From Tracie 09/27/2009 - Subject: GRIM REAPER
My name is Tracie, I was just reading some of your explanations and theories after stumbling onto your page, and I came upon the Grim Reaper page. I can't tell you enough about how amazed I was and still I'm sort of in a type of panic/ excitement over it. You see, when I was 9 yrs old I saw it, I was just writing about it 2 days ago after taking my aunt's advice about keeping a journal of all the paranormal episodes I get. This is what I wrote In my Journal :My first paranormal experience was when I was only 9 yrs old. I remember Douglas (my younger cousin) and I playing out back at his house on Elm St. in Chadwicks, it was getting dark so we decided to go in, as we stood up and headed for the driveway I saw a dark shadowy figure of what I thought was a man, but with no distinct features of a face, or any other body parts; just a black shadowy cloak, like what you see in movies on a grim reaper, it had it's hands inside the other hand's sleeve in front of his chest. I remember an overwhelming sense of fear that came over me and wanting to get away from him. When I turned to run the shadow man was standing right in front of me just barely inches away. (At the time, because I was so young, I thought it had to be at least 7 ft tall, but because of my size I'm not too sure exactly how big he was, I do know that in order to look at where his face was I had to tilt my head almost completely back in order to see). I froze In my tracks; horrified that in just a blink of an eye it could be right in front of me like that. I looked up at where his face would be, but again, there was nothing but a deep, empty hole of the darkest of all dark, it was so black you could feel yourself almost fall into it, like being hypnotized and trying to find something, something you could see through it, but just couldn't. As I stand there, inches away, it began to whisper, it sounded like an echo that's been carried by the wind from a great distance, but at the same time, it sounded close, very hard to explain. It just kept whispering over and over "SOMEONE'S GOING TO DIE". By the third or fourth time it said this I some how found the courage to run past him, I remember I was so completely terrified that I didn't look back, not even to see what Douglas was doing or where he was. I ran straight home and soon found the courage to confide in my grandfather about it, with how close we were and still are I thought he would understand and explained it all away so I would no longer have to be afraid, but he had no answer, no comforting explanation for me to grasp onto. Soon after I told my mother, she said my grandmother had a similar experience long ago, and shortly after that her first husband died.
A few days after seeing the shadow man my great grandma K. passed away. I dreamt of her the night she went to God, she was beautiful and she told me that where she is now is beautiful. She said she couldn't wait for me to see it. She said going to the light took all her pain away. As we talked I noticed she was sitting in an old wooden rocking chair, she had a cigarette in her hand, and she had on her favorite green button up sweater. At nine years old I didn't know she was in such a great deal of pain, it wasn't until only a few years ago that I learned she had cancer, and I never knew she had a rocking chair, in fact only a very few people knew about the chair because for years it sat up in the attic and no body ever really went up their for anything.
I hope this wasn't too long, like I said I wrote it 2 days ago, and when I read your page I couldn't believe how similar my story is to what you wrote; what it looked like, how tall it was, that it spoke, just everything, It brought back the memories like a title wave. The following year I had seen it again and I wrote that one down in my journal as well, it was more animated this time and laughed at me, what it was doing makes me know that it new who was going to die next and exactly how as well, but because this e-mail is so long already and I'm not sure if you will even get this I will save it for later if you are interested in hearing it.
VAMPIRE STORY: Todd's uncle Johnson always kept lots of garlic at home and there was a
cross in every corner of his house, even his fence was made up of
crosses and there was a big cross on top of his roof, just like a
church. Just across the road from his home was an ancient house. Its
windows and doors were boarded up for centuries and no one rented or
sold it. Local people used to say that one can hear screeching of a bat
from inside the home and many people also reported seeing shadow of a
tall and lanky man in the window, on the upper floor, which was the only
one not covered with boards.
Despite the long time for which the house had not been used, it always
used to look clean. There was not even a single leaf in the backyard.
The bats seemed to love the place and at night, a number of bats used to
appear there, as if from nowhere. According to the folklore, the house
was �lived-in� by a real vampire. Many people were reported to have died
inexplicably in front of the house. Their eyes used to be wide open, as
if they had seen something horrible when they died. It was also a site
where accidents used to occur quite frequently.
It was said that the vampire of the house opposite that of Uncle
Johnson�s, used to reveal his face to his victims only. People also said
that he was so ugly that people had a heart attack at the very instant
they saw him and this is why they died. Then, when they were buried, the
vampire used to dig up their graves and sucked their blood to feed
himself. The legend also went that anyone who passed a dare in the name
of the vampire would get to see how he looks and will die a painful
death at the hands of the vampire. Would you like to give it a try?
FROM: http://festivals.iloveindia.com/halloween/ghost-stories/real-vampire.html
He woke up hours later and noticed the sun was going down. He was too far from the nearest town and had no tent. He noticed a small cabin in the distance. He walked up to it and saw that the residence were not home. He decided to just sleep in the bed and explain himself to the owners in the morning. However when he reached the bedroom he saw that there were no windows and that paintings were hanging on the walls that were extremely detailed and grotesque faces of people. He tried to ignore them and laid in the bed. He looked at the paintings which seemed to be looking down at the bed once more and went to sleep.
The next morning the hunter woke up to a surprising light. He looked around and saw that there were no paintings after all. Only windows.
He ran out of the cabin and didn't look back until he made it home.
About 10 years ago, I was lying in the bedroom of my house in Cheyenne, Wyo., an old place that used to be workmen's lodging down by the Union Pacific railroad station. I wasn't in a deep sleep, more like that murky in-between state as slumber comes in for a landing. I opened my eyes halfway. In the doorway of the bedroom, a young man stood staring at me. Was he 15? Was he 20? Dressed in work clothes from the 1930s, of humble posture, he was there -- I will never forget those eyes -- yet I could see straight through him. Frightened to my core, I sat up, screaming until my boyfriend shook me. "What? What?"
"There was a boy over there! He was standing right there."
"No one else is here but us," he told me. "You were dreaming."
But I wasn't. The shock and fear left me shaking, but most disturbing was the physical sensation. I hadn't just seen this ghost boy; I had felt him. Sorrow, loss, loneliness. It was as if he was saying, I'm lost. Help me. I need to be seen.
I kept the bathroom light on all night for a month, maybe more, my eyes trained on that doorway. If I was going up the stairs in the dark, I would climb quickly, two steps at a time, as if someone, or something, was chasing me.
Growing up, a gory Halloween costume or haunted house could scare the daylights out of me, but I'd always been skeptical about ghosts and spirits. When I was 20, a hardened realist -- and an atheist, to boot -- broadened my mind. At the epicenter of the Bay Area punk scene in the '80s and '90s was a guy named Tim Yohannon. A product of the '60s counterculture's angry edge, he was punk rock's own paterfamilias, a graying, squatty Azerbaijani Humphrey Bogart. He taunted vegetarians. He smoked about 8,000 Benson and Hedges a day. Like much of my peace-punk cohort, I loved and looked up to Tim. He was generous, and in the midst of the crazy punk scene, he radiated sanity. Once, when we were driving along a winding Marin County road on the way back from a day at Stinson Beach, our hair sticky with sea salt, he told me that once, when staying at a nearby bed and breakfast, he'd seen a ghost. He was jolted awake by a strange voice hissing "TIM!" He opened his eyes to see a mean-looking disembodied head, floating there. He and his girlfriend dropped the key at the front desk and fled. I thought, if a realist -- a non-believer no less -- could encounter the supernatural, then maybe there was something to it.
In 1998, Tim died after a lengthy battle with lymphoma. While it is painful to lose a friend in any capacity, the loss of a role model is particularly acute. A sharp pain as the light draws down on a certain phase of your life -- the end of an era, indeed. But slowly, he faded from memory, supplanted by more immediate losses -- my father, a grandmother. Then last year, I went through a bout of insomnia. Work, as usual, was keeping me up at night, worse than ever.
As I stared at the laptop screen, the glow of the blank page insulting my eyes, I kept hearing Tim's voice in my head: "Be punk rock about it!" It bedeviled me. Not the sentiment; I got what it meant: Be bold. Leave a blistering mark. But the voice's persistence. Why now? I hadn't thought about him in, honestly, years. Yet, if the voice in my head was to be believed, it was as if he never left. Fully inhabited by the idea of him, I went downstairs to the kitchen for a drink of water. Then I drifted to the back door and opened it. I stood on the creaking old wood porch, dry-rotted wood on the door sill flaking under my feet, and tilted back my chin. The night was perfectly clear, no moon, the October air acutely sharp.
I looked up into the center of the starry sky and held out my arms, "OK, fine, Tim. If you're really there, then prove it." At that moment, a small but brilliant meteor streaked brightly across midheaven. The hairs at the base of my neck got all tickly and tears sprung up in my eyes. I felt as if I'd risen from my body, weightless. My breath whooshed out of me. "Cool," I said, to no one.
Lit up inside, I went back into the house, and powered through my assignment. There was something inspiring about what seemed like a paranormal visitation from an avowed atheist. Maybe it was his way of saying, "Hey, I was wrong. There's more." And a command performance in the sky: There was a wit to it. I know some people will insist that meteor was a coincidence, but I insist that it wasn't. And unlike my first brush with the Otherworld, I felt no fear whatsoever. Though the living Tim would have hated this particular expression, I felt blessed.
I've shared these experiences with people from time to time, and I've found that by admitting supernatural experience, a floodgate opens: A friend who swears he smells his grandfather's pipe whenever he's in danger -- a car about to serve in front of his bike, a branch overhead threatening to break, when he's hiking alone. A widow who is sure her husband tells her where she's put misplaced objects. These stories are often shared in the dead of night, when conversation veers off-grid, toward the realm of the unexpected. Maybe such topics are more welcome in the safety of darkness. I am only too happy to miss sleep to hear them. We're so rarely invited into each other's interior lives, and if you tell me that a departed loved one makes his or her presence known, I don't think you're crazy. I think you're lucky.
Do ghosts and spirits really exist? Sometimes, I still take that question into my backyard. With the fragile faith of the near-converted, I stare at the night sky, waiting, thinking about the ghosts in my life. How much of their vaporous presence is genuine, and how much is a trick of the mind, a fondest wish or worst fear manifest? It's hard to say. While I'm far from a state of certainty, there are a couple of things I believe in my heart: that there are more possibilities out there than we could ever fully imagine. And I'm no longer afraid of the dark.
http://www.salon.com/life/real_scary_stories/index.html
