3 Fat Chicks on a Diet Weight Loss Community

Super long post - apologies in advance.

The first experience I can think of happened when I was about 9. It was just after my grandfather died in March; I would guesstimate the month as being June-ish. I was sent up town (we lived in a tiny town) to pick up the mail from the post office and as I was walking down the totally empty main strip mall area, this older man was infront of me. We got to the alleyway leading to the parking lot between the library and the grocery store and he turned. I was only about 40 feet away and I swear it was my grandfather. Same thick black glasses, same sweat pants, plaid shirt untucked. He smiled. I said "Grampa?" and then he turned the corner. When I got there, he was gone. The walk to the parking lot is a good 50 feet, with no where to hide. And he was gone.

A few months after my grandfather died, my grandmother (grampa's wife) was in town and we all went camping in Alberta in our fifth wheel. We were in the mountains somewhere; Banff National Park I think. The previous morning I had woken up and thought I had gone blind because it was SO dark! All the trees kept all the light out until later on the morning. The next night, I slept above the table on the bunk with my sister. I, being older, slept on the outside. Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up. I felt him more than I saw him at first. I rolled over and there, bright as day, was this young man standing by the door of the trailer. He was tall, maybe 6 ft, with a brown leather jacket and faded blue jeans on. I didn't get a good look at his face because I was so scared. I pulled the blanket up and said to him "Please go away." When I looked again, I couldn't see anything because it was as dark as could be. I know I wasn't dreaming, I know I was wide awake.

We lived in this apartment building that housed mostly seniors. It wasn't specifically for senior's but that's where most of them lived. In my room, late at night, I would wake up out of the blue and I could hear talking. It sounded like it was coming from the apartment below us, but it was vacant for several years. I'd put my ear to the floor and I'd never be able to hear anything. But just sitting on my bed, I'd hear it. Like someone in another room talking to someone else, even though it'd be 3 in the morning and everyone was in bed.

The next time I saw something wasn't for a few years. I was 13 going on 14. My dad took some holiday time off and was going back to Ontario to see his parents. I was home-schooling at the time, my parents decided that I would go with him. It happened at my Nanny and Poppy's (his parents) house. I was sleeping on the living room floor with a clear view of the kitchen table and the front door. My uncle had come in from Thunder Bay but he was sleeping in his camper outside. Again, I woke up, wide awake in the middle of the night for no reason and I felt, rather than saw him at first. I remember sitting up a bit and turning to look at the kitchen. He was standing by my Nanny's spice rack against the wall. It was the same man from Banff; brown leather jacket, faded blue jeans. He had his arms folded and he was watching me. The only difference this time was that he only had half of his head. His face was intact, but the right side of his skull was missing. I remember falling back onto my back and staring at the ceiling and telling him "go away, I want to get some sleep." I woke up later that morning when my Uncle was coming in to use the bathroom and I asked him if he had been in earlier. He said no. No one else was in the house except my elderly granparents and my dad. I told dad, who told his mother who, being very religious, gave me a glow-in-the-dark rosary and told me if the man came back, to "banish him in the name of Jesus Christ." lol He didn't show up.

When I was 14, we were renting this little bungalow. We had sold the condo where most of the seniors lived a few months before Christmas and because my sister and I had shared a room for 4 years, I didn't have my own bed yet. I slept on the floor of my room on a foam. One night, when everyone was asleep, I woke up. Sat bolt upright in bed. My door was wide open and I could hear footsteps going up and down the hallway outside my door. My "bed" was right beside the door so I just rolled over to see who it was, thinking mom had gotten up or my sister was sneaking around. No one was there but I could still hear the footsteps going up and down the hallway. All I said was "can you please go away? I'm trying to sleep." Then I rolled over and laid there and the footsteps walked back toward my room, stopped, and then disappeared. When I woke up in the morning before my parents, my door was shut.

After that, the mine my dad worked at laid everyone off and we went to Alberta for the summer before coming home. We stayed at a friend's house while dad went back to Alberta to try to find work. After the mine re-hired everyone, we moved into the apartment that had belonged to the daughter of the friends we stayed with. My mom came to wake me up for school one day and I rolled over and looked at her. It was a rule in our house that you are fully awake and answer when you're called for school so that if you go back to sleep, you can't blame mom and dad for not waking you. My bedroom and my parent's room were side by side and the doors to each were also side by side. If you stood looking at them, my room was on the left, and theirs on the right. Dad was home, but sleeping off a graveyard shift. Wide awake, I looked past my mom and there was a guy standing behind her, looking in at my parent's room (the door to which was open). I said to her "Who is that behind you?" thinking we had company over or that my cousin was in town or something. The man was taller than mom (who is 5'1) and had brown hair, cut short. All around the edges of him was gold, like glitter. When she turned around and I looked to her, he disappeared.

The next time was in the same apartment. My cousin was visiting with her 2 year old boy. My door was shut. In the corner of my room, right across from the head of my bed, I had this giant fake leather, cow-print bean bag chair my parents had given me for Christmas a few years earlier. I didn't have a night-light in my room either so it was usually pitch black in it during the night. There was nothing on the bean bag chair when I went to bed. In the middle of the night, the room got so cold that I woke up. I rolled over and there, sitting on my bean bag chair, was this girl. She was dressed all in black and her hair, which was dark and straight, fell straight down over her shoulders. She was staring at me, and the whole room felt and tasted like true... wrongness. I wouldn't say "evil" but it certainly wasn't good. Her eyes, were completely red. There were no lids, no eyelashes. I saw all this because she was lighting the room up. It wasn't as bright as day, but it was bright enough to see almost everything, at least in shapes. This was the first time I had been truly, truly scared to the point that I SCREAMED! And screamed. And screamed until my cousin rushed into the room. The moment just before she did, the room went black and the heat returned. I didn't tell her what happened, but told her to wake up mom. She came in, and I told her. She covered up the bean bag chair but the girl didn't come back anyway.

On December 31, 1999, I had had enough of being bullied, teased, picked on, tormented, assaulted, ostrasized, etc in school. I was depressed and didn't feel like I could tell my parents. I didn't see any hope of getting better because the school always sided with my abusers. Even the cops in my town were frustrated; death threats, assaults, being called to the school every month and the blame was always on me; "she makes herself an easy target", "she's too nice", "her parents don't love her enough" (go figure that one out), etc. I thought the only way out was suicide. I had it all planned. I was going to do it just after midnight. I was in my room. I'd written a letter to my parents, telling them how sorry I was for being such a horrible daughter. For not being as respectful as I should have been, for not getting along with my sister, for not wanting to do the dishes, for being, what I thought was, a disease. A monster. I sat infront of this big mirror I had that was on the floor. I was going to cut my wrists open. There was no one else in the room with me. My parents had splurged and bought all sorts of goodies for New Years, which we normally don't get. We'd rented movies and had chicken wings, and spring rolls, and popcorn and pop and all this stuff we never usually had. As I heard the count down begin, I took a deep breath, held my mother's favorite pearing knife against my wrist, and, while crying, looked into the mirror. The room was light by only a few candles, enough like to see. I didn't want to see everything, I just wanted it to be over with. I wanted one last look at myself, to know I was doing what I thought was the right thing by taking myself out and making their lives easier. And then.. there he was behind me. The man in the brown leather jacket and blue jeans from that night in Banff. His head was intact. He stood, leaning against the dresser behind me, watching me with the most hurtful look on his face. I remember crying, sobbing and trying not be too loud about it. And this voice, his voice, was in my head, but not in my head, it was just there, I can't explain how I heard it but i did. Maybe I felt it more than heard it. "They love you so much, don't hurt them like this." I remember my hand wavered, the knife against my skin, and I dropped my head to sob. When I looked up, the man was gone and I heard "3....2.....1!" then my mom was banging on my door screaming "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" I went out and she embraced me, then asked why I was crying. I remember stumbling over my words, saying I had "stabbed my toe, I mean stubbed my toe." To this day, she doesn't know. And she'll go to her grave not knowing if I can help it.

A few months later, I had to drop out of school because I couldn't take it anymore. My mom had went to see a psychiatrist in the city and after explaining everything to him (at the ridiculous price of $90/hour) he told her what she needed to hear: "Either she's going to kill herself, or she's going to kill someone else." This was just a few years after Columbine, and I'd already been interrogated by the school and the police on whether I had access to guns (I did) and whether I could use them (I could). My mother had freaked out at the counsellor one day when she went to complain about me being attacked again, and she said "it's no WONDER why those poor boys in Colorado did what they did, if this is the treatment you give children suffering through bullying and beatings!" I was called back in after that. Another kid, my best friend's brother who also went through a lot of torment, was the victim of someone calling the police saying he was making a bomb. They tore the house apart and had him in handcuffs, in the jail for hours interrogating him and asking him whether he would ever build a bomb. My best friend left school that day in tears; she was already being the mom and sister to her brother because their mother had packed up and went back to Scotland and her dad was always in Qatar training firefighters. But, I digress.

After that talk with the psychiatrist, mom decided to move me down into the city and got me an apartment. I was only 15, but she was with me most of the week and then I'd go back to their house on the weekends. It worked until the Ministry of Children and Families found out and accused mom of abandoning me. But, anyway. One night, while I was alone in the apartment, I was woken up by someone crashing around in the kitchen. I lived on the 2nd floor, with the balcony facing a large tree that you couldn't climb. The door was locked, dead-bolted and chained. No one was getting in. But SOMETHING was. Whatever it was, it was pulling all the drawers in the kitchen open and slamming them, and clattering all the cutlery around. I was terrified, so terrified that i couldn't even move to reach for the phone I kept in the room because I was scared that someone was out there, they'd hear me, and come hurt me. I remember crying, sitting on my bed, trying to make as little noise as possible. After what seemed like hours but was only about 15 minutes, the clattering and slamming stopped and I heard what sounded like the door slamming shut. Rather than calling the police or my parents, I hid under the covers and went to sleep. The next morning, I tentatively stepped out. The door to the apartment was still chained and bolted. All the windows were still locked with their sticks still in place. ALL the drawers were opened, some cutlery was on the floor, or on the counter. Definitely not how I had left it the night before.

After that, nothing really significant happened apart from me having to be hospitalized in the psychiatric ward. This isn't so much a ghost story as it is an ..otherworld experience. I was HIGHLY afraid of needles after getting several bad innoculations in high school. When they were doing my intake, they needed blood work. Even though they had given me EMLA cream to numb the skin, I was still panicking. I remember holding onto my mom, hugging her, crying, and then feeling the needle go in. It didn't hurt, but I felt it. I could feel my blood leaving me and I passed out.

What I saw, I can't explain. Up until that point, I had been anxious, fearful, depressed, and to the point of near suicide. But when I passed out, all of that was stripped clean away from me. I was barefoot. In a sea of..nothingness except for a marble walkway beneath my feet. The marble was warm.. like heated flooring warm. On either side of me were trenches about 2 ft wide filled with lapis lazuli blue water. Ever see an anime show? When they show the ocean it has those white lines for the white caps and stuff? That's what this water had. All around me was this beautiful, peaceful, calming light. It wasn't really yellow and it wasn't really white either. It was a colour I've never seen before or since. Up ahead, it was brighter. And everything was pulling me towards that brightness. There was no sadness. There was no depression. No grief. No frustration. It was just utter and total peace. Like I never experienced before. It wasn't like relaxing outside with nothing to do and the sun on you, it wasn't like laying on a beach on a vacation. It was complete, total, spiritual, mental, physical, metaphysical, peace. I wasn't really walking toward the brightness, but I was moving there anyway when I stopped. All around me a voice spoke but didn't echo. It was neither male or female. It wasn't really outside my head or inside. It was just THERE. I will never, ever forget the words it said. "You have to go back. You're needed." And before I could protest, though there was never a feeling of wanting to protest, I opened my eyes. Two doctors, a nurse, and my mother were crowded into this little closet of a room staring at me, and all I could see coming from around all them them was rainbows. Like a rainbow on a wall from the sun going through a prism but brighter, more intense without hurting the eyes. I don't remember being put in a bed. I don't remember talking to my parents and asking for my teddy bear, Ribbon. I don't remember meeting my nurse. I didn't finally "wake up" for 18 hours.

It was several years before anything else happened. Small things would happen, I'd feel something more than see something. A candle would blow out when there was no wind in the room. I'd see what I thought was a paper airplane fly past my peripheral vision (though admittedly, that would happen to me when I was younger too). I'd feel a cool brush of air pass over my arm or neck. I'd hear laughter in the middle of the night. Or someone walking up and down the stairs outside my basement bedroom in the house we bought when I was 17. One night, our dog Zoe, got up on this chair by the wall and while staring at the top of the entertainment stand, BARKED her fool head off for half an hour. We could not get her to shut up and no matter how many times we took her off the chair, she would race back to it and keep barking. After about half an hour, she suddenly just shut up and sat down. Another time, about 3 years ago, it was the middle of the night and just mom and my sister were home with Maggie, their black lab. She woke up, Maggie did, and stood by the door of the bedroom (which was open) SNARLING and growling, all the hair on the back of her neck standing straight up. She then CHARGED something, down the hallway to the door where she stopped and kept snarling and growling and barking. Mom, by this time, was up and had rushed out. She was too scared to open the door, thinking someone was outside. She peeked out the front blinds but no one was around. Maggie wasn't growling or barking like she normally did when you play with her, this was a "if you come near them I will rip your f*cking throat out" growl that a Labrador doesn't often exhibit. It woke my sister up, who looked out her window (she's at the front of the house) and there was no one around. No one else was in the house either.

One big thing I remember happening in that house happened one night when my mom was babysitting 3 kids. She, because of her snoring (sleep apnea gone untreated), slept on a day bed in the living room, beside the computer desk. The kids were on the floor on mattresses in the living room/dining room. My sister was on the computer. I was in the basement, but my door and the door in the kitchen were both open. Mom was sound asleep, the kids were asleep. Only my sister and I were awake.

All of a sudden, it sounded like someone or something was running their hands down the venetian blinds in the dining room. They were metal, so they clank when you dust them or try to straighten with your hands. It was loud enough that it woke my mom (which is amazing b/c she doesn't wake for ANYTHING). She sat bolt upright, thinking one of the kids was awake and causing havok. She asked my sister if she heard that and my sister, pale as a ghost, said yes, she had. How could she not? All 3 kids were still sound asleep. My sister got up and went to check on the blinds which looked fine except for 4 of them which had been turned the wrong way, and one of which the end had been bent (they weren't bent before). My sister came to the top of the stairs and asked if I had heard anything and I, not knowing what was going on, said "yea, the kids were playing with the blinds." She said they were all asleep. I shrugged, she went back to the computer but about 10 minutes later, we all heard it again. The same sound of someone racing their hands up and down those venetian blinds. Again, she went to check and all the kids were still asleep. She would have heard any of them get up. The blinds, this time, were obviously disturbed. She told me, then went back to the computer. I went up a few minutes later to get a drink, and while I was in the kitchen, with my back turned to the window it was happening with, the same sound happened again. For whatever reason, I slammed my coke can down and turned to look directly at where the blinds were still swaying. I said "Stop it right now! The kids are sleeping! It's time for bed so go back to sleep!" The rest of the night, the blinds never moved.

Other little things happen in that house all the time. My mom, who never really believed in ghosts all that much until I came around with my sightings and whatnot, firmly believes the house is haunted. I call it the black hole. You'll put something down and it will DISAPPEAR. Sometimes, one of the family members moves it; like mom will move my cell phone to the shelves by the door and whatnot, but other times, it moves on its own. She often says "No one touch this! I'm putting this here" and sometimes, it vanishes anyway. I had a receipt for a camera charger that doesn't work. I left it at their house a few months ago. I told her it was on the microwave and she said she found it. She put it on the fridge, under a heavy magnet and told dad and my sister (the only other people in the house) NOT to touch it. It's disappeared. They moved the fridge and searched through all the drawers, but can't find it. It's completely vanished.

So far, since I've moved out, nothing major has happened. I'll feel that cold air sometimes, or I'll wake bolt upright in the middle of the night feeling like SOMEONE is watching me, but there's never anyone around that I can see. During these times, I usually take a deep breath and just say "I can feel you, I know you're here. Please let me go back to sleep" then I'll roll over and go back to sleep. The dog, Nilla, will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night if I don't, and start barking, 1 or 2 barks, followed by growls. She'll usually be looking at the wall when she's doing it or out toward the living room even though no one else is up in the house and I don't live with anyone. I say the same thing these times, usually like "I need my sleep - go away" and then the dog will just.. shut up. She may go investigate, growling and huffing indignantly but she comes back and lays down and goes to sleep.

My scientific, rational, mind can't rationalize this stuff. I believe in science, hard facts, data that can be proven and none of this can be. I'd like to say it was my imagination, but I know it's not. I would like to say that a lot of it happened because of my tenuous mental state during a few years of my life, but things have happened to me before and after those times that I can't explain with me simply going crazy. I don't want to believe ghosts and spirits exist, but I have to. Because I've been presented with proof for my own eyes. I could maybe explain the otherworld experience as being my brain's attempt to calm me with an image that I've been described, and we've all been described, of "going into the light" etc. But it wasn't a tunnel. There weren't any other people there; no dead relatives, etc. Some doctors say that when a patient is dying and they claim to be seeing angels, it's really just mini-strokes happening in their brain as everything is shutting down. I wonder how much of that is true, and how much is maybe our desire to not think or acknowledge that maybe when we die, the energy that is our life doesn't just disappear. That somehow, on some existence, some of us, maybe not all of us, live on.

Given that I am terrified of dying because, despite my experiences, I don't KNOW for absolute certain that there is a heaven and I don't like going through experiences I can't research other people's experiences on, I think I'd like to believe that there is something beyond the now. And that I hope I'm one of the lucky ones to find myself there, in the in-between.