Once in a while, someone will get in contact with me with a personal story they are willing to share. These don’t always come from Wiltshire either, as with this one. I am very grateful to Toni who has trusted me with a paranormal story she has found incredibly difficult to share. It affected her tremendously and as you will see, it must have been very terrifying. Written in her own words, here is Toni’s paranormal story.
Toni’s Story
‘There have been many paranormal events in my life and although I have survived them all, there’s one that occurred which terrified me most. It has remained at the core of all the experiences I have had, and it’s the only one I cannot get past. For sixty years, I have lived with this, and it still hasn’t lost its grip on my memory. When I describe this encounter, it heightens a mixture of anxiety, sorrow, emotions, and even anger.
Forgive me please if my story seems to ramble, but I have never written about this, my paranormal encounter. Ever. Until now.
If something so very evil can appear to such a young and innocent mind, what else is it capable of? Who else had suffered its torture before me? This malevolent being violated every sense of my childhood, and that truly angers me. I have carried this with me throughout my whole life. Does it still frighten me now? Yes.
This was not a ghost as you might normally imagine, though I’ve encountered several spectral beings, and they were always truly unsettling. This was a demonic entity. A demon in every sense of the word. And I know that term gets thrown around a lot but this is what I felt it was.
If this infernal and terrible creature was powerful enough to exist beyond life as we know it, in our realm, and it was able to step beyond the veil of reality, then its boundaries are limitless. Nothing can prevent it from visiting me again. I’m also fearful that in telling this story, it will solidify its evil existence forever. Almost give it more power.
My life started in California and I was born on the 13th of October, 1959. I was the youngest of two daughters, five years apart. We lived in the house where my first encounter occurred from my birth up until 1971.
This terrifying experience has left me with so many questions from back then, and it still does all these years later. As a child, I reasoned that this was a fact of life, my life. You don’t really question events as a child in the same way you do as an adult and I felt I should expect this kind of thing to happen again. I lived in fear that it would. In a way, my reasoning wasn’t far off because that first encounter was, I believe, the catalyst of future events.
Let’s head back to the year 1964. I can recall every detail of that forsaken house in my mind. The address, the construction, every room, each corner, and the way it stood out from all the other houses in appearance. Both the entry door and interior doors were fitted with skeleton locks and keys. Each door had a crystal knob. The house was at least 100 years old when we occupied it. It was likely built on farmland before the city was established and grew larger and long before the other surrounding houses were built. There was only one entrance and one exit to the community, which was accessible from the main road.
We shared a common address with each individual house, numbered alphabetically but haphazardly marked. Six of these houses had the appeal of newly built cottages, with plaster exteriors and an attached garage. But we had tar-paper shingles that were more suited for a roof than exterior walls; the garage was a separate structure with barn-style doors.
Another contrasting feature of our house was its raised foundation, with a cement porch which stretched from end to end with a rough wood railing. None of the other houses were built on this raised foundation, and none of the others had a front porch. The mention of the porch has a significant meaning to my story, but I’ll get to that later.
The awful exterior was a stark contrast to the interior, which was nice and cosy. The large family room had a huge fireplace that nearly occupied an entire wall. From the dining room, our mother’s bedroom was the first door on the right, and our grandma’s room was at the other end of the house. With a shared bathroom between the two rooms, it was a Jack’ n’ Jill design.
My sister kept her things in my grandma’s room and mine were in my mother’s room. Mom assigned me a cabinet where I kept my reading books, colouring books and crayons, and a pair of dull edge scissors, like the ones in the image. At the end of every day, all my supplies were placed back into the cabinet for the night, neat and tidy. I never deviated from this practice. Each night, my sister and I took turns sleeping with either our mother or grandmother. This particular night, I slept with our mother.
For those who’ve experienced any kind of paranormal encounter, you’ll agree that even before you’ve seen anything, you feel it. It’s like it is ‘in the air’. The whole atmosphere changes. It’s an unusual and undeniable feeling that you get when someone, or rather something, is watching. A prickly sensation might start up the back of your neck, quickly racing up your spine, raising the hair upon your arms. Perhaps you were awoken and hadn’t mustered up the courage to look out into the darkness, but you’re certain that there were eyes fixed on you while you are sleeping. Other times, you may think, if you just don’t open your eyes, it will go away.
On this one night, I opened my eyes…
In the corner of the room, closest to me, stood a little child, visibly illuminated in the night of the room. It was a full-bodied apparition watching me, and of this, I am completely sure. I can’t explain how I knew that this entity was a boy, but I just knew. He didn’t look anything like the other boys that I played with in our neighbourhood. His appearance was something I’d never seen before that night. When he looked at me, he conveyed utter desperation and complete sadness. His eyes were unusually large, with a furrowed brow expression on his face. Neither of us uttered a word but we were in a transfixed conversation.
I don’t know why, but I was more curious about his presence than I was alarmed. He didn’t frighten me. Perhaps it was the empathy that I felt for him. A child-to-child connection. He seemed to beg for help, or perhaps he was pleading with me to forgive what was inevitably going to happen next.
I only wish that, at that point, I would have woken my mother…
Without warning, a sinister-looking figure stepped out from the dark abyss of the room. But this time I was instantly terrified by his presence and his expression towards me. He was a tall skeleton man, illuminated enough to see every feature of his hideous face. He had bulging eyes which were blue, and his face was distorted by pure evil. There was his insidious grin that widened with each beat of my racing heart. I gasped, but I couldn’t scream. His delight in my terror was evident. I stole a glimpse towards the corner to look for the boy spirit, but he was gone. I knew that my torment had only begun.
This evil demon (and I still call ‘it’ that because that’s what I feel it was) intently watched me struggle. But I could not move a muscle. My tiny little body was paralyzed by the fear. His toothy, ugly grin shined bigger and brighter in the darkness. Once he was confident that he had my attention, he turned his gaze towards my cabinet. With slow, strobe-like movements, he stepped towards it. His hideous face looked in my direction once more before he reached inside. He found what he was after and held in his bony hand my scissors, clipping the void as he strode towards me. Snip, snip, snip.
Finally, I was able to scream out loud. I scurried under my blanket and over to my mother’s body, screaming hysterically. My poor mom had no idea what was happening to me. She called my name over and over, trying to calm me. But I wouldn’t budge from underneath the safety of the covers. I huddled next to her body while sobbing and screaming between the cries. I carelessly thought that, after enough time had passed, the monster had to be gone. How foolish I was. I lifted just enough of the blanket to peer my little face out for a peek, and those disgusting eyes were waiting, along with a continuous snip-snap of the scissors. I covered my face once again and started to choke. Between my screaming and crying, I couldn’t catch any air.
My mother jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and panicked, believing that I needed a doctor. As you can imagine, by this time, everyone in the house was wide awake. My grandmother and sister came rushing in to check on me. Their confused expressions were almost too much to bear. I had never displayed any sort of behaviour like that before in my life. My mother checked me over, holding me tightly to comfort me. Once everyone was satisfied that it wasn’t a medical emergency, I was able to go to grandma’s room. My sister got into my mom’s bed.
The next morning, I crept into my mother’s room, looking for my shoes, cautious of every single step I took while my face darted around the room. I was watching for the ugly creature to appear once again. I figured that, with daylight, the monster must be gone. As I rounded the foot of the bed, I crept over to where I had left my shoes. They were not there. So, I stepped over to the other side and gasped… my scissors were lying on the floor, exactly where the demon creature had dropped them. It proved to me that everything that happened the night before was real. Needless to say, I never slept in my mother’s room again.
In 1970, the suspended overhanging entrance crashed to the ground during an earthquake and the house was condemned by the city thereafter. In 1971, we moved into another house that our mother purchased. By 1972, the house was eventually demolished, and debris was removed, all except the cement porch, weirdly. In 1987, the cement porch was finely removed.
The cement porch always served as a constant reminder of the horror I witnessed back in 1964 every time I drove by that address. I was glad to see it gone and it’s been a long time since I lived there.
In conclusion: Wherever a horrific crime has been committed or a tragic death has occurred, a haunting can follow. I strongly believe, and know within myself, that this was a case of child abduction and murder and believe that the malevolent entity that came for me was once human and had previously occupied our house. I believe that the man had abducted this poor child and performed unspeakable acts on him prior to murdering him. The child might have been a neighbour, or a runaway, or a farmhand, but he was likely a relative. Don’t ask me how I know this; I just do.
My heart still aches for the child entity because I believe that he has been held captive in that darkness for all these years. I have never gotten over this terrifying encounter.
What I regret most is that since the house was demolished and replaced by another structure, there is no way to release this poor child’s spirit to give him the peace he deserves. This will sit with me forevermore.’
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Stay spooky everyone!
