Once Upon a Haunting

Ghosts. Haunts. Demons. The stuff that October is made of, those stories of the unseen breaking in on the world we know and love. Searches are up right now on words like “paranormal”, “haunting”, “ghostly mists”, “orbs”, “apparitions” and other catchphrases that go hand in hand with the spooky feeling of the season.

A number of people have sites dedicated to photos that capture the supernatural – photos taken by people looking to take a picture of a ghost, and photos taken by people who didn’t notice anything weird until after the shot was captured. Even if you are a hardcore non-believer in the afterlife or in supernatural occurrences, some of the photos that are out there are just flat-out pulse elevating.

While I don’t have a picture to share, I do have a story. Last year, I spent a few weeks in October telling regional ghost tales – stories from Savannah, Tennessee, and Alabama. They are some of the more popular things that I’ve written, with annual hits in of nearly 1,000 or so, most in the month of October.

But there was one story that I didn’t tell, and with good reason. It’s my own, and to this day, I don’t know how to classify what I saw or remember. I will say this: as a person who believes in the existence of a real and awesome God, who believes that He entered into time and space in the person of Jesus Christ, who believes that same Christ was crucified, buried and raised from the grave, I firmly believe in things that are supernatural. I also affirm that there exists a real being dedicated to malevolence, a being that can be called Satan, Lucifer, Ol’ Scratch, Be’elzebub, or as we knew him growing up, the Devil. I believe such things because where there is an embodiment of good, it is logical to have an embodiment of evil. If there are heavenly angels, then I see no reason not to believe in demonic ones.

Now, having said that and laid my credibility on the line as a sane man, I will confess to having awakened one night from a dream. I was in my childhood home, in the bedroom that was mine for over twenty years. Having recently moved home from college, and having recently re-affirmed my faith and belief in Jesus Christ, I was wrestling with the idea of good and evil, of temporal realities manifested in the corporeal sense. In other words, I was wondering if the devil and his demons were as real as God and His angels.

I’ve never seen an angel. Never seen God, either. Never had an theophany or an out-of-body, go-toward-the-light type of experience.

But after a day of studying the concept of spiritual warfare, of studying accounts of encounters with the devil and his demons, I awoke in the middle of the night in a sweat. My room was humid and silent. And there, at the edge of my bed sat a form that would best be described as demonic. The face was thin and angular, smooth and free of lines or scars. In some ways it was a face of perfection – not wide, perfectly symmetrical, and just as flawless as baby skin.

The eyes were set deep into the face, eyes possessed of a glowing yellow-green ochre, a rich and almost unreal color luminescent in the dark of my room. The mouth was small and drawn into a droll grin, not malevolent but not comforting either. The arms were slender and long, and the fingers were tipped with blackened nails. There might have been other physical features, but those were the ones that stood out to me as I stared into the blackness and the blackness stared into me.

Had those scant details been all I noticed, I would have chalked the episode up to the delusions of bleariness – of being barely awake. But the form did two things that still chill me to think about:

1 – The form faded from my view. Unlike other nightmare visions I’ve had that vanished almost as soon as my heart began racing and my senses were startled into wakefulness, this one remained well after I became aware that I was not only awake, but panicking. And when the figure did leave my sight, it did so in a slow fade, like a movie dissolve, which would have left me to believe I’d invented the affair if not for…

2 – As the figure faded, I became aware that there was not only an indention on the bed from the figure’s weight pressing into the mattress, but as the figure faded, the indention lessened, until both the figure and the indent were gone at the same moment. In other words, as the figure vanished from my sight, so too did it’s impression on my bed.

I’ve never experienced anything quite like it before or since. To this day, it still bothers me – as a Christian and as a human being. Do I believe I saw the Devil? I don’t know. A demon? Maybe. Something that can’t be explained by all the science in the world? Damn straight.

There’s nothing more to the tale, although, given some of the stuff that I’ve read about children being especially perceptive to things of the paranormal realm, I can honestly say that I patrol my children’s rooms at night, looking and listening for anything out of the ordinary.

Because I know well that anything, I suppose, is possible.