump opposite Adams, a woman at her car was behind him. When the gas nozzle clicked Adams placed it back onto the pump and went inside the store. Things were different when he came out.

“There was no line in the gas station,” Adams said. “I bought cigarettes and walked out but when I came out my car was the only one there. I had only been in the gas station for maybe two and a half minutes. As soon as I noticed everyone was gone I felt scared but couldn’t figure out why.”

Then he saw the man standing by his car. As Adams walked by him, he noticed a smell, like the man hadn’t showered in weeks.

“He looked like an average guy but when I looked at him I felt scared like my life was about to end,” Adams said. “I went to my car and looked at him – he was staring at me.”

The man came closer to Adams as he stood at the driver’s side door, walking in long steps.

“I need a ride,” the man said, the force in his voice striking Adams like something physical.

“It scared me to death,” Adams said. “I said, ‘what?’ And he said, ‘give me a ride.”

Then Adams saw what frightened him.

“His eyes were completely black. No whites, no nothing, just black,” Adams said. “When I was talking to this thing I could smell its breath, which was horrible.”

Adams worked up the courage to ask where the Black-Eyed Man wanted to go. The man simply replied, “just give me a ride."

“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ then he took a few steps toward me,” Adams said. “His walk was kinda odd, but stopped as this conversation was happening.”

But what terrified Adams was the man’s eyes.

“I couldn’t take my eyes off of his,” Adams said. “It was like they were sucking me in.”

As Adams stood, watching the strange man with the black eyes approach him, something broke whatever held Adams’ gaze. Adams hopped into his car and sped away.

What did Adams’ see?

“This is really troubling me cause I’ve had dreams about this man every night since the day it happened,” Adams said. “

Black-Eyed People have been in the popular culture since two approached journalist Brian Bethel as he sat in his car in 1998. The encounters are usually the same. Black-Eyed People are usually children to young adults who use language and assertiveness that would seem to be beyond their means. But the most common thread is their eyes; black, without iris or whites, and dead like a Hollywood vampire’s.

What these people may be – aliens, demons, practical jokers – is a matter of debate. However, the reports continue. Like this report from Omaha, Neb.

A little girl, about five years old, brown hair in a ponytail ran around the play area at the Westroads Mall, but Debbie Rife knew something was wrong with the child.

“I saw her eyes and just thought something was weird, different, off about her, so every time she ran past my way I tried to figure out what it was,” Rife said. “Then I realized that there was little to no difference in the shading between her pupil and iris. So of course I kept staring, only not trying to be obvious about staring.”

If there was any white to the girl’s eyes, Rife said it wasn’t noticeable.

And the odd little girl kept following Rife’s seven-year-old son.

“I was waiting for something weird, spooky or crazy to happen like a scene from ‘Carrie’, but really nothing happened,” Rife said. “She followed (her son) around for a little bit and kept saying, ‘Hi, hi, hi,’ and something about she wanted to marry (him). He said she was funny, but also creepy.”

Then there was the screaming girl.

“I didn't hear anyone else notice the child,” Rife said. “The only thing I did notice was that another little girl kept going up to her and doing this scream thing. She did that to her a couple of times until her mom came and told her to stop that and then she didn't bother the (Black-Eyed Kid) again.”

Online poster Thaisa, saw a Black-Eyed Person on a train in early May – and the horror haunts her.

“I have seen one of them and now wherever I go I don’t look into people eyes,” Thaisa said. “You can see something strange, sense something different. I did not feel scared until I saw this person’s big, entirely black eyes, no white inside it.”

As Thaisa watched, this man, who fidgeted on the commuter train, moving nervously from seat to seat, locked eyes with her, and his eyes changed to black within seconds.

“I turned my head immediately from fear,” Thaisa said. “I tried to rationalize this event. I thought I might have had a hallucination in the middle of the day.”

She looked at the man again and he still glared at her. Big, entirely black eyes stared into hers, and a fear like sleep paralysis gripped her.

“This person was sitting just opposite me in the train and was observing me for 35 minutes,” Thaisa said. “Clearly it wanted to make contact but I did not respond.”

The man eventually reached his stop and Thaisa felt like she snapped out of a spell.

“When he left the train I felt such a relief,” she said. “I felt like the biggest disaster was behind me. I was shaking for a couple hours after.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Encounters with Gnomes

2010-06-30T12:51:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: A June 2009 “From The Shadows” installment told the tale of “Tammy” whose family was terrorized by an evil, little gnome-like man on their property near the Tule River in Porterville, Calif. Her case is not as isolated as we may hope.

Dan Bortko’s family moved from Wyandotte County, Kan., to Liberty, Mo., in 1948 when he was about nine months old. His family didn’t know it, but something already lived in the house on High Street.

The house, a stucco bungalow built atop a hill in the 1920s, wasn’t the only structure on that site.

“There was a spring in the basement,” Bortko said. “The site of the spring was the site of a large farm from the 1860s through 1914. Our property was the part of a farmyard at some time.”

A barn still sat outside the two-bedroom house when the Bortkos moved there. In that house in 1952, Bortko saw something that has haunted in his mind since.

“I’ll call him a troll because that’s what he reminded me of,” Bortko said.

Regardless of the name – troll, gnome, dwarf, goblin – these diminutive, human-like earth creatures have littered cultural mythology across the globe. And they are known to approach, and sometimes abduct, children.

Bortko, 4, napped in the same room as his two younger brothers, both in cribs, when something roused him from sleep. As his eyes slid open, he realized he and his baby brothers weren’t alone.

“I had just awakened form a nap and was rubbing my eyes and saw what you would call a troll,” Bortko said. “It was an old man with a long beard, large nose, about three feet tall standing at the foot of my bed. And I was astounded.”

The little old man wore German lederhosen and held a smoking pipe in his hand. As the little old man stood looking at Bortko, he smiled through his beard, winked and disappeared through the closet door.

“The only thing I could mutter was ‘goss,’” Bortko said. “My mother came in and opened the closet door and on the top shelf was a toy rubber goose.”

Bortko knows he didn’t say “goose,” the word “goss” had something to do with his troll.

Although Bortko doesn’t think he saw the little man again, later in life his mother told him he often talked about someone no one else could see.

“As a child my mother said I had an imaginary friend and I called it by its name,” he said. “My mother said it sounded like a science fiction movie name.”

During this time Bortko remembers looking out his bedroom window at night and seeing people near the old barn in the backyard – little people.

“That’s what scared me,” he said. “There were fairy tales pictures on my wall. There was a man on the mountain smoking a pipe. And this reminded me of him.”

As a child, Bortko, now an artist with a master’s degree in photography from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, once tried to capture his little man on paper.

“I remember doing a drawing of a picture of a man’s face with large dark eyes,” he said. “And my brother Bill started crying. Every time he saw it he was out of his wits.”

Maybe Bortko wasn’t the only person in his house who saw the “troll.” He certainly wasn’t the only person of that era who saw it.

David Schwab, 52, grew up in Orange, N.J., and is familiar with tales of a similar entity. His friend Jerry saw one of these “trolls” in the early 1960s.

“I remember Jerry always talking about some kind of troll/elf/leprechaun-type critter with a rather long beard being on his steps,” Schwab said.

Schwab met with Jerry in December 2009 before his friend moved to the Philippines and asked him about the story.

“He said that when he was a kid, he was in his backyard and was startled by a small gnome-like man with a long beard, standing by his back porch,” Schwab said. “He said he had funny clothes on and a pointed hat and all.”

The entity, about two or three feet tall, just stood at the steps, staring at him. This wasn’t the last time the gnome made an appearance at Jerry’s house.

When Jerry was in his 20s, his five-year-old nephew took a nap in a converted bedroom his family called the ‘shower room’ because it had once been a bathroom, a showerhead still jutted from the wall.

“His nephew started crying and ran downstairs,” Schwab said. “He said that he was woken by a small man with a long white beard that stood and looked at him. Now that's weird.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Grandma’s Still Watching

2010-06-17T08:23:00.001-05:00

A noise came from a dark corner in the basement of Bearcat Boogie Dance Studio in Maryville, Mo. A tinny sound, like muffled music from a cheap speaker.

Dance studio owners Dana and Dave Schmidt were in the building working on a garage sale when Dave heard the noise.

“My parents were working at their dance studio and my dad was down in the basement,” Keaton Schmidt said. “We’ve kept some of our old items – household items, some of our old toys – and he hears some soft music and he goes upstairs and talks to my mom. He thought it might be a car driving by.”

The music wasn’t from a passing car. When Dave went back downstairs, he found the noise came from a pile of boxes – boxes of Dana’s mother’s belongings.

“My mom had passed away and a lot of her stuff is in the basement of our dance studio,” Dana said. “I had tried to get my dad to come and get a bunch of stuff out for the garage sale, but he wasn’t ready to go through her stuff.”

Her father came to the studio that day to retrieve something from his late wife’s belongings. He brought his new wife with him.

“He got something and came upstairs with it and my dad just left,” Dana said. “He wasn’t downstairs but five minutes.”

When Dana’s father left, Dave discovered the source of the noise.

“He goes back downstairs and still hears it. In the far corner of the basement he can hear it in one of the boxes,” Keaton said. “What was making the noise was a little toy phone. My grandma gave it to me.”

Dave came upstairs smiling and holding the toy telephone that was still playing.

“He said, ‘it’s probably your mom because your dad was here with his new wife and she’s mad,’” Dana said. “My mom got that for Keaton for his first Christmas. It’s been down there for at least nine years.”

Dave and Dana tried to shut the telephone off by its on/off switch, but the phone wouldn’t stop playing music.

“We opened it with a little tiny screwdriver. The batteries were all corroded,” she said. “We couldn’t get the phone to shut off so we took the phone to Keaton.”

Keaton said the music played for another two hours.

“He has the phone and he thinks it’s neat,” Dana said. “I’ll ask off and on if it still rings. He said yes, not often, but it’s always in the middle of the night.”

One night the telephone started playing on a date that meant something to the Schmidt family.

“Pretty close to the anniversary of her death it woke me up one night playing music,” Keaton said. “It lasted about 10 minutes. It scared the crap out of me. But now it’s pretty nice to think Grandma was trying to tell me something.”

The telephone wasn’t the first or last message from Grandma. Before Grandma’s funeral, Dana’s daughter Bailey said she saw “Nana.”

“She came into my daughter’s bedroom,” Dana said. “Bailey said she’d come to the end of her bed and just stare at her.”

Thinking her daughter, upset by her grandmother’s death, was imagining things, Dana told her to stop talking about it.

“The third night it just made me mad. It was right after she died. We hadn’t buried her,” Dana said. “The fourth night she said, ‘Mom, Nana came into my room and stood at the end of my bed. I sat up in bed and said, Nana, you’re scaring me,’ and she disappeared and she hasn’t seen her since.”

But Dana knows her mother is still watching them.

“When my mom died from cancer she told me she’d send pennies from heaven and I’ve gone out to her grave and there will be pennies there. No one knows about this,” Dana said. “I’ve wiped out my windowsills and there’s been one penny in each sill. It’s always one penny, not two, not a quarter.”

The pennies appear everywhere.

“When my daughter is dancing, she’ll go on stage and get into her pose and there will be a penny on the stage,” Dana said. “I’ll take my pants out of the dryer and there’s a penny in the pocket.”

Although Dana didn’t save these pennies at first, she is now.

“We didn’t think much of it. It was just our imagination,” she said. “But the same thing happens to my brothers. They’ll find one penny on the computer. Or on their pillow. Just random places. Now we keep the pennies.”

However, no one in her family has been able to determine the significance of the dates on the coins.

“We always look at the date to see if they mean anything,” Dana said. “Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.”

But Dana’s sure they’re coming from her mother.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Glowing Eyes in the Darkness; Hoof Prints in the Snow

2010-06-10T08:42:00.000-05:00

Wigwam Brook runs beside a parking lot in Orange, N.J., the shallow water traveling quietly through a world of asphalt and beneath a power station.

David Schwab, 52, grew up on Cleveland Street, across from the brook, and the parking lot that sat alongside Lakeside Avenue. Events from his youth are linked to that brook – dark events.

“I had a recurring dream that something was down in that brook,” Schwab said. “In the dream I arrive home one night with my parents and there is a crowd of people gathered with a spotlight of some kind shining in the water, and a feeling of fear, and what looks like glowing eyes down in the darkness.”

In the early 1970s, Schwab, two close friends – Jerry and John, and three or four friends of theirs he doesn’t remember well, sat outside Schwab’s house one February night when his dream came true.

“It was late winter and there was still some snow on the ground that was starting to melt,” Schwab said. “It was about 10 p.m. and we were just hanging out talking and stuff. It was an overcast night and I noticed something moving in the sky.”

Through the clouds Schwab saw a dark brown spindle-shaped object with a light on each end float just above their neighborhood.

“I pointed it out to the other guys and we all wondered what it was,” Schwab said. “It was darting back and forth in the clouds.”

The boys watched what they were sure was a flying saucer skim over their heads and saw it sink low over the railroad tracks.

“A block from us was the old Erie Lackawanna freight line,” Schwab said. “By this time it was rarely used, and me and my friends used to go walking on the tracks all the time. When a train did come, it moved very slowly. So we decided to go check this thing out.”

The boys grabbed sticks and other objects – Schwab picked up an aluminum tent poll – and walked toward the tracks.

“We were like an angry mob looking for the troll,” Schwab said.

They walked down Lakeside Avenue and up High Street. At this point the tracks ran alongside Wigwam Brook. The backs of buildings lined one side of the tracks, the brook and beyond that back yards lined the other. The boys walked down the railroad tracks, gripping their makeshift clubs, their way guided by the light of a far off street lamp.

“As we were walking we thought we saw this object go back into this area,” Schwab said. “This was a very strange feeling, like it wasn’t happening or something.”

As they walked farther down the tracks, they saw a “disk-shaped object about 20 to 25 feet in diameter.”

“The object. It was either on the ground, or right above it,” Schwab said. “It was hard to see in the dark, but something was there.”

Then the boys saw the prints in the soft earth, muddy from the melting snow.

“A series of small, hoof-like prints,” Schwab said. “They looked like parentheses and were open in the front and back. They were staggered left to right like a biped would leave tracks. They were about three inches long and two inches wide. This is a city, a suburb of Newark, N.J., so there is not a lot of wildlife to be had. We had possums and raccoons, and that’s about it for exotic animals.”

Schwab and his friend John took a few steps closer to what they’d determined was a spacecraft, but a splash in the brook stilled their feet.

“At this point in the brook was kind of a dirt island. The water was only a few inches deep,” he said. “I looked down to where I heard the noise and to my horror saw two small things standing upright like a person.”

The creatures were about four feet tall, dark and covered in hair.

“They were standing in a posture like they didn’t want to be seen or make any noise,” Schwab said. “Like a tip-toe posture with their arms slightly raised by their sides, and they were slightly leaning. One was just behind the other.”

Although Schwab couldn’t make out facial features in the dim light, he could see something that chilled him. Something from a childhood dream.

“They both had very large glowing green eyes, round, but much larger than human eyes,” he said. “They didn’t seem to be reflecting light like an animal, but were glowing.”

Schwab froze, staring at the creatures in horror.

“What are those things?” John asked from his side.

As David and John stood, staring at the entities that stared back at them, one of the other boys yelled, “Where’s Jerry?” David turned and looked, but Jerry wasn’t there.

“Jerry was gone,” Schwab said. “I think someone might have said, ‘they got Jerry,’ and we all ran like hell out of there and back to my house.”

Jerry’s house sat in the middle of the block on Lakeside Avenue on the way to Schwab’s house. When they got to Jerry’s house he was there, sitting on the front steps, out of breath.

“We asked him what happened, and he said, ‘something grabbed me on the arm and I turned around and saw this hairy thing and ran,” Schwab said. “At this point we did not discuss what we had seen with each other. It happened too fast. We then spend some time wondering what they were and comparing what we saw.”

The next morning, Schwab went back to the area. The hooved footprints as well as the boys’ footprints remained – so did something else.

“Back where we thought we saw the disk was a large circle melted in the snow down to the dirt,” Schwab said. “The snow was maybe an inch deep.”

He went home and, as he mixed plaster in an old coffee can to make casts of the hoofprints, John showed up.

“We went back together,” Schwab said. “We went to the spot and poured some in a couple of the prints, one in the snow and one in the dirt.”

When the boys went back the next day to retreive the foot casts, someone had destroyed them.

“I went back with John again and they were smashed to bits,” Schwab said. “John started going on about how there were kids who walked along the tracks breaking plaster in the snow. Yeah, John, right. I’m sure he did it, but I have no idea why.”

Years later, Schwab heard stories about the dark, hairy, glowing-eyed entities near the brook from friends who had no connection with his encounter – he’s convinced they are real.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Voices Not His Own

2010-06-02T14:19:00.002-05:00

Daniel Natal’s aunt heard him call to her from somewhere in the house. She walked from room to room, searching for him, but couldn’t find him – because he wasn’t there.

This incident marked the first time a member of Natal’s family heard a disembodied voice, but it would be far from the last.

“The second instance was related to me by a cousin who said that he heard me calling him from his upstairs bedroom,” Natal said.

Natal’s voice kept saying, “In here. In here.” As Natal’s cousin followed the voice, it led him to his bedroom closet. He opened the closet, but Natal was not there. He found Natal outside playing basketball.

Natal read a February “From the Shadows” that featured the story of a Lawson, Mo., family who often experience the disembodied voices of family members; they determined their incidents to be a form of telepathy.

“I’ve experienced extremely similar phenomena for some time,” Natal said. “In my own case, the facts don’t lead me down that path. It would appear to be far, far, far more complex.”

Unlike the Lawson family, Natal’s experiences with disembodied family voices moved from a simple beaconing to a conversation.

“This is where the pattern departs, and does so chillingly,” he said. “About six months after the first instances, I received a phone call from a friend in Idaho. She informed me, to my dismay, that she had just gotten off the phone with me.”

Natal hadn’t talked with this friend in eight months.

“She expressed skepticism, thinking I was pulling some prank,” Natal said. “I was adamant, though. I had not phoned her.”

However, she was just as adamant he had.

“But I just got off the phone with you,” she told him.

“Maybe it was someone who sounded like me,” he suggested.

“I think I would have been able to tell the difference after a 20-minute phone-conversation,” she said.

The thought of someone posing as Natal capable of holding a 20-minute telephone conversation with a friend shocked and somewhat frightened him.

“Whatever was imitating my voice had done so now for an extended period,” Natal said. “That event happened about 10 years ago, but the phenomenon hasn’t stopped.”

A number of years after the Idaho telephone call while Natal spent the weekend with his cousins in another city, his wife heard his voice in Center City Philadelphia.

“My wife reported that she heard me call her in broad daylight as she walked on the sidewalk,” Natal said. “She thought I must have come home early because someone with my voice used her nickname.”

His wife felt a hand touch her shoulder and, when she turned to greet her husband, no one was there.

“She found herself alone on the sidewalk, with the closest pedestrian being about 50 yards away,” Natal said. “No one was possibly close enough to have placed a hand on her shoulder.”

When they moved from Philadelphia to South Carolina, the phenomena followed them.

One day, as Natal lie in bed trying to drag more sleep out of the morning, someone poked him.

“Let me sleep,” he said, but the pokes continued. He opened his eyes and, through the open bathroom door, he saw his wife giggling to herself.

“The thing is, my wife doesn’t giggle,” Natal said. “And the time-lapse between the poking and her position in the bathroom didn’t allow sufficient seconds for her to have moved away so far. Something was definitely off, but I ignored it as I went back to sleep.”

This happened sometime after 10 a.m. When Natal finally got up from bed and walked downstairs to find his wife, it was around noon.

“Why did you keep poking me?” he asked her, then described the poking and giggling event.

She insisted she couldn’t have poked him; she hadn’t been upstairs since she woke at 8 a.m.

And the events continued.

In late winter 2010, a telephone ringing in the upstairs hallway shook Natal from sleep. He looked at the clock; it was 3 a.m.

“The first ring dislodged me from sleep,” he said. “So I was wide awake for the second, third and fourth rings.”

The rings bothered him. The rings belonged to a much older telephone – something Natal didn’t have in his house.

“A paranoid father, thinking a burglar might be in the house, I sat up,” he said. “Just then I heard someone answer the phone. It sounded like me. It was my voice.”

Natal checked the house, no intruders, nothing out of place, and his family still slept. It’s left him wondering what has intruded into his life, imitating him, imitating his wife.

“What the hell is going on? Inter-dimensional lapses? Mischievous imps? Mind-energy projected outward to create doppelgangers?” Natal said. “Whatever it is, it isn’t isolated to telepathy and assumptions of family-members coming home. It’s something far, far more complicated.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

More Haunted Real Estate

2010-05-21T08:31:00.002-05:00

A real estate agent sold an old property in downtown Indianapolis to a metropolitan police officer. The agent, now retired, didn’t expect the telephone call she received from the officer a few weeks later.

“Did you know this place was haunted?” the policeman asked.

“No,” the agent said.

“There’s a woman who glides up our stairs,” the officer told her.

“Are you OK with this?” the agent asked, starting to worry.

“Yeah,” the policeman said. “It’s cool.”

In Indiana, like many states, there are laws that require real estate agents disclose the property is haunted if a potential buyer asks, said Jill S. Beitz, an agent with F.C. Tucker Company, Inc.

“In Indiana, the haunted property falls into the category of stigmatized,” she said. “Under Indiana law you don’t have to disclose that fact until you’re asked directly.”

However, when it comes to the seller disclosing this information, most agents want to remain in the dark.

“Usually that’s the kind of thing you’d like to plug your ears and say, ‘La la la la la. I don’t want to know anything about it,’” Beitz said. “You can always tell whenever you ask an agent those questions (about hauntings). They grimace a little bit because of that legal issue.”

When it comes to haunted property, Beitz is different than most real estate agents – she’s a paranormal investigator. Haunted properties don’t surprise her.

A friend of Beitz who decorates properties going on the market called her one day and told her about a house she was decorating. On her first visit to the house, the seller said the basement was haunted – but that wasn’t the only strange thing about the house.

“She went to the upstairs of the house. All the doors from the third floor are locked from the outside and manacles are on the walls,” Beitz said. “She said, ‘I have to go back to this house. Would you go with me?’”

Beitz did, and found her friend was right about the house.

“We both agreed we didn’t like the stairs,” Beitz said. “I had to swallow pretty hard to walk up them.”

She also had a problem taking photographs in the home – a problem she’s noticed in a number of her listings.

“I’ve had some weird things happen,” she said. “I would notice in some of my houses I’d have a hard time photographing. I’d start getting big orbs, mist, and all kinds of stuff that messed up my pictures. I asked everyone if they had a hard time photographing their property and they looked at me like I was crazy.”

Orbs – bright balls of light that began appearing in photographs at the dawn of the digital age – are often called proof of ghostly activity. Usually it’s moisture, dust or insects that appear as orbs when reflecting the flash. Sometimes, however, orbs are a bit harder to explain.

While photographing the listing of an elderly woman named Rose Garr, Beitz had a hard time taking a photograph without something anomalous appearing in the pictures. Beitz knew it was Rose’s late husband who was upset she was there.

“I said, ‘Mr. Garr, Rose has moved out, she’s fine. We’re selling your house, just be at peace.’ Then I could take the pictures,” Beitz said. “(Paranormal) investigators don’t put stock in orbs, but it always makes me pay a little more attention when things like that happen.”

Although popular culture has glamorized ghosts and haunted locations, they aren’t always popular with buyers.

“The reason those things were always seen as stigmatized is that it’s going to decrease the value of the property or make it unappealing,” she said. “What I’m curious to find out is if there’s a segment of people as buyers who would be looking for haunted property. It would make it a niche property, like lake property.”

However, Beitz warns not all haunted houses are as friendly as the woman gliding up the stairs in Indianapolis or what people see on TV.

“It can be very serious,” she said. “One person could live in a house for decades and be fine and have someone else move in with personality issues which will open it up to it.”

Or, someone could be looking for trouble.

“Right now I have someone who has activity. She’s asking for it. She’s a Wiccan and she’s set up an altar,” Beitz said. “You might think you just have this cute little friendly ghost and it’s an entity. That’s non-human and has never lived on this earth. I would never advise someone to start monkeying around.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Night of Terror on Kauai

2010-05-12T13:15:00.001-05:00

The three friends had been awake for maybe 40 hours in early January, Adderall fueling their consciousness. Ellen doesn’t know if the Adderall or sleep deprivation is related to their night of terror, but she is convinced they experienced something.

Ellen, her boyfriend Brad and a friend John, who live on the island of Kauai, had come home from drinking and hanging out by the ocean until dawn when they decided to take the Adderall, a central nervous system stimulant prescribed to people with narcolepsy and ADHD that can cause hallucinations.

“We didn’t lose momentum and somehow we all decided to eschew sleep,” she said. “We remained together for the entirety of the two-day period of sleep-deprivation and Adderall use. The second night is where things get weird.”

At about 9 p.m. on day two, the three drove to an isolated beach under a clear moonlit sky on the south shore of Kauai when they began to notice something wasn’t right.

“I was starting to get minor visual hallucinations,” Ellen said. “At this point they were just minor swirlies and swimming effects.”

When the three neared the ocean, they drove to a cliff dotted with trees and tall grass that gave them a clear view of the beach.

“It is very dark at this place, as there are no major cities around,” Ellen said. “We lit a fire.”

Then the horror began.

“I noticed that the rocks and roots and trees around us looked liked gnarled, grotesque faces,” Ellen said. “I pointed it out to my two companions who agreed. I wasn’t scared because I thought they were merely hallucinations.”

As Brad built a fire, Ellen and John walked down a footpath through the tall grass and started seeing shadows.

“We came to a small clearing in the grass, when I noticed I saw several shadows, like the shadows a person would make,” Ellen said. “There were at least four. Thinking they were perhaps being cast by me and my friend, I raised my arms. Only my shadow moved its arms and I realized that the other things weren’t me or my friend.”

Frightened, Ellen and John hurried back to the fire.

“My boyfriend was skeptical and didn’t seem to think anything of it,” Ellen said. “But he mentioned that we were right next to a heiau – a pre-contact place of worship for Hawaiians, like an alter. I was very miffed that he would bring us to such a creepy and spiritually charged place.”

Growing paranoid they had upset something ancient by their presence, Ellen and John decided to walk to the heiau and offer the only food they brought with them – a pear – as a gift As they approached the heiau, Ellen couldn’t go any closer and stopped.

“The vibe of the place seemed very charged, not like when we had first arrived,” she said. “We said a prayer out loud, stating our respect and that we were giving a food offering. John walked into the grass to deposit the pear and disappeared.”

A few moments later, Ellen heard something running through the grass. It was John.

“He was panting, and seemed very alarmed. He said he’d heard people walking in the grass,” Ellen said. “We listened for awhile, now both getting alarmed. We clearly heard the sound of someone running fast through the grass. It wasn’t wind. Everything else was still.”

The largest animal in the area would be a wild pig, and Ellen was sure it was not a pig.

“It was at this point that faces we were seeing became more pronounced,” she said. “The roots now made full bodies, and the trees started to look like people or spirits.”

The two watched three dead trees near the heiau turn into bluish-gray men in robes, with vertical headdresses made out of sticks.

“They were clearly shamans,” Ellen said. “They didn’t walk, or move their limbs like a human would, but they seemed to know we were looking at them, and their faces seemed alive, like they were making grotesque faces, opening their mouths, looking mournful, or like someone who is making a horrible face.”

As the sounds of movement in the grass became closer and faster, Ellen and John decided they had to leave – now.

“My boyfriend was ignoring us and our fears and wasn’t part of this discussion,” Ellen said. “But John and I decided we had to leave, and we said, ‘Brad, let’s go. Brad, we gotta go.’”

While watching Brad put out the fire, Ellen and John saw faces appear in the night around him, the swollen, pumpkin-like faces of hags.

“I was scared of what I would see at this point, so I stopped watching Brad for fear of what I might see,” Ellen said.

She turned to face the truck and in the reflection in the rear window Ellen saw the fire, herself, John, and two malformed women approaching Brad.

“There were two female figures holding onto his waist as he moved quickly around,” she said. “They were flying, or whipping around, completely horizontal. It was horrible. Never in my imaginings of ghosts would I have thought that they would look that strangely formed or that fantastic.”

Ellen grabbed John and turned him to look at the reflection.

“He’d been relatively calm up to this point, but when he saw the reflection he was as scared as me,” she said.

They dove into the car and Ellen closed her eyes as Brad got behind the wheel and drove down a service road and back toward civilization.

“John calmed down once we began driving out, telling me it was going to be OK,” Ellen said. “I thought, once we get away from this ancient place, back into the populated world, this will stop.”

It didn’t. The trio saw ghost-like figures, menehune (little people of Hawaiian folklore), and nature spirits during their drive home. Although Ellen leans toward a natural explanation for her experiences, the fact that she and John shared experiences makes her wonder.

“Perhaps some of the things we saw were simply drug-induced malfunctions of our brains,” she said. “I just can’t believe, though, that a lot of if wasn’t real. There seems to be a whole ghost world populating ours.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Giant Cockroach – Part 2

2010-05-05T11:07:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: This is the second in a two-part series about Jenice H.’s knowledge of and encounters with intelligent insects.

The old motel sat like a row of Army barracks on the side of a grassy hill in California City, Calif., about halfway between Bakersfield and Barstow.

Jenice H. of San Antonio, Texas, was traveling to Los Angeles from Las Vegas in the late 1990s when she stopped at the motel for the night – a night that burned itself into her memory.

“It was good and cheap just for one night’s stay,” Jenice said. “But I never went back there again, it was so horrendous.”

The motel had a big cockroach problem.

Late in the evening, as Jenice sat inside her room watching VH1, someone knocked on the door. She approached the door and pulled it open as far as the chain would let her. She wasn’t prepared for what was in the hall.

“A human voice behind that door had asked if I could hand him some bed linen,” she said. “I never saw his features, but in the slight crack of the door I could see a long upturned giant cockroach cleaning it’s legs frenetically.”

When the creature, Jenice marks at about six and a half feet tall, saw her through the crack in the door, it spat something brown toward her. She screamed.

“Why?” the creature asked, but Jenice didn’t answer. She threw open the door and ran down the hall, past a motel employee crumpled on the floor.

“That poor girl in the hallway all slumped up must have been in shock from what I had seen, too,” Jenice said.

As Jenice neared the door, the great cockroach thundering close behind, it grabbed her.

“It was frightening,” she said. “It grabbed onto my cotton dress and I couldn’t get away from its doubled-barbed hands on my wrists.”

The thing’s antenna brushed against Jenice’s face, her vision grew cloudy and she thought she might faint.

“Then I remembered a Chuck Norris movie and I dropped to my buns on the floor and kicked its ankles out from under it with my tennis shoes,” Jenice said. “Then I kicked it in the face.”

Jenice got up and ran but felt the creature closing on her as she threw open the door at the end of the hallway and slammed it shut on one of the creature’s antenna.*

“You never heard such a loud high-pitched scream come out of living matter as I did,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how loud these giant upright walking cockroaches could shriek.”

Then Jenice ran blindly into the night and ran into an old man walking his small dog, a corgi. The injured cockroach pounded through the motel door in pursuit of Jenice, followed by another one.

“He saw it too and was taken aback,” Jenice said.

Then the corgi, a Welsh breed that reaches a maximum of 27 pounds, attacked the first creature.

“(The creature) screamed again and deftly bent around to bite the little dog in the neck with its pincers,” she said. “(The dog) bled out and died right there.”

A young man who had seen the giant cockroaches chasing Jenice called the police on a pay telephone next to the motel and seconds later two police cars screamed into view.

“Then out of the right; these two giant roaches were hitting maybe 55 mph speeding up the hill,” she said.

The police got off a few shots as the creatures jumped a fence and disappeared into a fogbank Jenice said came suddenly – a black fogbank that did not look natural.

Jenice is convinced what she experienced – the giant roaches, the fogbank, the creatures’ disappearance – was extraterrestrial, and someone is trying to cover it up.

“I know those cops who got there at twilight had caught them on tape on top of those hood-mounted dash cameras on their squad cars,” she said. “If the government is hiding the pictures from us, we have a right to know.”

Discussions with a former teacher in her neighborhood brought forth the conclusion these extraterrestrial cockroaches may have either stumbled on a “viable grease food source,” or are here to feed on something bigger – us.

“Bugs multiply real fast,” Jenice said. “People I talked to had said they’d seen things flitting behind trees at KOA California campsites. What if they’re breeding?”

*Jenice saw the young man who telephoned the police retrieve the broken antenna. She said he has red hair and is probably now in his 30s. If you are reading this blog, please contact me.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Giant Cockroach – Part 1

2010-04-27T13:38:00.003-05:00

Author’s note: This is the first in a two-part series about Jenice H.’s knowledge of and encounters with intelligent insects.

There are more than 4,000 known species of cockroaches on earth today. Jenice H. knows there are more species – giant species. Species science knows nothing about.

Jenice lived in San Antonio, Texas, in 1990 when she struck up a conversation with a man in his mid-20s from New York who walked his dog through her neighborhood.

“He said he had nothing else to do but shoot the breeze, so I barbecued him up a hot dog,” Jenice said. “He asked if I wanted to hear a weird, but true incident that had happened to him around 1985. He said he had quit on the spot, as it had scared the bejesus out of him.”

The young man had just graduated high school and got a job at a restaurant that he soon found had a pest problem.

“He had only intended to (work) there a few years, as there was bad sanitation problem what with the rats and breathing in cockroach (waste),” Jenice said. “He said he wondered why he had been wheezing more about that time for some many weeks.”

Cockroach feces and saliva carry allergens and can trigger asthma, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

One day, the grease trap under the kitchen floor clogged and the owner asked the young man to clean it out. It was early evening and the young man was preparing to clock out.

“His boss had asked him if he could squeeze through a small crawlspace in the kitchen floor,” Jenice said. “The boss said there’s something blocking up the natural draining of the fry grease. Fix it before inspectors reported it.”

So, the young man did what his boss asked and shinnied into the crawl space the city uses to vent the pipes under buildings. The beam from his flashlight cut through the darkness as he pulled himself through the dank, filthy, cramped area under the floor, and he noticed what clogged the drain.

He reached for the object and pulled out something that looked like a plate of an insect’s exoskeleton – but this was two-feet long.

“He then heard some kind of screeching, and thought perhaps it was a rat,” Jenice said.

The sound came from a semi-circular ventilation shaft leading away from the crawlspace. As he moved his arm to toss the object he’d found into the shaft something in that shaft moved.

“He almost didn’t piece it together until he saw two long feelers about a yard long swish around on the other side of the groove,” Jenice said. “It was a giant cockroach. By the dimension of the feelers, maybe six-feet long.”

The young man dropped what he was now certain was exoskeleton and pushed himself out of the crawlspace and back into the restaurant kitchen. He resigned immediately and never went back.

“Roaches are purported to be an intelligent insect,” Jenice said. “The roach was smart enough to clog up the grease to harden it and eat in the dark hours when the restaurant closed. Borders on the bizarre.”

Next week: Jenice encounters the giant cockroaches in California.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.