My Weirdest (Personal) Paranormal Stories (2 / 3)
I’m convinced that pretty much everyone in the world has had some sort of paranormal experience at least once in their life. Here are my weirdest ones.
The second of my weirdest paranormal stories. (For the first one and introduction to this post series, read here.)
Story Two: The Wolf and the Witches
When I was in the eighth and ninth grade, I lived in The Netherlands with my father who was stationed at a NATO post with the U.S. Air Force at the time. Nearly all of my friends from the international school I attended lived in the suburbs of Germany while our housing was in a little village of Holland whose location meant all calls to peers were international and therefore not allowed due to the cost. Thus, I dove deeply into my reading hobby for entertainment. I happened upon a book called The Forbidden Game at the base library one day, and its plot full of Nordic worlds and related topics fascinated me. Soon after reading that book, I came across a non-fiction book on Celtic paganism at the base’s book store with similar stories to those forming the background of The Forbidden Game and from there tumbled head first into the world of Earth-centered religions and magick. My father and step-mother were definitely not happy with this development, but very little was restricted from my exploration. I suppose they thought it was a phase I’d outgrow.
At school I made friends with a girl whose own dad had been recently reassigned back to the U.S. and moving in a few months. She babysat for another military couple with two young children one or two days per week, and it paid well. Since they needed a new sitter and I was definitely looking for something to do with my time besides read, she introduced me to them and I was offered the job once she left.
I got along very well with the children’s mother, and she became a mentor and friend to me in many ways. She was also Native American via her mother’s side, so our discussions eventually came to involve myths, rituals, Shamanism, and that sort of thing. Also, she was very open minded about some of the Wiccan things that were becoming more mainstream in those days (see: the 90s, Llewelyn, Silver Ravenwolf, etc.) and had another military wife friend she knew was also very into those topics. She introduced me to the friend at a dinner at some point, and I later met through the same women yet another young, open-minded military wife that had just moved there via her husband’s NATO assignment. Time passed, ideas were discussed, and we all eventually decided to do a ceremony together called, “Drawing Down the Moon.”
This ceremony is a goddess-centered ritual done during a full moon and generally focuses on pulling in energy from the lunar light at its peak. Many variations on its execution exist, and our version was just a simple casting of a circle, creating a personal name sigil, some meditation, dancing, and done. I was assigned to circle casting, and the more studied wife was in charge of the rest of the magickal parts. Most of that night was pleasant and great fun. We ate and discussed many things waiting for the sun to go down. Once it did, things started to take a turn for the not-so-great.
The woman who’d been in charge of the ritual planning was concerned that, being so young, I’d be nervous when put on the spot for casting the circle of protection around us, so that part was skipped nonchalantly. Contrary to that thought, I’d been waiting to do my part, but I didn’t want to make a scene about it and never mentioned it until later that night. This meant neither of us communicated properly on the issue, perhaps for the worse.
Now, this is a detail I mention because I’m not sure if it made a difference overall for what happened next, but if you’ve ever participated in one of these types of rituals, you know the circle casting part is very, very important. Spiritually, it stands as a protective barrier between the worlds when one’s mind will be in a vulnerable state of meditation. Energetically or dimensionally you could think of it in a similar manner as leaving a portal open to anything that wanted to pop in out of curiosity or malice.
While the group of us were in the deepest part of our meditation, I began to hear the sound of running hooves in the distance. The yard we were sitting in had a surrounding fence with shrubs and trees for privacy from the open farmland on the other side. I recall not thinking much of the sound considering the neighboring farm, but that also meant I didn’t question why a horse would be out and so active that late at night. The galloping quickened its pace as I slowly became aware from the increasing volume that it must be approaching where the yard met the farmland. Then suddenly, the shrubs covering the fencing bristled loudly as though an animal had come through them followed by the fierce growl of a wolf sounding off right in my face.
I jumped to my feet in fear instantly, seeing that the others had done the same. Confused, startled, scared, and unable to see any visible source of the growl, we all ran to the porch for safety and observed the yard for a while before determining nothing was there. After our wits had returned a bit, the woman in charge of the magickal parts of the night started chiding herself for being so negligent about casting the circle. She then admitted also reading that the particular moon we were working under was also supposed to attract shapeshifting entities as it was so powerful or something to that effect. This was obviously important information that explained the galloping horse before the growl, but strangely no one else had heard that part but me. Soon after, the next door neighbor called the woman whose house we were at asking if we all were okay. She’d been taking a bath and heard us all scream. However, none of us had screamed.
To move on from the experience and calm the terror we felt, we ended up taking the notecards we’d drawn our personal sigils on, rolled them up into pretend lightsabers, and went around the yard repeating a banishing chant. Who knows if it had any actual impact on whatever entity was there, assuming something was hanging around. But we were able to move on for the night without thinking our dreams would be filled with a hungry demon.
A fun note on this story:
• My time in The Netherlands and Germany really instilled a great love for fairy (fae) tales both light and dark, and that further encouraged me to explore many topics that led me eventually to hidden worlds, biblical archaeology, ancient aliens, and so forth. Another hint about future post topics!
Thanks for reading again! Stay tuned for my craziest paranormal story tomorrow…
-Daysha