Greetings, all. I feel I ought to apologize, first, because I've not been participating in the YGS conversations over the last two months; I have missed the banter and discussion. (I'll try to catch up on the 200 stories that I've not yet read when I have a moment.) The reason I've been preoccupied is that I've had to focus upon events that have consumed a great deal of my time. This narrative is going to meander; it may seem as though I have a peripheral role in one or two of the events, but "stay a while. I will be faithful."
One of the freshmen, whose real name is not "Jim," had begun acting a little strangely. This is not a good sign in high school, but I could see that there was more to it than being withdrawn or stressed; I asked him what was wrong. He was rather guarded and cagey about giving me a response. He paused for a moment while he was trying to avoid giving me a clear answer, then he asked a question: "you taught my older sister, didn't you Mr. B.?" I remembered his sister as a bright, inquisitive student some years before Jim's arrival. "She said you told the class about why you believe in... Uhh... Spirits?" I probably had mentioned it, so I agreed. "Would you... When you... Ummm. How do you, uhhh, you know..."
I looked at Jim, *really* looked, and I knew that it was safe to tell him. "I've had experiences with spirits and I'm post-cognitive." His eyebrows began to attack each other in confusion, so I clarified; "I can watch and feel events in the past, though they are usually traumatic, and I can distinguish between sleep-state precognition and normal dreams. I can also borrow information that I'm going to learn later and use it now." I paused. "You won't discuss this with anyone else." (If you are wondering, I am well aware that this sounds like a dissociative disorder or the psychedelic introduction to a Terry Gilliam movie). Jim just stared at me. "You just... Why did you tell me that?" I looked him in the eye and told him, "I can trust you." "How can you be sure?" "I know. I can trust you. That's it. When you're ready to talk to me, you know where I am."
The next morning, Jim expressed some disbelief in my having told him about my experiences. I was ok with having told him, so I said not to worry about it. He told me that he has a hard time telling anyone about what is happening to him, but that he'd like to trust me. He'd gone from being a kid with occasional "weird" events occurring in his life to being woken in the middle of the night by a terrifying shadow-person emerging through the wall above his bed and seeing apparitions in broad daylight that no-one else noticed. He didn't know anyone he could tell about this because he didn't want to be sent to a mental institution. "Great," I thought, "I reach out to reassure the awkward kid and now I'm in 'The Sixth Sense'."
Over the next few days, he discovered that chatting with me relieved some of his stress. I was still somewhat skeptical; was this kid wrestling with a psychological problem but making up a fantastical narrative to get attention? If so, why would he avoid telling anyone about it? As I was evaluating a story he was telling me about his previous evening's encounter, the air pressure in my classroom changed. Some sort of force or presence had entered my classroom through the north (external) wall, about 15 feet behind my left shoulder. I knew this because of the pressure I could feel against some of my shielding, and because my left ear "popped" in reaction to the sudden change in pressure. I had been erasing the board as we spoke, so as I turned to face Jim I stated, "over my left shoulder, 4 seconds ago, it came through that wall," and that's when I saw Jim's face. He hadn't heard a damn thing I'd said because he was too busy being terrified of the apparition I couldn't see.
"Can you see it?" he whispered.
"No, Jim, I can't. I felt it enter the room, but it's not going to hurt you."
"How do you know that?" he asked, even though he had still not removed his eyes from where my internal radar told me it was standing.
"First, very few things are stupid enough to try that in a space saturated with my personality; second, no matter how weird it looks or behaves, it's not evil. Instead of coming in through a window or door, it entered through a wall as though the wall was not there, but it stopped abruptly once it was inside. I think it's some form of nature spirit that got curious but doesn't want to be caught or trapped."
"Oh," he said, "that explains why it looked so surprised when you pointed to it. Did you know that it's been staring at me while I've been staring at it?" I was now reasonably sure that Jim wasn't lying about what he could see. I still had some doubts (because I always do), but I was reassured that he was not trying to deceive me.
The next day, he described the way his parents had reacted to his discussion of "dark spirits" or "shadow people" in his room. His mother wasn't happy with the idea at all, but his dad said, "I wondered if you'd inherited it. I'll go and clear out anything that's hiding in there." His dad apparently didn't return for 45 minutes. Jim stated that his room was much less dark and pressurized after his dad had cleared it.
My wife is one of Jim's teachers. A week after his dad cleared his room, Jim was in my wife's class when there was a knock at the door. As she happened to be standing near the door at the time, she opened the door and looked out into the hallway. The hall was empty. Her classroom is placed such that there are no convenient places to hide nearby, nor are there other classrooms that can be reached in 3 seconds without making a noise. My wife was a little irritated, but carried on with class. Jim, however, watched the woman in Victorian-era clothes who had entered when my wife had opened the door. This apparition wandered around the periphery of the class, then seated herself where there wasn't a chair, and had begun working on something Jim couldn't see because she had her back to him. Here's the weird part: while Jim was explaining to me what had happened, there was a very quiet double tap upon the wooden door behind me *before* he mentioned the knock on the door, but when I replicated the kind of tap I'd heard, Jim was surprised that: 1) I'd known it was two knocks instead of one, because he had not mentioned that; and 2) he had not heard the tap on the door behind me.
Since that conversation, Jim has seen the lady return to my wife's classroom, though she was later joined by a couple of other people who appeared to be having tea or coffee with her. When discussing this event, I discovered that he did not know there had once been a large residence on the site now occupied by the school.
I don't think that anything has followed us home, but on the day I was going to discuss these events with my wife, I found her looking at the floor in the living room doorway. She was searching for the puddle because she could have sworn that two shiny droplets had emerged from the lintel and fallen to the floor. She was worried that a pipe may have leaked; I was jealous because I have never seen an orb, and threshold orbs that appear to drip from the ceiling have been a point of curiosity for me; frankly, they're the kind I'd like to see.
I filled in the school's social worker on some of the details about Jim. I avoided anything that would give her cause for alarm, as Jim had begun to improve in his socialization with others, but I told her a bit about what I can do and why Jim trusts me to listen to him. That's when she told me about the malevolent haunting that tormented her in her grad school apartment. I found her openness about this reassuring, but I can't share it here because I know that it crosses the line into hearsay.
Jim is working with his dad to develop some control over what he does. I suspect he's a physical medium, as many of the details from his narratives tend to deal with shielding, spirits, emotions, events, etc. Also, he's seen my "Guardian." Honestly, I wasn't entirely sure I had one, as I've never seen it; the manner in which he described its appearance and its behavior made a hell of a lot of sense. He's asked me if I knew about how my shielding looks and behaves (I do) and he's told me about my wife's guardian. Apparently, her guardian is huge, doesn't trust most men but likes me, doesn't like Jim staring at it, and has incorporated some of my shielding into its form (which I thought was odd). My wife stated that it made sense to her, so I'm just going to trust that this situation is normal, despite the fact it seems to get weirder each day.
Please, feel free to share any thoughts or to ask questions about details, and I'll do my best to explain.
-Biblio.
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