Tomorrow Is Another Day...

Happy Halloween!!

I know, I know.  I missed last Thriller Thursday, but it was actually completely intentional.  I only have one "scary" story left to tell and I wanted to wait until Halloween to end this endeavor.  I hope you all have a wonderful Halloween and find plenty of mischief to get up to, whether you're at work or at home.  And those of you with kids--be sure to test their candy before they eat it.  You know you wouldn't want them to eat that Reese's Peanut Butter cup or that Mr. Goodbar--oooh, or that Sugardaddy!--before you give it a completely thorough taste test for safety!

*Cue in dreamy harp music*

A long time ago, in a country far, far away, I had an unexplained encounter.  Come with me back to London, England circa 2000 and join me for a mysterious tube ride of... mystery...

Okay, so, this is the one encounter where I've can guarantee that I've something completely unexplainable--it wasn't a dream, it couldn't have been the wind, and NO ONE else saw this happen, even though I was surrounded by people in a brightly lit subway (or tube as the say in London).  Again, this was when I was in England with my family and family friends for my senior trip, and before we headed off for the wilds of England, Scotland, and Wales, we spent a few days in London sightseeing.

A great deal of our time was spent in tube stations and traveling back and forth in the underground of London.  Typically the tube was packed with people on their way to or from work, and it would be standing room only, but every now and then there would be only a couple of other people riding, and I often found myself people watching to pass the time.

During one of these times when there were very few people on board I caught sight of a non-descript looking man, wearing a business suit and reading a newspaper.  I couldn't see his face as he was holding the paper up high, but I watched him flip pages every now and then and imagined where he could be going since it clearly wasn't the typical rush hour.  From time to time the tube cars would come to a stop between stations--I imagine so that any tube line repair men who needed to could get off, or for some other technical tube related reason about which I have no clue.

I was sitting next to my sister, and my parents and family friends were sitting across from us, I think maybe the men were standing up and holding the rails--our stop must have been coming up shortly.  But before we arrived at our station the tube stopped for a minute in the blackness of the tunnel and we waited for it to start up again.  As it did I leaned over to gather my belongings and noticed that the man in the suit was gone.  I looked around the car, thinking that maybe he had gotten up and moved toward the door, but in doing so, he would have had to have crossed in front of us to get there.  Regardless, the man was nowhere to be seen.

I thought that was odd and asked my family if they'd seen what happened to the man who'd been sitting next to us.  They looked at me blankly and replied that they hadn't seen a man in the car with us.  I explained that there had been a man reading a newspaper and he had been sitting just a few seats down.  Someone suggested that he may have gotten off to do some repairs, but I knew that it was pretty unlikely that a tube repairman would wear a business suit to work in the sooty blackness.  I insisted that there had been a man sitting next to us, and they in turn stood by their story that they had seen no such man.  We got off the tube at our station and I continued looking around for Mr. Business Suit, thinking that maybe he had changed cars somehow, but I didn't see him anywhere. 

I never saw his face or heard him make a noise aside from the rustling of the paper as he turned the pages, but I don't see how, if there had actually been a man sitting there the whole time, anyone else in the car would have missed him.  I'm generally pretty skeptical about my "encounters"--I believe that dreams can be our minds way of comforting us or venting emotions, the wind can make you think "unexplained" things are happening--but I also like to think that maybe sometimes there's something more than meets the eye.  But as skeptical as I've tried to be for the past six years about the man on the tube, I can't explain how a man can be there one second and gone the next.  I've never seen any other apparitions, but I really believe that in that moment on the tube I truly did see something--or someone--from another world.

Thriller Thur...erm...Friday: Vol 3

Okay, so yesterday I was busy at work (well, I wasn't really, but I was distracted by other things on the interweb that I shall leave for another post on another day) and didn't get around to posting my Thriller Thursday story.  I figured, no big deal, approximately 4 people per day read this site, so no one will notice.  Well, as soon as I got home I was berated by one loyal reader and even supplied with a story to tell that I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN ABOUT!!  So, here's Thriller Thursday a day late, just for you, sis.

When I was a senior in highschool I opted to take a trip to England, Scotland, and Wales with my family and some family friends rather than partake in the drunken debauchery that supposedly took place in Cancun--you know with all 12 people that actually went there.  I've never regretted that decision and it is part of what made me far more well traveled between the ages of 17 and 18 than I've been in the last 6 years of my life.  It is also where my love for British history was fully realized and I learned of the restorative powers of a miniscule glass of mead and potted meat.  (Yes, potted meat... It's meat.  In a pot.)  It was also the site of a few little ghostly encounters experienced by various members of my family.  (And also the site of the London street where my dad almost stepped out in front of a speeding vehicle and I screeched out in alarm and then dubbed him "YOU BIG BABY!!", a quote which has gone down in family history.)

One of our evenings was spent at Ruthin Castle, a gorgeous medieval fortress in Northern Wales located near many unpronounceable towns of which you may or may not have heard.  After we dropped off our luggage in our rooms and waved hello to the deer grazing mere leaps and bounds from our windows, we headed out to wander the grounds before dinner.  There were gorgeous gardens and grottos to take in and passageways that led to such savory locations as the drowning pit and dungeons, and my sister and I were having a glorious time playing investigators.  We came upon a grotto with a large imposing gate which of course only made us want to get inside.  We pushed and shoved, but the gate was either rusted or locked shut and we couldn't get passed.  Since there was plenty left to explore we didn't worry too much about it and instead began to move on from that location.

However, as we turned to leave, my mom and my sister swear up and down this actually happened, the gate began to slowly swing open on it's own.  They alerted us to the fact that the gate had opened of it's own accord, so we went in and were surrounded on all sides by tall stone walls covered in ivy and in the center a pile of stones and boulders.  My parents pulled out their camera and my sister and I exercised our theatrical abilities, pretending that we were at a grave site as we draped ourselves over the stones as though we were in mourning and staged ourselves as ghosts.  It was great fun, but we didn't really think anything of it and we eventually moved on to the drowning pit.

That night, after dinner, we were back in our rooms watching tv and reading through the literature provided about the castle.  One of the brochures was a guidebook to the grounds and we looked through it to find all the places we'd been that afternoon.  We found the gated grotto in the brochure and looked up what it had been--and it turned out that the pile of rocks we'd been playing all over really was an unmarked grave.  Specifically, the grave of The Grey Lady, a murderess and wife of the second in command of the castle hundreds of years ago.  The story goes that she discovered her husband was having an affair with a local woman and she proceeded to take care of the situation in the most logical of manners--the hacked the woman to death with an ax.  The lady was subsequently executed for her crime and buried on the grounds as the bishop would not allow her to be laid to rest in consecrated grounds.  She is now known as the most commonly seen ghost at Ruthin Castle.

So, the skeptics out there would say that after pushing on the gates they eventually gave way on their own and opened from a slight breeze that blew through.  I would counter that we pushed against that gate with all our might and it gave no sign of budging until we were already quite a few steps away and moving down the corridor.  I'm convinced that The Grey Lady just wanted us to find her grave and sure enough we did.  But hey, call me crazy--you certainly wouldn't be the first!

Thriller Thursday: Vol 2

For as long as I can remember I've been a very solid sleeper and very rarely remember anything about my dreams.  However, there are a few dreams that I've had over the course of my life that I can still remember vividly to this day.  The slippery nature of dreams makes it very difficult to put into words exactly what these dreams encompass, but when I close my eyes I can still see the images that were imprinted into my brain.  The only link that connects all of these dreams are their unsettling natures.  I am almost always running from someone, the setting is everchanging, and I can't ever pinpoint exactly where I am, or even who I am.

A few years ago I was going through a very difficult breakup that left me mostly with feelings of betrayal--I was angry, hurt, I completely lost my appetite and I rarely slept.  During that first month I lost an extreme amount of weight and all of my memories from that time are extremely hazy as I was existing in an almost zombie-like state.  Finally, one night I managed to fall into a deep sleep, and I still get chills when I remember the dream I felt that night.

I've always been terrified of the character, Freddie Krueger.  It's a combination of the fact that kids would tease me by calling me Angela Krueger and that I ran across the movies on tv countless times as a child when I was home sick and could never change the channel quickly enough.  This really childish fear has followed me into adult-hood, and even after seeing the actor on numerous talk-shows.

That night for whatever reason, I dreamed that I had been in a relationship with Freddie Krueger and that I had broken it off with him recently.  In my dream, I was in my dorm room, set up exactly as it was in real life, and I remember thinking to myself it's okay, this is only a dream, but also feeling that it was very real.  I was sitting at my computer writing a paper when my closet door slid open, and Freddie was standing behind the door staring at me angrily.  He lunged at me yelling about how we were supposed to be in love and I had betrayed him, and I was frightened at first but then an intense and terrifed anger built up inside me.  I knew that he was coming at me to kill me and I grabbed a pair of scissors from my desk to defend myself.  As he attacked, I sunk the scissors deep into his gut and I could feel the resistance of his body to the stabbing--it was the most realistic feeling.  As he fell to the ground, he reached out and swiped my leg and I felt the white hot pain as he cut into me.  Just as that happened I awoke with a start and sat up, sweating and breathing heavily.

My leg was throbbing and when I looked down, I had a long red welt running across my thigh.  And when I looked to my left the closet door was open--the door that I would close every night before bed.

Seriously.

I suppose it could be explained that somehow I had managed to scratch myself in my sleep, and that I had forgotten to close my closet door the night before.  Despite any logical explanations I could think of, I think it's needless to say, I was freaked the hell out.  The intense anger that I had felt in the dream, the realistic feeling of stabbing someone, and then the appearance of the welt on my leg, it was all more than I could handle, and it was a long time before I was able to sleep peacefully again.

Thriller Thursday: Vol 1

Okay, in a brilliant burst of creativity I decided to totally copy the format of my local radio morning show.  I know!!  Why didn't I think of this sooner!!  Anyway, during the month of October I'll be hosting "Thriller Thursday", and you're welcome to play along in the comments or over at your site.  Just let me know if you've got a story to share and I'll link to you at the bottom of my post each Thursday!  This could either be super fun or go over like a flip flop store in the South Pole--we'll see!

I've always believed in "supernatural elements", ghosts, possessions, spirits, psychics--whatever you want to call it.  I've only had a few run-ins during my lifetime, but I think my level of sensitivity, or sixth sense if that's what you want to call it, just isn't very attuned to that world.  Even without having many experiences of my own I hear all of these stories of ghostly encounters, see my dogs bark at nothing, watch children playing contentedly with "imaginary friends", and it's too hard to believe that we're completely alone in this world.  And I have had enough bizarre encounters to solidify my belief that there's more out there than meets the eye.  Over the next few weeks I'll share those stories with you, and you can either dismiss them as a fanciful imagination or bizarre coincidences, or you can believe that sometimes things just aren't explainable in this world.

During the spring of last year a very difficult period in my family began.  My grandmother had been sick for many years, and just in the past few years her health had deteriorated to the point that she truly was just a shell of her former self.  Finally, shortly after I had been home for a visit to say my goodbyes, she passed away quietly in the hospital.  I went back home for the funeral, but had to return to work shortly after.  Just a few months passed during which my grandfather's health began to fail rapidly, and we knew that it was only a matter of time.

It was a difficult time for all of us, and a particularly lonely time for me as I was far from family and unable to make the trip to the Northeast to see my grandfather one last time.  I felt guilty, sad, and alone waiting for the inevitable phone call.  After a long week at work I spent the weekend at home and went to sleep hoping that some rest would help shake the depression that I had felt creeping over me.  It's rare that I have vivid dreams that I actually remember the next day, but that night I had a dream that I will never forget.

I was sitting in the same pew at my old church where my grandmother's funeral had been held, I didn't know who had died, but in my dream I was crying uncontrollably.  I looked to my left and saw various family members, also crying, and when I looked to my right my grandmother was sitting between me and my sister, staring straight ahead and patting my leg consolingly.  I was confused because I knew that I had already been to her funeral, so I asked my sister to look and see if she could see anyone sitting between us.  She just looked at me strangely and said no, she was sitting next to me, not anyone else.  I tried to talk to my grandmother, but she continued staring straight ahead, not saying a word, but somehow inside my head I could hear someone saying "It'll be okay, you'll be fine".

I woke up to the sound of my cellphone ringing, and when I answered my mother was on the other end, obviously distressed.  She told me that she had sad news, that my grandfather had passed away and she would be going to his funeral the next week.  Logically, I realize that I had been distressed about my grandmother's passing and that we all knew my grandfather didn't have long, but in my heart I feel certain that she came to me because she knew that I would need family with me during that time.  I've never dreamed about her or any other grandparents since then, and I'd never dreamed about her before, so the fact that she came to me right when I needed someone to console me seems to be far too much of a coincidence to dismiss.

Now it's your turn!  Just leave a comment or a link, and try your best to scare the pants off of me--I'm a sucker for a good ghost story.  And stay tuned for more Thriller Thursday stories, the next one is a real doozy!