My Weirdest (Personal) Paranormal Stories (1 / 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 some of my weirdest ones.
I’m convinced that pretty much everyone in the world has had some sort of paranormal experience at least once in their life. It may not always have been seen as paranormal, perhaps (pennies on the ground from Heaven?), but the experience was still there and valid to the person experiencing it.
That being said, I’d like to open this new blog with the three most memorable paranormal events I’ve encountered in my own life – posted in three parts for easier reading. I wouldn’t say they were the drivers of my interest in this field – I blame Blockbuster Video trips on Friday night for that. However, anytime I am questioning whether anything classified as paranormal is real at all, these are the experiences I tend to fall back on as a reminder that there’s definitely something to this field that’s more than just crazy imaginations.
Story One: The Midnight Bathroom Renovation
During my third through fifth grade years in elementary school, my parents lived in a two-story house in San Antonio, Texas where my brother and I had our bedrooms on the second floor. The air conditioning never worked properly up there, and the resulting heat was often distracting and kept me up throughout many nights. Over time I came to realize that the house had a strange feel to it during the darkest hours, or “witching hours” as they seem to be called.
As an adult, I’ve reviewed my memories over and over trying to dismiss some of the notions I gathered at my younger age about the place as either my wild imagination or the result of noises my mother was probably making as a sleepwalker - something I didn’t know until my 20s. But, there was this one noise I woke up to one night that I still don’t understand what the explanation would be while being completely open to figuring it out as mundane some day. For now, I still remember it as paranormal.
That night, there was a familiar sound coming from the bathroom at the end of the hall where my room was located. Strangely, though, I simultaneously recognized it but also knew it wasn’t the noise I thought it sounded like, which was masking tape. It’s a familiar sound that most would know as well – as the tape is pulled from the roll, a distinct ripping sound plays out as the adhesive is forcefully separated from its layering, followed by a quick paper-type tear indicating a piece has been removed for use. I knew that’s where I’d heard the sound before, but I also knew that’s not what I was hearing.
Have you ever noticed when people tell their strange stories, sometimes they describe how they just “knew” something without knowing why they were so certain? That’s what I mean.
Even as a child of nine or ten, I was highly skeptical that I was going to find anything truly weird making the sound, but I also just “knew” I needed to go and investigate what I was hearing. As I made my way down the hall, I decided that I needed to verify that my brother was sleeping soundly – even though I “knew” that would be the case, too. I opened his door, heard him snoring, then closed it again. The bathroom door was now in front of me and slightly open as it usually was left. I pushed it a bit more open and took note that the sound was even further inside the bathroom than the sink that was near its entrance. The room, while fairly small, still had an open doorway separation between the sink portion and the tub/shower/toilet portion. The taping project seemed to be taking place inside the combined tub and shower portion of the bathroom.
As I inched my way inside, I decided to turn on the light before looking around into the tub at the sound’s source, again “knowing” nothing would be there. One look confirmed it. There was no mysterious bathroom renovator making changes with masking tape, but it was loud enough that there definitely should have been someone visibly doing just that. This also wasn’t happening in a rhythmic way that would maybe indicate a mechanical source. It really did sound like someone was ripping off a piece of masking tape, doing something with it for a second or several, and then ripping off another piece.
Next came whispers from the other end of the hall. First a barely audible one, then louder, and finally one that snapped me to reality. My mother was calling to me. I made my way over quickly to be not-quite-greeted by her barely awake figure at the bottom of the stairs angrily demanding to know why I was up and what I was doing. Apparently, I’d been making a lot of noise walking around investigating the bathroom mystery although strangely, I don’t remember moving around much at all. As far as I can recall, I just went down the hall gingerly and practically tiptoed into the bathroom. I went back to bed as ordered after failing at explaining myself, and the noise continued until I fell asleep. It was gone by morning.
A few notes on this story:
There was an attic in the house, and I imagine the bathroom fan was connected to a portion that went through it. I also cannot recall where the air registers were, either, so both of these considerations could mean I was hearing a sound traveling from elsewhere in the house and merely echoing against the bathroom fixtures which amplified its volume. I am not satisfied with this explanation, however, because footsteps would have been very loud in the attic, of which there were none, and it would have been highly unusual for either of my parents to be awake at that hour, much less doing something extensive with masking tape.
My mother, when sleepwalking, exclusively cooks and reorganizes the pantry, and further seems wide awake and mumbly rather than half asleep and angry as I described her at the end of the stairs. While it’s possible she was doing something with masking tape in those earlier sleepwalking days than she does presently, I have difficulty with this reasoning considering the noise did not stop suddenly but rather continued after I’d returned to bed with no mention of it by her after I told her what I was hearing.
One day I’d like to test out the air register/traveling sound theory, but in the meantime it plays into my feelings about many encounters being inter-dimensional in nature. More on that in another day’s post.
Stay tuned for my next stories by subscribing… I promise the next two are much stranger and worth your while!
~Daysha