In 1926, an illiterate 13-year-old Romanian peasant girl, Eleonore Zugun, was brought to London for a series of experiments at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research by a Viennese countess with a deep interest in parapsychology.

For 11 months prior to her arrival in London, young Eleonore had apparently suffered spontanoeus attacks of both poltergeist activity and stigmata. Fearing possession by Dracu (the devil), local villagers had locked Eleonore away in an asylum from where Countess Wassilko-Serecki rescued her and whisked her away to Vienna, before making the trip to London.

On 16 April 1927, Adelaide’s The Advertiser reported on the strange case of A Roumanian Ghost Girl who had been the subject of “a series of careful experiments” “made under ideal scientific conditions” at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research.

“She was brought to London last September by Countess Wassilko-Serecki for an investigation at the laboratory, and was submitted to a series of tests respecting her poltergeist (‘noisy devils’) claims, and the enigmatic markings which appeared on her body,” the article reported.

“Conclusions reached by the investigators are that: stigmatic markings appeared spontaneously on various parts of Eleonore’s body. She was not consciously responsible for the production of the marks,” and that, according to the report, “under scientific test conditions movements of small objects with out physical contact undoubtedly took place in the girl’s presence and that the coins which moved were attracted towards the medium, and that neither movement was due to magnetism.”

The countess, who had rescued the “Ghost Girl” initially taking her to Vienna had recorded over 1,070 manifestations “which have been either of the poltergeist (merry ghost) or stigmata variety”.

“Instances she quoted of the former were of pieces of furniture suddenly jumping from their place in a room where the girl was playing, of a stiletto hurtling through the air and sticking in the door; and of an inkpot which flew from its place on a desk and poured its contents over people in the room.”

The countess also recounted an episode of stigmata that had recently afflicted the poor girl.

“An example of the stigmata manifestation occurred yesterday morning in my presence. Soon after I had entered the room a mark was noticed rapidly growing on the girl’s arm. As I watched it, it grew into a number of cruel-looking weals [red, swollen marks left on flesh by a blow or pressure], which might have been inflicted by a whip or a thin cane. I am satisfied that neither the girl nor anyone else can have inflicted any such blow. Within a few minutes the marks had disappeared.

Countess Wassilko-Serecki

“Some minutes later, while I was helping Eleonore to wind up a clockwork cat, of which she is inordinately fond, I my self saw similar weals beginning to appear on her other arm, arid at the back of her neck. Nobody but myself was near her at the time, and both her own hands were fully occupied with the toy.”

Marks of Teeth Deeply Indented into Flesh

An earlier article, Astounding Phenomena: Girl Possessed of Devil, which had appeared in the Sunday Mail on 12 December 1926, detailed another case of stigmata that had afflicted young Eleonore:

“A party was taking tea in the laboratory when Eleonore, in the act of raising her cup to her lips, gave a cry of pain and rolled up her sleeve. On her forearm appeared what seemed to be the marks of teeth deeply indented into the flesh, as if she, or someone else, had bitten fiercely into the arm. The marks turned from red to white and finally took the form of white raised weals. They gradually faded, but were still noticeable after an hour or so.”

And in another instance, the illiterate peasant girl was observed to perform automatic writing with intriguing results.

“On one occasion while playing with a toy in the presence of Wassilko-Serecki and Miss Kay, secretary of the laboratory, she broke off and filled several sheets of paper with writing in the Roumanian language. The countess read it and asked the secretary if she had lost any keys, and on receiving an affirmative reply said; ‘Then you will find them in the pocket of a coat in the cloak room.’ Which Miss Kay did.”

However, unlike the countess and Miss Kay, not everyone was convinced of the supernatural nature of Eleonore Zugun’s afflictions.

An Elaborate Hoax?

In Roumanian Mystery Girl: Alleged Trick Exposed, which appeared in the Barrier Miner on 3 March 1927, it was reported that the countess was suing a Dr. Hans Rosenbusch for libel.

“Dr. Rosenbusch (Munich) and Otto Stehl, a conjuror, claimed to have exposed a deception practised by the countess in connection with Eleanore Zugun, the 13-year-old Roumanian supposed ‘mystery girl’.

“Teeth marks appeared mysteriously on the body of the girl. Dr. Rosenbusch and Stehl declared that the countess, under the pretence of smoothing Zugun’s hair, scratched her cheek and neck, but that the skin of the girl reacted abnormally, and did not show marks until two or three minutes later. Thus while Zugun was exhibiting one mark the countess was adroitly producing another.”

Could the countess and the girl have really fooled the researchers at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research (NLPR), one of which was Harry Price, an “amateur conjuring expert” and “debunker,” with such sleight of hand trickery?

The Dracu Complex

The final NLPR report did not find trickery, but rather Eleonore’s own subconscious, as the source of the stigmata. However, on the question of her telekinetic abilities, the report’s verdict was left open.

“What has happened to Eleonore is apparently this: During her early childhood when the so-called ‘poltergeist’ phenomena became first apparent, the simple peasants threatened her so often with Dracu (the Devil) and what he would do to her that her subconscious mind became obsessed with the idea of whippings, bitings, etc., which the ignorant peasants said would be her lot at the hands—or teeth—of Dracu. Remove the Dracu complex and the girl would probably be troubled no further with stigmatic markings.

“If we have discovered the cause of the ‘stigmata’ I am afraid we cannot lay claim to having unraveled the mystery of the tele-kinetic movements of the coins, etc. We have merely proved that they happen.”

As in many poltergeist cases, the apparent supernautural activity experienced by Eleonore Zugun soon diminshed and by 1928, she had left Vienna to return to her native Romania where she later married and was said to have lived a “normal life”.

Writing about the paranormal for about a decade, I’ve seen certain topics grab the public’s attention and quickly fade (orbs, rods), but others, for good reason, stick around year, after year, after year (ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, shadow people). A fairly recent entry into the paranormal landscape that has stalked its way into our deepest nightmares, the weirdest bogyman to show its greasy-haired head in a long time, is the Black-Eyed Kids. I’ve written quite a bit about BEKs, and frankly many of the cases are too similar. Someone alone is approached by children or teens that try to talk their way into a house/car/secluded spot. The children seem strange, then the person notices their all black eyes. The person slams the door and the story is over.

Creepy, but we’ve heard it before.

Every once in a while I find someone whose encounter with these entities is a bit different, and that gives me the willies. Here are two.

A Horror on the Farm

Tonya’s family moved from an apartment in town to a small ranch house in rural Indiana when she was five. “My Mom was pregnant with my sis,” Tonya said. “I remember having a swing set and Mom and Dad let me have a rabbit outside in a cage.”

One night while her mother and father were inside preparing supper, Tonya played on the swing set and discovered she wasn’t alone. “Another girl appeared behind me,” Tonya said. “I remember thinking I would have someone to play with now.”

The girl looked dirty, poor, her hair in tangles. “She didn’t speak to me but she scared me,” Tonya said. “I will never forget that. Her eyes were dark and her teeth were wrong; sharp, a lot of them, and dirty also.”

Although the girl with the mouthful of needle-like teeth stood still and made no move toward her, Tonya jumped off the swing and ran inside. “Mom gave me a bath after supper and put me to bed,” she said. “The next day … I was too afraid to get out of bed cause I thought she would get me.”

That day, Tonya’s parents found her pet rabbit dead. Something had opened the lock on the hutch and shredded the rabbit. “I tried to tell my mom about the girl, but she was upset over my rabbit. We both were,” Tonya said. “To this day I remember her face, eyes, and teeth. She killed my rabbit. I knew it then, and know it now.”

My Brother’s Terror

Shay’s brother Korey was young when he became afraid of the dark. “He was just seven years of age and now at the age of 23 he still sticks firmly to his story,” Shay said.

Shay and Korey’s family moved from Arkansas to Olive Branch, Mississippi, in April 1996, and quickly adjusted to the new town, new home, and new school, but after three weeks, some things in the house were still missing. “We had no blinds on our windows,” Shay said. And that brought on Korey’s fear.

One night while Shay helped his mother cook dinner, his father watching television in the living room, Korey sat in his room doing homework. “He had only been in his room around 20 minutes when he came barreling down the hallway with the most horrifying scream I had ever heard with tears rolling down his face,” Shay said. “He nearly climbed my mother like a tree trunk all while trying to bury his face as to hide from something.”

The something was horrifying. “He said as he sat doing his homework he felt an eerie feeling like he was being watched and like something was calling to him,” Shay said. “He then said he glanced up at his window and saw a white-faced boy that looked like a ghost peering into the bottom of his window.”

Korey said, “Momma, he looked my age and I thought it was me at first, but when I got close to the window he blinked and moved closer, and he had all black eyes there wasn’t no white there.” Korey knew what he saw wasn’t his reflection; it was something wicked.

“I’m sure now if my brother would have stuck around without running away in fear the child may have asked him to let him in,” Shay said. “For nearly three weeks after the incident my brother being scared to sleep in his own room made camp underneath my daybed with my cocker spaniel Danny.” After that, Shay and Korey swapped rooms, but by then blinds hung from the windows – and Shay never opened them.

Sixteen years later, Shay knows the memory still terrifies Korey. “As I was leaving work at night somewhat frightened and feeling horrified to walk to my car alone, I called my brother,” Shay said. “I asked, ‘Korey, do you still remember that little boy you saw looking in your window all those years ago?’”

Korey’s voice was shaky in response. “The one with the black eyes?” he asked. “Shay, why did you have to bring that up?” Shay had read an Internet story about Black-Eyed Kids. “I wish you wouldn’t have told me that,” Korey said. “I’ve tried forgetting and it still terrifies me, especially now that I know it wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks on me.”

When Anomalist Books’ Patrick Huyghe mailed me a copy of their title Spirit Voices: The First Live Conversation Between Worlds by Mark L. Cowden, I have to confess that, at first, I viewed it with a degree of trepidation. Not, I should stress, because I had any specific qualms about dealing with, or confronting, the subject-matter, but simply because although I read a lot of books – and write a lot of books too – on UFOs, cryptozoology, and conspiracy-theories, I have to admit that ghosts, spiritualism, and life-after-death have never really been my thing.

But, since Patrick asked me if I would review the book, and I had said “Yes,” I  figured I would see what the author had to say. And I’m very glad that I did! Spirit Voices is most certainly not your average book about chain-rattling spooks, shrieking specters and things that go bump in the night. Rather, it’s a very readable, highly engaging, and thoughtful study of one man’s quest (Mark himself) to seek out the truth about life-after-death, the nature and heart of the phenomenon, and its reported interactions with our plane of reality.

This is the type of subject that could have easily been turned into one of those horrible, sickly, belief-driven, self-help, “love and light”-style books written by hippie-types with names like “Eagle,” “Cloud,” and “Dolphin,” that I totally, totally despise. Fortunately, there’s none of that here – at all.

Rather, what we get is an utterly absorbing study of how Mark – an audio-visual technician from Oklahoma – found himself in Ireland, in 2010, investigating apparent contact from beyond the grave. And when I say contact, I mean precisely that: the capture and recording of apparent conversations with spirit entities from somewhere else.

And what particularly stands out for me is that Spirit Voices is as much about the potential for something, some essence, maybe – call it what you will – surviving bodily death, as it is about Mark’s very own, and deeply personal, quest to come to terms with the incredible data and experiences that crossed his path during the course of his adventurous trek in search of the truth.

Written in somewhat of a diary fashion (which is a good thing, I should stress), Spirit Voices expertly captures the essence of the investigation, as Mark grapples with such issues as whether or not (from the perspective of Christian teachings) it’s ethical, moral or right to try and contact the dead, the profound positive implications for society and science that interaction with the spirit-world undoubtedly provokes, and the effect that exposure to such phenomena – in a conversation-style setting – can have on the individual.

And that Mark has a background in the audio-visual world is a major bonus, too, and particularly so when we see him in-the-field (or in the proverbial spooky old house or haunted castle), utilizing technologies to capture the voices of the dead, rather than simply employing the tired, well-worn tools of some old Gothic novel.

In other words, Spirit Voices - and its many attendant revelations, implications, and discoveries – offers us some hope that death is not the end. And – this being one of the most important aspects of the book – it shows that growing advances in human technology and fringe-science may actually play significant, future roles in contacting the dead, and validating that physical death may not mean literal death.

But, perhaps above all else – and I base this on Mark’s very own forthright and refreshing style of writing – Spirit Voices shows the sheer extent to which people can find themselves propelled to new levels of thought, understanding and appreciation of the mysteries of this world and beyond when they address the controversial question that each and every one of  us want answering: What happens to us when we die?

Whatever your views on life-after-death, Spirit Voices is an extraordinarily good, solid look at its subject-matter, written by a man who offers us an undeniably personal and near-unique look at a phenomenon that is as misunderstood as it is mysterious.

I will leave you with what I consider to be one of Mark’s most important statements in his book. Of the revelations that might await us, he says the day may come when “the world’s religious leaders finally accept that there does not need to be one specific explanation for our magical existence, with the copyright holder of this information being the strongest, wealthiest, most agenda-driven organization capable of reaching the most people.”

Amen to that!

Check out Mysterious Universe’s interview with Mark Cowden in Season 6 Episode 16

Yes, the words above probably do amount to the strangest article title I have ever written! And the subject matter of that same article is no less strange, as you’ll now see. In the week leading up to Christmas 2007, I found myself on the receiving end of one of the strangest stories ever to darken my path. It has been my experience that when people are looking to speak with someone about their encounters with the unknown, they seek out those most amenable to what they have to say. By that I mean: most of my cryptozoological work is focused upon those fringe cases that exhibit evidence of high-strangeness and paranormal qualities. And so, the bulk of the reports that are brought to my attention usually tend to present such eerie qualities, too. Laura’s certainly did.

She was thirty-six, lived in Rochester, New York, and worked for the Post Office. Laura related to me a remarkable and disturbing series of events that occurred to her and several friends in the summer of 1985 – events that began with attempts to contact the spirit world and culminated in the manifestation of a fearful, hairy man-beast.

It was a Friday night, around June or July of that year, Laura told me, that she and three of her school-friends, Beth, Brooke and Alison, had come to visit her. Laura’s parents were out for the evening, and so a slumber-party, loud music, and discussions about boys were the order of the day; or, rather, the whole night. That was not all, however.

Brooke’s older brother possessed a 1940s vintage Ouija board and she surprised the friends by pulling it out of her bag when she arrived at Laura’s. As Laura told me, none of them were seriously frightened by it: rather, they found the idea of “playing with the Ouija board while my mom and dad were out” to be both fun and exciting. But what began as a bit of light-hearted entertainment for four teenaged girls, soon mutated into something very different.

Laura admitted that none of the four girls had any real idea of how to use the board, aside from “what we had seen in horror movies.” Nevertheless, they improvised to the best of their collective abilities, pulled out the obligatory wine-glass, placed it in the center of the board, and the index fingers of their right hands atop it.

Questions of a typical “Is anybody there?” nature abounded, while each of the girls attempted to use the board to contact a long-dead relative, such as a great-grandparent, a great-aunt, and so on. Laura told me that on no occasion did the spirit world answer back, and, having eventually got bored, the girls returned to their favorite topic: the boys at school.

But not before, on two occasions, the electricity went off – something that disturbed the four friends, given the fact they had been indulging in a bit of ghostly activity only minutes before. The rest of the evening progressed without further incident, Laura assured me; however, the same thing could most definitely not be said for the following night.

For reasons that she is at a loss to explain, Laura stated that after her friends had departed the following morning, and after the all-night slumber-party was over, a feeling of dread began to build within her – but for reasons she was never able to fathom. That dread only increased when, once again, the electricity went out: at around 6.00 p.m.

Then, just after she bid her parents good night and retired to her bedroom, Laura heard a strange, animalistic scream coming from the direction of a small wooded area near her home. She opened her bedroom window, looked out, but nothing could be seen in the overwhelming blackness. Still feeling somewhat disturbed, Laura climbed into bed and anticipated getting a good night’s sleep. Some chance of that happening.

Around 2.00 a.m., Laura was woken by what she said was the “grossing smelling thing ever: like an old rotting cabbage.” She was about to reach for her bedside lamp when she could see silhouetted across the room a large, black, man-like figure that seemed “hunched over and had huge, long arms and big, white eyes.”

As I sat in my office and listened down the telephone, Laura told me that at the moment she attempted to scream for her parents, it was “like I’d been paralyzed. I was sitting up, but couldn’t speak or move at all.” Worse still: the hairy, smelly creature slowly moved towards her and stopped about eight or nine inches from her face. It was, Laura told me with some significance, “just like Bigfoot: a big hairy thing that I couldn’t tell if it was a monkey or a hairy man.”

The beast stared intently into her for several moments, and then backed away, until such a point that its black form was practically indistinguishable from the shadows of the far wall, and it eventually disappeared, “like it had been sucked into the shadows.”

Interestingly, Laura explained that although the monster had undoubtedly terrified her, she did not get the impression that it was hostile. Rather, she felt – but could no precisely explain why – that it had manifested with the specific intent of warning her “not to get mixed up with ghosts and Ouija boards.”

And, since that day, she has not. As for the man-beast, he never returned.

Reports of strange phenomena absolutely abound throughout the English county of Staffordshire – which happens to be where I spent my childhood. But there is one place in Staffordshire that seems to attract a great deal more than its fair share of such activity. Its name is deeply familiar to one and all throughout the area as Castle Ring. Located near to the village of Cannock Wood, Castle Ring is an Iron Age structure commonly known as a Hill Fort. It is 801 feet above sea level, and it main ditch and bank enclosure is fourteen feet high and, at its widest point, 853 feet across.

It has to be admitted that very little is known about the mysterious and long-forgotten people who built Castle Ring, except to say that they were already in residence at the time of the Roman invasion of A.D. 43 and remained there until approximately A.D. 50. Some suggest that the initial foundations of Castle Ring may even have been laid as early as 500 B.C. Moreover, historians suggest that the creators of Castle Ring might have represented a powerful body of people that held firm sway over certain other parts of Staffordshire, as well as significant portions of both Shropshire and Cheshire at the time in question.

While its enigmatic builders exited our world millennia ago, and left us with very little solid knowledge of who they were or what they actually represented, Castle Ring can claim to play host to far stranger entities, as I will now demonstrate.

On May 1, 2004, Alec Williams was driving passed the car-park that sits at the base of Castle Ring when he witnessed a hair-covered, man-like entity lumber across the road and into the trees. A shocked Williams stated that the sighting lasted barely a few seconds, but that he was able to make out its amazing form: “It was about seven feet tall, with short, shiny, dark brown hair, a large head and had eyes that glowed bright red.” Interestingly, Williams stated that as he slowed his vehicle down, he witnessed something akin to a camera flash coming from the depths of the woods and heard a cry that he described as “someone going ‘Hoo.’”

Just over one year later, on June 8, 2005 to be precise, in an article titled Hunt For Dark Forces at Chase Monument, Chase Post newspaper journalist Sarah Taylor reported that “paranormal investigators are set to swoop on one of the area’s oldest monuments to find out what dark forces lie beneath it.” As the newspaper noted, “a team of real-life ghost-busters” had determined that the area of Gentleshaw that surrounds Castle Ring lay upon what was described as a “psychic fault.” Certainly, the whole area surrounding Castle Ring has been a hotbed of weird activity for years – and not all of it revolves around weird beasts.

For example, commenting on the mountain of strange activity at the Ring, Sue Penton – of Paranormal Awakening, a group affiliated to the Association for Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena – said: “There have been reports of strange music being heard up there. It is such a high place there have been lots of UFO sightings there, too.”

The comments of Sue Penton were echoed by Graham Allen, then of the Etchinghill, Rugeley-based Staffordshire UFO Group: “Obviously, Castle Ring is the highest point on the Chase which makes it a good place for UFO spotting. There have been numerous incidents of UFOs, which could be because you are more likely to see something from a high point.”

Graham Allen elaborated to the press on what he knew about the mysteries of Castle Ring: “There have been reports of something landing there in the 1960s. From a research point of view there are a high number of reports around ancient sites. One argument could be that ancient sites have been located there because of the incidents of UFOs and natural phenomenon. There could be locations where there could be magnetic influences in the ground which have been attributed to earth lights.”

Moreover, relatively close to Castle Ring is an old, disused windmill, which, it is widely believed by local folklorists, was built upon nothing less than an ancient, pagan burial ground. Ghosts of the miller’s children, who allegedly suffocated in a flour silo, are said to haunt the mill to this day, and legend tells of a strange black, humanoid figure that manifested just before the tragedy occurred. Could this perhaps have been the very same, dark figure that Alec Williams saw near Castle Ring in 2004?

Equally as strange are the reports that come from the nearby village of Cannock Wood – from which Castle Ring lies in a northwest direction – of a ghostly nun reported seen in the vicinity of an ancient well where water was once dutifully gathered by local villagers.

In September 2005, local media reported that the aforementioned Paranormal Awakening investigation group had recently completed a nighttime investigation of Castle Ring in an attempt to chronicle the strange activity that had been reported there for years. It was an investigation that proved to be immensely profitable.

A spokesperson for the group said, after the experience was completed: “The Cannock Chase local authorities were kind enough to give permission for PA to conduct its research. Indeed, we are extremely grateful to them for being so open-minded as to allow us to conduct our research at this historical and most important monument. The group’s results are stunning and have created yet more questions than we have answers. We appear to have obtained a very strange mix of UFO and genuine paranormal activity.”

As for the specific nature of that activity, this was made public midway through February 2006. The Chase Post elaborated on the revelations: “A paranormal investigations group say they have evidence of strange, dancing lights and ghostly figures at the area’s most ancient monument.” On one tape, said the Post, one of the group’s members is heard to exclaim: “Tell me that isn’t a big black shape walking towards me.” The Post added that: “A mystery make voice responds, ‘There is!’”

Lest we forget, large, walking, dark shapes and strange lights were both staple parts of Alec Williams’ May 2004 Bigfoot-like sighting at Castle Ring, too. But the story is far from over. In a future article I’ll highlight the most recent reports of high strangeness at Castle Ring, which are as creepy as they are monstrous…

A thing of dreams.

Marcus still wakes screaming in the night, the nightmare as fresh in his newly conscious mind as it was in sleep. However, the dreams aren’t as frequent as they were when he was younger, like the one he had at eight years old. “In the dream I was at my family reunion and there was a little boy maybe twelve years old, and he was chasing us around with a butcher knife,” Marcus said.

Marcus and his brother ran through this dream reunion, past relatives chatting and eating chicken and potato salad off paper plates, but no one else seemed to see this boy who chased them, this boy with pitch black eyes. Then the boy caught them. “He killed my brother and he came after me,” Marcus said. The knife-wielding, black-eyed twelve-year-old pounced on top of Marcus and raised the knife, still wet with his brother’s blood. “Right before he killed me I woke up.”

The dream fear clung to him like wet clothing, and Marcus realized he wasn’t alone. “Right on top of me sat the black-eyed boy from my dream,” Marcus said. “He was holding me down and I tried so hard to get away from him but I couldn’t move.”

The boy from the nightmare raised his hand and slapped Marcus’s left cheek. As the sting shot through him, Marcus sat up and the boy vanished. But Marcus knew the boy was real. “My cheek stung and I was crying so hard, and I was so afraid of what had happened.”

He tried wake his big sister, but she wouldn’t move, so he crawled in bed next to her and cried the rest of the night; he was too afraid to go back to sleep; years later, he’s still afraid. “I remember exactly what the boy looked like,” Marcus said. “He had auburn hair, was wearing a red, black and green-stripped sweater, and of course had completely black eyes.”

Lucid dreams, in which people seem to be awake during the dream state, sometimes bleed into consciousness. During sleep, our bodies become paralyzed so involuntary muscle movements don’t shake us awake. Sometimes in a deep REM sleep, when our dreams are the most vivid, we wake, and our dreams momentarily become reality. Then, sometimes, they actually are reality.

The darker side of dreams – Sleep paralysis

Lauren was sixteen years old when she met the dark man in a dream. “I was driving home from work and there was this other car that crossed the lane and made me wreck my car,” she said. “I heard sirens and looked over and saw him standing over me.” A tall, black shadow of a man loomed over her in the dream, his eyes red burned into hers. “Then I saw this really, really bright light then woke up.” That wasn’t the last time she saw the black shadow man.

She woke one night to find her bedroom bathed in darkness. Lauren usually slept with her television and a nightlight on because she always felt as if she were being watched. But that night her TV and night light were off. “I had one window and a little light was coming through so I could kinda see the shoulder and half the head of a tall shadow man with red glowing eyes just staring at me,” she said. “I laid there staring at his eyes not able to think or move or feel anything. It was like it had a trance on me or something.”

During this trance she couldn’t close her eyes. “I had a fan blowing right on my face and I never once blinked,” she said. “When I felt like I could move again I sat up never taking my eyes off of him, and when I sat up my eyes started to burn really bad and started to water, so I blinked.” When she opened her eyes again, the dark figure was gone, and she lay down and went back to sleep.

Lauren has seen it since, fleetingly. The shadow man occasionally flitters across the street only to disappear as she focuses on it. “When I see him its like time stops,” she said. “I can’t move, I can’t blink, I can’t do anything till he is gone.”

But her initial death dream brought on by this dark, sinister figure haunts her still. “I still don’t drive to this day,” she said. “In fear that I will die the way I did in my dream.”

When seven-year-old Dalton Vitt’s parents moved the family into a two-story house in Bonner Springs, Kansas, the move was nothing new. His father is a home remodeler, and they change houses every few years. But when they move, the family always takes something with them. “We built it new,” Dalton said. “But there was a lot of antique furniture.”

When the Vitt family settled into their new home, a two-story, three-bedroom house, they gave Dalton a bedroom upstairs. “It always felt creepy when I was upstairs by myself,” he said. “I always felt there was something behind me at all times.”

Vitt met that something shortly after they moved in. “I woke up in the middle of the night,” he said. “There was this guy looking out the window. He was wearing old Victorian clothing, and had on a powdered wig.”

Vitt vividly remembers rubbing his eyes to make sure he was awake. He was. The figure stood with his hands joined behind his back, looking out the window opposite from where Vitt lay. “He wasn’t looking at me,” Vitt said. “I didn’t want to draw attention.”

The figure was as clear as if a man were standing before his window – except Vitt knew it wasn’t a man, at least not anymore.  “His coat was like a vest. It looked maroonish,” Vitt said. “It was like in full detail. Not like an outline or anything. Pretty creepy.” The figure stood straight, with its hands behind its back, just staring out the window. “Didn’t move, didn’t make any noise, just stood there in one spot.”

The figure in the wig stood before Vitt’s window, just feet from the bedroom door. Vitt knew he couldn’t run for the safety of his parent’s bedroom without attracting its attention. “I looked at it a couple of seconds, then lay back down and went to sleep,” he said. “I was a little kid and didn’t know what else to do.”

The next day he told his parents; they patted his head. “Back when we lived there I would always tell them it would feel creepy upstairs. They would tell me I was imagining it,” he said. “Now that I’m older I say, ‘that stuff actually happened.’ They were trying to comfort me, but I know it was a ghost.”

That wasn’t the last time something spectral haunted Vitt in that house, a few years later he encountered the Blob.

“I don’t remember why, but I was sleeping in the guest room,” he said. “I woke up and was lying on my side facing the wall where the door was.” The wall the bed rested against held the only window to the room, a big bay window Vitt couldn’t see from the bed.

No sooner had Vitt woken than he saw the apparition. “A big blob of white floated from the door into where the window was at,” he said. The Blob floated slowly and silently past Vitt. At first he thought the light was caused by the headlights of a passing car, but he’d seen those lights before. This wasn’t the same.” It was pretty slow. It wasn’t like a car driving by,” he said. “That light was yellow. This was perfectly white.”

The Blob floated by the bed where Vitt lay staring at it. Then entered the space of the bay window and disappeared from sight. “I was more creeped out by the Blob (than the wigged apparition) because it was way closer to me and it was moving towards me,” he said. “It was the second thing that had happened. It was proof that the first thing wasn’t a dream.”

A year later, Vitt received further confirmation that something ghostly inhabited that house. His mother pulled into the garage after school, and Vitt jumped out of the car to beat his little brother inside. “I was the first one in the house,” he said. “It sounded like there was a trumpet playing. It was loud. You can’t mistake a trumpet. It sounded like it was coming from upstairs. I knew my dad had a trumpet because he played one in high school.”

But this was hours before his father usually came home from work. “I went out and asked Mom why Dad was home and she said he’s not,” Vitt said. He didn’t immediately tell her about the trumpet. “I went back in and it was gone. I check all the TVs and radios and nothing was on. It was just a trumpet that played.”

That night he told his father. “He laughed and said I was just hearing things.” Vitt is away to college, and his parent’s mantra about something spooky in that house has changed.

The Vitts have moved to another house in Bonner Springs, and nothing otherworldly has visited Dalton Vitt there. Vitt said he thinks his experiences had something to do with the antique furniture in that house; something ghostly may have been attached to them. The family left some of the furniture in the house, and sold the rest.

But something from the house may have attached itself to him.

On a night in 2011, Vitt was with a friend driving on a country road from Bonner Springs to nearby Tonganoxie, Kansas, when he saw an old friend. “We came up over this hill and to the left there was a big pasture and this thing shaped like a Blob,” Vitt said.

The bright, pure-white entity looked just as it did the first night he saw it, except for two stumpy legs. “It was out in the pasture, it looked kind of small,” Vitt said. “As we were driving next to the pasture, it took off running across the field. Usain Bolt speed. It was coming toward us.”

Vitt didn’t say anything about the Blob to the driver. “We came up over the next hill and my friend said, ‘did you see that?’ He saw I too,” Vitt said. “That’s the first thing that ever happened that someone was there to see it too.” Then it was gone.

Vitt hasn’t seen the Blob for two years, but he knows it’s still out there.

The wedding just never seemed to happen. Tina and Doug lived together for a few years in the mid 2000s, and planned their wedding a number of times, but they always had to change their plans. “Last wedding planned we found out that same month he was terminal with cancer,” Tina said. “So I went from planning our wedding to going to hospitals and treatments trying to find help and surgeries.”

Doug seemed to adjust well to his fate, except when it came to Tina. He couldn’t tolerate the thought of leaving her behind. “When he talked about his dying he made it clear he wanted me buried beside him,” Tina said. “He wanted to be at the feet of his mother and I was to be at the feet of his father.”

That didn’t happen. Doug’s aunt passed, and he got more bad news. “At the funeral he was told I could not be buried beside him due to the easement of the road,” Tina said. “This upset Doug. He cried a lot about it, and worried about it more than his own well being.”

A month after his aunt’s funeral, Doug died. Sometime later Tina met her new boyfriend Randy, but she’ll never forget Doug, and, it seems he’ll never forget her – even in death. “I never told Randy about this at all, no one had,” Tina said. “Even now things keep happening and I know it is him.”

Tina and Randy drove home from church in Moberly, Missouri, early one Sunday afternoon, and as they approached the small town of Huntsville on U.S. 24 highway, Tina looked over at Randy and asked him to take a small detour. “Let’s stop by the cemetery,” she said. “I need to see Doug’s grave and visit.”

Randy said, “Okay,” and a few minutes later pulled into Hagar Cemetery in Huntsville. “We went to Doug’s grave then we walked around the cemetery,” she said. When they walked by the tombstones of a young couple, Tina knew something was wrong. “Randy had a huge sadness come over him,” she said. “He could not shake it at all.”

They got back in the car and drove from the cemetery. Eight miles down U.S. 24 highway, Randy pulled over and broke down crying. He turned toward Tina, tears running down his face. “I don’t know why this sadness hit me so hard,” he said.

Randy’s eyes froze her in her seat. “His eyes where not his eyes. They where not his honey brown eyes,” she said. “They were the deep, dark brown eyes like Doug’s.”

She stared into her dead finance’s eyes that burned from her boyfriend’s gaze. “He reached out and touched my face like Doug used to when he was sick in the hospital,” she said, then Tina found her voice. “I looked him straight in the eyes, and with tears in mine, said, ‘I love you still, and I always will.’”

The sadness that gripped Randy faded enough he was able to drive home, and prepare to shower before work. As Randy peeled off his shirt, Tina saw something she couldn’t believe. “I was shocked at what I saw there,” she said. “It was a perfect handprint larger than mine, bright red and yellow on his lower back.”

The handprint quickly faded and revealed two letters apparently scratched into his skin by fingernails. The letters MM. Tina and Randy couldn’t determine what MM might mean. Faced with daily life, they got ready and left for work, but Tina wasn’t the only person to notice Randy’s eyes that day. A co-worker named Ron saw a difference.

“You okay?” Ron asked Randy later in the evening.

Randy nodded and asked, “Why?”

“Because,” Ron said, “those aren’t your eyes.”

Ron later asked Tina if she’d noticed Randy’s eyes were darker. “I said, ‘yeah,’ knowing I could not tell anyone,” she said. “No one would believe us.”

Back home after work, the couple sat on their love seat, and Randy again touched Tina’s face just as Doug had as he was dying. “Again I saw Doug’s eyes,” she said. “He began to cry again.”

Tina kissed Randy, but talked to Doug. “I still love you and I am not trying to replace you, but I cannot be buried next to you,” she said.

As those words left her mouth, Randy shook his head, and everything became normal. “He was here again,” Randy said to her.

Then she confessed everything she’d kept from him. “I told him about the road at Hagar (Cemetery), and why I could not be buried there and how much it upset Doug,” she said, but Randy already knew about Doug. “He told me that he knew Doug used his body, and he knew what was happening, he just had no control. It was like he was watching it.”

Ever since the trip to Hager Cemetery in Huntsville, Randy has felt Doug with him. Sadness grips him every time country songs like “Getting You Home,” and “Temporary Angel” come on the radio. “He always says, ‘those songs had great meaning to you two, right?” Tina said. “I say, ‘yes.’ He says, ‘I know.’”

Music continues to haunt them. In early March, as Tina stood in the bathroom fixing her hair, and Randy got dressed in the bedroom, the song “I Loved Her First,” sounded as the ringtone on Tina’s cell phone. She had no such ringtone. Randy walked to the bathroom door and said, “He’s here.”

As for the now-faded initials carved into Randy’s back, Doug’s sister and stepmother are sure the MM was Doug telling Tina to “Marry Miller,” which is Randy’s last name. “They said, ‘there is your answer. He’s telling you to move on. He loves you and will always be watching over you.”

Tina is convinced that is true. “Love,” she said, “does not die with death.”

When 20-year-old Walter woke, the red, glowing lights of his bedside alarm clock read 88:88. He quickly saw the clock wasn’t the only thing wrong in his room. “Standing above it was a man-sized black shadow with glowing red eyes,” Walter said. “I looked right at him, and was more confused then anything.”

Walter, now 28, has always been used to strange things in his room. During many nights as a small child, the thin blanket of light crawling into his room from nearby streetlights would slowly dim until he couldn’t see anything. Although he was too young to remember, family members told him this is when the voices came out. “At that time what I was told was imaginary friends would come and I’d talk to them,” he said. “Even now when I’m in a dark room it’s like I can still hear the whispers of others and even during times of danger there is always a voice that warns me to take action.”

But as far as he could remember, Walter had never seen the source of these voices until the night of the red-eyed shadow. “He leaned forward towards me and said, ‘They are watching you,’” Walter said. “He climbed back into the wall of my room, and my alarm clock turned off and resumed its regular time after that.”

They are watching you. Walter already knew that; he’s known it since he was 16. He just doesn’t know who “they” are. “When I was younger I always noticed I was being watched by several people in black vans or SUVs from a distance,” he said. “I know they were looking at me because as soon as I left the line of sight they packed up and left.”

These vehicles followed Walter everywhere. He saw them often around the school he attended, Banting Memorial High School in Alliston, Ontario, and on shopping trips to nearby Barrie, Ontario. “I noticed the same style cars that would stop by stores I was at and left when I was leaving,” he said. “No one got out while I was at the store. Just parked while I entered and drove off while I left.”

The drivers of the vehicles soon became brazen. Numerous times as Walter stood on a street corner waiting for the light to change, one of the black SUVs would make a full stop at a green light, looked Walter down, and drive off. “I even saw a flash once before it took off.”

Then came the day Walter tried to confront a driver. “I caught one watching me,” he said. Walter stepped behind a vehicle, momentarily out of view, and snuck close to the black SUV. Two people were with the vehicle, one sitting inside, the other standing outside holding a camera with a telephoto lens.

“They were dressed in somewhat leisure-style clothing. Black pants and a white shirt and had sunglasses on,” Walter said. “They noticed I was ten-ish feet away and threw everything in the car and booked it.” Walter thinks these people in the dark SUVs may be gone for good. “After the shadow figure told me they were watching me I haven’t been bugged by them to the best of my knowledge.”

Are these the mysterious Men in Black; strange darkly dressed, semi-human entities that have been reported harassing UFO witnesses since the modern UFO flap began in the 1940s? The men and vehicles Walter saw fit the description, but Walter has never encountered a UFO.

However, he has experienced something almost as strange. “I did noticed one thing that was going weird around me,” he said. “Lampposts would turn off while I was close to them and turn back on when I left their area, I even walked past some emergency fire lights and they turned on when I got too close.”

Street Light Interference, lights going on and off when people approach them, has been documented for decades. Although no one knows what causes the phenomenon, this happens to Walter, which brings us back to that night in his room, when the streetlights went dark, and the red-eyed shadow man spoke.

“I had no clue what the shadow entity was, but I always loved the dark, I feel at ease the darker the room is,” he said. “I even have a hard time during the day seeing since the sunlight burns my eyes. I kinda joke with my friends at times who I’ve told this to that he helped me out of kinsmanship.”

“Micah, come quick,” she said. I could already hear the stress in my mother’s voice, and my concern was mounting as I ran out to my car, still holding my cell phone to my ear while my mother explained the strange something that had erupted out of thin air right before her eyes, and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. 

“I have no idea what it was, just hurry,” she asked again. By now, I was already driving, and before hanging up the phone, I had worked to try and console her about the worrisome “apparition,” for lack of a better term, that had appeared in my parent’s living room. Had the otherwise quiet A-frame wooden structure, built by my father in the early 1980s, suddenly fallen victim to an inexplicable haunting? 

Once I arrived, I entered the living room to find my mother sitting on the couch with a worried expression. “So what happened?” I began.

“Whatever it was had been floating in the air,” my mother said. “It was a strange blue ball of light, and I saw it hovering right there, ” she said as she pointed in my direction. “It was precisely where you’re standing now.”

I asked my mother to describe how the “apparition” had appeared. She began to explain that as she sat enjoying a small plate of fruit after returning home from work for the day, a bright blue swirling ball of light had appeared out of the corner of her eye.

“I saw it right there where you’re standing,” she said. Discussing the matter further, she told me that she was absolutely certain it had been an omen of some kind; something alerting her to trouble or ill fortune that might be occurring someplace else. “I immediately called your grandparents,” she said, expressing fear that her aging parents, both in their mid nineties, might have suddenly fallen ill. But upon making the call, albeit shaken by the odd orb of light she had seen, my mother was relieved as the mellow sound of my grandmother’s voice answered the call, assuring her from across town that both she and granddad William were fine.

I sat and spoke with my mother, who had recently also been stressed not only about her parent’s wellbeing, but a few health-related issues of her own just as well. She had recently been prescribed blood pressure medication by her doctor, and for the past several weeks had constantly been having to change her diet in order to meet the new requirements of a healthier lifestyle. Furthermore, my examination of the area where the “light” had appeared yielded no results; while I had initially been concerned about a faulty outlet nearby, or perhaps some other kind of electrical discharge that might have occurred, I could find no evidence of scorches or burns, nor any reason why an outlet nearby might have been emitting electrical sparks or other dangerous activity of the sort.

“Mom,” I confided in her finally, “I don’t doubt that you saw something,” I told her. “However, I wonder if this might not be a case of questioning whether the chicken or the egg came first.” I explained that, while she indeed may have witnessed some kind of strange, unexplained illumination, her interpretation of the phenomenon had been primarily negative. In other words, perhaps the stress her mind, and even her body had been under for the last few weeks, led her to reach an almost panicked state upon perceiving what she believed had been a ghostly apparition in the living room.

“Give it another couple of days,” I said to further comfort her. “I guarantee you’ll find that there were, in fact, no deaths or other ill fortune in conjunction with the ghost light you saw.” And as predicted, within a week all had returned to normal at the Hanks residence.

The story I’m relating here is not intended to be a dismissal of the presumed appearances of strange phenomenon at various locales. While I have written extensively myself on homes that do appear to be haunted, I do often wonder if there aren’t elements that could be underlying the “popular” notion of a ghostly manifestation (i.e. that ghosts are simply “spirits of the dead”) that stem back to the individual witness. As was the case during my research into the haunting that is said to be ongoing at Reynolds Mansion, while the actual owners living on-site at the historic mansion had claimed to see very little, a number of guests at the home (now operating publicly as a bed and breakfast) have nonetheless supplied their stories of ghostly apparitions they claim to have seen at the residence. Could it indeed be that some may be capable of “seeing” a ghost more often, or even more easily, than others?

Perhaps even more important is the question of how the individual who witnesses something wholly inexplicable chooses to interpret the phenomenon; a question about one’s world view does come into play somewhat here, and it becomes something of a matter of how one’s outlook on life will tend to gravitate toward conclusions based on the apparent presence of an apparition. In my mother’s case, a strange, orb-like phenomenon she claimed to have witnessed had seemed to indicate an impending tragedy when, in reality, no such tragedy had (or was even about to) occur. Without having to doubt whether or not anything had been seen by y mother on this occasion, could it be that certain otherwise explicable phenomenon are witnessed from time to time by individuals who merely interpret the phenomenon as being evidence of something it is not? How often might this interpretation lead one to believe that a house might be haunted?

The ranch in small-town Texas stretches over 1,200 acres, and has been in Xiania’s family for more than 150 years. Her family runs Texas longhorn cattle and trains quarter horses on that ranch, and as they go about their daily routine, Xiania’s family doesn’t go it alone.

Xiania, now 24, grew up on the ranch with her parents, grandmother, and four older brothers, but those aren’t the only family members on the ranch. “There have been many deaths (there) over the years,” she said. “Great-great grandparents, aunts and uncles that died as children, and other family members.”

Many are buried at a far corner of the land in a cemetery littered with headstones; some that date back to the 1700s. “My grandmother and I have both seen the spirits of some of the deceased family members,” she said. “My grandmother has always said that they are only here to keep an eye on us and to make sure we are well. I personally don’t think that.”

She has reason to believe the dead aren’t friendly. “We would see shadows walking down the hall on the upstairs landing and my grandmother and I saw a woman who wears a long black Victorian-style dress with a high collar, long sleeves with short puff sleeves,” Xiania said. “Her hair is in a bun on top of her head and she always has a mean look on her face.”

Nothing frightened Xiania until something came into her room. “One evening I was in my bedroom doing homework,” she said. “I got a strange feeling that I was not alone in the room, and it had turned very cold.”

She looked up from her schoolwork and scanned the room. “I watched as a doll that was sitting on my bed went off onto the floor all by itself,” she said. “It did not fall off because it was in the middle of the bed and there was no way it could have just fallen off. I saw that doll lift up a little before it went off the bed.”

These increasingly ominous experiences escalated. Doors opened and closed throughout the house at night, items disappeared, and sinks would turn on by themselves.

Then one night while Xiania lay in bed, surrounded by the suffocating darkness of night, the presence grew personal. “Someone would whisper my name in my ear,” she said. “But there would be no one there. My name is not an easy one to say for someone who has never met me or spoken my name, but whoever it was that whispered in my ear spoke my name perfectly.”

Xiania is convinced the whisperer lingered in her room and hid in her closet. One of her cats, Jasper, began to grow nervous near the closet door. “Jasper would not go anywhere near my bedroom closet, and he always seemed cautious and scared when he was in my bedroom,” she said. “One day he disappeared and was never found.”

Other pets feared the closet. Her ferret Pierre, that was “into absolutely everything” refused to go near the closet when the door was open. One day it disappeared as well.

Visitations began to occur outside the ranch house. Riding alone searching for a lost calf, Xiania’s horse froze. “I saw a Native American man from about the 1800s or somewhere around there,” she said. The man wore only a breechcloth, his hair ran down to his waist; his legs disappeared below the knees.

“The Native American spirit stood there watching me for a few seconds and then he suddenly just disappeared,” Xiania said. “My horse is what they call bomb proof because it doesn’t matter what goes on around him he doesn’t get upset or afraid, but this day he was afraid and no matter what I did he refused to go near the area where the Indian was standing, and even after the Indian disappeared.”

Things became quiet at the ranch until 2011 when her brother’s then-girlfriend claimed she could talk with the dead. “(She) fancied herself a ghost hunter, and she wanted to do an investigation of our house and the surrounding area,” Xiania said. “I was very opposed to it, and so was my other brother.”

That didn’t seem to matter. One weekend when Xiania’s parents and grandmother were out of town, her brother’s girlfriend brought a ghost-hunting group to the ranch, equipped with digital cameras, a video camera, and audio recorders. After claiming to pick up scratchy EVPs, the girl produced a Ouija board and set it up in Xiania’s bedroom.

“This woman convinced my brother to let her and her crew use a Ouija board to talk to the spirits that are in the house,” Xiania said. “He reluctantly agreed but this I opposed completely. Our grandmother had told us stories about using what she called a door to the devil.”

As the girl asked questions, the planchette immediately began to move. “The first spirit they contacted was supposedly my great-great grandmother,” Xiania said. “They began speaking to another spirit or entity that was not related to the house in any way.”

Then the air in the room grew cold. “So cold we could see our breath in front of us, and it had been stifling hot in the room just minutes before,” Xiania said. “Then there was a very bad odor like rotten eggs or rotten meat.”

“What’s your name?” the girlfriend asked the board. The planchette skittered across the board, spelling out, ‘cannot tell you that.’

“What are you doing here?” she asked. The board spelled, ‘you called for me.’

“That started making everyone nervous,” Xiania said. “I was especially nervous as we were in my bedroom playing with this board and now strange things were really starting to happen.”

Frightened, Xiania sat on her bed, away from the small circle of people on the floor hovering over the board. “They had candles burning all over the place and it was spooky,” she said. “Every shadow was creepy, and it felt as though there was someone or something very bad in the room. The air seemed to get thick. That is the only way I can describe it.”

She looked away from the scene on the floor and stared out the window. She wished she hadn’t. A dead tree stands between the ranch house and an old barn nearby. The stooped shadow of a man stood beneath that tree, the light of the full moon casting no doubt on what she saw. “Then it turned into a dark almost black mist,” Xiania said. And it disappeared. She kept silent about what she’d seen.

“What do you want here?” her brother’s girlfriend asked the Ouija board, oblivious to what Xiania had witnessed. The planchette spelled ‘harm.’

“As soon as it spelled out that answer every candle in the room suddenly went out,” Xiania said. “There was no breeze or anything that could have blown the candles out.”

Frightened, the group packed up the equipment and the board and went home. Xiania soon discovered they’d left something in her room. “Not long after the night of the investigation things began happening that had not happened before,” she said. The smell of death permeated her bedroom, the family’s always-friendly housedogs became mean, and horses grew skittish.

“I was on my horse who had always been so gentle,” Xiania said. “Out of the blue my horse started bucking.” Xiania flew over the horse’s head and landed hard, air shooting her lungs. Still spooked, the jumping horse struck her helpless body. Xiania was rushed to the hospital where she stayed two months, regaining the use of her legs. While there, doctors diagnosed her with Fibromyalgia, a painful syndrome sometimes brought on by physical trauma.

During her hospital stay, the family gave their now-growling, biting dogs to a friend. Away from the ranch house, the pets immediately returned to their placid selves.

At home, Xiania’s health began to decline; she lost weight and had trouble sleeping. “My disease, the Fibromyalgia, was getting worse and it would be so bad at times that I could not get out of bed,” she said. “I had also started having some horrible nightmares of demons chasing me and doing terrible things to my parents and my brothers.”

She woke one night to find the shadow she’d seen by the tree standing at the foot of her bed. “At first he just stood there as though he was watching me sleep, but then it was like he noticed that I had seen him and he floated into the wall and was gone.”

Another night she woke from a fitful sleep to a burning pain on the back of her neck. “It was like my neck was on fire,” she said. She painfully got out of bed and went to the bathroom. “I put cold water on my neck and when I looked in the mirror I could see three scratches.” As she stared into the bathroom mirror, she saw a shadow move in her bedroom doorway.

Whatever was in the house began to leave more physical evidence. “The next morning we woke up to the sound of my mother father and brothers yelling,” she said. “On the kitchen floor was a huge feces. It looked like an elephant had been in the kitchen. It was the worst thing I had ever seen or smelled in my life, and this was not the last time we would find it.” The family would wake to find large piles of rancid feces in the kitchen, or on Xiania’s bedroom floor. No pet in the house could have produced something that size.

“My health continued to decline and was so bad that I moved out of my bedroom and onto the sofa in the television room where I would not have to go up or down the stairs,” she said. “My mother had to care for me full-time. I had lost so much weight.” Xiania at five feet tall and 110 pounds was down to 80 pounds. “It got so bad that my doctor finally put me in the hospital,” she said. “I started feeling better by the next day and started putting on weight and getting my strength back.”

Within a week she was home, but she quickly took ill again, and the pieces began to fall into place. “My brother told me that he thought whatever his now ex-girlfriend had called in with the Ouija board was what was making me ill,” she said. “He told me about some things that he had seen and heard since that night.”

Walking past her bedroom one night, he saw the large, dark figure standing over his sister’s bed. “He said that the dark thing was bent like an old person, and it looked like the fingers were very long,” she said. “He couldn’t make out any features but it was creepy and gave him a very bad feeling.” Her brother stepped into the bedroom and said, ‘Hey.’ The shadow being turned, looked at her brother, and disappeared.

Xiania and her brother convinced her parents to allow them to move out of the house. They reluctantly agreed, and her health quickly began to improve. “My brother and I have been living in our own little house just a couple of miles from our parent’s ranch for about a month, and so far I am doing fine,” she said. “I will always have the Fibromyalgia, and at times will have flare-ups that cause me to have pain all over my body, but it is nothing like what I felt when I was ill on the ranch.”

Xiania’s parents and grandparents seem to be immune to the dark entity that moved onto the ranch, and into Xiania’s room. She thinks it’s because they weren’t present for the Ouija board session.

Out of the house her brother began to open up about his own experiences. “He told me that he awoke a few times with something lying on top of him holding him down and making it difficult to breathe,” Xiania said.

Her brother also smelled the odor of death, and was attacked by wall hangings hurling themselves at him. “He started seeing the shadow man where ever he went in the house,” she said. “But he really started getting worried the night he saw the dark creature standing over me in my bed and that is when he started thinking about getting us both out of the house.”

According to a Glasgow, Scotland electrician named Danny Thomas, on a particularly cold and wintry evening in January 1879, his great-great-grandfather, who had apparently suffered from some form of severe mental affliction for years, committed suicide by violently hurling himself off Scotland’s Tay Bridge, and right into the harsh and churning waters of Dundee’s Firth of Tay far below. But this was to be no ordinary, tragic suicide.

In the immediate days that followed the family’s sad loss, ominous reports began to quietly circulate within the close-knit confines of the neighbourhood of a shaggy-haired man-beast  with glowing, silver-colored eyes that was seen roaming the Tay Bridge late at night, and that came to be known locally – in distinctly hushed tones – as the Shuggy.

It’s a term that instantly evokes thoughts of Rendlesham Forest, England’s Sasquatch-like Shug Monkey and the Bigfoot-infested grounds around Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire, England. That the term” Shug” is derived from an old English term meaning “demon” only makes matters all the more intriguing. Even more intriguing, the death in the Thomas family was not the only tragedy that occurred at the Tay Bridge in 1879.

As far as the known data are concerned on the other disastrous event, at least, the story goes like this:

Almost two miles in length, the bridge – which was built according to the plans of Sir Thomas Bouch – was the longest on the planet back then. Proposals for such a vast project dated back to the 1850s, with the initial foundation stone put into place in July 1871.

The first engine duly crossed the bridge on September 22, 1877, and it was officially opened by Queen Victoria on June 1, 1878. Ulysses S. Grant worded it correctly when he commented that it was “a big bridge for a small city.” But that situation soon changed – and most definitely not for the better.

It was an appropriately dark and stormy night on December 28, 1879 when, shortly after 7.00 p.m., and as a veritable storm of truly deluge-style proportions was blowing right down the length of the estuary, the central navigation spans of the Tay Bridge collapsed and plummeted into the Firth of Tay – taking with them a train and all its carriages that resulted in more than seventy untimely and tragic deaths.

An official investigation was quickly put into place and which came up with at theory that the collapse of the Tay Bridge resulted from was “…the insufficiency of the cross bracing and its fastenings to sustain the force of the gale.” Plans were duly made for a new bridge to be built – according to the designs of one William Henry Barlow. The first stone was laid on July 6, 1883; and, by the time of its completion, no less than fourteen of the construction workers were dead, all from a variety of accidents.

It must be said that Danny Thomas was most definitely not an adherent of the theory that the Tay Bridge disaster, and the many accompanying deaths, could be attributed to something as down to earth as the stormy and relentless British weather. No: It was his firm belief that the dark and sinister forces of the Shuggy were at work on that most tragic of all nights.

Moreover, Danny was of the opinion that the precise cause of the Tay Bridge disaster of December 1879 was his great-great-grandfather; returned, after his January 1879 death, to our plane of existence in the spectral form of some vile man-beast that haunted the darkened corners of the bridge – positively oozing negative energy and creating an atmosphere of death, doom, tragedy and decay as it did so, albeit briefly for a few weeks following the collapse of the once-mighty bridge.

A doomed bridge, indeed.

When it comes to sightings of strange creatures in the UK, they don’t begin and end with the likes of out-of-place big cats and the Loch Ness Monster. Nope. Bizarrely, there are many reports on record – but that seldom get the coverage they deserve – of what sound like wild, primitive humans roaming the old land. Sounds bizarre? It is! But, read on…

Theo Brown – a noted Devonshire, England folklorist and acclaimed writer – was the author of such books as Devon Ghosts and Family Holidays Around Dartmoor, and someone who collected countless dark tales of terror. One such chilling tale came from a friend of Brown’s who had been walking alone at dusk near the Neolithic earthworks at the top of Lustleigh Cleave, which sits on the extreme east side of Dartmoor, England in the Wrey Valley.

Lustleigh Cleave is an extraordinarily strange place at the best of times, and where an inordinate number of unexplained incidents and anomalous phenomena seem to take place on an amazingly regular basis. Moreover, the remains of prehistoric stone huts can be seen in the direct vicinity, and an ancient burial monument, Datuidoc’s Stone – which is estimated to have originated at some point around 550 to 600 A.D. – still stands to this very day, pretty much as it did all those years ago.

British cryptozoologist Jon Downes, director of the Center for Fortean Zoology, says of the weirdness that dominates Lustleigh Cleave: “I have got reports of sightings of a ghostly Tudor hunting party, of mysterious lights in the sky, and even the apparitions of a pair of Roman Centurions at Lustleigh Cleave.”

But, adds Jon, getting to the most important aspect of the story, “Theo Brown’s friend saw, clearly, a family of ‘cave men,’ either naked and covered in hair or wrapped in the shaggy pelts of some wild animal,  shambling around the stone circle at the top of the cleave.”

Moving on, the late Stan Gooch, the author of a number of books, including Creatures from Inner Space and The Paranormal, told of his encounter with nothing less than what seemed to be a Neanderthal man at a séance held at a house in the English city of Coventry in the 1950s! In Gooch’s very own words, during the course of the séance, something both primitive and primeval materialised before the shocked attendees:

“This was a crouching ape-like shape, which became clearer as the moments passed. I guess it approximated to most people’s idea of what an ancient cave man would look like. Yet one could not make out too much detail – the eyes were hidden, for example. It stood in half shadow, watching us, breathing heavily as if nervous. I must say, though, that I sensed rather than heard the breathing. I could not decide whether our visitor was wearing the skin of some animal, or whether it had a rough coat of hair of its own.”

All attempts to question the man-beast, and have it join the circle, were utterly fruitless, and, eventually, it melted away into nothingness. Nevertheless, Gooch never forgot the experience and later mused upon the notion that what he had seen on that fateful evening was a “classic Neanderthal.”

Rather interestingly, Gooch, in later years penned a number of books, including The Neanderthal Question and The Neanderthal Legacy, which theorized that we, as Homo sapiens, are the result of a hybrid mix of Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthal man.

A man named W.E. Thorner was on the island of Hoy, off the north coast of Scotland, during the Second World War when he saw a group of wild men dancing on the top of a cliff at the height of a tumultuous winter thunderstorm. In Thorner’s own, captivating words:

“These creatures were small in stature, but they did not have long noses nor did they appear kindly in demeanour. They possessed round faces, sallow in complexion, with long, dark, bedraggled hair. As they danced about, seeming to throw themselves over the cliff edge, I felt that I was a witness to some ritual dance of a tribe of primitive men. It is difficult to describe in a few words my feelings at this juncture or my bewilderment. The whole sequence could have lasted about three minutes until I was able to leave the cliff edge.”

Are primitive humans really roaming the more desolate parts of the UK? Could we be seeing evidence of past-times occasionally – and bafflingly – melting into present-times? Or, maybe, we should relegate cases like those above to the doman of the paranormal – whatever that may really be. Whatever the answer, there’s wild stuff afoot in the UK!

As she grew, so did the terror of these demonic visitations.

“I saw more demons in my life that you can imagine,” she said. “No wonder demons spotted me and so I early became a victim of an incubus spirit.”

As an adult Lana sat in her room undressing for bed, not thinking of anything in particular, when vulgar images began to seep into her mind. The images quickly became sexual. “I felt like somebody was watching me,” Lana said. “I felt the strange urge not to put my clothes on so I sat like that on my bed hoping those feeling would go away.”

Lana’s breath came in short, clipped bursts as she tried to control her racing thoughts; thoughts she began to understand weren’t her own. “Demonic manipulation was so big,” she said. “Then, one by one, vulgar questions started popping in my mind. I believe the demon was trying to seduce me by talking dirty. I fell for the game, but it felt extremely wrong.”

A force Lana is convinced was an incubus suddenly threw her backward onto the bed and forced itself inside her. “Next thing I know I was being raped in my bed, very violently, not knowing how to chase that demonic manipulation away,” she said. “That night he raped me once more. It was very strange and I felt all the power he had over my mind and my body.”

Parasomnia
Attacks by an incubus (a demonic entity that has sex with sleeping women), science says, are all in a person’s head. According to psychologists, incubus attacks occur when a person becomes partially conscious even though most of their brain is in the REM sleep stage. This leaves the dreamer paralyzed by sleep while their mind weaves concrete images with dream images into an encounter that seems “real.” This state, called parasomnia, often involves sexual arousal, which can include an invisible rapist.

Are these sexual assaults simply a dreaming mind playing tricks? To the people who experience the attacks, they are all too real.

Attacks in Alabama
An unlikely snow fell in usually warm Birmingham, Alabama, on the January 2011 night the demon came to visit Tsura. “I awoke to what I thought was my husband having a bit of fun with me,” she said. “I was very, very wrong.”

Adrian and Tsura, who was just showing her pregnancy, had been married a month and had only recently moved into the apartment. 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, and on that snowy night in January, it showed itself. With Adrian at work, Tsura fell to sleep, and woke to someone pulling open her legs. 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. She eventually lost consciousness. She also discovered she’d miscarried. “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, but I knew I was attacked by an incubus.”

Attacks in Sweden
The attacks started slowly enough Erica dismissed them as dreams. “Half-awake, see a dark long shadow circling me super fast several times throughout perhaps two to three seconds,” Erica wrote in July 2010 in the diary she keeps to log her dreams. “Find myself immovable. Then several hands touch me over my body. Can’t move. Slightly uncomfortable. Relieved when it’s over.”

The fear, the helplessness, the discomfort of this night time encounter disappeared with the light of the new day, and Erica’s mind pushed the events away – until it happened again four years later.

While living at a youth hostel on the Swedish east coast in the late summer of 2011, Erica felt a weight on top of her and waves of sexual pleasure. Had she attracted the attention of a spirit entity? This wouldn’t cross her mind until January. “Since January 4 I’ve felt a weight on my body, an energy, like the body of a being thrusting into me and moving back and forth above me. First I felt pretty good as I thought my body somehow made itself feel it, but that spooky night really turned things around.”

That ‘spooky night’ was January 4, 2012, when during a sexual attack loud, painful sounds raked her ears, and she realized it wasn’t just her body producing these experiences; it was something else. “I now realize how foolish that is as I don’t know what this (entity) is,” she said.

Pin-pricks began to plague her during the day and night, which elevated to the feeling of a knife blade being plunged into her body, although the attacks never left a mark.

On January 18, these feelings continued until she lay down for the night and her attacker crawled into bed with her. “When trying to fall asleep, an energy-like substance moved under or through me and I felt the energy of someone lying next to me while touching my shoulder,” she said.

Days later during a sexual assault, invisible hands grabbed her own and Erica saw a vague, shadowy face looming above her.

Erica tried threatening the entity, and praying for it to go away. Nothing helped. “It seemed to backfire because I felt something sharp against my throat in the bathroom and my breathing didn’t come naturally,” she said. “I yelled out loud to leave me alone. During my prayer I heard a chuckle, followed by a ‘hush.’”

She doesn’t care what is attacking her; she just wants it to go away. “How can I make this stop?” she pleaded. “Can this be a human being doing an astral projection to my location? Or is it more likely a spirit, demon, incubus?”

The Assaults on Lana Continue
Incubus or parasomnia, Lana continues to be terrorized in the night. A few days after her first sexual assault, she saw her demon attacker. “He showed himself to me in human form. He looked very handsome,” she said. “I know that’s just his way of disguising himself.” The entity also showed her visions of a newborn child. “I thinks he’s just trying to tie me to himself, because I’m sure I’m not pregnant.”

This entity has since visited her many times. She knows when it is coming because she can feel it, “like something is about to change.” The feeling is horrifying. “Sometimes I am very afraid of him, sometimes I just react hysterically towards him and tell him to go away,” she said. “Every time after I say such thing, he sexually assaults me really violently.”

The entity has spoken to her, as well. “He said he is a demon from water, that I need to do what he tells me to do, that I’m not allowed to break this connection, that he won’t hurt me, that he’ll kill any person I end up in relationship with,” she said. “The most interesting thing he told me few days ago is I asked him why do demons of his kind chase women?”

The demon told her, “There’s no heaven without your beauty; there’s no heaven without angels.”

Lana has sought help from a psychiatrist who prescribed drugs, and a priest who told her the encounters weren’t real. She’s still looking for help. “I hope one day he breaks the bond, and leaves me alone. I am tired of his attacks,” she said. “If somebody has a solution, I’d love to hear it.”