Better Than Dead

“Apport” is a term used in spiritualism or occultism for objects that seem to appear out of nowhere—or disappear in one place only to show up in another. They have a long history of appearing in seance rooms through the devices of mediums, but there’s also a long history of fraud

involved in these kinds of apports. I personally would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims they can do this trick on command. There are just too many avenues for hokum in these situations.

But there is another class of apports, ones that happen spontaneously to ordinary people. Perhaps you are certain that you left your keys on the kitchen counter only to have them gone when you look for them and have them turn up in some unlikely place like the refrigerator. Which could be a scary indicator of dementia—but maybe not. As this PDF

from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research points out, spontaneous coin falls are common. There have also been extraordinary examples of fish or frogs falling out of the sky, but I’m not sure those are apports. I think they’re a different kettle of paranormal fish altogether, and there are also possible scientific explanations for them which don’t stretch credulity too far.

My own chief apport story falls into the category of spontaneity. At least I think so. Many years ago, I temporarily moved into a house my parents had recently purchased. (The house I inherited from them and that I now live in.) My bedroom, as I understood it at the time, had been previously occupied by the teenaged son of the people who sold the house to them. I don’t want to cast aspersions on teenage boys but there was a very weird energy in that room. Not sure what caused it, don’t really want to speculate, but it gave me the wiggins. So, I bought myself a nice piece of amethyst because I’d read it had protective qualities and could help cleanse negative energy.

It was an oddly shaped, elongated crystal but just the right size to fit neatly into the palm of my hand. When I went to bed at night, I would hold it in my hand and ask “the room” for peace and quiet and to help me get rid of any negativity. Then I would place it on the shelf of a headboard behind my bed which was also right behind the pillow I slept on. I immediately felt calmer and was able to go to sleep. But it got so that I couldn’t go to sleep without this ritual with my amethyst, long after the weirdness in that room had seemed to dissipate. I had developed a real dependence on that chunk of rock. Even I had to admit that to myself.

One night after relying on this crystal for many months I went in to go to bed and the amethyst was not in his usual place. I tore the bedroom apart looking but it was nowhere to be found, not under the bed, not on another shelf, not on the floor not…anywhere. I was upset and couldn’t go to sleep easily but I did finally manage it. The next day I thought about getting another piece of amethyst, but another piece would not be my special magic rock. So, I tried to sleep without my nightly ritual. As I said, the weird vibes in that room had dissipated and after a short time, I was able to sleep without the magic rock.
About a year later I was wondering what had happened to that piece of amethyst and thinking that perhaps the spirits (or whomever) had taken it away from me because I had gotten too dependent on it. I can’t recall if it was the same day I had these thoughts but shortly thereafter I went in to go to bed and the amethyst was in its regular spot on the shelf. I actually laughed out loud and said, “Okay, got the message.” I still treasured that crystal, but I no longer used it in the nightly ritual.

There have been several moves since then and I honestly don’t know where that amethyst is. I don’t think it’s been apported away again, I think it’s been relegated to being just another object I carry with me from place to place. It’ll probably turn up in some box someday. I’ll be happy to see it but I no longer need it to feel safe.

As a kind of addendum to this story, after I had moved out of my parents’ house and my father had passed away my mother rented out my rooms to a lady who was very staunchly Catholic. She was convinced the room was haunted, and specifically that her mother (who she had had terrible relationship with) was the one doing the haunting. She smudged the room and even got some holy water (through means I have no way of knowing) and sprinkled holy water around. It still wasn’t enough to completely calm her frazzled nerves, so she wound up sleeping every night on the couch in the sitting room that was next door to the bedroom. I should also note that we have a lot of critters in this neighborhood, and they do like to run across the roof sometimes at night—possums, raccoons, rats, even the occasional skunk. This poor lady was convinced they were demons even though my mother patiently explained that it was probably more likely raccoons. So, I believe this was a case of a human being who was haunted rather than a specific place.

But you never know. After this lady left and my mother started needing help I moved back into that bedroom and again the vibes were really strange. I ascribed it to the vibes left behind by that poor tortured tenant, but I also took steps to clear out the negativity. It’s been fine ever since.

Although to be on the safe side I did hang statues of the four gnostic archangels—Uriel, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael on the walls of the room. Because my magical thinking is so much more rational than that poor tenant lady.

There are many stories of dogs who anticipate their masters’ return home and will move to the front door or other chosen spot in anticipation. Plenty of rational explanations exist for this, of course. But there are also cases that seem to stand outside the strictly rational. Rupert Sheldrake wrote an entire book on the subject: Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

I myself have a multi-phase psychic pet story. I leave it to you to decide whether it’s rational or not.

My parents had a dog named Tippy who was a very good girl and when my parents went on trips I would cat and dog sit for them. The cats were okay as long as I took care of their needs and gave them laptime but Tippy would go into deep mourning. She’d retreat to my parents’ bedroom and not leave except to use the dog door to go to the bathroom—then right back into the bedroom. No amount of coaxing and sympathy would bring her out and I even had to take her food and water in there. My parents usually drove on these trips so although I knew the day they’d be back I never knew the precise time yet inevitably about a half hour before they arrived home, Tippy would go to the front door and lay down expectantly.

Tippy loved both of my parents but she was especially fond of my dad. He was a house painter so the times he came home every day varied a great deal. But again, about a half hour before he got home she would ask my mom to let her out front where she’d lay down on the driveway to wait for him. It was always a joyful reunion, as you can imagine.

When my father died, she kept looking for him, but she didn’t ask to be let outside. Except for the evening of the day of his funeral. She asked to be let out and went to lay on the driveway. We watched her through the window, crying, and my mom said, “If she does this every night it’s going to kill me.” But after about five or ten minutes she stood up and started wagging her tail like she always had when Dad got home, looking up at something neither of us could see. After a few minutes she came back to the house to be let in. She never asked to be let out again. My mom and I always believed that Dad stopped by one last time to tell her goodbye and that he wouldn’t be coming home again—at least not in the way she’d been used to.

I know I don’t have to tell you pet lovers this: don’t ever underestimate the remarkable critters we share our space with.

This is the only spooky Christmas story I have. As it’s a bummer I will understand if you don’t read it.

Background: I’ve had two fathers. There was my “biodad” who contributed the DNA to make me. I loved him, but we had a troubled relationship. And there was my step dad Tom, the father of my heart. Tom was a gift from the Universe for both my mom and me. He was the love of her life, and for me the only parent who gave me unconditional love, who made me believe that maybe the world wasn’t such a crapper after all. A gift, and not one that every person gets in their life. I feel incredibly lucky to have known him.

In December 1992 I gathered some of my loved ones together for our annual Christmas dinner: my two BFFs and ex-roommates, Lynn and Carl (now married to one another for 43 years), my mom, and Tom. These were nice gatherings, everyone enjoyed everyone’s company, and I really got into putting on a big show by cooking a special meal.

So right in the middle of all this—it may have been during after dinner chat, before the obscene dessert, I can’t be sure anymore—when everyone was telling stories and laughing, the world—or at least my part of it—came to a standstill. I’ve tried to describe this sensation before and that’s as close as I can come to it. I was sitting there in that room, but I was outside of it, too. I could see everyone talking, but I couldn’t hear them anymore. Though I saw all this movement, inside of me everything had gone completely still, the kind of silence and stillness I’ve never felt before or since. I heard a voice, not just in my head but in my soul, if that makes any sense at all. My impression is that it was deep, but I can’t be sure anymore and I can’t be sure whether it was male or female, but it was a voice of great conviction. It said, “This is the last Christmas you will all spend together like this.” With those words came the utter conviction that one of us would die before the next Christmas. I didn’t know who, but I suspected it was one of my parents. Then it was like the bubble burst and I was back in the room just as before, only trying hard to pretend nothing had happened, to deny what had happened, because I didn’t want to spoil the evening and because I knew everyone would just try to convince me I’d imagined it when I knew I hadn’t.

This experience was not created by too much wine at dinner. In fact, after that experience I was cold sober. As much as I put it down to excess imagination or bad brain chemistry or alcohol or whatever, I also had a deep conviction that it wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t tell anyone—I felt foolish just contemplating it. But I had this sense of the clock ticking, of waiting. That sense only grew over the months.

I felt desperate in that waiting place, helpless, unable to do anything, and still I had that reluctance to talk about it because of the fear of looking foolish. I began reading up on spiritual matters and found that the experience I’d had was not unknown. It had happened to other people. This wasn’t especially comforting (except to know I wasn’t alone) because these types of experiences tended to be portentous. I’d had premonitions before—sometimes trivial, sometimes not—but just enough that my friends jokingly called me “Spooky.”

My parents decided to go to DC on vacation and I began to focus all my worry on that trip, sure something would happen to them back there. But they came through fine. I’d put so much energy into worrying about that trip that the knot in my stomach began to uncoil. Autumn arrived and I really began to feel silly. Here I’d been worrying myself sick for months over something that was probably the result of mixing my liquor and I finally relaxed enough to tell Lynn about the whole thing. We had a good laugh about it over dinner one night. Two days later, just after dinner, my father collapsed with an aortal aneurysm. Ironically, that isn’t what killed him. They repaired the aneurysm, but Tom’s heart—that wonderful, giving, loving heart—was so scarred and damaged by a lifetime of smoking that it just stopped beating. They revived him three times but in the end they couldn’t save him.

We got the word in the wee hours of the next morning. It was hard to take in at the time, but the nurse attending us all night in the waiting room—a big bear of a Jamaican man and one of the most compassionate souls I’ve ever met—said that if Tom had lived, his life would have been greatly diminished. He’d have been an invalid, and that would have been a living death to Tom, who had always been active. “Maybe his soul decided not to go through that,” said the nurse, “not to put you guys through that.” Oddly, these words gave some comfort in the weeks to follow, the months and years of learning to live with it.

On the drive home from the hospital I asked the Universe politely but firmly to never, ever, EVER send me a premonition again. What the hell good are they if you can’t do anything to change the events??? I was done with them and with the horrible waiting to see if they came true. I haven’t had one since. I don’t miss them.

Have you ever heard of high cuisine strangeness? (Haute strangeness?) I’ve always been reluctant to take this seriously as an incident of genuine woowoo because it’s so silly, but it is strange so here it is.

When my mother was still alive, I had to get up early every Saturday morning to take her to dialysis. It was a chore to get up early on Saturday, but at least I got to sleep in until 6:45 instead of getting up at 5:15 as I did on weekday mornings for work. And it meant I had 3 hours of precious me time when I didn’t have to worry about either work or caregiving. I loved my mother, didn’t begrudge the giving of care, but during the week the only time I got alone was driving to and from work (and, I’m sorry, but that doesn’t really count as me time).

On this particular Saturday, I had just left my mother off at dialysis and was feeling good anticipating the free time. The quickest way between our house in Westchester (a suburb of L.A. near LAX) and Inglewood where her clinic was located, was the 105 Freeway. On that section of its run the 105 is built high up in the air, towering above all but the skyscrapers, and gives you a panoramic view of the L.A. Basin as well as LAX since the freeway was built to be something of an expressway from various parts of L.A. to the airport. (On an irrelevant sidenote, in a separate incident, I remember taking my mother to dialysis one morning and watching the space shuttle in the distance wending its slow way through city streets to the science museum.)

It was a bright, clear Chamber of Commerce day, blue skies all around and views to forever. The sun was behind me as I traveled west at high speed in the direction of the airport, and I had a clear view to the horizon from a long way out. From the 105, you see the backend of LAX, the south side behind the terminals and runways where they park planes and maintenance/emergency vehicles and the like, and where the outbuildings reside. I don’t know what made me look that way but I became suddenly aware of some odd thing floating low over this part of the airport. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground. It didn’t look like a balloon or a drone or any kind of aircraft. It was oblong and odd shaped and brownish. “It looks like a donut,” I thought—one of those buttermilk Long Johns, lumpy and irregular. That was odd enough, but stranger still was that it was absolutely motionless. It didn’t seem to move a particle for many long minutes, then began to glide with painful slowness to the northwest, towards the terminals and the runways, gaining a little in altitude but not much. The sun glinted off it a bit then, but not much. (I have an irreverent desire to say it had something to do with the donut being glazed.) I kept flicking my eyes back and forth between the road and the sky. Fortunately, early on a Saturday morning the traffic was fairly light. As I approached the Sepulveda Blvd. off ramp (where I usually exited the freeway), I flicked my eyes towards the exit, then back to the thing—and it had completely disappeared.

I usually prefer logical explanations before jumping on the high strangeness bandwagon so I thought perhaps whatever it was had landed (although in four or five seconds, that would have been more like a crash). I could still see the ground underneath where it had been and there was nothing like it on the ground. Maybe it was an odd-looking balloon and the wind picked up and started to move it—but why did it hover motionless for at least five minutes if that was the case? It could have been a drone, but I’ve never seen a drone that looked like a donut, and this was restricted air space and drones were much less common back then. I suppose because I was traveling at a high rate of speed towards the object, I could have had the illusion that a very slow-moving object was standing still and as I got closer it appeared to move. Or some other form of real life trompe l’oeil. These are the things I told myself as I finished that drive home and what I’ve thought about in the time since it happened.

But it was strange. And it did share the one characteristic with other more clearly delineated incidents of high strangeness I’ve experienced: I’ve never forgotten it, and it periodically hawks itself back up again in my memory to be examined and wondered over before I put it away on the shelf.

Another thing I’ve noticed about the incidents of high strangeness in my life is that they often occur during times of stress, and this was certainly one of those times. Could the stress unlock some corner of my mind that’s usually closed? Or because I was anticipating some downtime, maybe the stress hormones momentarily eased up and I was able to perceive things outside my stress bubble?

Or maybe I was just craving donuts. So hard to say.

Long ago in a lifetime far, far away…Okay, when I was in my twenties, my friend and I liked to drive up Calabasas way and visit Tapia Park—part of the larger Malibu Creek State Park. They used to film M*A*S*H and other TV shows in Malibu Creek Park (still do film up there) and some parts of Planet of the Apes and other films. In fact, much of the land was owned by 20^th Century Fox for location filming until the state acquired it for park land. Before that it was a country club. Before that it was taken over by Spanish and Yankee squatters. Before that, it belonged to the Chumash tribe for centuries.

The smaller area of Tapia Park has hiking and biking and equestrian trails but the part we visited mostly just had lots of majestic oak trees and less majestic picnic tables. The big attraction for us was Malibu Creek itself, which ran along the western edge. (I think it was the western edge. Pardon me if I’ve gotten the direction wrong.) To me, this area always had a presence, a kind of watching-waiting, sometimes benevolent if you caught it in the right mood and there weren’t a lot of people around, sometimes—well, if not hostile, then reluctant to have company, if you know what I mean. I never felt anything sinister there but sometimes it just was not in the mood.

What we liked to do was pack a lunch, take our shoes off, and go wading down the creek. In the rainy season (usually October to April here in SoCal) it was prone to flood. In the latter months of the summer, it was greatly diminished. But there was a sweet spot in late spring and early summer when the creek flowed freely and was really delightful. Chapparal grew all around and every year there was a different growing arrangement along the creek. If you’ve been in the SoCal hills on a hot day, you’ll know chaparral has a distinctive scent: wild fennel, barley, sage, manzanita, and other plants give it the baking aroma of some exotic bread. It’s a unique scent I’ve never smelled anywhere else I’ve been in the world and it always says to me: home. The creek had rock pools and small waterfall cascades over the big rocks. The flow was never so much to threaten to knock you off your feet, but some of those pools were deceptively deep and it wasn’t unusual to take a step and wind up with a soaked crotch. But it didn’t matter. I loved it so much. It lifted my heart and spirit.

One year we went on a particularly long wade down the creek and spotted a stone pillar standing on a slight rise in the creek bed. It was about three feet in diameter and about four feet high and it was composed of shale—lovely streaks of salmon and gold and caramel and flecks of black and white. It felt like a natural altar to me. It stood all alone, maybe fifteen to twenty feet from the cliff behind it. Shale is very flinty and flakes off easily, so it’s entirely possible this had once been part of the cliff behind it—perhaps an arch or some such geological formation that got washed away by eons of floods. It had a presence, though, a sense of self-containment, even as the water washed by it, and a sense of wonder. There were a bunch of loose shale pieces on top of it. I picked up a piece that beckoned to me, put it in my pocket, and took it home.

No, this is not one of those stories like you hear from Hawaii or California ghost towns where if you take something your luck turns terrible and you have to ship the rock or whatever back to the park it came from to save yourself. I had that piece of shale for years with no ill effect, proudly displayed with other rocks I’d collected here and there. (It’s probably still around here somewhere but I’ve no idea where. That seems to be the theme of my life these days.) But sometime after I’d collected that rock I couldn’t remember if I’d thanked the altar for it. I thanked it in absentia but somehow felt the need for an in person visit—because I felt so drawn to it. It took me a while to get back there—the next year, in fact. My friend and I waded down the stream but never found the altar even though we knew we’d waded farther than the year before (using a bridge over the creek as a marker). Where had it disappeared to? Who hid it from our view?

I don’t really think it somehow mystically, magically disappeared. Perhaps the chapparal grew thicker around it that year and hid it from view. But…perhaps the park and the altar were just not in the mood for my nonsense. I only know that I’ve always wanted to find it again, but it’s been a very long time since I visited Tapia Park, and I’m no longer physically capable of hiking down that creek. Its disappearance, however, has kept it playing through my mind and heart ever since. Probably no enchantment involved. Probably nothing magical about it. Except, perhaps, the enchantment of a heart always willing to believe in the possibility of magic.

But it could be magic, right?

Greg and Dana Newkirk of the Haunted Objects Podcast and the Newkirk Museum of the Paranormal like to say that paranormal experiences are often initiatory experiences. They give you a peak at the Other, breakdown the dogma of consensus reality. If you run from these experiences in fear, the initiation fails. If you try to overcome your fear and accept what has happened it can completely change you and your worldview. They also point out that these initiations can lead to periods of great creativity and productivity. By that standard, I have had more than one initiatory experience, but the one I’m about to relate is perhaps the most profound.

I haven’t told this story in full here before because at the time it happened I foolishly told it to one of my materialist friends and he said, “What bullshit.” It was brutal and said in front of my other materialist friends and they all laughed. Maybe it was nervous laughter but whatever it was, I was humiliated and made damned sure I only spoke of these things with people who believed as I did. (I drifted away from that group soon after.) Now that I am a geezer, I want to own my truth. That’s part of why I’m telling these stories now. If people think they are bullshit, that’s their problem.

I have experienced high strangeness all my life, starting when I was about three or four. Except for one notable period in my early thirties. I had just successfully fought off thyroid cancer. So much weirdness led up to the diagnosis and treatment, so many wild swings of emotion that seemed beyond my control. Afterwards, after treatment and getting a proper dose of thyroid hormone, it was like someone flipped a switch and I had my equilibrium back. No weirdness for a long time after that.

It made me wonder if all of the strange things in my life had been induced by bad brain chemistry and/or pure illusion. Coupled with this, I had been working and hanging out with a bunch of diehard materialists and absorbed a lot of their worldview. It had me reassessing everything. I went from believer to agnostic to almost-declared materialist in a very short span of time. I said to myself one day, “I don’t think there’s anything beyond this reality except bad brain chemistry and illusion.” Well, the Universe decided to call my bet and raise me.

I had a cat I adored. Her name was Mocha, a brown and orange swirled tortoise shell. When we first met, I was living in a bungalow on the back end of a property in Venice, California. My landlords lived in the house on the front of the property and on either side of us were open fields where houses had been torn down. Idiots were constantly dumping cats in these fields which meant we often had to adopt them or otherwise find homes for them. One sunny afternoon I was sitting in my bungalow with the sliding glass doors open to catch a breeze and Mocha walked in bold as brass and said, “Hello. I live here now and you need to feed me.” So, of course, I did. (No, I didn’t really hear her say this but I got the message clearly.) I had two other cats and one of them, pure white angel Ollie, got so insulted that he moved in permanently with the landlords. (They were great fans of Ollie and were okay with this.)

I have adored all my cats over the years but my bond with Mocha was different. I can’t quite explain it except to say she was a soul cat for me. I knew it the minute she first walked in the door. Some years later I had moved to another part of L.A. on a busy street and about the time of my materialist reassessment of things Mocha was killed. From that point on, all my cats became indoor only cats but I was filled with guilt and shame that I’d been so careless with someone so precious.

Immediately after her death strange things started happening. The dog, who liked to play with Mocha around a swiveling chair in the living room, began to play this same game with something only she could see. She would also sit in front of the hall window, one of Mocha’s favorite perches, and whine in an excited but puzzled way. When I went over and put my hand in the spot the dog was staring at, the air would be noticeably colder than the rest of the room, even when the sun was shining through the window. These were events experienced by other people living in the house. But one night when I was alone in my bed and crying over Mocha I heard purring coming from the empty pillow next to me. It so startled me I jumped out of bed. I couldn’t hear the purring anymore until I leaned over close to the pillow and there it was again! I straightened up, no purring. I leaned over, purring. It was actually very comforting, so I calmed down and eventually got back in bed and listened to the purring beside me. Gradually, it faded away and then I was able to go to sleep.

But I am very talented at making myself feel guilty and sad and one night—again, lying in bed—I was indulging in this and really working myself up. Then something happened that words are inadequate to describe. A wave of pure, unadulterated, one-with-the-Universe bliss swept over me, starting at the top of my head and spreading through my entire body. I knew it was a taste of the numinous and I also knew it was sent to me by or through Mocha. These words on this page/screen cannot possibly do justice to that feeling. It was a privilege, a gift, and I was so profoundly grateful for it. For days my heart was lifted by it. But I got greedy because, wow, that feeling. One night maybe a few days later I wondered if I could cultivate it again and I started the ol’ chain of guilt-making but this time it was like I got a slap across the face—not physically, but mentally, psychically. Along with it came a clear message: “Knock it off. Get on with your life.” I kind of felt that message was from Mocha, too.

I was inundated for days afterward by a ton of small but meaningful incidents of high strangeness until I finally said to the Universe one day, “All right! I get it! I am not a materialist. I believe. You can send any weird thing to me and I will accept it but I only ask one thing. I don’t want to see anything because I think that would drive me crazy.” The deluge of weird stopped, but it has continued to be an occasional presence in my life ever since. For the most part, with one notable exception (a story for another day) I haven’t seen anything, but I have experienced intense synchronicities, odd things happening in the house, ghostly but unseen visitations from other deceased ones I’ve adored, etc., etc. Curiously, I never experienced anything with Mocha again except one dream, months later. She was sitting on the edge of the roof of the old bungalow where we first met, not really paying attention to me. I called out to her, “Mocha! I’ve missed you! Come here.” She looked at me and I got the clear message, “Can’t stay. I’ve got other things to do.” And she trotted over the peaked roof of the bungalow and disappeared over the other side.

The other thing that happened after I accepted my non-materialist pact with the Universe is that I entered into one of the most profoundly creative periods of my life. Art was pouring out of me for many years after. At the time, I didn’t think of these experiences as initiatory, but I do now. I have had other initiations in my life, but that was the most profound. And all due to the ghost of my soul cat.

I’m not sure if this is a ghost story, not sure what it is, but it’s eerie and has “haunted” me for over 10 years. I’ve blogged about the different parts of this before, here and here, but have included both experiences in this one blog because I’ve always felt they were linked.

Anyway, in the last few years of my mother’s life, a marked coldness started dominating her bedroom—much more than the rest of the house. I had to buy her an electric mattress cover so she didn’t freeze at night and not have to turn the heating up until I myself was suffocating and sleeping without covers even in the coldest weather. The chill in Mom’s room was so intense and pervasive it stretched for about five feet outside of her bedroom door into a small adjoining den. Walking through the den towards her door I would hit a well-demarcated wall of icy air. Just wham! Normal temperature, then icy temperature.

Being a weird but mostly rational human being, I searched for possible sources of the chill, tried taping over even the most minor air leaks, had the heating company check the vents, but none of us could find anything to explain it. And to test the existence of this wall of cold, I had my friends walk through the den (without telling them what to expect) to see if I was imagining it, but they felt it, too. Even the skeptical one.

The day my mother died I brought her home for hospice to that bedroom. She arrived at noon and was gone by about eight that night. She was very ready to go. Two remarkable things happened after she died. First, five to ten minutes after she passed, our cat (who had not gone into her room once the cold stuff started happening at least a couple of years previously) came to the foot of her hospital bed and started rolling around, showing her belly and acting coy as she did when my mother talked baby talk to her. The second thing, which I didn’t notice until the next day: the cold had completely disappeared. No wall of ice emanating from her door, the bedroom the same temperature as the rest of the house. And it has never returned since, over ten years on (her ten year death anniversary was January 22), even in the coldest parts of winter (which in L.A. is a relative thing, but you catch my drift).

What haunts me is wondering what caused this.

Mom had two incidents of possible near-death experience in her later years and I’ve often wondered if they were related. There was the time in her late eighties when she got a severe blood infection and almost died. She told me that one night she woke up in the hospital and three shadowy figures stood in the corner. They didn’t speak aloud, she said, but in her mind. They told her that if she wanted to leave this life she could go, but it was up to her. She told them she wasn’t ready, and they said she could stay but things would get much harder from that point on. She survived, and things did get much harder. Maybe a year after this incident, her shaky kidneys finally failed and she had to start dialysis. Less than a year after that, she had a stroke. We were lucky in that it didn’t affect her mind, nor was she paralyzed in any way, but it severely affected her vision (kind of like macular degeneration but not exactly) and her sense of balance. She had to go into rehab for three months and came out of it with her fighting spirit intact.

She confessed to me, though, that those three shadowy figures visited her in the rehab center and offered her the same deal. Again, she refused, and again they said things would get much harder. And they did.

I keep wondering if the shadowy figures showed up that last time? She was in a coma and not talking so I’ll never know. Were they present those years when it was so cold in that room? Sightings of the Grim Reaper, et al., are often accompanied by an intense feeling of cold. But the cat being so coy after she passed makes me think there was nothing evil or malicious hanging around. I still live in the same house and although weird things do happen here I’ve rarely had any activity I would call malicious. Again, I doubt I’ll get answers to any of this, just more questions and speculation.

I haven’t posted to this series in a while mainly because I’ve been going through a lot of stress, both in my personal life and nationally and I haven’t had the focus to do much writing. The national situation remains dire, but things look as if they may resolve personally so I ardently hope I can get back to my creative work. I wrote up this little bit of strangeness for another project and thought it a good fit for sharing here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add to this series more going forward.

This incident took place at least 40 years ago now. (That blows my mind.) I was house and pet sitting for my parents while they were off on a road trip. I was slewping in one of the bedrooms near the front hall of the house when something woke me up. I noticed a strong glow coming from the hall so I went to investigate. This hall has a very small window right next to the front door that I almost never look out because of its smallness but I was drawn to it because the glow was coming into the house from it. When I looked out I saw a very bright big ball of light hovering over my neighbor’s house across the street, practically sitting on the roof. It was at least ten feet across, maybe more. It made absolutely no sound at all. I felt panicky because I knew it couldn’t be a helicopter. The police did do flyovers in that neighborhood with spotlights on but they never hovered right over the roof of any of the houses and of course they weren’t silent. Right in the middle of my growing panic, a voice came into my head and said, “Don’t worry about this. Just go back to bed and go back to sleep.” And I did just that!

The really weird thing is that when I woke in the morning I had no memory of this and I only know about it now because about a year later I came out of the same bedroom into that same hall, looked out that small window at my neighbor’s house—and the entire incident came back into my consciousness with this visceral punch. I felt all the things I’d felt that night and a deep puzzlement that I was able to go back to sleep and didn’t remember the next morning.

Now, of course, I realize this could have been some weird dream or hypnogogic something or other but I don’t think it was. It was just very weird, clearly something Other. I don’t know how to categorize it other than that.

I also don’t know if it’s relevant to mention that the particular neighbor whose house this happened over is bipolar and was going through a deeply chaotic time in his life at that point. Was it a manifestation of his turmoil? Was it something Other attracted to his chaos? None of the above? Who knows?

And what about that telepathic message? Those aren’t uncommon in UFO lore, nor is the “Go back to bed and remember nothing” nature of it. Carl Jung

(Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky) thought they were outward manifestations of our inner conflicts and fears. Jacques Vallee, groundbreaking ufologist (Passport to Magonia), thought they were closely related to fairylore. But he still has no explanation for what they are.

I personally think the nuts-and-bolts explanation—that they are real machines from outer space—is the least likely scenario, despite what Ancient Aliens would have us believe. No, whatever they are, in some form or another they have been with us a long, long time, perhaps for as long as our minds developed that mysterious trick of consciousness: in our dreams, in our skies, under the ground, in fields and forests, just the other side of this consensus reality we occupy. They are a part of us and a part of the earth. Whatever they are or aren’t they are not here to concur us Independence Day-style. If that was the case, their “technology” is so far superior to ours they would have done so long since. They are perfectly content, I believe, to concur our minds instead, or at least reside in that mysterious junction of consciousness and “reality.” Our minds, after all, are the best, most powerful, and most efficient paranormal machines of all.

This blog features a guest appearance from my friend Lynn (with her permission and cooperation) who had an experience that dovetailed with one of my own.

When Lynn was eighteen she moved into a small studio apartment above a garage in Ocean Park, a suburb of Santa Monica, California:

During this time, Lynn was having bouts of sleep paralysis syndrome where she would “wake up” but couldn’t move and would get panicky.

This condition is one in which, essentially, the mind “wakes up” before the body’s sleep-suppressed body movement does. In this state (called hypnopompic sleep) it’s still possible to be in a dream state and not realize it. Often times, fearful beings are perceived as being in the room with the sleeper, adding to the terror of the paralysis. These visions have intense clarity, as real as being fully awake. It’s also possible to experience these things while falling asleep (called hynagogic sleep).

Lynn’s bouts of sleep paralysis lasted from her late teens to her early twenties. Some people have this condition for years, others only occasionally or once in a lifetime. It often corresponds with stress but may also have a genetic component. Science is still figuring this out.

The paranormal community (and indeed many traditions around the world) say that although sleep paralysis explains some of these experiences, there may also be times when the visitations are real—an invasion from another dimension, et al., when we are at our most open and vulnerable in sleep.

One incident in particular was significant for Lynn:

I find the illness aspect of this quite fascinating. Many years back, my mother got an infection that went undiagnosed until it reached her bloodstream and made her very sick. She almost died and was in the hospital for over a week while they pumped massive doses of antibiotics into her. She told me later that one night in the hospital she woke to see three tall, shadowy figures standing in the corner of the room. They said to her, “You can let go now if you choose and come with us, or you can choose to stay. But if you stay, things will get much harder.” My mother, ever the fighter, told them she wasn’t ready to go yet and they disappeared. Her infection finally came under control enough that she could go home and continue the antibiotics there.

But they were right. Mom had been suffering from kidney disease before this but not at the point of dialysis. That infection pushed her over the edge into end stage kidney disease and she had to start dialysis soon after. Some years later when she was in a rehab center recovering from a stroke, they appeared to her again and gave her the same message. She still wasn’t ready to give up, they disappeared, and once again, things got tougher. I’ve wondered sometimes if they appeared during her final hospice stay, but by then she was beyond communicating with me. I do know that her time in hospice was very short. She checked out quickly.

Then there’s my own experience.

Several years ago, my roommates and I (one of whom was Lynn) lived in a “haunted” apartment. We all had odd experiences there—but that’s a story for another post. While there, I often woke up sensing a dark cloud hovering over my bed, something evil reaching tentacles out for me while I lay frozen, panicking. I knew that if I could just get myself to move, just reach out to turn on the light, the menace would disappear, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink, only send up fervent prayers for movement and light. Then, all at once like a bubble bursting, I could move, lunged for the light, shot out of bed, panting with terror.

Sometimes instead of the evil cloud I caught a glimpse of a figure I’ve labeled (long after the fact, when I felt safer) the shadow wench. She was a shapely woman figure that looked as if she’d dressed in a black body stocking that went completely over face and head, every speck of flesh covered, no eyes or features visible. Like Lynn’s geometric figure, she was the blackest black I’ve ever seen—no light escaping her, all light absorbed into her. She sat in a chair beside my bed (except there was no chair beside my bed). Unlike the amorphous hovering cloud, I got no sinister sense from her. More like a deep puzzlement and curiosity, perhaps a slight sense of alien judgment, as if examining a specimen. As soon as I moved and turned on the light, she disappeared like all the other phantoms.

Eventually, we moved from that apartment and went our separate ways. My roommates experienced no more weird things, and I had only one more incidence of sleep paralysis in my new place. Many months later, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The doctor said it had probably been responsible for the emotional rollercoaster I’d been on for the previous couple of years—sweeping swings of emotion that came out of nowhere and bore no relation to the events of my life. Oh, and had I been having odd dreams?

Had the shadow wench been a harbinger or just a symptom of a chemical imbalance?

Once the cancerous gland was removed and I was on a stable dose of thyroid hormone, all of that disappeared. I have been cancer-free for many years, and thankfully, sleep paralysis free. Like others, I have never felt sleep paralysis syndrome an adequate explanation for all incursions of weird stuff in night. Perhaps the majority of these experiences can be explained that way, especially in the proximity of beds or comfy chairs, but sometimes weird invasions occur when they can be corroborated by others. People aren’t always in bed. Sometimes they are in their cars, or reading a book, or sitting around a campfire when the strangeness comes creeping in and about them.

And why did my experiences, and those of my roommates, stop as soon as we left that apartment? Why didn’t they continue in the months before I received treatment for my thyroid cancer? I had very intense, weird dreams after that, but only that one incident at the new place of waking up with something creepy in the room. One last farewell appearance before the carny of odd went permanently on the road. At that time, I told it I’d had enough of it’s bullshit and was able to move—I clasped its odd, bulbous white head between my hands and squeezed until it popped like a soap bubble. It got the message and didn’t return.

I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation, perhaps some borderland between illness and otherness, but I do wonder, and always will. Certainly, I have not stopped having uncanny experiences or strange dreams, but my sleep remains mostly untroubled. Thank the gods, and the body chemistry, and the spirits, and the interdimensional beings.

All Weird Things Index

My early teens were a tumultuous time, with loads of interpersonal drama. But it was also a time of “spiritual” awakening—or maybe an occult one?—when many lifetime practices began. From about the age of twelve I began to read every paranormal book in the Santa Monica County Library. I nearly succeeded, but that wasn’t as impressive as it might sound. Paranormal books were looked down upon back then (still are in many circles). The entire collection at Santa Monica consisted of one bookcase: perhaps seven tall, five feet wide, crammed full of the classic titles of the time. There was Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers Are Real, The Philadelphia Experiment, The Search for Bridey Murphy, The Interrupted Journey, books by Hans Holzer and Brad Steiger, and scads of others. Everything topic was covered, some of it profound and some sensationalist junk: ghosts, UFOs, bizarre theories, metaphysics, and reincarnation. As long as it was strange, I was into it. I also scanned the book sections of the local drug stores for “weird books” and SFF to squander my allowance on. I didn’t completely give up on critical thinking. Even back then some of this stuff seemed like junk. But I loved the mental adrenaline rush reading it gave me, the boundless what ifs.

This was also the time I began playing with the Ouija board—at first with my enthusiastic mom who bought it for us to play with and my friends. We’d have mostly hilarious, nonsense sessions. It was a lot of fun. Some “guy” kept coming through to flirt with my mom. He told her that her second husband would have the initials QZK and we spent many sessions trying to get the scoop on him. Answers on QZK never really showed up, of course. Mostly we got evasion and nonsense. Mom was still married at the time to my biological father, but they’d been estranged for years. She really wanted to believe in an afterlife of love. (She did eventually get it but not with QZK.)

I also tried working the Ouija by myself. At first the planchette was sluggish, then it moved more rapidly. I was not conscious of pushing it but I’m mostly convinced I unconsciously made it move and was mostly talking to my own right brain. I suffered no ill effects or demon possessions. The hysteria over Ouija boards conjuring demons really began in the 1970s after The Exorcist came out. Before that, it was considered a parlor game for people to fool around with. The The abominable Ed and Lorraine Warren also popularized the whole satanic panic/demon possession thing and still haunt the paranormal zeitgeist through The Conjuring movie franchise.

It didn’t take long for me to get bored with solo Ouija board sessions (no friends to play with) and I moved on to Tarot. I’ve done Tarot on and off ever since. I also tried my hand at automatic writing. Like the Ouija sessions, it began slowly and painfully, then became more fluid, then fast. The “spirits” would move the pen in big looping scrolls, taking up a whole notebook page with ten to fifteen words. The handwriting gradually got smaller, but never conformed to neat and staying within the lines. (Spirits don’t conform to the rules.) Again, I didn’t feel as if I was pushing the pen, but I believe it was an exercise in unconscious talking to conscious. Later it developed into something more profound—a way of having meaningful dialogue with my Self. When I was in therapy, trying to dive deep down and clear out the programmed junk in my psyche, my Jungian therapist encouraged me to continue with the automatic writing. I still practice it. It remains a beneficial way of talking to my Self, divining how I truly feel about things, working through the decision-making process, et al.

Except sometimes. Sometimes, even in the early days, the tone would shift into something that felt outside myself, much deeper than talking to the wayward winds inside my brain. Something channeled from Elsewhere? I dunno. I get this now and again with Tarot, too, that feeling when a reading really clicks into place and seems more than wish fulfillment or facile projection. A few years back I asked “Them” if I was talking to my ancestors. They answered along the lines of “took you long enough to figure that out.” “They” sometimes have a good sense of humor.

I continue to talk to myself and the ancestors. It’s a great comfort when I need it, a way of calming myself when I’m stressed, or working through what worries me. The messages that come through are overwhelmingly positive. If negative things come through (almost always self-critical crap, as distinctly different in tone as the profound messages are) I say a little clarification/protection prayer and ask them if the negative things are true. They usually respond with something like, “No. That’s interference from your Shadow or old negative programming.”

But it all began back there in my early teens. I really needed to believe in “cosmic friends” or better angels or a realm outside the tough times I was going through. I’m glad I found those better angels—even if they were merely the better angels of my own mind and soul finding their way to the surface. They have sustained me throughout my life.