In Your Own Words.... Halloween Edition

(Enter creepy laughter...)

This is our first annual Halloween Edition. I asked friends and readers to submit a story of a strange experience that they have had... Whether it be paranormal, spiritual, spooky, or down right scary. We were amazed at the number of responses we received, and were able to capture some pretty chilling stories.

There is weirdness all around us, folks. We travel through our 3-dimensional world without much thought most of the time. What phenomenon we do know about is a microcosm of what is actually out there...

This and all photos by CVEckian

Yeah. But anyway. You already knew that... Grap a bowl of popcorn, pop open your favorite brand of soda and lets get this show on the long dark country road...

Bill Kendall: About 1992 I spent a few weeks in the Appalachian Hills of Kentucky with a friend who had a long standing relationship with a family in Cranks Hollow (Holler), Kentucky. It is a genuine hillbilly place, complete with all the moonshine, incest, and retardation you would expect. In the course of building houses and digging outhouse pits, my friend and I took an afternoon and hiked to a hilltop cemetery. We hiked and saw lots of beautiful stuff, and also the scars of strip mining. Then we came back down and I went for a walk on the road up to the end of the holler by myself.

As I walked, my attention was called to a flowering bush beside the road, and I walked over and turned to face this bush and peered into it. As I did so, I saw a series of images of faces, from cave men to present times, including Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Walt Whitman, and countless faces who must have just been regular people, and finally, the series of images ended with my own face. What I took to be the voice of God was in my head, not as a voice speaking words, but as some form of communication passing a thought to me. That thought was this: "All humans have the capacity to be Christ. You have a choice to do good or ill."

I've kind of taken that to heart since that time. I guess that is why I have such difficulty accepting when people do cruel things.
 
Renae Heikkila:  So the last house that we lived in was really creepy. I had a strong sense that children had died in the house. I didn't tell anyone this feeling (especially my kids who were already freaked out by the house). We heard footsteps on the hard wood floors in the living room, dining room and hallways when we were in bed sleeping. We had strange banging noises come from the basement coal room. We had weird "feelings" that someone was present watching us. It was very disturbing. My daughter who was 18 at the time was afraid to sleep in her room in the basement because she felt like something or someone was in the room with her.
 
So one night, I am sitting in the living room with my husband and he says, "so you know little kids died in this house right?". It TOTALLY freaked me out. I had the same feeling but hadn't said anything to anyone. I said, "WHY DO YOU SAY THAT?" He says, "I can just feel it. Something bad happened in this house." Well we never found out what happened, but we moved and have none of those weird things or feelings in our new house. The house was built in 1926 and has a graveyard behind the property where the family members were buried. We were told by a relative that in the winter, they placed dead bodies in tree stumps until spring when they could then bury them in the ground. CREEPY!!

Travis Lee Wake: I was 18 years old. My girlfriend was babysitting for a friend. That night about an hour after we put the kids to bed I saw Danni the little girl out of the corner of my eye. I went down the hall to her room. She was lying in her bed and i told her to quit acting that I saw her up. I went over to her rolled her over she whined a little as sleeping children are known to do and I got a chill up my back. There was a stir in the closet and I thought of her little brother Jesse. So I slid the closet door open and lost my breath when I saw a transparent little girl giggle and disappear. I don't know if a little girl died there for sure but I heard one did fall off the second story balcony. Which is strange because two days later the little girl Danni fell off. She was unharmed but still very spooky.

Mike Berhow: We lived in a spook house with lots of weird stuff happening all the time.It was that big house my folks had north of Kville. We were playing pool one day with Spirit blazing on the turntable when the arm just lifted up in the middle of a ...guitar solo. I yelled put that back and the arm went back down right in the same spot. Lights went on and off all the time and some folks got pushed down the stairs. Rhonda saw feet under the door and we woke up in the middle of the night to find my records spread out all over the floor. They were out of the sleeves and it was right by our heads as we were sleeping on a mattress on the floor at the time. My Brujo record vanished and it took me 25 years to find a replacement. New Riders were pretty hard to find. It was cool but for that.

Dante Smith: I remember a time when I could see dead people.... no wait, that was just Dick Cheney on television.

Karen Snyder Jimenez: When I was nine, and my sister was about 12, we asked the Ouija board who our guardian angel was. It gave us a name and we asked how he died and it said in a fire. I'll have to google the name-- Steve Stinfeck. I think it was spelled wrong.... Anyway, during the session I peeked, my sister wasn't looking when it spelled the words and I know I didn't move the center thing.

Mary Van Elsen: I saw a UFO outside of Newton (Iowa) when I was driving back from Kellogg with my Dad (he saw it, too). A bright light hovering high in the sky caught my attention, and I asked Dad, "What is THAT?" Since it was in the quadrant of the sky close to... the airport and since it seemed stationary, we thought it might be a helicopter with a REALLY bright light that just happened to be pointed our way. We were still watching it when it SHOT across the sky in front of us and disappeared. It basically covered the width of Newton in less than 2 seconds!

Cory Denton: It was completely dark. Me and a few friends were talking and we heard a coyote. So we all got together on the big luggage platform. We laid down and everyone started to doze off. If you were walking up to the platform it would have been Kylie closest to Miles (cabin) then me, Mir, and Noah. Noah and I both had our knives in our pocket. Mir and Kylie were freaking out because of the coyote but Noah and I both knew that it had come from across the river so we were okay. Then we laid down and about 10 minutes we heard someone playing a drum. Bum bum bumbum bum bum bumbum. Then we heard a howl but it was human like and sounded like it came from the library. Then we get this gust of wind come from magic hill ( there had been no wind that day) and then we heard footsteps. Noah and I had our knives ready to go. Mine wad a 4inch serrated switch and he had a walmart POS. We eventually fell asleep and then woke up the next morning to learn everyone was sleeping at the ball field. (This story occurred at a summer camp in Iowa).

Mark Shafer: Late one foggy Autumn evening in Aurora Heights on 25th Street in Newton, Jerry C. and myself were over hanging in our neighbor Randy K.'s garage with him burning a few left-handed cigarettes. As we were heading down the gravel drive toward home, a huge bright light rose above the house line across the street ahead of us. It paused for just a minute, then was gone, jetting off to the right from site in a spilt second. Sure, I know what your thinking, must have been the spliff. Then why did Jerry Lee and I both see the same thing? They're out there and yes, so were we...

Julie Osborn: So, I don't know if you know what I do or not. I'm an RN in an ICU in Denver. People die all the time. (Apparently there is a ghost of a child on our 4th floor ICU, but I haven't had the dis-pleasure of meeting him yet.) Anyway, one night while I was in a patents room, I was facing a window mixing up some medication or whatever. My patient was comatose, so he wasn't really chatting it up with me or anything. I looked up to see the reflection of another patient wandering past the doorway of my patents room. She was older-70's maybe- and had on a gown, but I noticed some blood on the front of it. She just kind of turned her head and looked at me, then kept walking. In the ICU we don't usually have people wandering about unattended and well, bleeding! I thought, "Where the heck is her nurse and she needs attention if she's bleeding!" So, I dropped whatever it was that I was doing and turned and ran to the hallway. When I got there and looked out-THERE WAS NO PATIENT! Even more creepy was the fact that there was NOBODY! No nurses, no doctors, no secretaries, NOBODY! The hallway and nurse's station were completely empty. I was working the trauma unit that night and asked everyone if they had a older trauma patient that was female and perhaps ambulatory, but out of the 8 patients on that unit that night-none of them fit the description. (Again, in ICU, they are rarely walking about unless they're trying to escape! lol) They all thought I was smoking something, but I know I saw what I saw. I just hope she found whatever she was looking for.

Doug Simkin:  I saw a ghost once. It was during the flood in 93 when I was living in a tent at Lake MacBride. On my way home from work at midnight, I parked my motorcycle at the head of the trail and was walking down the unlighted trail through the woods... To my tent. I sensed something behind me, and when I turned to look there was a child about 7 or 8 years old in a yellow nylon windbreaker standing there. The hood up over his/her head and it just stood there silently. Scared the bejeezus out of me and I turned and ran. I wish now I had tried to interact with it.

The Governor: My friend and I hitchhiked to a Grateful Dead show in K.C. at the Starlight theater. As we were walking the last couple miles through Swope Park, it was about 3 A.M.,we came around a bend in the road and saw the most incredible thing I've ever seen. A white worm about 4 feet long and about 2 feet around was wiggling along like a normal size worm would do. I immediately got the feeling that thing creature was of high intelligence. It seemed to glow and didn't mind our presence. All we could do was walk on by in a slight state of shock. I had the chills and we couldn't speak for a moment. Later as I told the story to others my friend decided, "he wasn't sure what he saw." It makes me realize that people see things quite often that they simply can't except into their reality. All I can say is, "what a long strange trip it's been."

Amy Hartman:  So...I lived in an apartment in Ankeny (Iowa), with my ex, about 12 years ago.. he was a douche, fought a lot. So, one day we came home, and we were fighting, and we got in the door...still fighting, and went straight ahead into the kitchen, still arguing, and took a 180 back into our main room, and within seconds, there was a PILE of RANDOM things, sitting EXACTLY in the center of the room....baseball hat sunglasses, lighter, papers....EXACTLY in the middle of the room! A week later, we had a crowd of people over and a basketball FLEW across the room, as if someone had punched it...AND MANY witnesses at random times over a span of weeks saw things fall, or fly, and they would all say something was up! We moved not long after, but our moving was not brought on by the activity. I tried to check archives for that area, but to o avail... There were a couple friends who would not come back!

Troy Church: The sounds upstairs couldn't be real. The pacing of the floors, the constant pounding and the spontaneous jumping. They were clearly a figment of my imagination. After all, there really was no upstairs, just an old floorless attic that had once been the starting point of a house fire. One couldn't even access it, unless they had a key to the empty apartment across the hall... And then another key to the attic stairs within. I was the only tenant in the four apartment building at the time, and had been in the apartment across from mine once, when Gene, the old man who owned the house was doing some repairs over there. He showed me the stairway to the attic and also the charred wooden beams that supported the roof of the apartment building. I made a mental note that there was no floor in this attic... Just the long abandoned floor joists where a floor might have once sat... I had already been hearing the strange noises upstairs.

Gene was the only one who had those keys, and it certainly wasn't he who was running and jumping and pounding on the floor above my bedroom at all hours of the night. He didn't even live in the same town for crying out loud...  A couple of times when the noise got particularly loud or bothersome, I actually wandered across the hallway and checked the padlock on the neighboring apartment. It was always securely locked... Keeping whatever was making the loud awful noises safely away. But, as always after I retreated back to my bedroom, the noisy activity would continue above.

One night I awoke to my mattress wrapping up around me encasing me in the middle like meat in a taco. (It's the best way to describe it.)  I could feel it being dragged acoss my bed and anticipated it's eventual fall to the floor... Which came with a violent WHOMP!. It was dark, but I managed to get sight of my captor... An old skinny man with long gray hair and bushy gray sideburns. With one hand he had both edges of the mattress gripped tightly, and even though he was small in stature, he seemed to have no trouble dragging me and my mattress across the wooden floor toward my bedroom door. I struggled to break free, but the walls of the mattress against me were way too tight. All the while however, I was able to see this old man who had a destination for me. Suddenly he stopped and looked back at me... He had deep red eyes and with his free hand, he put his finger up to his mouth in a hushing motion. "Don't say a word" he said to me in his snarling voice. At that point I froze, but was able to let out a loud yell.... Suddenly I woke up and was in my bed, with my mattress as if nothing had happened. An apprehensive sigh of relief came over me... It was just a dream! I didn't hear any sounds upstairs the rest of that night, and after awhile of contemplating what just happened to me I fell back asleep.

The next morning as I left my apartment for work I stepped out into the hallway. The door across from mine was shut, but there was no padlock on it. It lay on the hallway floor. With a spooky sense of curiosity, I opened the apartment door to look inside... The door inside the apartment... The one which led to the floorless attic above... Was torn off it's hinges, as if someone or something tried to get up there in a hurry. With a body full of goosebumps, and hair standing on the back of my neck, I regressed back into the hallway and slipped the padlock onto the apartment door. Not long after that, Gene put the building up for sale and I had to move out...  That place is still standing, and I can show you where it is.

Thanks to our tech master CVEckian for allowing me to use his incredible photos. But especially THANKS TO YOU for being a loyal reader, friend and contributor ro the Bigfoot Diaries. Much love to all of you...

Happy Halloween!