CONFESSIONS OF A PARANORMAL JUNKIE

In my last post, I wrote about my guilty pleasure passion for Asian horror flicks. But my love of the supernatural doesn't just stop there. I'm pretty much a junkie when it comes to paranormal subjects, including some which are rarely discussed in more mainstream circles. And for my first post of February 2013, I thought it might be fun to share some of them with you. Uh...fun for me anyway. For you...well, it's always a gamble. But here's hoping. Ready? Let's roll...

BLACK-EYED PEOPLE

They come to your door or window at odd hours of the night, sometimes even in the daylight, knocking and asking to be let in. They can be men, women, or children, and, according to most accounts, seem to be otherwise perfectly normal except for their strange black eyes and the disconcerting sense of dread that seems to accompany their appearance. Are they vampires? Demons? A predatory sub-race from another, unknown dimension? No one seems to know, but the internet is rife with websites containing "true stories" of encounters with them. And I, personally, can't get enough of these stories. Of course, being a former newspaper reporter with a modicum (at least) of skepticism in my bones, I don't take every single story at face value. But you can ferret out the fabrications fairly easily. They're the ones that contain every single detail associated with the main theme. The stories I tend to believe are the ones that don't read like a sophomore English attempt at a horror tale, and in which the writer seems genuinely confounded at having been singled out as the target for the encounter, and ends with a plaintive query for readers to offer some sort of opinion on where these unsettling black-eyed beings could come from. Interestingly, a good number of these encounters seem to occur in Wal-Marts, where the writer is nonchalantly going about his or her business when, suddenly, they look up to find that they are being watched by an otherwise normal-looking person with black eyes....setting off the infamous "sense of dread." Reading into the subject of black-eyed people, I was surprised to find that there are accounts that go all the way back to the 19th century, although, in those days, the people giving the accounts were more likely to associate the beings with the devil. Devils, demons, or denizens of another dimension, "the black-eyed people" are defintely one of my favorite paranormal subjects. To read more about black-eyed people, you can go here.

RAKES

The most interesting thing about "the rake"...a slender, humanoid creature whose MO includes sneaking into bedrooms (mostly in surburban areas) late at night where it crouches beside the bed and behaves in a threatening manner...is not so much the alleged creature itself, but the fact that, following a sudden flurry of online interest in 2008, most written accounts of encounters with it seem to have disappeared. Its brief moment in the spotlight was centered mainly in upstate New York, but there were those who claimed to be able to trace its history all the way back to the 12th century. Real or not, the rake is fascinating mainly because of the apparent "black-out" surrounding the subject. To find out more information about rakes, you can go here.

EVP

I love listening to evp (electronic voice phenomena) almost as much as I do David Bowie or The Beatles....and that's saying something, trust me. Supposed spirit voices captured on recordings when no other evidence of a paranormal presence is in the vicinity, evp fascinate me not so much because they are the alleged voices of spirits, but because of what the alleged spirits say in them. In one of my favorites, which was recorded in a cemetery, a female voice with a faint Irish lilt can be heard saying, "I'd love to find my stone." In another, recorded at a Civil War site down south, the person making the recording starts off with a somewhat jocular request for any ghosts who might be present to "stand in front of the camera so we can take your picture." While there was no response in real time, when the recording of the moment was played back, a male voice can clearly be heard to reply, "Why? 'Cause there's bullets in it?" If you want to hear some equally interesting ep for yourself, you can find some good ones here.

PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD

Sometimes referred to as "phantom phone calls", accounts of alleged telephone communication from the Great Beyond are more prevalent than you might think. I first read about the phenoneon in an engaging, well-researched book called (appropriately enough) "Phone Calls From The Dead" written in 1979 by Raymond Bayless and the late D. Scott Rogo. Since then, I'm always on the look-out for new accounts of people who pick up the phone to hear the voices of deceased friends and loved ones on the other end. Sometimes the "spirit" on the other end is merely calling to check in or to say good-bye, but in my favorite accounts, the calls are rather lengthy and involve what seems to be at the time a completely normal conversation. It's only when the conversation ends and the "spirit" hangs up that the recipient of the call realizes that such a conversation couldn't have taken place because "Aunt Joanne" or whoever has been dead for nine years. It's this strange "amnesia" that sometimes takes place during the course of the phone call that I find most intriguing of all. Does the spirit cause it on purpose? Or does the caller's own brain, unable to fathom the possibility that the dead person could actually be on the other end of the line, simply shut down for the duration of the call? I doubt we'll ever know. But to read more about phones calls from the dead, you can find more information here.

Well, that's it for now. Hope I didn't scare you. If I did, just turn on a light, have a shot of whiskey, and you'll be fine. Until next time...skol!