It’s the holiday season, and everyone is looking forward to the festivities and the presents, right? While this season is certainly one of peace and happiness, or at least it is supposed to be, it is also sometimes the season of scary encounters with the unknown. Here I have dug up some of the creepier and at times most terrifying brushes with the supernatural at a normally joyous time of the year. Ghosts, specters, and perhaps more, here is a darker look at Christmas time.
Despite the cheerful season of year, some ghostly Christmas encounters seem to be anything but benevolent, and one such report was related by a witness named Caitlin Williams, who recalls a bizarre and spooky experience from 1996, back when she was living with her parents in Bluffton, Indiana. She claims that from when they first moved into the home when she was a child there was something not quite right about the place, and that she constantly felt an intense feeling of being watched, like eyes boring into her, especially when she was lying in bed alone in the dark. This went on for a while, and while unsettling, was not truly scary yet, but that would change one day at Christmas time. The witness says:
One year around Christmas time, I was having a friend spend the night. The heat had just shut off briefly and she and I were sitting in the living room watching television when the temperature dropped substantially. As I rose to turn up the heat, the Christmas tree began to shake violently. Ornaments were falling off right and left and she and I were terrified! We ran upstairs and lay down on my bed. My white cat curled up with us and my door was open slightly. When I gazed out at the dark hallway, I was horrified to see a tall white figure run down the hall. I turned to my friend and she acknowledged that she had seen the exact same thing. She never spent the night ever again.
After this rather sinister and startling event, things seem to have quieted down for several years, until the witness came down with what she calls a “chronic illness” and paranormal activity began to make itself known again, and it became especially pronounced and frightening when she turned 18 and her grandfather passed away. This activity covered a broad spectrum, from moving objects to anomalous noises, to creepy shadow figures and apparitions prowling the house, and she says of it:
It started out with the voices. It was like a television had been turned on and there was a flurry of voices coming from downstairs or, even more frightening, outside my room. My parents were always asleep when this would happen and their room was right next to mine with a vent, so I could hear my parents sleeping next door. I would get up and check all the rooms, but there was no TV on, nothing to account for the voices. I was getting more and more scared as the voices started happening every night. Then that’s when I started seeing shadow figures.
They varied in size, but they were always human-shaped, except for once. One night I was walking out of my room with my cat in my arms when she began to growl ferociously. She never does this. She’s normally an extremely docile cat, and I was shocked to see her acting so. That’s when I looked down the hall and saw a shadow the size of a large dog run down the hall quickly. We don’t own a dog. We had owned one before I became ill, but were forced to give it away due to the fact that we could no longer provide it with the proper care that it deserved. My cat growled and growled until the shadow disappeared.
For all the other times that I saw shadow figures, they never took the form of a dog again. From that point on, the shadow figures were strictly human-shaped, some tall, some child-sized, but they frightened me to death. I would lie in my bed at night, tortured by the fear that I was going insane because no one else was experiencing this. When I confessed my experiences to my parents, they took me to a psychiatrist who could find nothing wrong with me. I continued seeing the shadow figures up until the last few months that we lived there.
Indeed, these strange experiences would stop when they moved to a new home, and the witness still vividly remembers this malevolent invasion that all started one night at Christmas time. Another rather ominous account comes from a witness who posted in Pintrest, who claims that one Christmas night when he was a child he got up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom when he heard an undefinable voice whisper in the darkness. He looked up and was startled to see a bright red light shining against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. He was transfixed by this odd light, as no one was awake and there was no discernible source to it, and to his child’s mind he began to think that it was actually Santa Claus. The witness then says he crept downstairs, following the anomalous light and expecting to see Santa down there unloading presents, but this is where things would get rather strange and terrifying. The witness says of what happened next:
That’s when I heard him. A very strong, masculine voice. Different from the first. Not at all like my father’s (not to say he isn’t masculine, it was just distinctly different). It said, “Stop! Right now. Go back up those stairs.” I listened, turned around, and what happened next I am not sure I would believe if someone had told me this same story. After reaching the top of the stairs, I heard a very loud CRASH that sent me running back to my mother’s bed where I jumped straight under the covers and stayed there the whole night.
When we awoke the next morning, the poinsettia lights (little Christmas flower lights that glowed red) my mother had put on the railing down the stairs were pulled straight down to the bottom of the stairs, some broken from what seemed like a forceful tear, laying in a single pile. The dry sink in my living room had fallen from the wall. My mother could not explain it! My father was worried we had been the victims of a home invasion. My sister was crying. There was nothing missing, nobody had broken in, there did not seem to be any reason this had happened. And then I saw it, and I kept quiet about it because I was so afraid that I could not force words out of my mouth.
There, on the edge of the wooden dry sink which had been facing up, were three indentations where the finish on the wood had been worn, almost as if in a forceful grip. Something down there had GRABBED IT AND THREW IT DOWN. That was what the bang was.
Was this a home invasion as his parents had feared, or something else? One similar and very menacing encounter within someone’s home was relayed to me by a reader quite recently, and this happened on the night of Christmas Eve. The witness told me that he, his wife, and his two children had gone to bed for the night, but that he suddenly awoke in the middle of the night with a cold sense of dread washing over him, a profound sense that something was not right. He saw what appeared to be a shadow drift out of the room into the hall. He at first took it to be his dog, who usually slept in the same room as them, and he went to see what was up. That was when he heard something rummaging around downstairs, and he froze in startled panic. He told me of the bizarre sequence of events that would unfold:
It sounded at first like someone just sort of shuffling around down there, moving things around, but I knew it wasn’t my wife because she was still fast asleep. I checked on the kids and they were asleep too, so my immediate thought considering the shadow I had seen was that for some reason the dog was stumbling around down there. I looked for the dog in the bedroom just to be sure and he was there, only he was cowering against the corner seemingly terrified of something, but not barking or whimpering, just frozen.
The sound downstairs got a little more urgent, although it was not loud enough to wake anyone else up, and I was about to wake my wife up but I didn’t want to worry her. I decided to quietly go down the stairs enough for me to peek into the living room, and that’s when I saw it. There in the dark were two glowing orbs, red eyes set within a dark shape that rose up to stare right at me before blinking into nothingness. I was breathless and turned on the lights but there was nothing there but presents that had been tossed about all over the place. I searched every inch of that room and there was no sign of anyone, no sign of a break in, nothing. Whatever that thing was, I’m pretty sure it was not Santa.
There sometimes seem to be strange things afoot outdoors as well, as we can see with the rather sinister experience reported to StokeontrentLive by a witness named Keith, from Stoke-on-Kent, England. He claims that one icy evening just a few days before Christmas of 2016 he was out shopping for last minute gifts for his wife and child. At the time he was walking through the frigid air the top of a place called Dresden Bank and along Queens Park, and it was so cold out that no one else was out on the street at the time. At some point he noticed through the mist of his breaths a tall, dark figure approaching from the opposite direction along a stone wall, who appeared to be wearing some sort of antiquated, old fashioned clothing, with “a long coat on, a stick and what looked very much like a top hat.” As the two passed each other, Keith claims he looked up and was horrified to see that the stranger had a face completely devoid of any face or features, just a plain, dark oval. When this bizarre site passed, Keith whirled around but the faceless man was simply gone. He would say of the odd experience:
It wasn’t like he walked away. It was as if he just vanished. It was and still is the most terrifying experience of my life. Most people won’t believe me, of course, but that night I found out that ghosts are real. And each Christmas I will remember that encounter.
An encounter with yet another possibly insidious entity was reported on ThoughtCo. and experienced by an Australian witness named on Paulina T., which she says allegedly happened when she was visiting family in Samoa for the Christmas holidays. She was with her cousin and some of his friends at the time, and they were playing hide n’ seek at a graveyard near the town church. This seems a bit odd, but things would get even odder still, as the witness explains what happened as they waited hiding there in the dark:
Since we were all hiding in the graveyard, we all found our way around in the light that the church cast onto the graveyard. We all hid in the shadows and waited for the boy. We could all hear the boy coming, so we kept quiet. The boy was pretty loud, so we watched what he was making a fuss about. He had walked into the church as he thought that his brother was hiding there.
As he walked into the church, he later told us, he saw a boy standing right at the front of the altar. He didn’t know if it was his brother because the boy’s back was turned. He ran up and tapped this boy on the shoulder. As soon as he did this, the strange boy disappeared! Our friend fainted!
We went home to tell his parents and we returned with the boy’s parents to find him still lying there, dead still. The parents took the boy home and we never played in the graveyard at night again. We later found out that the boy’s brother had been at home the whole time and he hadn’t been to the church at all! What really scared us was that the boy who fainted has been ill since that night and he still hasn’t recovered to this day. Whoever it was in the church must have been pretty mad that we kids had disturbed him.
What sort of ominous entity was this? Was it a ghost or something else? Who knows? These sorts of creepy encounters are certainly not anything anyone wants to experience at Christmas time, and they are someone made all the more menacing precisely because they clash so loudly with the otherwise jovial ambiance that this time of year is supposed to bring. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, these spooky Christmas tales are enough to make one think twice about that odd noise in the dark, or that barely glimpsed shadow across the room.
Brent Swancer (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
0 comments:
Post a Comment