Post by The Warden on Sept 25, 2012 11:43:06 GMT -5
My Paranormal Life
Written by: Herk Collins
"The world is full of mysteries, or so people say. Unexplained things which have occurred for centuries, seemingly gone unnoticed by most, but not all. Some people, for whatever reason, have been able to see another world within our own. A world of strange happenings which parallels that of the happenings we have always known, or so we thought we knew. Imagine moving a ring or a set of car keys from one place to another, quite explainable indeed. Now imagine these things moving on their own with seemingly no help at all. Most of us would immediately assume we were losing our sanity if we witnessed things moving on their own or worse, flying at us as though thrown.
This very type of occurrence is what has caused two factions of the scientific community to be at odds for more than a century. The natural and the supernatural, these two extensions of the scientific community have always been as polar opposites, one pushing away at the other. We are supposed to believe only that which we can physically see according to most scientists, but there is another area of science which tells us that those things which go unseen in the natural world are none the less real and just as believable. They refer to this area of science as paranormal research.
I was born into a family with a long paranormal history, a family which lived in an area that was once the site of a large cemetery. Some of the original cemetery remained and if you lived in the right spot, you could look out your window and see grave stones for more than a mile. I was raised in this place and lived there for twenty one years, I have witnessed a great deal of activity throughout my life, most of which has been in this neighborhood. When I was a small child, I would hear people talking, but they were invisible. I grew up thinking that everyone had these invisible people, at least until the age of four. I began to learn that there was a great deal of history behind our neighborhood and that it was the spirits of those which had past on that I would hear. I also learned that this was something my mother’s side of the family had lived with for many generations.
My Great Grandmother lived in a building that was once a hospital, in those days, patients that died were dragged to a certain place to keep the surviving patients from being set ill at ease by thoughts of their own mortality. My Great Grandmother would tell stories of hearing the boxes containing the dead bodies being dragged or the sounds of medical equipment that would clang with metallic sounds all through the night. My Aunt would tell of seeing people in her home that would walk a few steps and disappear into thin air, she also told of a woman who would brush her hair and smile, but she too would disappear after brushing my Aunt’s hair. The stories from my Mother were the defining ones, the ones that explained so much about our strange family, our neighborhood, and the houses we lived in there. I would wonder no more by the time I was ten years old why I saw, felt, and heard things. My Mother, as it turned out, was a very powerful woman. She had fought with demons, seen and spoke to the spirits of those who had passed on, and witnessed occurrences before they happened.
I remember her story of our neighborhood making the local news because of what was named “The Phantom”, grabbing people, whispering to people, and jumping from rooftop to rooftop. I actually thought this one might have sounded too good to be true, but later in life, I found the write up on it. I have a long memory of the things my Mother told me she had done, seen, and experienced in her lifetime. I remember some of my own first experiences as well. I was about four years old when I saw a paperweight fly off a dresser and break the window, nothing big at the time naturally, I’m shocked I even remember it. The first big experience was at the age of seven, I was not a good sleeper as a child because I was plagued by nightmares. I went downstairs one early morning, it was still dark out and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be outside at that late hour.
I was playing around on our walkway when suddenly my Mother was at the door, she yelled for me to look behind me and told me to get in the house. I turned around to see what she had seen and right there behind me was demon. This was my first ever experience with a demon, but it would not be my last. I saw a dark figure that looked like smoke, I remember that I could see the house across the street right through it, that it was large and wide, and there was what appeared to be horns on the head. I ran into the house and got back into the bed, my Mother stayed with me for a while. The next morning, the toy I had been playing with was destroyed, I continued to have nightmares for many more years, but never again went outside. I guess I thought that meant I was safe from dark spirits, but I was wrong. I awoke another time a few months later and went into the dark hallway and tried to look into my parents’ bedroom to see if they too might be awake, it was too dark to see and I didn’t want to turn on a light just in case they were asleep.
Though I was unsure why my parents would be downstairs in the dark, I just felt the need to go see. I went downstairs with the lights out, I walked very slowly. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I looked into the dark living room and called out “Daddy” then I heard my Dad say “we’re in here, son”. I remember feeling good that my parents were there and I happily turned on the light only to find the living room empty. I ran back up the stairs, this time turning the lights on as I went. There, fast asleep, my parents were in their bed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but anything that could imitate my Dad’s voice was obviously not a human spirit. I learned many years later that demons often take on a form or characteristic that is appealing to someone in order to lure them in. This was also about the time I found out that my older brother was possessed when he was ten years old and why my Mother sat with me so long that night when we both saw that a demon was behind me.
I have had the usual experiences through the years, an ice cold hand on my shoulder, voices, and the feeling of being watched or followed. I also saw my Great Grandmother waving at me the day before she died. However, it seemed that I was destined to continue to have experiences with the diabolical. When I was about fourteen, I was laying in my bed taking a nap. As the story was told to me, my sister came up to use the bathroom, my bedroom was directly across the hall and my door was open. When my sister opened the bathroom door and was turning out the light, she saw a creature laying in my bed with stringy black hair, red eyes, and sharp teeth. I ,however, was not in my bed according to the way I heard it told to me. My sister ran downstairs and told my mom what she just saw. My mom is shaking me and yelling for me to get out of the bed, my sister is also yelling and visually frightened. We went to my mother€™s room and she began to pray and asked me to pray also. We prayed for what seemed like twenty minutes or so, then we all went downstairs and I was finally told what my sister saw and why they wanted me out of the bed and out of the room. The next experience I had a while later was what I call “The Breather”. I was sitting alone and thought I heard a noise, I got quiet and listened. I heard what sounded like breathing, but as though someone was having trouble, it was very heavy.
As I listened, the breathing sounded as though it was getting louder and sounded like it was moving. The sound originated in the hall and got louder and closer as if someone was walking toward me. Finally, the heavy breathing was right in front of me and very loud. I ran up the stairs and asked my sister if she heard breathing, she told me she heard heavy breathing the night before coming from my room, but thought it was just my asthma causing me to breathe loud and forgot all about it and went to bed. Again, it just seemed to be a pattern with me that dark spirits or demons were finding an attraction to me and I really wasn’t understanding why. I talked to my mom about it and found that she was the one that exorcised my brother when he was ten, she told me the whole story and told me that she always worried it would return. Some years later, it did just that. I found my brother having what I thought were convulsions and yelling out a name I had never heard before. I got my mom and told her it looked like a seizure and was told to call an ambulance, but no sooner had I picked up the phone, my mother told me not to call an ambulance and to stay downstairs and away from my brother’s room. I later learned that the name he was calling out was the same name he called out when he was ten.
Throughout my life, I have had many experiences from the sound of footsteps going up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night to voices coming from an empty room. There was even a tear drop, as my mother called it, that would come from out of nowhere and land on your arm or hand. It didn’t matter where you were in the house or what time of day it was. You would feel a drop of ice cold water and it was always on your hand or arm, my mother and I both had this experience. We searched for leaks, but never found any and the strangest thing was that it was physical. You would feel the drop and look down, there would be an actual drop of water. By the time I was fifteen, I began researching everything I could on the paranormal. I wanted to know the wherefore and why of these occurrences. The fact that it was a part of my family history was a given, but why did these things happen to people? What caused a spirit to remain earthbound?
My mom passed away in August of 1991 and since everything appeared to be tied to her side of the family, I assumed the activity would cease. I had taken care of my parents until the passed and once they were gone, I really had no place to go. One of my sisters was living in Louisiana and I moved there to live with her. There was no activity of any kind in her home before I moved in, but I had a birthday a few months after arriving and a friend of my sister’s gave me some balloons. The balloons were in my room and they were still all the way up to the ceiling, plenty full of helium. One night as my sister and I were watching television, the balloons came floating out of my room, went across the living room, and into the kitchen where they stopped at the island range. They were not at ceiling height, but were down as though a child were carrying them, they remained at this level when they stopped in the kitchen. My sister looked at me, then at the balloons, then back at me with complete confusion in her expression.
I went and got the balloons and took them back to my room, when I let them go, they rose right back up to the ceiling as they had been before.
From that point on, activity was following me everywhere, so much for my theory of it being connected only to my mother because of her family’s paranormal history. I have gone into a store to get a fountain soda and as I got withing two or three feet of the machine, the button to dispense the ice pushed in and the ice dispensed all over the floor. Also, a bowl which was on a shelf behind me flew off the shelf and across to the adjacent isle in another store. A gentleman standing next to me who had witnessed it happen looked at me in shock and asked Is this place haunted? I have experienced paranormal activity all of my life and have been a paranormal investigator for around twenty five years because of it. When I get requests for help that involve demonic activity, I still get attacked by the diabolical force that I have kicked out, I once had my entire mid section flatten completely out on one side as though someone were squeezing me in two and it was quite painful. However, I will always accept a plea for help no matter what, because now, I have been allowed to understand that I am just as powerful as my mother was and believe it or not, demons fear me. I am the senior director and co owner of CSI: Paranormal and I am proud to say that I support paranormal unity. We now have more than six thousand supporters from all over the world and have used many of those teams in international and national investigations. I can’t help but think that my mom would be proud.
This is dedicated to my mom who taught me much of what I know about the paranormal today. I love you mom."
View the original entry here: horrorfansasylumreviews.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/my-paranormal-life-by-herk-collins/
Written by: Herk Collins
"The world is full of mysteries, or so people say. Unexplained things which have occurred for centuries, seemingly gone unnoticed by most, but not all. Some people, for whatever reason, have been able to see another world within our own. A world of strange happenings which parallels that of the happenings we have always known, or so we thought we knew. Imagine moving a ring or a set of car keys from one place to another, quite explainable indeed. Now imagine these things moving on their own with seemingly no help at all. Most of us would immediately assume we were losing our sanity if we witnessed things moving on their own or worse, flying at us as though thrown.
This very type of occurrence is what has caused two factions of the scientific community to be at odds for more than a century. The natural and the supernatural, these two extensions of the scientific community have always been as polar opposites, one pushing away at the other. We are supposed to believe only that which we can physically see according to most scientists, but there is another area of science which tells us that those things which go unseen in the natural world are none the less real and just as believable. They refer to this area of science as paranormal research.
I was born into a family with a long paranormal history, a family which lived in an area that was once the site of a large cemetery. Some of the original cemetery remained and if you lived in the right spot, you could look out your window and see grave stones for more than a mile. I was raised in this place and lived there for twenty one years, I have witnessed a great deal of activity throughout my life, most of which has been in this neighborhood. When I was a small child, I would hear people talking, but they were invisible. I grew up thinking that everyone had these invisible people, at least until the age of four. I began to learn that there was a great deal of history behind our neighborhood and that it was the spirits of those which had past on that I would hear. I also learned that this was something my mother’s side of the family had lived with for many generations.
My Great Grandmother lived in a building that was once a hospital, in those days, patients that died were dragged to a certain place to keep the surviving patients from being set ill at ease by thoughts of their own mortality. My Great Grandmother would tell stories of hearing the boxes containing the dead bodies being dragged or the sounds of medical equipment that would clang with metallic sounds all through the night. My Aunt would tell of seeing people in her home that would walk a few steps and disappear into thin air, she also told of a woman who would brush her hair and smile, but she too would disappear after brushing my Aunt’s hair. The stories from my Mother were the defining ones, the ones that explained so much about our strange family, our neighborhood, and the houses we lived in there. I would wonder no more by the time I was ten years old why I saw, felt, and heard things. My Mother, as it turned out, was a very powerful woman. She had fought with demons, seen and spoke to the spirits of those who had passed on, and witnessed occurrences before they happened.
I remember her story of our neighborhood making the local news because of what was named “The Phantom”, grabbing people, whispering to people, and jumping from rooftop to rooftop. I actually thought this one might have sounded too good to be true, but later in life, I found the write up on it. I have a long memory of the things my Mother told me she had done, seen, and experienced in her lifetime. I remember some of my own first experiences as well. I was about four years old when I saw a paperweight fly off a dresser and break the window, nothing big at the time naturally, I’m shocked I even remember it. The first big experience was at the age of seven, I was not a good sleeper as a child because I was plagued by nightmares. I went downstairs one early morning, it was still dark out and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be outside at that late hour.
I was playing around on our walkway when suddenly my Mother was at the door, she yelled for me to look behind me and told me to get in the house. I turned around to see what she had seen and right there behind me was demon. This was my first ever experience with a demon, but it would not be my last. I saw a dark figure that looked like smoke, I remember that I could see the house across the street right through it, that it was large and wide, and there was what appeared to be horns on the head. I ran into the house and got back into the bed, my Mother stayed with me for a while. The next morning, the toy I had been playing with was destroyed, I continued to have nightmares for many more years, but never again went outside. I guess I thought that meant I was safe from dark spirits, but I was wrong. I awoke another time a few months later and went into the dark hallway and tried to look into my parents’ bedroom to see if they too might be awake, it was too dark to see and I didn’t want to turn on a light just in case they were asleep.
Though I was unsure why my parents would be downstairs in the dark, I just felt the need to go see. I went downstairs with the lights out, I walked very slowly. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I looked into the dark living room and called out “Daddy” then I heard my Dad say “we’re in here, son”. I remember feeling good that my parents were there and I happily turned on the light only to find the living room empty. I ran back up the stairs, this time turning the lights on as I went. There, fast asleep, my parents were in their bed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but anything that could imitate my Dad’s voice was obviously not a human spirit. I learned many years later that demons often take on a form or characteristic that is appealing to someone in order to lure them in. This was also about the time I found out that my older brother was possessed when he was ten years old and why my Mother sat with me so long that night when we both saw that a demon was behind me.
I have had the usual experiences through the years, an ice cold hand on my shoulder, voices, and the feeling of being watched or followed. I also saw my Great Grandmother waving at me the day before she died. However, it seemed that I was destined to continue to have experiences with the diabolical. When I was about fourteen, I was laying in my bed taking a nap. As the story was told to me, my sister came up to use the bathroom, my bedroom was directly across the hall and my door was open. When my sister opened the bathroom door and was turning out the light, she saw a creature laying in my bed with stringy black hair, red eyes, and sharp teeth. I ,however, was not in my bed according to the way I heard it told to me. My sister ran downstairs and told my mom what she just saw. My mom is shaking me and yelling for me to get out of the bed, my sister is also yelling and visually frightened. We went to my mother€™s room and she began to pray and asked me to pray also. We prayed for what seemed like twenty minutes or so, then we all went downstairs and I was finally told what my sister saw and why they wanted me out of the bed and out of the room. The next experience I had a while later was what I call “The Breather”. I was sitting alone and thought I heard a noise, I got quiet and listened. I heard what sounded like breathing, but as though someone was having trouble, it was very heavy.
As I listened, the breathing sounded as though it was getting louder and sounded like it was moving. The sound originated in the hall and got louder and closer as if someone was walking toward me. Finally, the heavy breathing was right in front of me and very loud. I ran up the stairs and asked my sister if she heard breathing, she told me she heard heavy breathing the night before coming from my room, but thought it was just my asthma causing me to breathe loud and forgot all about it and went to bed. Again, it just seemed to be a pattern with me that dark spirits or demons were finding an attraction to me and I really wasn’t understanding why. I talked to my mom about it and found that she was the one that exorcised my brother when he was ten, she told me the whole story and told me that she always worried it would return. Some years later, it did just that. I found my brother having what I thought were convulsions and yelling out a name I had never heard before. I got my mom and told her it looked like a seizure and was told to call an ambulance, but no sooner had I picked up the phone, my mother told me not to call an ambulance and to stay downstairs and away from my brother’s room. I later learned that the name he was calling out was the same name he called out when he was ten.
Throughout my life, I have had many experiences from the sound of footsteps going up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night to voices coming from an empty room. There was even a tear drop, as my mother called it, that would come from out of nowhere and land on your arm or hand. It didn’t matter where you were in the house or what time of day it was. You would feel a drop of ice cold water and it was always on your hand or arm, my mother and I both had this experience. We searched for leaks, but never found any and the strangest thing was that it was physical. You would feel the drop and look down, there would be an actual drop of water. By the time I was fifteen, I began researching everything I could on the paranormal. I wanted to know the wherefore and why of these occurrences. The fact that it was a part of my family history was a given, but why did these things happen to people? What caused a spirit to remain earthbound?
My mom passed away in August of 1991 and since everything appeared to be tied to her side of the family, I assumed the activity would cease. I had taken care of my parents until the passed and once they were gone, I really had no place to go. One of my sisters was living in Louisiana and I moved there to live with her. There was no activity of any kind in her home before I moved in, but I had a birthday a few months after arriving and a friend of my sister’s gave me some balloons. The balloons were in my room and they were still all the way up to the ceiling, plenty full of helium. One night as my sister and I were watching television, the balloons came floating out of my room, went across the living room, and into the kitchen where they stopped at the island range. They were not at ceiling height, but were down as though a child were carrying them, they remained at this level when they stopped in the kitchen. My sister looked at me, then at the balloons, then back at me with complete confusion in her expression.
I went and got the balloons and took them back to my room, when I let them go, they rose right back up to the ceiling as they had been before.
From that point on, activity was following me everywhere, so much for my theory of it being connected only to my mother because of her family’s paranormal history. I have gone into a store to get a fountain soda and as I got withing two or three feet of the machine, the button to dispense the ice pushed in and the ice dispensed all over the floor. Also, a bowl which was on a shelf behind me flew off the shelf and across to the adjacent isle in another store. A gentleman standing next to me who had witnessed it happen looked at me in shock and asked Is this place haunted? I have experienced paranormal activity all of my life and have been a paranormal investigator for around twenty five years because of it. When I get requests for help that involve demonic activity, I still get attacked by the diabolical force that I have kicked out, I once had my entire mid section flatten completely out on one side as though someone were squeezing me in two and it was quite painful. However, I will always accept a plea for help no matter what, because now, I have been allowed to understand that I am just as powerful as my mother was and believe it or not, demons fear me. I am the senior director and co owner of CSI: Paranormal and I am proud to say that I support paranormal unity. We now have more than six thousand supporters from all over the world and have used many of those teams in international and national investigations. I can’t help but think that my mom would be proud.
This is dedicated to my mom who taught me much of what I know about the paranormal today. I love you mom."
View the original entry here: horrorfansasylumreviews.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/my-paranormal-life-by-herk-collins/