(Above: A photo of my son through a sheet of plastic with a backlight--using it for a ghost in a clock project for Etsy)
**MY COX CABLE IS GOING OUT LATELY AND THEY WILL HAVE A TECH TO MY HOUSE ON TUESDAY--BASTARDS--WELL, MY INTERNET COMES ON INTERMITTENTLY SO IF I DON'T REPLY TO YOUR COMMENTS--I'M NOT BEING A BIA-TCH, I'M JUST BEING SCREWED BY COX (HAHAHAHA)...
I have had plenty of experiences with paranormal events and the ones that really unsettle me didn’t happen inside of a dank hall or dusty attic when I was seeking them out; they occurred when I didn’t expect them.
Some of the most common types of unexpected spontaneous encounters include shadowpeople and visitations from dead loved ones. Upon occasion, we get the variety of spontaneous goosebumps, feelings of being watched, something touching our hair, a scent, a voice, but the ones that startle us the most occur when we are going about our usual life and then – bam! We come up against something that wasn’t supposed to be there.
I remember one time having such an encounter that stuck out in my mind because, as most of ya’all know, I have a wicked sense of humor. I was walking through a relative’s home back east (yeah, us transplants in the west call it “back east” and ya’all call it “out west.”) So, I’m walking into the guest room where I’m going to be staying and I reach for the light switch, turn it on, and I see a movement and look up and the closet door shuts with a dark figure going into it as it closes. It was man-sized. I was thinking, “who the hell is that?” because this relative didn’t have a man living there at the time. I don’t know why, but I just started laughing hysterically. I guess it was the element of surprise. I knew when I swung the door open, there’d be nothing there. There was nothing but some stored boxes on the shelf and nothing hanging inside the closet. I laughed pretty hard cause it was so absurd. The last thing I expected in this meek relative’s home was a shadowperson in the closet. The door had a lock on it, so I clicked it shut to lock it into the closet, then laughed even harder imaging a locked door would do anything.
Generally, when you run into something paranormal when it’s not expected, if you’re a smart person and not a goof-ball like me, you will probably find logic to be your first defense. “I must have left the window open,” “I must have been the shadow created by car lights…” You talk yourself out of the encounter all together because “it couldn’t happen to me,” or “nothing ever happens in this house,” or “I must have been seeing/hearing it wrong.”
The next time you think that ghostly encounters only happen in creaky old mansions and abandoned asylums, think again. The majority of paranormal encounters happen in Middle America, in our homes, our work places, our bedrooms and our bathrooms. They are not when or where we expect or coming in the form we expect. Many will go their whole lives without such an encounter, and a few will have it happen but manage to file it under “mistaken identity.”
If you have had an unexpected encounter when you weren’t ready, I’d love to hear about it.