The Girl, Abigail

I am on a mission to get all my big experiences on this website before I experience something else that I would like to post here. It's important to me for some reason. I would just like my history documented here as a record, I guess. I feel like it will help me when I relay things that are more current, which I intend to do when they happen.

In all honesty though, I have been procrastinating at writing this part of my history down. When I made a list of the experiences I would like to submit to the website, I labeled this one as "The Girl". Just writing those two words gave me the chills. I felt jumpy for a few hours after that and I had to do a lot of praying just to get some sleep that night. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep, but any sleep was a blessing.

I want you to know that I am not a religious person. I am a spiritual person at best, but there are two spiritual entities in my life that have caused me to turn to a higher power out of fear. This girl is one of them. She is a true source of horror for me and I'm not the only one she's bothered. I have called her Abigail but my mom is fond of just calling her "the girl" or "that girl". I am finally ready to tell you guys all about her. This might get a little lengthy, so strap in. It's going to be a weird and spooky ride.

First of all, I feel like I should tell you what she looks like. She's maybe five feet tall, if not a little shorter than that. She has long, blonde hair and fair skin. I know you guys can't see me and you don't know what I look like, but she looks just like I did as an eight year old. I am estimating the age, but every time she's appeared to anyone, including myself, she has taken on this image that almost mirrors a picture of me between the ages of seven to nine. In this picture, I was at my dad's mother's house and standing in front of an antique chest. I was wearing a pink and white dress with white tights and glossy white shoes. It was a picture from some Easter that I don't remember. I wish I did remember it because I have precious few memories of the grandma on my dad's side.

The girl got her name from a baby doll of mine, something that was also precious to me at one time. I developed a fear of dolls around the 1st or 2nd grade and that fear extended to my doll Abbey. I knew that I had loved Abbey so much as a little kid and I felt guilty for being scared of her blinking, soulless eyes, so I have kept her. She is currently in a sealed box in my closet. I am both terrified of her and nostalgic of her. I feel like this was why I started calling the girl Abigail, my doll's intended full name. I have always been scared of Abigail but she looks so much like me from a much more simple time in my life that I also felt guilty for that fear.

I saw Abigail a lot after I moved to Texas. I don't remember seeing her, even once, in Iowa. I do remember the feeling she gave me when I would see her after I moved. It was an intense pressure and she always had this malicious vibe going, like she was waiting for an opportunity to make mischief or cause harm. To get the full feeling of what it's like to be around her, imagine being in the woods with a hungry predator nearby. You know it's there, you can feel its unblinking gaze eyeing your weak spots, biding its time for the optimal moment to strike. Every instinct tells you it's there, lurking just out of sight and yet you have no idea what to do except wait for the moment when you need to act as well. I felt that in Iowa just as much as I felt it in Texas. It's an unmistakable feeling.

My mom was actually the first person to see her. While we were still living in Iowa, she would see me running from room to room or down a hall only to realize that I wasn't home or she would take notice that this "me" was wearing a dress. I loved the freedom of pants as a child. Pants meant I could climb trees, ride my bike, roll in the grass, and do whatever physical action I wanted without being chastised for being unladylike. As such, I refused to wear dresses or skirts unless it was absolutely necessary. The fact that this girl would wear dresses always clued my mother in that she wasn't seeing me run around.

My mom has a long history of seeing and experiencing things. She has taken up the stance of "ignore it and it will go away". That's exactly what she did with the girl and, while the girl never left because my mom ignored her, the worst experience she's had with her is that the girl has made her uncomfortable.

I am not sure what the girl is. Part of me thinks that maybe I ejected her from myself when I was around the age of 11 or 12. My grandpa on my mom's side, as well as my grandma and grandpa from my dad's side, all passed away within about a year of each other. My mom was diagnosed with fibromyalgia which meant that I knew and saw that she was constantly in pain. I was also starting to realize that no matter how hard I tried to fit in with other kids, I just wasn't good at it. There was a lot going on that year and I tried very hard to force myself to grow up and be less childish. I felt like people needed me to be stronger and I felt like I needed to look out for myself more. I pushed what I felt made me childlike away and I worry that I created a monster this way.

I admit that it is also possible that something picked up on this chaotic period in my life and just used what I was feeling to torment me. After all, that picture of me that the girl mimics is a favorite picture of mine. It reminds me that I did spend time with my Grandma Betty, even if I don't remember it. The name comes from a doll that I used to love. There is also the fact that she doesn't just plague me but she also concerns herself with a few people that are close to me.

It could be that this specter saw me during this extremely difficult time in my life and saw an easy target or it could be that some separation of myself created this homegrown demon. Either way, it has been unpleasant to say the least. In fact, dealing with her has felt like a continuous battle.

As I said, my mom was the first to actually see her in a lifelike sort of way. I felt like I was being watched or followed a lot while I was in Iowa. When I moved to Texas, I would still get that feeling every once and a while, but I also started to see the outline of her in dark rooms. I didn't know that she looked like me then. I saw the outline of a young girl in a dress. Eventually, I started seeing gold, cat-like eyes along with the visage, the image would make me turn on a light or stay out of a particular room for hours. There have been nights that I would sleep with the lights on all night because I would see those eyes and that shadow in the pitch black of my room.

After I started sleeping in the steel frame bed I inherited from my grandma, I noticed that my bed would shake at night. It was rock and sway, mostly at the foot of the bed. It felt like something was clamoring up over the footboard. This would also scare me and I was often too scared to move or cry out. I could barely breathe when I felt it happening. My dog would even get up and move up closer to me.

At one point, I took a trip up to Minnesota to hang out with my cousins and my aunt. While I was there, I would sleep in my younger cousin's room because he preferred to sleep in the living room. I don't know why he liked sleeping in the living room but the privacy of staying in his room was nice for me.

Back then I was really curious about astral projection. I had read a couple books on it and I wanted to see if I could do it. Subsequently, this was the first time I actually saw the girl, Abigail. It was also the second time that I saw Brigid, but that is a story for another time.

I won't go into detail about how I tried to astral project and what happened while I was doing that. I am aware that there is another website for those experiences and that any spiritual experiences of that nature belong there and not here. This is important to my timeline though, as it is the first time I saw Abigail with any more detail than just an outline.

I went through the house during my projection, looking at everything that was there. I was looking for spirits to talk to, and I eventually found Abigail. I thought she looked remarkably like me and I found her very intimidating, but I was worried that I was scared of her because of the resemblance. I made a point to talk to her and when she looked at me, she had gold-colored cat eyes. That was weird, but she was friendly enough not to set off too many warning bells.

When I went back to my body, I thought she was a spirit that stayed in my cousins' house and I didn't think about her much more beyond that because of what happened with Brigid. (Basically, I saw Brigid and it was monumental for me. Abigail was the last thing on my mind after I saw Brigid.)

I returned to Texas a few days later and that's when I started seeing full apparitions of Abigail, as well as the shadowed, cat-eyed version of her. I would usually spot her in my room, at the end of my bed if I left the door open. Sometimes I would see her in the living room, so I avoided spending time in the living room alone.

The bed shaking thing escalated at night as time passed. Not only would the footboard shake, but I started to feel someone crawling up my mattress towards me. I would stare down where I would feel the movement, but I wouldn't see anything. I just felt someone crawling closer.

By that point, I had read that preteen girls are the source for most poltergeist activity so that is when I guessed that I had somehow created Abigail. In order to get her to stop, I would try to talk to her when she would act out like this. I would tell the girl that everything was going to be okay and that she didn't have to try to scare me to get my attention. I would apologize for pushing her away.

The bed shaking didn't stop. It actually continued to escalate until I would feel someone curled up beside me at night. I would grit my teeth and bear it because I felt this was my punishment for being some sort of inadvertent Victor Frankenstein.

I can tell you the exact moment in which I decided that I wouldn't suffer this torment any longer. My neighborhood is prone to power outages. It has been since we moved in here. If a bad storm blows in, our power blows out. I can usually sleep through a storm, but a power outage will wake me up in a panic.

This happened after midnight one night. The power went out and I snapped awake to an abrasive silence. Before I could calm down, the foot of my bed started to shake. I could feel hands and knees land on the bed and crawl up from the footboard to the pillow beside me. I took a few deep breaths and told myself, as well as Abigail, that it was going to be okay. It was very dark and I wanted to go where my mom and her husband were, but I knew that wasn't going to solve the power issue. I just had to go back to sleep. Everything would be fine in the morning. As such, I rolled over on to my side with my back facing away from where I felt Abigail's pressure on the bed.

At this point, you should know that I thought she would just lay there. That was what she had always done before. She would lay there and eventually I would fall asleep and I wouldn't feel her there in the morning. That night was very different. As soon as I closed my eyes, I felt a small leg wrap around my waist, a chin pressing down to the top of my head, and hands on my face. They felt like small hands, child-sized, but they were wrapped over my nose and mouth.

It was a struggle to get up but I got out of bed as fast as I could. I grabbed my phone to use as light, but obviously there was nothing to see. I immediately got my dog, who was panting at the end of the bed, and left the room. I was up for the rest of the night and I didn't go to sleep again until they finally got the power back on the following evening.

I know little kids do scary things sometimes because they don't realize what they're doing is scary. I tried to rationalize what happened as that sort of behavior, but I started noticing little scratches when I would wake up in the morning. I would have one long scratch down my arms, across my hands, on my legs, or on my face. I still get those from time to time, but they were far more frequent then. I bite my nails. It's a bad habit I've had for as long as I can remember. I don't have enough nail to leave scratches like that.

I told my best friend what had happened and she thought it was weird, but she agreed that kids can do creepy things sometimes. Still, she didn't have an experience with Abigail until she started spending more time at my place. After that, she wasn't convinced that Abigail was all that innocent at all.

The first part of that experience happened to me. My best friend had come over so we could hang out. I hadn't gotten cleaned up for the day, so I decided to do that so that we had the option to go somewhere if we so desired. I hopped in the shower and she talked to me for a bit. After a while, she went elsewhere in the house while I got out, got dressed, and did my hair.

While I was blow drying my hair, I thought I heard my best friend scream my name. From the sound of it, she was right outside the door and it sounded like she was hurt. I immediately turned off the blow dryer and looked out into the little hallway, just outside my bathroom. She wasn't there. Worried, I went to the living room only to find her on the other side of the house calmly looking through the books on our bookshelf. She was genuinely surprised to see me running out there with half dried hair and full of concern. I asked her if she was okay and after letting me know she was perfectly fine, she asked me what happened. I told her and made her stay in the bathroom with me until I finished getting ready.

Weird, right? Well, that's not the only time that's happened. The second time, it happened to my best friend instead of me. She had stayed the night not terribly long after that first incident. We wanted to go for a walk, so I was getting ready in my mom's bathroom while she was getting ready in the hall bathroom. I was brushing my teeth when she came bolting in, asking if I had called for her. She looked scared and worried. I told her I hadn't said a thing and that freaked her out even more. She finished getting ready in my parents' bathroom, right next to me. She said it sounded like I was hurt and screaming for her to help me. That alone made her not want to be by herself in my place again.

After that, I had the feeling that Abigail was going to keep doing more harm than good. I wanted to get rid of her so I tried talking to her, telling her that she was no longer part of my life and thus she wasn't welcome. It sort of worked. The bed stopped shaking for the most part and I didn't feel her presence next to me at night. I saw her a lot less and when I did see her, I used my mom's method of defiant ignorance to deflect her. The activity involving any clear signs that it was Abigail went way down.

A year later, I got a random message from my pen pal. My pen pal lives in Pennsylvania. We have a lot in common and she's been a wonderful friend to me even though we've never met in person. We talk on the internet, the phone and we also write each other letters, which is why I call her my pen pal.

There are times when our lives get busy though and we just don't talk as much. It was during one of those busy periods that she texted me out of the blue. I don't recall having told her about Abigail before then. I don't know why it would have even come up because we usually talked about writing, college, feminism, and our mutual love of werewolves. Her message told me that she had a very strange dream and that is was very urgent that she speak with me.

I told her I was up and available all day. It didn't take all day for her to reply though. Her response was actually fairly immediate. She told me in a very long text that she had a dream that night that she and I had finally met. We were having a lovely time but she kept seeing a little girl lurking around off to the side. She asked me about her and apparently I told her that her name was [blank] (she couldn't remember the name I used) and not to say her name because she would make life a living hell. She said that she was a creepy little girl and that she kept hearing in the dream that I should not let her in and that she was dangerous. As dreams go, she did end up accidentally saying the girl's name and suddenly she was being chased by her. She said that the world turned from a relaxing, sunny day to a scary and bloody one. It was a really bad nightmare for her and she just wanted to warn me.

I didn't take her warning lightly. I have done a lot of soul searching and praying. I try to force her away. I ask for protection a lot. I have done and will continue to do everything I can to keep her away permanently. She has never brought anyone good feelings and I have noticed that if you allow her to escalate activity, she will do so quickly. I have tried everything in my power to keep her at bay.

I'm not even entirely sure I created her, which is something I once truly believed. I tried to destroy her. I tried doing her what I do with all my own negative energy. I imagine it getting pulled into a big, huge sun and being burnt away until there's nothing left of the bad. It works to make me feel better. Even after I did that to her image, my mom has told me that she still sees her around.