Fairy in a Cemetery?
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
When American reader Todd took this photo of a pyramidal monument in the Cedarwood Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut, he spotted what he believes to be a spirit or a fairy sitting placidly beneath it. Todd would be delighted to hear other Paranormal readers’ comments on his photo. Please get in touch with your comments.
My Poltergeist
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
The Editor recalls his own experience of the paranormal: as the focus of a poltergeist when he was a boy. The house where these incidents occurred is still the home of his elderly mother, so locations have been suppressed.
I can remember screaming. Screaming with the full force of my lungs and swearing, too.
I was lying in the intensive care ward of the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. The previous day I had undergone a five-hour operation. My ribs down my left-hand side had been cut through with an implement of cold metal, a saw or shears. Then my 11-year-old body had been prised open like an oyster and rubber-clad hands had forced their way inside me.
My stomach had become displaced during birth and was now situated too far up inside my thorax. There had been no noticeable effects of this deformity until my body began to grow at puberty. Then the increased pressure on my heart and lungs had made me very ill indeed. There was only one thing that could be done: my stomach had to be manoeuvred down to its correct position.
With broken ribs and manhandled guts, it’s no wonder I was in agony for a long time afterwards. I cannot, of course, remember the pain itself - memory, though a miracle, spares us that ability - but I remember the result of it. I was on a morphine drip to kill the pain but the effect of the drug would dissipate an hour before the dose could be repeated. I had to endure several hours of agony every day.
On one occasion the nurses missed the dose. Perhaps I used to count every second as the pain kicked in, but somehow I knew the dose was late. I began to shout. As the pain got worse, I shouted louder. Eventually, I was like an infant bawling, without meaning or consciousness, just a storm of rage and pain. As nurses hurried past the end of my bed ignoring me, I yelled abuse. I think one nurse yelled abuse back.
My ordeal came to an end at last when a tired, drawn middle-aged woman ambled over, adjusted the drip and instantly transformed my life. I floated above the bed and lay back on a cloud of joy and tranquillity, as the child who had just died on the other side of the curtain beside my bed was discreetly wheeled away.
I was discharged from hospital three weeks later. There was the usual period of convalescence, but for a further month or so I was still too weak to spend more than a morning at school (and my friends made a great show of carrying my bags about while I was there). I spent the afternoons sleeping or reading or watching ‘Mr Benn’ and ‘Crown Court’. Occasionally I’d put some languid effort into the homework my teachers set for me.
It was all very pleasant and indulgent. During the day. But my nights were filled with fear.
One odd side-effect of the trauma of the operation, and one which may have some relationship to the frightening phenomena which followed, is that during my first week or so back home I sleepwalked. I would wander about in an almost hallucinatory state, existing in a dream world yet also aware of my everyday surroundings. I can remember one of these incidents clearly. I strode into my parents’ room and woke them up with imperious demands for a sword I could see hanging from their wardrobe. After some sleepy curses and mutterings, my father, no longer fazed by this sort of behaviour, reached up to where I was pointing and handed across the bed an invisible something. I grasped the air and stomped back to bed, where, presumably, I continued my dream, which now had me wielding the imagined sword.
Although I can remember many such incidents and impressions from this time, I am hazy as to chronology: what happened when and for what duration. I can’t say for certain how soon after the sleepwalking it all began. Nor can I recall how I reacted the first time it manifested. I can guess my response, however: I would have kept it to myself. My home felt no longer my home because of this secret. Almost every night, a stranger found a way into the house and then invaded my bedroom. While my younger brother slept in the next bed, the intruder tormented me.
It never physically abused me. It used instead a variant on the Chinese water torture. It would tap… tap… tap… on the wall a few inches above my head. The rhythm was so loose as to be almost random but I feel sure it conformed to some strange, endlessly looping pattern. Each tap was precise yet muffled, as if the bricks of the wall were being rapped beneath the wallpaper and plaster.
No human hand caused the tapping. Nothing visible ever appeared. I soon recognised the intruder for what it was and named it accordingly: ‘the Poltergeist’.
You can read the rest of this feature in issue 27 of Paranormal magazine
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