That Time I Met the Psychic

My parents divorced when I was eight, and my dad moved into a three bedroom rental house. I wasn't sad to see them split up. This isn't one of those stories. In fact, I was GLAD when my dad moved out, because the frenetic energy of their combined ire was enough to keep my hair standing on end pretty much 24/7, and I already had enough shit to deal with.

For one thing, Daddy's new rental came with a disgruntled old guy who was angry at his wife for renting out their house and moving away. When I refused to respond to his complaints, or to even acknowledge I could see him, he started doing things like turning the old dial radio in the kitchen on and changing the stations, flicking light switches, turning the tv up really loudly, just general, inane annoying ghost shit. Eventually, he just gave up when he realized I wasn't going to let on that I could see him.

At this point, I'd pretty much convinced myself that all the things I'd seen were a figment of my imagination, and whenever one of them slipped through the mental block I'd put up, I just ignored them, hoping they'd go away. I'd still see the Indian occasionally, and I'd just close my eyes and tell myself over and over that he wasn't real. After all, good Christians didn't believe in that sort of thing, according to my grandfather. A person couldn't believe in ghosts AND believe in God, not even when you saw them staring right back at you. Supernatural experiences were obviously a sign of an overactive imagination, or insanity, and that's exactly what I told my dad's friend Larry the day he told me about his psychic friend.

          ( This sinner is on the highway to Hell, obviously. I mean, just LOOK at that carpet...) Creatureculture.com

Even at 8, I knew Larry was kind of an obnoxious prick who couldn't keep a secret to save his life, so it was no surprise to hear him say, " I'm not supposed to tell anybody, but I know this guy who's a one hundred percent for real psychic.

                                                                                 ( Sure, I can keep a secret...) pixgood.com

I don't remember exactly how the conversation began, but it was something to do with a movie someone had seen about a psychic and how silly it was, which of course was a perfect opportunity for Larry to brag. I just rolled my eyes at him in the way of little girls who know absolutely everything.

" There's no such thing as psychics", I said with as much disdain as I could muster. " It's against the Bible."

Larry didn't like that. At all. " What the hell do you know, little girl?"

With extreme ignorance comes unerring certainty, especially for young children. I was undeterred. " My Granddaddy says that you don't believe in Jesus if you believe in stuff like that. It's a sin." So there. And don't you DARE put a dent in that wall I've so carefully crafted!

But Larry was oblivious to my internal struggle. In his eyes, I was just a little know-it-all kid who needed to be put in her place. " Well, how 'bout I just prove it then, you little smart-ass?"

I rolled my eyes again as he went to the phone and began dialing a number. I couldn't believe this guy had regular friends, much less psychic ones. Besides, wouldn't a REAL psychic know that he was friends with a blabbermouth jackass? I wasn't worried, much.

Whomever he was calling picked up after a few rings and Larry asked, " Hey man, you busy?" The answer must've been no, because he continued, " Well, I've got a little girl here who don't believe in psychics. Will you do the card thing for her?" Another pause and then Larry looked at me. " Go find a deck of cards."

That wasn't hard. My dad had at least five decks roaming around the house, so I grabbed the first one I put my hands on in a kitchen drawer and went back to Larry, who was holding the phone receiver out to me. I took it reluctantly and put the phone to my ear. " Hello?"

The young sounding guy with a weird Yankee accent on the other end did not seem amused. Without even an attempt at standard phone etiquette or nicety he sighed and said, " Okay, shuffle your cards and pick one." I did what he what he asked and picked the four of spades. Immediately, he told me which card I was holding. It seems like a small thing, but I was utterly blown away.

Now, remember, this was some time around 1984 when cell phones looked like this:

                         ( Dr. Martin Cooper, inventor of the cell phone, calling his local Ferrari dealership.) e2save.com

The only people who could afford one of these ten pound modern marvels were affluent business types, being that they cost the modern equivalent of around $9000.00 with roaming charges of about $1.00 per minute. In other words, NOT something the average 30 year old blue collar fella from rural Alabama would be using to play a prank on a little kid. We had one phone in the house and the nearest neighbor was 100 yards away through the woods. I knew immediately that this guy had to be for real.

In retrospect, I'm glad the guy didn't prove himself in some more melodramatic fashion, because I probably would've peed my pants. As it was, I could only stand there, clutching the phone with white knuckles as I whispered, " How did you do that?"

The sympathy in his voice was as clear as if he'd said it out loud. " I just know", he replied sadly.

After Larry was able to pry the phone from my hands, I cornered him for the inquisition. Who was this guy? How was it possible for him to do this? Larry never would tell me the guy's name, saying that he didn't want people to know he was psychic because it caused him all kinds of grief, either because they wanted something from him or because they thought he was possessed or insane. I could certainly relate to that. The old man standing in the corner that only I could see had the good grace to look a little bit ashamed.

I'd like to say that after that, I fully embraced the weird and accepted my own abilities, but if anything, knowing it was real just made it that much worse. I didn't want people to treat me like I was crazy or evil, and what if it was true? I had nightmare visions of being given up for adoption because no one wanted a little girl that was in league with the devil like that creepy kid in The Omen. If anything, I just kept blocking what I saw that much harder until I couldn't see any of them anymore, but that didn't stop them from invading my dreams...

The Indian

If you went to a pow-wow and saw this guy:

                                                    
                                    ( 40 year old me thinks this guy is a total hottie.) blog.AL.com



You'd probably think "neat". If you're five years old, and you see a vague impression of him standing in your bedroom door looking in on you in the middle of the night, not so much. Seeing the Indian was the catalyst for me blocking out my "visitors".

I was so happy when we moved into our new house. I had a bigger room with actual carpet and newly painted walls. Best of all, there weren't ghosts walking through my room all day and night. " Crazy Hippie Lady" was nowhere to be found. My bed was my own again, and finally, I could sleep through the whole night. That lasted about a week, I think.

This time, however, instead of droves of random people, it was just one guy that I call " The Indian". As an adult, I'm not afraid of him at all, but back then, he was the proverbial straw. There I was, fast asleep in my brand new bed, tucked safely between two rows of about forty stuffed animals, when I woke to the sound of lightly shuffling footsteps.

My eyes popped open, and I lay there, frozen, listening as the footsteps moved around the house. At first I thought maybe my dad was up wandering around, but pretty soon, the steps started moving down the hallway towards my room. I could only stare at the open door as this guy in this crazy outfit looked in at me and simply stared.

Had I seen him when I was three or four, I probably would've just said " hi", but the incident with the two Charlies had shaken me. I now understood that I wasn't just seeing people, but was actually seeing ghosts, and outside of Casper, popular culture tends to vilify all things that go bump in the night. Five year old me had not only become terrified, but also fearful that I was crazy and possibly evil.

My upbringing was very strictly Southern Baptist, and as far as the Baptists, (AKA my whole family) were concerned, people who saw ghosts were at best nutballs with loose screws, or at worst, Devil worshippers. Decent people paid no mind to such things, and if they even THOUGHT something supernatural MIGHT be occurring, the correct response was to pray to Jesus until the feeling went away. So, that's what I did. Every time I saw the Indian, I'd close my eyes and repeat to myself over and over that he wasn't really there.

It took a while, but it worked. Eventually, by the time I was around seven, I couldn't see the Indian, or anyone else for that matter. I could still feel them, and even hear them occasionally, but any time I did, I just reminded myself that "good" people didn't believe in ghosts. It felt like I was missing a limb, but the relief I felt at not having to worry about being woken up by weird visions in the night helped me overcome the sensation. By the time I was nine, I'd pretty much gotten used to it. And then one of my dad's friends introduced me to a psychic...

The Two Charlies

So, I was about five years old, and my mom had been invited to a party at this big old fancy house in town. She brought me along, not realizing that it was supposed to be adults only. The host was really nice about it, though, assuring her that I'd be perfectly safe playing in the foyer by the stairs. This was back in the seventies, where parental hyper vigilance had yet to take root, and the general rule of thumb was that what didn't kill your kids made them stronger, and no one thought twice about leaving an overly curious kindergartner to play alone by herself in a strange house.

In an attempt to make me feel welcome, the guy even gave me a present that was intended for some other kid, not that I cared. I mean, when you're five, a present is a present, and I wasn't about to feel guilty for taking another kid's gift, especially when I opened it to find my all-time favorite toy ever, Weeble-Wobbles:

                           ( Petty theft is nothing. At five, I would've cut a bitch over these things.) Pinterest.com


So there I was, all alone , smacking my brand new Weeble-Wobbles against the fancy marble floor in attempt to discover how far from the floor I could drop them before they cracked open, finally freeing the oddly happy little children from their plastic egg prisons, while all of the adults had their totally-boring-party- that-I-didn't-even-want-to-go-to-anyway behind a pair of massive oak doors. Once I'd decided that even dropping them with my hand raised as high as I could reach while standing on tippie toes still wasn't high enough to break them, I proceeded to utilize the big fancy winding staircase, completely forgetting my promise to my mother that I would, under no circumstances, climb the stairs.

Methodically, I started dropping Weeble-Wobbles from every other stair and then climbing back down to see if the impact had done any damage. I'd made it about halfway up when I heard movement from upstairs. Curious and faintly hoping I'd found someone to play with, I walked up a few more steps to see who it was, but all I saw was a shadow that faintly resembled a man.

                   ( He looks like he might know how to smash a Weeble-Wobble...)   regolish.blogspot.com


In my previous post, I talked about seeing people that others couldn't since the age of three. Two years in, I'd grown accustomed enough to it that I wasn't immediately terrified of a black shadowy ghost figure. In my world, unless they were actively being mean, strange humanoid creatures were just like everyone else, which in the eyes of a little kid is a potential playmate. Up to this point, only the Crazy Hippie Lady had ever directly interacted with me, but I wasn't afraid of the others, and so I didn't hesitate to climb up the stairs towards the figure, calling out a greeting.

I only made it a couple of steps before a man's voice coming from behind me stopped me dead.
" You don't wanna go up there. That's Charlie, and he's not very nice."

Turning around, I found myself face to face with a smiling young, slim, pale man with short dark hair. " Why is he not nice?"

" He doesn't like all these people being in his house.", he answered. " He's lived here for a long time."

I was confused about why having people in his house would make him angry, but I didn't ask the young man why. Instead, I asked, " Well, who are YOU?"

The young man smiled again. " Well, my name is also Charlie and I live here, too."

I was starting to think he was teasing me. " Why are ya'll both named Charlie?"

The young man shrugged. " It's a family name. That Charlie is my great-granddaddy."

That made sense, so I nodded. " But you're nice Charlie and he's mean Charlie."

He nodded. " That's right, so I think you should stay downstairs and play til your mama comes back, okay?"

I looked back up the stairs at " Mean Charlie", who'd managed to disappear during our conversation. Without looking back at "Nice Charlie", I asked, " Well, will YOU play with me?" He didn't answer, and when I turned around, he was gone. I was disappointed, assuming he'd gone back to party with the other adults, but resigned myself to being alone, again. For a brief second, I considered going upstairs to try and reason with " Mean Charlie", but after remembering the incident with " Crazy Hippie Lady", I decided it might be a bad idea. Instead, I resorted to chucking my Weeble-Wobbles against the wall until my Mom came and got me a few minutes later.

When we got in the car, I told my Mom about the two Charlies. She gave me a weird look and replied, " I think somebody was playing a trick on you. They had a son named Charlie, but he died in a motorcycle accident before you were born." After that little revelation, I could only sit there in stunned disbelief and rising terror. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that the people who only I could see were actually DEAD, and I'd just spent the evening having a conversation with one of them.

The Ghost Beside You

    

 I don't see ghosts anymore. When I was a kid, they were literally fucking everywhere. I'm not even sure if "ghost" is the right term for all of them, but let's just say when I was a kid, public places were a lot more crowded than most people seemed to realize. I can distinctly remember sitting on a bench in the mall, watching strangers pass as my mom fed my baby brother, when this guy walked past, catching my eye.

To call him unusual would be a vast understatement. For one thing, he was really tall, like around seven feet, and really thin and pale, but his most distinctive characteristic was his incredibly long, s-shaped goose neck. I just remember staring at him and saying something to my mom about the guy with the really long neck. Without looking up, she reminded me that it was rude to stare. I couldn't stop, though, and I watched him walk past, wondering how many people could see him, and, why was he wearing sunglasses inside?

 Upon doing an internet search, the closest thing I can find when Googling "long neck man" is this guy:

  

                                                  (Unusual, Sure, but not remotely supernatural)   Bored.com

 

And then there are these people:

 

 

 

 

                              

( Kayan woman with neck rings) Wikipedia.org

 

 

This wasn't that. It was like this:

 

                          (Horrible rendition based on the recollection of a five year old. Why yes, those ARE bell bottoms.)

 

And, yeah. I know what people will say-that I was just a little kid, and I'm misremembering, or I just misinterpreted what I saw. There are a million and one ways to explain it away, which is why I don't bother telling anyone and why I'm blogging about it under an assumed name. I can never prove that I saw him, and I never saw him again, but he scared the crap out of me, and he was just the tip of the ice burg.

 

Actually by the time I saw old Long Neck, I'd lost count of how many strange "people" I'd seen. The first thing I remember as a very small child, probably around three, were people walking through our home. We lived in an old, shitty single wide trailer that was probably twenty years old. There was no carpet, only scuffed and dingy white laminate. At night, there'd be people walking around all over the place, walking straight through walls like they weren't there. They didn't look ghostly or strange in anyway. They were just going about their business, talking to one another as they walked straight out of my closet door and onto to some unknown place, and most of them didn't seem to notice me peeking out at them in terror from under the covers.

 

Sometimes, they DID see me, and seemed just as surprised as I was. I can only wonder what they saw. Was I a tiny child lying in a bed sitting on the side of some road in an alternate dimension? Did they wonder if they were hallucinating? I don't guess I'll ever know, but there was one woman who not only saw me, but seemed to take particular pleasure in harassing me.

 

She was about middle-aged, I guess, with long , stringy brown hair and round eyeglasses that were about ten years out of style, given that it was 1979. Being that I was four and from Alabama, I didn't know what a hippie was back then, but looking back, she definitely fit the bill, and not in the "spreading love and peace" kind of way. More like in a , " I've been dropping acid and sleeping on the sidewalk for a week straight" kind of way. Calling her strung out would be kind.

 

I didn't see her all the time, but occasionally, she would walk into my room through the back wall and demand that I get out of my bed and let her have it. Naturally, being completely terrified of this strange, insane looking adult, I obeyed immediately, and would run crying from the room.

 

 

 

 

 

 ( She looked a lot meaner in person, and ya know, with hands... and 3-dimensional)

 

 

 

At least once a week, she would show up in my room and kick me out of bed, whereupon she'd immediately crawl into my bed and just...pass out. She'd curl up in a little angry, dirty hippie ball and sleep, well, like the dead.

 

 

Eventually, my parents got pretty tired of waking up to find me wedged between them, and insisted that I not leave my room at night unless the house was on fire and/or I was being murdered. Obviously, they didn't believe my story about the crazy lady stealing my bed at night, and had me half-way convinced I was imagining the whole thing. So, the next night that she came back and told me to get out of bed, I tried to reason with her, explaining that I wasn't allowed in Mama and Daddy's room anymore, and that she'd just have to sleep somewhere else. After, a few moments of thoughtful consideration, she gave me a gentle pat on the head and shuffled off through the wall in search of a new place to sleep.

 

Just kidding...shit got ugly, FAST. When I didn't immediately get out of bed, she grabbed me by the leg and dragged me to the floor. Once I was down, she leaned over until she was right in my face and hissed, " MY BED!!!" That was the first of many nights spent sleeping in my toy box.

 

 

 

                             (Oddly, NOT the strangest thing I've ever used for a mattress.)  Fisherprice.com

 



 

 

 



About a year later, we moved into an actual house. In our new place, there weren't droves of random people coming and going through walls, and I never saw Crazy Hippie Lady again, but that wasn't the end of strange nightly visitors. In fact, from the perspective of a five year old, it got a little stranger. My next visitor for the next two years would look a bit like this guy:

                     ( Forty year old me would probably ask for his phone number.)   mangobite.com


There's lots more to tell in future blogs, three decades worth, in fact, so I'll save it for the next post. Is it all real? To me, yes. Am I crazy? Possibly. Anyone who admits freely to seeing and hearing shit that others don't has to at least entertain the possibility. And anyway, even if it's all real, the experience alone is enough to put me on the deviant end of the scale. And for the record, I AM NOT a paranormal investigator of any kind, nor am I affiliated with any paranormal groups. I'm just another random person with a story to tell, who happens to firmly believe that in all likelihood, there's an individual that you can't see standing very close to you, possibly reading over your shoulder.