In the early 90s, I was in the Navy, stationed at Pearl Harbor, HI. It was toward the end of my second go-round in the service, but officially it was my first time in. The real first time for me was from 1978 to 1984, the last four years of which were spent on the USS Coral Sea CV-43. From 1984 to 87 I was a homeless bum. My discharge was honorable but I had a re-enlistment code that wouldn't allow me to re-enlist. So, in 1987 I lied, pretended I'd never been in, and went to boot camp for a second time; Great Lakes it was that time, not Orlando.
In 92 or 93, I had permission one day to be in my barracks room in the middle of the workday. The building was empty except for me. I fell into such a deep mood of despair, frustration and anger, that my chest felt like it would actually burst. Suddenly, behind me, I heard a woman say, "David, you're so funny!" Shocked, I whirled around to see who it was. There was no one there - and yet I heard it exactly as if a woman were standing behind me.
A month later or thereabouts, I had gotten off duty around 3 pm [1500] and was waiting in the empty sickbay building on Ford Island. I wanted to pass the time there while waiting for the small boat to show up and ferry all of us over to Pearl Harbor. Once again, I felt the same horrible feelings while lying down on a bench in the empty courtyard. Suddenly I heard a man that I couldn't see say to me, "Ready to give it up?"
That voice scared the dickens out of me, because I knew he was asking me if I was ready to give up doing whatever I wanted, and I knew the answer to that was, "No." He wouldn't force me to do anything, but, at the same time, I couldn't fool him.
For a few days afterwards, I walked around scared that Jesus was going to strike me down. He didn't, of course.
That was the only two times I heard voices of beings I couldn't see. They sounded exactly, and I do mean exactly, as if they were two human beings standing right there talking to me.
At the Easter Vigil 1995, I was received into the Catholic Church.
I recently turned 62 and I have never experienced anything out of the ordinary. As a Catholic, I do believe in demons, possession, oppression, etc. but it is not something I dwell on or go looking for. I am also fortunate to never have met anyone whose behavior could be characterized as demonic.
One night, after a family gathering, my husband, myself and our four year-old son were sleeping together in bed. My other two children went with their cousin to spend the night at my mom’s house. At 2 am, I hear slow, dragging footsteps on the hard floor of our bedroom. The steps get to the foot of the bed and I bolt up and turn on the lamp. I see nothing. My husband heard it too and before I switched on the lamp he was getting ready to grab for the bat under the bed. The whole time, I was not scared and slept peacefully (I think it was the Holy Spirit that kept me at peace). The next morning, we woke up and dismissed it as raccoons walking on the roof, as there was no rational explanation. My mom called me that afternoon with the sad news that my sister’s ex-husband(the father of the cousin that went with my kids to mom’s house) died in car accident. He was not a “good” guy; a product of bad upbringing. I immediately knew. It was him! I asked my sister if she knew the time of the accident. It was just before 2 am. She didn’t believe it. Why would he come to MY house? Later, we figured that he was looking for his beloved daughter to be with her one last time(he knew she was at my house). My mother said that about that time, she awoke disturbed, checked on the kids and started praying the praying the Rosary. I believe that his guardian angel, through God’s mercy, accompanied him to find his daughter. I believe he found her. I told her that her daddy loved her so much that he couldn't leave this earth without seeing her one more time. Knowing this gave her so much consolation. Later, my husband admitted that he felt his spirit in a cold wave, move past him and out the wall behind us.
I wanted to riff on the possibilities in fiction writing and screenwriting that come out of this spooky stuff, and I’ll get to it in a moment, but some things in the article strike me as odd so bear with me if I offer a few comments… Early on you describe the Catholic faith and point out the absence of tangible or everyday signifiers of the things we are given to believe, as if we take it on blind faith. There’s a lot missing in this, like the presence of Jesus Christ at every mass and every tabernacle in the world, in practically every neighborhood. Also I myself have a confidence in the presence of God from his effect in my soul and in my life, in fact the entirety of my life is built on Heavenly gifts and clearly, observably directed by Providence. But if, like Thomas we require absolute sensory proof, and even the thousands of testimonials by Saints and ordinary people of contact with apparitions of Jesus and Mary, etc, etc, etc, isn’t concrete enough, it’s easy to find pictures of documented miracles. Sometimes we get frozen in the routines of the natural world and have a hard time looking above it, sometimes we’re lukewarm and un-spiritual, sometimes we get demoralized by the evil in the world. Anyway, our beliefs are animated by the supernatural gift of Faith, but there’s also overwhelming evidences. As for descriptions of the Heaven which (hopefully) awaits us, one source is Martin von Cochem’s The Four Last Things.
On the question of UFOs, I suggest to listen to a recent episode of the podcast Jesus 911 on the topic. Jesse Romero is your fellow Arizonan and an authority on spiritual combat, and it’s a great show with a ton of invaluable information, especially for us men. If we have no point of reference I guess we could think UFOs, if it’s undeniable they’re witnessed and recorded, might be aliens or who-knows-what. Educated Catholics who take them to be demonic do have a considered argument about it. One point is that demons are said in spiritual literature to often create lighting effects. It’s something well within their powers and repertoire. A second point is that the people who claim to be witnesses typically have a background of drug use or occultist involvement, both of which will open up contact with demonic entities. There’s other points, but as to the modus operandi… The devils want to take attention off of Jesus Christ in any way that works. If they can beguile the secularist society with the illusion of UFOs and ETs, it’s a rabbit hole. The New Age movement is closely connected with UFOs, see a talk by Paul Christopher, Demonic UFOs, which casts a lot of light on the movements who take it seriously. It’s a large deception.
Last thing, if the UFOs are an illusion, it has even Catholics speculating outside of basic Catholic teaching to explain it. And we know these are times of intense diabolical confusion, when “even the elect” would be deceived if God didn’t help us. This UFO report comes out under the anti-Christ Biden administration? Red flag through the roof. Ross Douhat thinks the little people (leprechauns perchance ?) are a new type of supernatural being, who the Holy Ghost didn’t bother to tell us about? And who is it who speculated that there’s “theological dimensions” to extraterrestrial creatures existing who pilot the UFOs? It was left out of Genesis, I guess. Jesus Christ came to save the human race, he’s the 2nd person in the eternal trinity. Did he come to save an advanced extraterrestrial form of creature? This is exactly why we can deduce this is diabolical. It disorients and leads away from the Church.
The other thing is that in different places these extra-ordinary creatures fit in to the cultural identity. In Ireland it’s fairies to suit the local folklore, in Eastern Europe they’re vampire crazy. In our culture we are obsessed with technology and consider ourselves above superstition, so we get hooked by high-tech vehicles and start to believe in aliens, be they naughty or nice. This alone points directly to it being a diabolical illusion. It is consistent in some ways across the cultures, with abductions, lighting effects, etc, yet in each case it’s tailored to the locality.
Okay, well sorry this is getting long… I really wanted to bring up the possibilities this type of phenomenon opens up in fiction. I thought you might be interested, being a fiction writer. I don’t know where to start exactly, but I think the show The X-Files did a really good job with this type of material. Aside from the fact Scully is Catholic, which is a good start but could have played more of a part in the shows, it depicted eerie and evil things in a very candid, intelligent way. It’s a great show in a lot of respects and maybe a good source of inspiration for Catholic writers.
Are you thinking of writing in this genre? Out of curiosity.
I forgot to add… It is cool that we can’t claim to understand all the eerie or unexplained things that happen in the world. In the last chapters of the Book of Job, God describes his creations and how overwhelmingly huge and unsearchable is His Creation... I’m interested in the Bermuda Triangle and I guess I’m into some of this unexplained stuff, but it can also lead to nowhere. Oh, also often souls do visit from Purgatory, it’s in a good book by Fr. F.X. Schouppe published by TAN books. Poltergeists are typically known to be demonic infestations. If someone is seeing devils or phantasms it could maybe be a type of oppression. I’m in Asia, I was just talking to someone from our chapel who, like some other people here, does see spooks. Black shadows creeping about. His great-grandmother was a witch who converted to Catholicism, and he thinks the blood-line still carries a curse.
Of course, if you want a really strange and spooky story, The Green Children of Woolpit, England is a good start. Even the lousy Wikipedia entry conveys the strangeness of the story (though by accident). I thought of it because it occurred during the reign of Good King Stephen. Google it.
(PS: Would you like to know where I think they came from?)
There is a story handed down in my family from my mother about a strange thing that took place when she was a young girl. My grandparents had a farm west of Battleford, Saskatchewan, and about half a day's ride north of the old Riel Rebellion battle field of Cutknife Hill.
It was sometime back near the end of World war 2. My grandfather had not yet come home from military service yet, and my mother was a child of perhaps 5 years of age. She and my grandmother had spent much of the day with other women from the area at the local parish church. It was a cleaning day, and everyone lent a hand. Afterward, everyone had a bite to eat together and some tea before going to their homes.
It was my grandmother's turn to do the washing up, and when it was finished, she and my mother came into the church to make sure the windows were closed before locking up and going home. It was still early spring, and the daylight was already fading. Much of the church was already in shadow, and although my mother said the church had electricity, the lights were off.
But when they went in, they found that candles had been lit at the altar. Near the communion rail, the figure of a young priest could be seen getting dressed for Mass.
My grandmother was a pious woman, and loved to go to church, so instead of leaving, she put on her mantilla, and together they went to a pew and waited for Mass to begin.
The young priest opened the Communion rail, and went to the foot of the altar, and began to recite the prayers. My mother said that there was nothing at all out of the ordinary for quite some time, but as the young priest started up the steps to the altar, something made my grandmother look up. She seemed to freeze in place, not moving an inch, hardly breathing. My mother said she remembered looking from her mother to the priest, then back to her her mother again, wanting to ask what was wrong but not daring to.
Suddenly, she said, she saw what was wrong.
As he stood at the altar, his shoes weren't touching the floor. He was hovering in the air just a little bit above it. Then, as the priest moved through the ritual they both saw that they could see the lit candle very clearly through him as he passed in front of it.
They stayed frozen in place until the moment when the young priest turned at the altar to face the people and say the words, "Nobis quoque peccatoribus", when grandmother suddenly erupted out of the pew like a startled quail, grabbed my mother and fled to the doors.
They ran out of the church, and all the way over to the rectory. Grandmother banged on both the front door and the back, but the parish priest was out making calls, and wasn't home. They waited a bit, but with the dark coming full on now, and the night getting cold they decided to leave and started for home. Grandmother stopped at the church only long enough to lock the door, and they hurried to the farm as fast as they could, very shaken.
Early the next morning they went back to the rectory to return the key, and had a talk with the priest about what had happened. The old priest asked them both a lot of questions.
In the end, after a few days had passed, the priest stopped by their home, and told them that the apparition they had seen most probably was the soul of a priest, and not a devil, as they had feared. He had made some enquiries, and learned that a young priest, newly come to the mission church at Cochin, to the north, had died some time before of smallpox. He fit the description that they had given, and by all accounts was a deeply pious man, devoted to the Mass.
The old man believed it was likely that the young priest wanted to finish saying the Masses he had vowed to say. He thought that perhaps what they had been witness to was a special act of Grace, and to remember him in their prayers.
From that time, until her death, my grandmother was very devoted to praying for the Holy souls in Purgatory.
The young priest's ghost was never seen there again. Much later, the old church was decommissioned, but the building was saved, and was moved to the Western Development Museum at North Battleford.
Every time I drive past it, I can't help but think of that story.
I don't think those r/nosleep stories are real. Isn't it a horror/creative fiction subreddit with a first-person theme? Those stories are certainly captivating, but I think all they are is someone writing Paulides-inspired fiction.
It's a good question. I know that it at least was creative fiction at some point, but I thought it had evolved to include real stories as well. I mean, if someone is making this stuff up they're a genius and should be writing novels.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet
In the early 90s, I was in the Navy, stationed at Pearl Harbor, HI. It was toward the end of my second go-round in the service, but officially it was my first time in. The real first time for me was from 1978 to 1984, the last four years of which were spent on the USS Coral Sea CV-43. From 1984 to 87 I was a homeless bum. My discharge was honorable but I had a re-enlistment code that wouldn't allow me to re-enlist. So, in 1987 I lied, pretended I'd never been in, and went to boot camp for a second time; Great Lakes it was that time, not Orlando.
In 92 or 93, I had permission one day to be in my barracks room in the middle of the workday. The building was empty except for me. I fell into such a deep mood of despair, frustration and anger, that my chest felt like it would actually burst. Suddenly, behind me, I heard a woman say, "David, you're so funny!" Shocked, I whirled around to see who it was. There was no one there - and yet I heard it exactly as if a woman were standing behind me.
A month later or thereabouts, I had gotten off duty around 3 pm [1500] and was waiting in the empty sickbay building on Ford Island. I wanted to pass the time there while waiting for the small boat to show up and ferry all of us over to Pearl Harbor. Once again, I felt the same horrible feelings while lying down on a bench in the empty courtyard. Suddenly I heard a man that I couldn't see say to me, "Ready to give it up?"
That voice scared the dickens out of me, because I knew he was asking me if I was ready to give up doing whatever I wanted, and I knew the answer to that was, "No." He wouldn't force me to do anything, but, at the same time, I couldn't fool him.
For a few days afterwards, I walked around scared that Jesus was going to strike me down. He didn't, of course.
That was the only two times I heard voices of beings I couldn't see. They sounded exactly, and I do mean exactly, as if they were two human beings standing right there talking to me.
At the Easter Vigil 1995, I was received into the Catholic Church.
I recently turned 62 and I have never experienced anything out of the ordinary. As a Catholic, I do believe in demons, possession, oppression, etc. but it is not something I dwell on or go looking for. I am also fortunate to never have met anyone whose behavior could be characterized as demonic.
One night, after a family gathering, my husband, myself and our four year-old son were sleeping together in bed. My other two children went with their cousin to spend the night at my mom’s house. At 2 am, I hear slow, dragging footsteps on the hard floor of our bedroom. The steps get to the foot of the bed and I bolt up and turn on the lamp. I see nothing. My husband heard it too and before I switched on the lamp he was getting ready to grab for the bat under the bed. The whole time, I was not scared and slept peacefully (I think it was the Holy Spirit that kept me at peace). The next morning, we woke up and dismissed it as raccoons walking on the roof, as there was no rational explanation. My mom called me that afternoon with the sad news that my sister’s ex-husband(the father of the cousin that went with my kids to mom’s house) died in car accident. He was not a “good” guy; a product of bad upbringing. I immediately knew. It was him! I asked my sister if she knew the time of the accident. It was just before 2 am. She didn’t believe it. Why would he come to MY house? Later, we figured that he was looking for his beloved daughter to be with her one last time(he knew she was at my house). My mother said that about that time, she awoke disturbed, checked on the kids and started praying the praying the Rosary. I believe that his guardian angel, through God’s mercy, accompanied him to find his daughter. I believe he found her. I told her that her daddy loved her so much that he couldn't leave this earth without seeing her one more time. Knowing this gave her so much consolation. Later, my husband admitted that he felt his spirit in a cold wave, move past him and out the wall behind us.
Wow I made the mistake of reading those r/nosleep stories! I'm so freaked out now 😭
I wanted to riff on the possibilities in fiction writing and screenwriting that come out of this spooky stuff, and I’ll get to it in a moment, but some things in the article strike me as odd so bear with me if I offer a few comments… Early on you describe the Catholic faith and point out the absence of tangible or everyday signifiers of the things we are given to believe, as if we take it on blind faith. There’s a lot missing in this, like the presence of Jesus Christ at every mass and every tabernacle in the world, in practically every neighborhood. Also I myself have a confidence in the presence of God from his effect in my soul and in my life, in fact the entirety of my life is built on Heavenly gifts and clearly, observably directed by Providence. But if, like Thomas we require absolute sensory proof, and even the thousands of testimonials by Saints and ordinary people of contact with apparitions of Jesus and Mary, etc, etc, etc, isn’t concrete enough, it’s easy to find pictures of documented miracles. Sometimes we get frozen in the routines of the natural world and have a hard time looking above it, sometimes we’re lukewarm and un-spiritual, sometimes we get demoralized by the evil in the world. Anyway, our beliefs are animated by the supernatural gift of Faith, but there’s also overwhelming evidences. As for descriptions of the Heaven which (hopefully) awaits us, one source is Martin von Cochem’s The Four Last Things.
On the question of UFOs, I suggest to listen to a recent episode of the podcast Jesus 911 on the topic. Jesse Romero is your fellow Arizonan and an authority on spiritual combat, and it’s a great show with a ton of invaluable information, especially for us men. If we have no point of reference I guess we could think UFOs, if it’s undeniable they’re witnessed and recorded, might be aliens or who-knows-what. Educated Catholics who take them to be demonic do have a considered argument about it. One point is that demons are said in spiritual literature to often create lighting effects. It’s something well within their powers and repertoire. A second point is that the people who claim to be witnesses typically have a background of drug use or occultist involvement, both of which will open up contact with demonic entities. There’s other points, but as to the modus operandi… The devils want to take attention off of Jesus Christ in any way that works. If they can beguile the secularist society with the illusion of UFOs and ETs, it’s a rabbit hole. The New Age movement is closely connected with UFOs, see a talk by Paul Christopher, Demonic UFOs, which casts a lot of light on the movements who take it seriously. It’s a large deception.
Last thing, if the UFOs are an illusion, it has even Catholics speculating outside of basic Catholic teaching to explain it. And we know these are times of intense diabolical confusion, when “even the elect” would be deceived if God didn’t help us. This UFO report comes out under the anti-Christ Biden administration? Red flag through the roof. Ross Douhat thinks the little people (leprechauns perchance ?) are a new type of supernatural being, who the Holy Ghost didn’t bother to tell us about? And who is it who speculated that there’s “theological dimensions” to extraterrestrial creatures existing who pilot the UFOs? It was left out of Genesis, I guess. Jesus Christ came to save the human race, he’s the 2nd person in the eternal trinity. Did he come to save an advanced extraterrestrial form of creature? This is exactly why we can deduce this is diabolical. It disorients and leads away from the Church.
The other thing is that in different places these extra-ordinary creatures fit in to the cultural identity. In Ireland it’s fairies to suit the local folklore, in Eastern Europe they’re vampire crazy. In our culture we are obsessed with technology and consider ourselves above superstition, so we get hooked by high-tech vehicles and start to believe in aliens, be they naughty or nice. This alone points directly to it being a diabolical illusion. It is consistent in some ways across the cultures, with abductions, lighting effects, etc, yet in each case it’s tailored to the locality.
Okay, well sorry this is getting long… I really wanted to bring up the possibilities this type of phenomenon opens up in fiction. I thought you might be interested, being a fiction writer. I don’t know where to start exactly, but I think the show The X-Files did a really good job with this type of material. Aside from the fact Scully is Catholic, which is a good start but could have played more of a part in the shows, it depicted eerie and evil things in a very candid, intelligent way. It’s a great show in a lot of respects and maybe a good source of inspiration for Catholic writers.
Are you thinking of writing in this genre? Out of curiosity.
I forgot to add… It is cool that we can’t claim to understand all the eerie or unexplained things that happen in the world. In the last chapters of the Book of Job, God describes his creations and how overwhelmingly huge and unsearchable is His Creation... I’m interested in the Bermuda Triangle and I guess I’m into some of this unexplained stuff, but it can also lead to nowhere. Oh, also often souls do visit from Purgatory, it’s in a good book by Fr. F.X. Schouppe published by TAN books. Poltergeists are typically known to be demonic infestations. If someone is seeing devils or phantasms it could maybe be a type of oppression. I’m in Asia, I was just talking to someone from our chapel who, like some other people here, does see spooks. Black shadows creeping about. His great-grandmother was a witch who converted to Catholicism, and he thinks the blood-line still carries a curse.
Of course, if you want a really strange and spooky story, The Green Children of Woolpit, England is a good start. Even the lousy Wikipedia entry conveys the strangeness of the story (though by accident). I thought of it because it occurred during the reign of Good King Stephen. Google it.
(PS: Would you like to know where I think they came from?)
There is a story handed down in my family from my mother about a strange thing that took place when she was a young girl. My grandparents had a farm west of Battleford, Saskatchewan, and about half a day's ride north of the old Riel Rebellion battle field of Cutknife Hill.
It was sometime back near the end of World war 2. My grandfather had not yet come home from military service yet, and my mother was a child of perhaps 5 years of age. She and my grandmother had spent much of the day with other women from the area at the local parish church. It was a cleaning day, and everyone lent a hand. Afterward, everyone had a bite to eat together and some tea before going to their homes.
It was my grandmother's turn to do the washing up, and when it was finished, she and my mother came into the church to make sure the windows were closed before locking up and going home. It was still early spring, and the daylight was already fading. Much of the church was already in shadow, and although my mother said the church had electricity, the lights were off.
But when they went in, they found that candles had been lit at the altar. Near the communion rail, the figure of a young priest could be seen getting dressed for Mass.
My grandmother was a pious woman, and loved to go to church, so instead of leaving, she put on her mantilla, and together they went to a pew and waited for Mass to begin.
The young priest opened the Communion rail, and went to the foot of the altar, and began to recite the prayers. My mother said that there was nothing at all out of the ordinary for quite some time, but as the young priest started up the steps to the altar, something made my grandmother look up. She seemed to freeze in place, not moving an inch, hardly breathing. My mother said she remembered looking from her mother to the priest, then back to her her mother again, wanting to ask what was wrong but not daring to.
Suddenly, she said, she saw what was wrong.
As he stood at the altar, his shoes weren't touching the floor. He was hovering in the air just a little bit above it. Then, as the priest moved through the ritual they both saw that they could see the lit candle very clearly through him as he passed in front of it.
They stayed frozen in place until the moment when the young priest turned at the altar to face the people and say the words, "Nobis quoque peccatoribus", when grandmother suddenly erupted out of the pew like a startled quail, grabbed my mother and fled to the doors.
They ran out of the church, and all the way over to the rectory. Grandmother banged on both the front door and the back, but the parish priest was out making calls, and wasn't home. They waited a bit, but with the dark coming full on now, and the night getting cold they decided to leave and started for home. Grandmother stopped at the church only long enough to lock the door, and they hurried to the farm as fast as they could, very shaken.
Early the next morning they went back to the rectory to return the key, and had a talk with the priest about what had happened. The old priest asked them both a lot of questions.
In the end, after a few days had passed, the priest stopped by their home, and told them that the apparition they had seen most probably was the soul of a priest, and not a devil, as they had feared. He had made some enquiries, and learned that a young priest, newly come to the mission church at Cochin, to the north, had died some time before of smallpox. He fit the description that they had given, and by all accounts was a deeply pious man, devoted to the Mass.
The old man believed it was likely that the young priest wanted to finish saying the Masses he had vowed to say. He thought that perhaps what they had been witness to was a special act of Grace, and to remember him in their prayers.
From that time, until her death, my grandmother was very devoted to praying for the Holy souls in Purgatory.
The young priest's ghost was never seen there again. Much later, the old church was decommissioned, but the building was saved, and was moved to the Western Development Museum at North Battleford.
Every time I drive past it, I can't help but think of that story.
I don't think those r/nosleep stories are real. Isn't it a horror/creative fiction subreddit with a first-person theme? Those stories are certainly captivating, but I think all they are is someone writing Paulides-inspired fiction.
It's a good question. I know that it at least was creative fiction at some point, but I thought it had evolved to include real stories as well. I mean, if someone is making this stuff up they're a genius and should be writing novels.
And let me just emphasize, they are EXTREMELY captivating.