IT HAPPENED TO ME...
First-hand accounts of strange experiences from FT readers
Night visitors
My parents divorced when I was six and my mother took me and my three older sisters from our house in Melbourne, Australia, to a series of temporary addresses in Brisbane, her (and our) place of birth. When I was seven, we finally moved into a house. It took my mother a long time to find a place both big enough for all of us and cheap enough for a single mother to afford. It was an old place, a timber ‘Queenslander’. I have no idea just how old it was, but there was an old coal burner kitchen that was blocked off from the ‘modern’ gas kitchen. This meant that the house must have been built at least 50 years earlier, and could have been much older.
As the youngest, I got the smallest room – just big enough for a bed and not much else. From the beginning, I didn’t like the place. I don’t remember when I realised it was haunted, but I have early memories of closing my eyes before entering rooms, particularly at night. When alone in my room during the day, I saw shadows dancing around the corners of my vision. I got used to it in the end. I was too scared to try and talk to the ‘ghosts’ – I knew they weren’t friendly and were teasing and mocking me. At night, I would sleep with the sheets over my head, too terrified to open my eyes. Occasionally, I would feel them touching me with probing fingers.
One day when I was nine, I was talking to my mother who was watching television, and I entered the hallway leading to my room without closing my eyes first. I looked into my room and saw something that has stayed with me to this day: a man, dressed entirely in black. He was rather ordinary looking – balding, with a narrow strip of hair around the back of his head – but everything else about him was far from ordinary. He was draped in a transparent black veil that covered his whole body, under which he wore a black tank top. He was bent over, doing something with his hands on the wall. I saw him side-on. He heard me, turned, and stared at me for a whole second. His eyes were bright red, like a modern red LED. He had no expression, but unlike the other shadowy figures I would see during the day, he was completely solid and looked ‘human’. Abruptly, and without a sound, he ran directly into the wall and vanished. I was left standing, speechless with terror. I told my mother what I had seen, and she just laughed at me.
I moved from that room shortly after, when my eldest sister moved out, into the room on the other side of the hallway. I was very careful after the incident not to look towards my old room without showing myself first. I never saw the creature again, but the occasional ‘touching’ continued until we finally left the house in 1977 when I was 11. As an adult, I have been back to look at the outside of the house, but even now I would not be game enough to go inside again.
We moved into another house, after my mother and I had lived in a flat for a year and my sisters had all left home. I reverted to my old habits of closing my eyes before entering a dark room and sleeping under the sheets. Then, after we had been in the new house for a few months, I had some friends around for a sleepover. We all slept together in the lounge.
I awoke in the middle of the night, and felt a peace unlike any I had felt before. It was a calm that went completely through me. I opened my eyes, and saw a woman.
She was standing in the doorway, and dressed in a long white dress that covered her feet, like a bride on a wedding cake. There was a pattern on the dress, but I couldn’t make it out. She stood about 5ft (1.5m) tall and had curly, light brown hair. She was looking directly at me, smiling. I looked at her, and smiled back. She was lovely, and I have never felt like that before or since. And then she slowly vanished. I looked at where she had been standing for a few minutes, and went back to sleep, feeling wonderful.
To me it was obvious why she had appeared. I have always believed that she knew what I had gone through over five years in the other house and was telling me that I was safe in ‘her’ house. It changed my life, and I stopped being frightened. I never saw her again.
Many people will dismiss my experience because of my age at the time. All I can say is that I know that this is how it happened. I was never the sort to imagine events and pass them off as real. I can’t explain the events, or the reason for the first house’s haunting. Neither my sisters nor my mother saw anything strange in the house, to my knowledge.
Perhaps some of the events were simply the imaginings of a frightened little boy. Even the woman in white could have been a fragment of a dream, although I don’t believe so. But I have no doubt the vision of the man in black was real. I always believed it was a demon, or perhaps a lost soul. I don’t know if I really want to know the answer.
Robert Euston
By email
Skinwalker Entity
Here’s a link is to a clip of some strange anomalies captured on my 4 Sight Dash Cam just one mile south of the entrance to Skinwalker Ranch on 11 July 2018: https://vimeo. com/347800383. My brother and I were investigating the area around Skinwalker Ranch near Fort Duschene, Utah. We were parked at what is known among fellow researchers as the “Southern Vantage”. Darkness had just fallen when for just a split second I noticed an amorphous blue image appear and quickly vanish over the hood of my car. It materialised outside the windshield and in front of my brother who was seated on the passenger’s side. I believe that purple image in the video (shown above) is what I saw, prompting me to ask my brother to press the Event Button on the dash cam.
I now refer to the purple coloured image as the “Skinwalker Entity”. What I saw was definitely blue, and I cannot explain why it appeared purple in the video. This clip also recorded an orange orb emerging from underneath my car. This streaks off into the darkness at a very low angle. The video lasts a little over two minutes and contains other strange anomalies that were not included in the clip. There is an unedited version on my website at http:// www.creepyencounters.com/. If you have any questions feel free to email me at info@creepyencounters.com
Jay Bradley
By email