One afternoon, my friend Sherry and I were talking as we walked around the little drive that wrapped around the manicured lawn. We were enjoying a nice afternoon when we looked far ahead of us from atop the hill and saw the figure of a robed man, literally standing in the sky. He was pure white and was glowing as if lit from within. He was extremely large, quite still, and seemed to hover just above the trees. We stood for some time and watched him hold his silent vigil. Because we could not understand what it was that we were witnessing, we finally decided that it must have been a statue, and that it only appeared to be floating. When we left the cemetery, the figure was still there, radiant in the daytime sun, overlooking the trees that lay before it. The figure was gone the next day, and in fact, was never seen by my friend or myself again on our many strolls around the cemetery. Many years later, I met my friend again and asked if she remembered what we saw that day, and she confirmed that my memory was accurate.
Like many other teenage girls in the 1970s, the walls of my room were covered with posters of the “heart throbs” of the day. My favorite was David Cassidy. One night when I had some of my friends over, we witnessed David’s young and beautiful face on the poster turn into that of an old wrinkled man, right before our eyes. There were also nights when my friends and I observed every light in the house turn on and then off again without any human help.
Talking on the phone was my favorite thing to do at age thirteen, much to my dad’s chagrin. The man must have told me one hundred times a week to get off the phone. One day while my dad was outside in the front yard, I was in the kitchen having a phone chat with a friend when the doorknob of the carport door began to rattle. I became frightened, not of anything unearthly, but of my dad catching me on the phone again! I quickly hung up and struck an innocent pose. I waited for him to enter, but instead, the doorknob shook even more vigorously than before. I walked to the door thinking that it was merely locked and that I needed to open it. Just as I touched it, it became still. I flung the door open, the word “hey” on my lips, fully expecting my dad to be waiting on the other side. However, to my surprise, no one was there at all, and the storm door was firmly closed.
One summer night when I was alone, I was watching the Johnny Carson show in the living room shortly before midnight. I was waiting for a commercial so that I could attend to my nightly chore of taking out the trash. As I watched TV, I glanced toward the doorway to the kitchen in time to see a white hazy human form pass directly across the doorway and towards the door to the carport. I was frozen in my chair, and could not bring myself to move for an hour. Not willing to face the darkness of the kitchen and the carport beyond, I let the garbage stay put that night.
The next day, however, when I did go outside, our neighbor Barbara from across the street called out to me. “Why did you not speak to me last night?” she asked. “What are you talking about?” was my reply. “I saw you come out of your house and walk around the corner. I yelled at you, but you just kept on going.” Apparently, for reasons I do not understand, the spirit had taken on my form once outside the house. I inquired as to the time of this sighting, and she said it was around midnight.
While it seems clichéd that many of my adventures have taken place around midnight, or even on the proverbial dark and stormy night, it is nevertheless when they happened. I think that there are certain times that are more apt to create the right vibration that allows paranormal events to unfold. The best time for things to happen are “in between” times, and the best places are “in between” places. The most special time is at dusk or dawn, when it is neither dark nor light.
Midnight marks the in between time of am and pm, and other-worldly things are more noticeable at night when there are less distractions to hamper visions. In between places, or magical, places are places such as a riverbank or beach- not part of the water, but not fully dry land. Another place might be in the branches of a tree- part of the air, but still connected to earth. I find my deck is a special place because it is part of the house yet still part of outside, part of the land but suspended in air. Being in such a place or time is conducive to heightened awareness.
It is also interesting to note that adolescence is an “in between” age and is the age at which some young people attract accelerated supernatural activity around them. Indeed, poltergeist activity has almost exclusively been noted around adolescents.
