The Others

This page last updated on 01/26/2019.

I believe our family has a psychic strain running through it: some think this notion is utterly ridiculous, others have had fearful experiences with it, and the rest have learned to appreciate it. I’ve been “seeing” people out of the corner of my eye for many years now, and when I pay close enough attention I can usually sense a nearby presence. Here are a few of my experiences with the Others, meant to be thought provoking rather than frightening.

I presently work in the basement of a prison hospital in Medical Records. After getting out of the elevator, I have to wait for the officer upstairs to pop the gate open before stepping out into a long hallway. To the left are the staff offices. To the right are several mechanical rooms, and around the corner, up a few steps, and around another corner there are a couple of unused cells, a gated off stairwell that runs up the 1^st floor, and several other rooms mostly used for storage now. This end of the hallway is isolated with no phones/intercoms/cameras, and because of the corners, you can’t hear anyone out in the hallway. Some years ago inmates were tortured, exposed to radiation, and subjected to weird experiments back in this area, and now it’s become haunted - so that must mean some of them died in the process. Staff who have to go this end of the hallway and stay for any length of time see shadows behind them and hear voices, though no one is there when they turn around or call out. My co-worker says she frequently feels a presence behind her when she’s filing, and one day she jumped then said she felt someone’s cold fingers run down the back of her neck. Lately she’s been hearing strange banging noises in the morning before I get there. Just the other day we heard the bell dinging by the door we have to unlock when people want through, but no one was there when we opened it. One afternoon the outguides kept falling off the shelf one by one, just ahead of me, as I was filing - this hasn’t happened since. For 2 days in a row the charts wouldn’t stand up in one particular spot on the shelves where they always stood up before - and since. The hospital has a long standing - and well deserved - reputation for being a snake pit due to the horrendous personnel problems, and I got to wondering if it’s because the Outpatient/Dental clinics (where the problems seem to stem from) sit right over the basement cells and rooms where the tortured inmates were experimented on.

One afternoon I was making up the bed and felt a powerful presence behind me. I stared at the spot, and got the queerest feeling I was being sized up. I wished I could pull aside the veil and see who was so curious about me and ask it what it wanted. This lasted about 10 minutes, then the presence was gone.

Some years back I woke up with a horrible start in the middle of the night and saw something darker than the shadows standing next to the bed staring down at me. Then it moved up in the corner of the room by the ceiling and glared at me with yellow, hateful cat-eyes. Needless to say, I was pretty frightened by this incident. The next day I remembered I had been reading one of Tim LaHaye’s books earlier in the evening and figured that was what prompted this “haunting.”

I was washing dishes one evening when I saw tall dark haired man standing near the kitchen table staring at me intently. At first I was startled, but he only seemed interested in watching me and eventually disappeared.

During the winter I usually take the garbage can out to the road after sunset and frequently see two men dressed in cloaks, sitting by a campfire out in the pasture. They stand and wave at me, and once they walked over to me stopping a few paces away, and just smiled at me.

While watching TV one evening, the dogs began barking at something out by the back porch. I looked out the window and saw someone walk by - just caught a glimpse of the back of their head. I wondered where in the world they were going as the pasture is fenced in and there are only fences, wheat fields, and the river after that. I turned on the porch light and looked all around but didn’t see anyone.

jlb:February 2005

I would also recommend the movie "The Gift" with Cate Blanchett