life

My Creepiest Memory, Wrapped Up in Sad Story

Recently I was involved in a discussion about “creepiest thing that ever happened to you.” To date, this has been my one and only truly creepy experience. As I went into more and more detail, I began to realize that it was a creepy moment wrapped up in a sad story. For better or worse, here it is.

There was a very odd period during my freshman year of high school where I spent a lot of time talking to a girl who was extremely disturbed to say the least. I’ve never been one to believe in supernatural events – for me it all comes down to numbers, probability, coincidence. It’s not a choice, it’s a gut reaction. When I hear something extraordinary my brain immediately falls back on probability and logic. Admittedly this aspect of myself was much less developed at 14 or so than it is now, but what happened with this girl really shook me to the core.

I had a friend – let’s call her L. She was my first real girlfriend, and we had a lot of ups and downs. Fast-forward about a year and we’ve settled into a comfortable friendship. I was doing my own experimentation with marijuana and alcohol and whatnot at the time, but she took it several steps further than I was comfortable with. As a result, my “tamer” circle and L’s more “hardcore” circle of friends drifted apart. Around this time I lost track of exactly what she was doing. Before then I could tell if she was a little drunk or had just smoked, but it got to a point where she was on any number of substances and I didn’t bother to keep track. Sometimes talking to her could be extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, we managed to keep in touch through all of this. I think there was a little piece of her that knew most of her “friends” didn’t care much about her – just what purpose she could serve – and I think she needed me to keep her grounded. As for me, well, I guess I harbored some fantasy that she would suddenly clean up and give us another shot…but beyond all that we were good friends.

For a while there, maybe a period of 3 to 6 months, some very weird things started happening when we talked. Let me clarify – we talked on the phone late into the night. I was lucky as a teenager; I had my own phone line and my parents slept upstairs (I was the only one downstairs) so once they were out, I could easily talk on the phone all night. She knew this, and that’s a big reason why these phone calls started and continued with such regularity.

What was happening was that she was getting increasingly scared of the dark and of going to sleep. Girls were strange creatures at that age, and I remember not thinking much of it. About half the time she was too drugged up to make any sense, but the other half it was a real pleasure and continued to bring us closer as friends. Eventually she’d get ready to go to sleep and ask me to stay on the line until I was sure she was asleep.

As the weeks wore on, her behavior got more and more erratic. It was easy to chalk it up to the drugs – and maybe it was – but there was something else there: genuine fear, nay, terror.

I started picking up on the fact that something was most definitely wrong and tried to get her to talk about it. She was extremely reluctant at first but after promising to believe her and not to laugh, the details started flowing. Now bear with me, these were her words, not mine. She said she saw what she called “demons.” She described them as these big black shapes that were everywhere, all around her, all the time. And they weren’t just around her, they were pretty much everywhere, and if she concentrated, she could “see what they saw,” something akin to remote viewing I guess.

Of course this sounded as silly to me as it does to you, and although I didn’t believe her, I had genuine concern for L and I believed that she believed it. We kept up our talks, though now on most nights, as her energy waned and she got closer to sleep, I got to hear more about these “demons.” L didn’t just see them, she heard them, and felt them. They were constantly poking at her, tickling her, brushing up against her. She heard them laugh and moan and whisper. Still crazy, right? But the way she talked about it…there was such fear and desperation in her voice.

One night I asked her why being on the phone with me made any difference and she said they didn’t mess with her nearly as bad when she wasn’t alone. L’s behavior would escalate and plateau several times, though it was clearly getting worse. However, she seemed fine during the day. I saw her at school and from looking at the two of us you’d never suspect the darkness that she shared with me most nights over the phone. I even hung out with her and smoked and drank a little – she was still fine. However, sometimes her mom would have to go work really early some mornings. To avoid riding the bus, she’d get her mom to drop her off at my house (I lived a block from the school). So she’d come over and crawl in my tiny bunk bed and sleep for another hour before it was time to get up and go to school. And I will never forget how tightly she held on to me those mornings. Like a vise. But it wasn’t attraction that drew her in, it was safety. Sleep had become utterly terrifying for her.

Anyone reading this will think that it was the drugs doing it to her, and I mentioned as much to her. Her answer was something to the effect that the drugs made her more open to their presence, but that these shadowy demons were hanging around regardless. She began describing to me what she’d taken on a given day and there was nothing to suggest that anything she was taking would give her full blown visual, auditory, and sensory hallucinations. L wasn’t taking anything frequently enough to induce crazy withdrawal symptoms, and although she had no qualms about mixing ritalin, xanax, and a few wine coolers, there was nothing consistent enough to account for her “experiences.”

It was around this time that the creepiness began to bleed over into my world. L’s fear was growing worse; she began hearing noises in her house, she was scared to be around windows after dark, and these phone calls were going later and later into the night. Obviously at this point I suggested professional help. Turns out that her mother had totally brushed her off and her step-dad was such a dick he wasn’t worth telling.

One night in particular, her “visions” hit extremely close to home. I’ll never forget those words or how she said them…”they’re outside” she half-whispered, ominously but matter-of-factly. I wasn’t totally sure what she meant – I’m sure I just said something like “huh?” “They’re outside,” she repeated. “At your house.” Did I believe L was seeing demons? No. But I’d be lying if I said that didn’t send a chill down my spine. “How do you know?” I said. (We’d established that she didn’t communicate directly with them.) “I can see you…through them,” she said, a little too coldly for my liking.

L had been in my house dozens of times, so she knew what it was like inside. At this point I actually laughed, mostly because I couldn’t believe something like this was happening to me. I had to ask, “ok, if you can see me, where am I, what am I doing?” “You’re in the kitchen. Leaning against the sink. With your back to the window,” was her reply without hesitation. I almost dropped the phone and I’m sure the color drained from my face. This wasn’t her taking a stab at me being in my room laying on the bed (which is how I spent most of my time on the phone) or on the patio having a cigarette.

Somewhat panicked, I asked her what I was wearing; she immediately got the colors right. (Not sure if this was a revelation or not; I can’t remember if it was weekday where she may have seen me at school, or if I’d changed into different clothes, or what.) After she answered though, I do remember immediately running into my room and changing into a shirt I wore infrequently and asking her again. Like L was standing right there next to me, she said, “orange shirt.” In order to change I had to move from the kitchen to my room – away from the window – but I honestly wasn’t ready to ask how she could still “see me.”

I still don’t know what I believe about the incident. Nothing remotely similar has happened since. But every now and then when I rinse off some dishes or fill a pot with water after dark, I look out that very same window and wonder. That was almost 17 years ago. After that our talks faded in intensity, mostly because I quit asking so many questions. I’m not sure that I was ever truly scared, though I think a piece of me was worried that I might be on the cusp of opening a door that I didn’t want to open. She still had rough nights and I still patiently waited until I had heard her breathing change and she had fallen asleep before I hung up.

I don’t remember when or how our talks ceased; there was no clear end of the phenomenon (that I know of). We stayed friends for another year or year and a half after that, though it never really seemed appropriate for me to bring up the “demons,” and eventually she stopped mentioning them. Our lives continued to drift apart as our friends became less and less connected. She stopped going to school for the most part and shortly before my junior year of high school began she moved far away. This was before social networking (it was the days of AIM) and L never was much for the computer, so we completely lost touch.

I ended up becoming good friends with one of L’s girlfriends outside of L’s influence (we’ll call her A), and a few years down the road I mentioned the “shadowy demons” in short form to A. A had never heard anything of the sort from her. I stayed close to A for several years and we went to the same college. About 5 or 6 years after L had moved away, A and I had tracked down an alleged phone number for L.

After a bit of phone tag I managed to speak to her, and honestly, our brush with the paranormal was about the third thing on my list that I wanted to ask her about. (I’m not sure if I would’ve come out and asked, “do you see demons still!?” but I was hoping to work up to it by working back to those late night calls.) Unfortunately, the poor girl hardly remembered any of those days. Wouldn’t surprise me if she’d forgotten my last name. There were all sorts of people we knew from back then and what I thought would be a fun bit of reminiscing turned into a heartbreaking conversation; all these people and events were fuzzy to her drug-addled mind, if she even recalled them at all. I’d hoped the move would do her some good, but it was quickly evident that she’d done little more than pick right up where she’d left off.

We weren’t even on the phone 15 minutes. I gave her my number, but I knew she wouldn’t call, not when she could hardly remember a half-dozen people she saw every day for 2 or 3 years. I knew that the L that I knew, the one who’d crawled into bed so sweetly with me on those ungodly early mornings, the one who’d spent a summer with me cuddled up in a recliner playing NES on an 11-inch TV in my mom’s bedroom, the one that shared those deep dark fears with me, that girl, was gone.

That was 10 or 11 years ago. I never bothered to call her again and I haven’t heard from or about her since.

I don’t know where those shadowy figures came from. I never denied that she saw them, that every creak and groan in her house was one of them stomping or snarling, that every breezy draft was one of them creeping up behind her. She had a step-father that openly discussed all the “gash” he’d gotten at her age in front her and her mom. Somehow he pegged me as a terrible influence on L when more often than not it was L who shared her stash with me, nevermind the hordes of shady characters that wandered in and out of that basement. Her mom pretended like nothing was wrong with either step-dad or L, though she did finally summon the courage to leave, which is why they moved. L fell in with crowd who treated her like a piece of meat, a pretty girl to drug up and then sex up. It’s not wonder she carried around a thick darkness with her and it’s easy to see how, at the end of the night, free of distraction, your life can come back to haunt you in strange ways. All that I can believe.

However, I still haven’t a clue how she could’ve possibly seen me.

Written by The Cubist