My Strange Encounters

Life Updates.

So as I stated in my last personal post, months upon months ago, I’ve moved to Rhode Island. 

For the first time in a very long while I can say that life is “normal.” It almost breaks my heart to say it but, to quote the late Zelda Rubenstein, this house is clean. No strange bumps, noises, visions, possessions, or oppressions. Nothing. For me this house being “normal” is just strange. 

Everywhere I’ve lived, sans one place, was weird. The house I grew up in, the apartments I’ve moved to, and pretty much everywhere else. It got me thinking that maybe it was all in my head. That it was all just me wanting things to be paranormal. Now, living here, I’m beginning to see that it wasn’t just me and my over-active imagination.

The only real reason I’m even writing this entry is because of what happened tonight. In retrospect, over the course of my years, the event tonight isn’t even paranormal in my opinion. It’s just the first bizarre thing to happen and even then it’s not bizarre just… creepy.

Long story short I got a call from a blocked number and sent it to voice mail. When I listened to the voice mail…

*whimper*
*breathing/shuffling noises*
(child’s voice) “Oh for Pete’s sake.”

And that was it. Checked my call records and there is no record of that call ever taking place. Is it bizarre? Absolutely. However I feel that it is far from “paranormal” or “supernatural.” Just a weird phone call at it’s best.

So that’s it so far. I don’t even know if anyone still reads this Tumblr but hey. I’m going to update it every now and then and if anything out of the ordinary happens, you few readers and followers of this will definitely see it here.

Weird Millbury (Part 1)

So I’ve regaled you with my stories from my home town and my stint in Connecticut, but now I’m going to start you in on what’s happened where I am now… in Millbury, Massachusetts. 

In Connecticut, I became close friends with a coworker of mine and when I decided to leave the old house behind, I wanted to return home to Massachusetts and I did just that. At last minute I found myself an apartment in Millbury that needed two room mates, and my friend decided he was fed up with Connecticut as well so he joined me. I had two other room mates at the time, a very nice couple who had lived there for a year already. 

Now I’ll start in with some of the bizarre facts of my current (until next week, that is) residence. At one point it was an old school house, then a general store and eventually turned in to a three apartment house with two smaller apartments on the first floor and another on the second. When I moved in, I decided to get myself acclimated to the building and explored everywhere I could. On the second floor we have direct access to the attic for storage. I went almost a year before noticing that the walls and ceiling in the attic weren’t painted black but were actually all charred wood from a house fire. Just the energy in there feels so… oppressive. Not quite bad, aggressive or evil just really noticeably different with a hint of negativity to it. Maybe it’s just all the black, but everyone who’s ever gone up there agrees on the feeling.

The basement, which was eventually locked even though it housed the fuse boxes, is another story entirely. You walk in and the first room is a concrete/dirt floor with concrete walls. Very unfinished, it held random household repair parts like wiring fixtures and pipes. On the back wall was a pentacle in green spray paint. I’ve always been around symbols like that due to most of my friends and even a few girls I’ve dated being Wiccan or Pagan so, while it didn’t disturb me at all, it made me notice it. On the back wall is also a mismatched patchwork door.

Through this door is the access to the hot water heaters, power meters and the circuit breakers, as well as a walled off makeshift locked room that holds all of the tools and supplies for yard work and what have you. What I didn’t notice, at first, was the door across from that. It was an old door with no knob. Instead, it had two wooden slats (a third had broken off) that rotated to sort of lock the door shut from the outside. That really bothered me because I could no wrap my head around any reason as to why the door would ever need to be locked from the outside and in such a crude manner at that. What was past the door shed a bit of light on the situation.

You enter the room and you noticed the partially exposed red brick walls and floor. This room was added on much later than the house was built. There is a small standard basement window by the ceiling, but it’s blocked by wall insulation and an upside down “No Parking” sign screwed in place. In the corner, and I get goosebumps as I write this, is a bare metal cot. There is a coax cable running in to the room, and under that lays one of those plastic mats you put on a carpeted floor to let your computer chair slide on it easier. Someone STAYED in this room. Whether it was by choice or not is another story, but the fact remains. That room had signs of someone, at one point relatively recently, living in that room. The most disturbing part, at least to me, is that on the inside of the door, someone had scribbled what looked like HOMEWORK INSTRUCTIONS in chalk, as well as multiple lines of scratches.

To me, it felt like it was a room someone was put into in the past decade as punishment. In my head, I see a small boy locked away in there with a desk, a computer and a bed so he can do his school work. I say a boy, because of the fact that the window, being so high up, wouldn’t have been that hard to unblock, the scratches being lower on the door, and the bottom outside latch was the one that had broken, possibly from kicking it from the inside to escape.

That room is absolutely terrifying.

At first, it seemed like a normal apartment. Nothing strange really happened in there. Then, my friend and I started hearing noises from the attic. First, it just sounded like light foot steps. I told myself it was probably just the house settling seeing as it was usually at night we heard them. Then, while we were the only ones home, I heard a loud thunderous crash inside my apartment.

As I step out of my room to see what happened to my room mate, he steps out of his to see what happened to me. We both searched the apartment with no sign of what had happened. Then we ventured in to the attic. 

Since I tend to either use false names or don’t use names at all, I’ll openly state that, at one point, my room mate grew multiple marijuana plants in his room. I say that because he had large rubbermaid bins in the attic filled with potting soil. They were not light, to say the least. On top of one there was an old metal computer tower, still full of it’s components. 

When we found our way up into the attic, we found that not only had the computer tower been laying on the ground feet away from the bin it once rested on, but also the bin itself was moved the other direction and raised up to rest on an elevated floor board some two inches thick. 

Around the same time of these noises, my at the time girlfriend was staying over and, much akin to the time I left a girlfriend in my room alone before, I returned to my room to find her shaking, terrified, under some blankets. She told me that as I was in the bathroom, she saw a tall dark figure materialize in front of a kitchen window, walk down the hall towards my room, stop and look at her then find it’s way to the attic door. She is a sound mind (as far as situations like these are concerned. My personal opinions on her now are for an entirely different blog) and would never make something like that up. Within the same week, a painting in the couple’s room was found removed from the wall, turned 90 degrees, and replaced. It was taped to the wall with double sided tape and placed between an adjacent wall and a book case with only an inch or so on either side.

It wasn’t until some room mates left, new ones moved in and I met someone more “sensitive,” that things really picked up and took a turn for the worse. When I come back to this, I’ll tell you those events which include shattering glass, mysterious scratches in the night, and terrifying experiences involving people talking in their sleep. Also, in a past post, I talked about forced imaginations. More of those, including the most recent one that caused me to write that post all together. Thanks for reading.

- Unrelated to these events, I will be moving within the next week to my new (hopefully non-haunted) apartment in Rhode Island, so if I don’t get back to this for a week or two, hold tight. I’ll finish these for you, and in great detail. 

Finally, Connecticut Part 2.

Sorry it’s been a while. I’m in the process of moving (which hopefully will come along with more tales of the supernatural) so I’ve been a bit preoccupied as of late. Without further ado, I bring you the rest of my strange encounters in Connecticut.

I’ve told you the tales of hauntings that occurred there, but spirits weren’t the only thing coming around to say hello in that house. The house was in a very rural area. A forest behind it that was filled with deer and lakes and one of my neighbors even had a “Tractor Crossing” sign that was absolutely legitimate. 

When we first acquired the home it was still filled with the previous tenants belongings so it took us a bit of time to get it up to par with modern living. Everything needed to be cleaned. The walls needed to be stripped and repainted. One night my girlfriend, her best friend, and I were all sitting around in the living room testing paint swatches and faux finishing techniques to try out on the walls. It was late, and the only device running was an old quartz space heater. There were no TVs, no computers to make any noise. After a few hours we heard a loud noise break the silence. It was a long, drawn out rising wail. At first it sounded like it was coming out of the basement. The friend was afraid of everything, so the instant the noise was heard, she panicked and began grabbing her things to get out to the car. My girlfriend, being the good friend she was, slowly started grabbing her things to accompany her friend. I told them I’d stay in for a bit and clean up before we left. As they were getting up we heard it again.

I put my fingers to my lips and told them to be quiet for a minute. I listened to the space heater, somehow thinking maybe the sound was coming from that. Nothing but a mild buzz. Then again, the wailing started, but it was clearly not coming from the heater. They got up, and left for the car. I unplugged the old heater, closed up the cans of paint and shut off all of the lights. As I opened the back door to drive them home, I heard it one last time, but it proved to me it wasn’t coming from the house. No, it was echoing it’s way from the forest behind the house. I was intrigued, but after that night it was never heard again, so I eventually forgot about it.

It wasn’t until the following summer that I was reminded of what I had heard. The three of us, along with the friend’s younger brother, were all on a weekend road trip to a music festival in New Jersey. It was here that I bought my first and only copy of the amazing magazine “Weird New Jersey.” I had purchased the books “Weird US” and “Weird New England” before and loved them. As I’m flipping through the pages I come across an article from a man who had a very close encounter with a Sasquatch.

Now this was years ago so please forgive me if I get mildly confused with the exacting details of this article, but it was about a man who, after hearing a loud noise, saw a Sasquatch come from some woods, mess with his trash cans, make the noise again and then confront the man, hitting his car. The noise was described as a long, rising wail. Similar to the beginning to a police car’s siren. That description was all I needed to read. It sent chills up my spine and make all of my hairs stand on end. 

So I spent the next few weeks researching supposed Bigfoot sounds online. I found a few that were exactly like what I had heard, and some that weren’t. It didn’t take long before I heard sounds like the others as well. 

A mutual friend was going to be moving in to one of the spare rooms at the house so I was giving him a tour of the house and surrounding woods. We made our way through the passage of bent tree branches, through the large clearing behind my house, and all the way up to the lake. It wasn’t until we were on our way back that we heard the sounds in broad daylight. We heard two distinct high pitched screams coming from the south. Now I know what all of the local fauna sound like, from Barn owls to Fisher cats and everything in between. It was none of these animals. It was a sound that I had never heard aside from those few supposed recordings online. It sent fear straight into me and we started picking up our pace back to the house.

One night a month later the encounters got a bit closer to home. I needed to run to the store and had misplaced my wallet. My girlfriend and I were searching high and low to no avail. We had a firepit in our backyard, so heading out there with a flashlight was never out of the question. As I was upstairs, I could hear her shout-whispering my name up to me. I came down, and she was frozen in the door way to the back yard. I asked her what was wrong, and all she kept asking me was to look and tell her if I saw anything out there. Even though I was nervous, I mustered up what courage I had and looked. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, but I could feel something looking back at me. I shut the door, sat her down, and asked her to retell me exactly what had happened. She told me that as she opened the door she heard a rustle followed by footsteps heading back up toward the woods. Now I know we had lots of animals around, so I asked her to describe the footsteps, trying to lead her to it being a deer.

“Were there four legs kinda running lightly? Almost darting?”

“No,” she replied “There were only two legs. The footsteps were heavy and slow.” To be honest, I never once thought “Sasquatch” at all up to this point. When she described the footsteps, I did my best Bigfoot walk through the living room and she told me that was exactly how they sounded. Could it have been a heavy-set neighbor trying to sneak away to the woods? Absolutely. But it was late. Very late. Nobody would have been out in my yard at that time. We were far from bad areas and our house wasn’t exactly the nicest on our street so I doubt anyone was trying to break in. 

The last evidence I had came from that winter and is, to me, the most concrete. One morning, a few days after a mild snow fall, I was standing in my second story bedroom looking down at the yard. I noticed footprints leading from the street, to my living room window, and then up to the backyard and into the woods. Again, I didn’t “jump to Squatch” but was still uneasy. It meant someone was looking into my windows! How could you not be upset by that? I went outside to get a better look when I realized the footprints in the melted snow were much further apart than I could walk easily. I followed them from the street to my window. It was at that point that I put two and two together. As I looked up, I noticed the bottom of my living room window was above the top of my head by a few inches. I’m 5’ 10” so that puts the bottom ledge at around 6’ 4”. Anyone, or anything, that tried to look into that window would’ve had to have been at least 6’ 7” to attribute for eye height. The prints leading to the woods sealed the deal. To, they were the tracks of a Bigfoot, and going through my very yard. 

I went through the rest of my stay there with no problems. No more howls, no more foot prints or lumbering steps out of my backyard at night. I do realize that there are possible explanations for most of the occurrences but when all together, I just can’t explain them under one category besides either A) it’s a giant mentally challenged adult screaming out wildly in the woods or B) Sasquatch. 

As an addendum, I must say that nobody was under the influence of any substances at any point during these encounters and I, nor my at the time girlfriend, had even taken part in Marijuana, let alone any other mind altering substance, and had not consumed alcohol during, directly before or after any of these instances. I was of clear mind, and while I may have a deep interest in things such as Cryptozoology, I do hold a bit of natural skepticism and have never concluded that anything was paranormal without ever doing all that I could to prove it otherwise. 

Next time, I’ll begin what I consider the scariest and most long running series of events in my life. I’ll tell you what has happened to me in my current apartment, a place filled with noises, apparitions and a strange history that we have never unraveled.

In Connecticut… (Part 1)

So I moved to a house in Connecticut. The story as goes, before the strange happenings, as follows. I was dating a girl who lived in Connecticut, and my parents were going to move to Florida, so I ended up moving in with her at her parent’s condo. She then inherited a house, and we moved in. It was a long process, for this house hadn’t been lived in for years, but all of the old belongings were still there. It was her great-grandparents’ house, so it wasn’t awkward having to move it all out.

One of the first incidences that occurred was, as cliche as it is on Halloween one year, when we decided to construct a “Poor Man’s Ouija” which is essentially just the use of a pendulum as a medium to interact with spirits and the like. As far as they go, I’m not much of a believer. I understand things like involuntary muscle movement and subconscious thoughts so I’ve never held much faith in these things. This night absolutely changed my opinion.

We began asking questions which started out vaguely with vague answers. Then we started delving deeper into it and got a lot of specific answers to questions we had no previous knowledge of. One of them was if one of the spirits of the great-grandparents, Frank, smoked cigarettes. We got a resounding yes. Another was if Myrtle, Frank’s wife, liked Ouija boards. You see, we had attempted contact previously with an actual board and got absolutely no response whatsoever. When asked if she liked them, we were answered “No.”

So we asked questions and were answered, but none of us took it really all too seriously. It wasn’t until we asked my girlfriend’s mother, daughter to Frank and Myrtle, the same questions we had asked the spirits. It was at that point when she gave us all of the same answers that we realized that we had actually contacted the spirits of her Great-Grandparents. But they weren’t the only spirits patrolling the grounds.

One night, a while later, I had gone to take a shower while my girlfriend was on her computer, across the house. No more than five minutes had gone by until I heard a loud, distinct sobbing emanating from outside of the bathroom door. Fearing she were violently upset over something and needed me, I jumped from the shower, threw open the door and was standing behind her, dripping wet and naked.

“What’s wrong?!” I asked, placing my hand on her shoulder. It was then that she turned around, confused. She removed her headphones, which I never even noticed she was wearing, and looked at me, raising an eyebrow.

“What’re you talking about?”

“I heard you crying all the way from the shower! Is everything all right?” Her face gets even more perplexed.

“I haven’t made a single noise since you got in the shower…” As much as I was startled, I just shrugged it off as me hearing things and got back in to the shower.

(As I side note I would just like to say here that numerous things had happened in between that last part, and what I’m going to tell you next. They were all just along the lines of cabinet doors not staying shut, kitchen doors opening to the outside and hearing footsteps, floors and stairs creaking with nobody on them. Standard fare for a situation like this.)

It wasn’t until months later that something else of this magnitude occurred again. This time I had some friends over in my living room and had stepped in to the kitchen to go scoop out some ice cream. I was standing at my stove. The counter tops stretched to my right, and then a ninety degree bend across the adjacent wall. To my was the refrigerator, and behind that a small pantry.

So there I am, scooping out three bowls of ice cream when I hear the same crying. This time, I hear it so loudly that it drowned out the sound of the TV in the other room. It was coming from behind my refrigerator. It was coming from the pantry. I stopped dead in my duties, looked toward it, and then went back. At that point in my stay there, so many things had happened that it was almost second nature to me to just ignore it.

For the record, I never felt unsafe, threatened or afraid in that house. Well, at least not from the spirits.  But those stories I’m saving for my next entry.

I’ve since moved from there, twice. I’ve also burnt the bridge between my ex and myself, so I’m not even sure if the activity has persisted or not.

In my next entry, I’ll regale you with tales of tall beings and snowy footprints.

As a side note, if anyone reading this at any point that knows me remembers something that has happened to me in my past, there’s a good chance I’ve forgotten over the years. Please contact me and remind me! It’s greatly appreciated!