Everyday Paranormal Experiences, Interview #9
Suzie was a little girl when it happened, eight or maybe nine years old she thought. Whichever the age she was, Suzie remembers it vividly and tears made her eyes glassy and wet. She could not tell me what happened to her and breaks off the interview, said she changed her mind and asked me to leave her porch.
I was at a loss for my week’s assignment.
She called me back to her house a couple hours later, but I was unable to make the trip downtown so late in the day. She offered to tell me her story over the phone. I don’t like talking on the phone, but I needed her story and so I agreed. It started out awkwardly, but she soon forgot she was telling me the story and just recounted her tale to herself, or so was my impression at the time.
“I get the feeling all of the time and I always wonder if it’s happening again,” she began, words coming timidly at first, but becoming more confident the more she said, “You know the feeling I’m talking about – we all have it sometimes. That feeling that maybe there’s something wrong with you, or why you did something and can’t explain it. Just little things like, ‘How did I miss the exit to go home, I drive this route everyday!’ or like when you think to yourself not to say something to someone and the first thing you do is say it – those kinds of things. I don’t like feeling like I did something I didn’t want to, or didn’t plan because of what happened when I was in the fourth grade.”
She explained that she lived in Prattville, Alabama when she was a kid and her best and worst memories were from there. In fact, because of the memories related to her story, her family moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to help her cope with what had happened.
I ask her to tell me directly what happened that could cause her family to make such a drastic and major change.
“I was possessed,” she said flatly, “Or so we think.”
She described the feeling of sharing her mind with something else for a few years – only she couldn’t tell if it was really something else or part of her that did not feel fully attached to the rest of her. It was a very confusing and disorienting feeling, and so she said she tried to ignore it to the best of her ability for a few months and it seemed to help. She remembers most of the events of that time of her life from two different visual perspectives, though, and that causes her to pause her story; I hear her sniffing through the receiver, obviously wiping away more tears.
“I remember my sister’s birthday party,” she explains, “I remember sitting at the table and singing to my sister as she blew out the candles, and I remember… I remember watching myself sing to her… I see myself from off to the side and behind everyone else. I have lots of memories like that from that time in my life. Some are even of events I don’t recall with my own eyes, but through those of someone… some… something else; like memories of watching me sleep or eat or bathe – like they’re someone else’s memories of me.”
She gives a few more mundane examples and then stops suddenly, realizing she has begun to ramble. She sighs and her voice goes soft again as she says, but there are some things I remember the other way around. I remember doing things that I didn’t intend to, and seeing myself do them even though I didn’t want to as I did them. I found a bird’s nest with eggs in it once and checked on it every day before school to see if the chicks had hatched yet. I was so excited to see the baby birds! Then, the day I checked on them and they had finally hatched I knocked the nest out of the tree… I… stepped on the chicks right there in my… in my backyard… I don’t know why! I hurried to scoop the… the poor things up and cried and cried! I don’t know why I did it… I didn’t want to do it, but they died… all three of them!”
She went on to explain that these incidences came more and more frequent until her behavior became apparent to others. She had captured the neighbor’s little dog in a pillow case and threw him in her other neighbor’s pool. The dog survived, but only because the neighbor just happened to be looking out her window overlooking the pool while doing her dishes. This brought the concern of her neighbors and family down upon her and she didn’t know what to say, because she already knew she was guilty and didn’t want to do these things in the first place.
“What could I say? What were they supposed to understand,” she asked me shrilly, “That I wasn’t in control of myself at all times? That I was crazy? I knew I wasn’t crazy because I remembered doing them and wondering why I was – and my father always said if you can ask if you’re crazy it means you’re not. Yet, at least. So to the church we went, and we weren’t church-going people as a rule, but the neighbor who’s dog I tried drowning insisted I was possessed by a malicious spirit.”
The pastor of the Methodist church prayed for and with her, but she didn’t seem to notice a difference. She still shot the stray cat with her older brother’s pellet gun, and cried after hearing the poor thing yowl as it ran away from her. She decided she was evil and would not be able to enjoy her life since she kept hurting things.
“I might have been young for such a thought,” she says in a voice not much more than a whisper, “But I threw myself in that same pool I tried to drown the dog in. Fully dressed with my brother’s boots on and not knowing how to swim, I expected it would be the end of me. But that same neighbor that rescued the dog rescued me, and I’m ever thankful she did!”
Suzie lost consciousness in her attempted suicide, but after having water pumped from her lungs by the neighbor and taking that first painful breath of fresh air she felt renewed. She described the feeling as if she were whole again, like she had been only a few months prior to her odd and devilish behavior beginning. She has also turned quite religious since that event in her life.
“It may have been the devil that threw me in the pool,” she said, her voice regaining strength, “But it was God that pulled me – and only me – back out. Whatever demon that had me drowned in the pool by itself.”
A classic case of possession or a slightly psychotic little girl? Whichever the case, Suzie was very emotionally impacted by the experience she had in the early 90’s and it changed her life. Perhaps without her experience she would not be the woman she is today – and though the quality of her life is subjective to us, it is unquestionably better for her. Have you been possessed or known a possession victim? If so, let me know and we can relate your story, or any other paranormal experience here every Thursday.
The Skeptic’s Rating: 7/10 – I don’t doubt the details of the story, but the cause… possession? A little hard for me to swallow, especially as an atheist it’s hard to believe in magic and angels and demons affecting (or caring to, if they did exist) human lives.
Next Week’s Everyday Paranormal Experiences, Interview #10: “Zombies, Sure.”
On the Article Series:
I myself am a huge skeptic of all things paranormal or extra-terrestrial and I tend to take most tales of either with a huge grain of salt – sometimes even an entire salt shaker, depending on the tale that’s being weaved. I have even had a couple ghostly and otherworldly experiences myself, which I may relate in later stories – and I’m skeptical of those! Is what I experienced the truth of the experience or is there an empirical explanation that I simply have not yet unlocked? Regardless of my skeptical nature, ghost stories and alien encounters have always fascinated me as they have all of humanity for thousands of years.
It is this fascination that I wish to convey in a unique and different paranormal or alien experience every week – Thursday, to be exact. I will be conducting interviews with everyday people to hear their stories and relate them back to you, the Paranoid Gamers. Perhaps I’ll be interviewing some of you, as well.
Do you have an experience of a haunted item, place, or person? Have you been visited by aliens or heretofore undocumented intelligent life – terrestrial or extra so? If you’d like to share your experience and possibly have your tale published in this series of articles, please contact me and we can relive your experience.
[signoff1]