Ghosts never interested me, but that was until I saw one with my very own eyes.
Just weeks after I moved into my apartment with my roommate Jacob strange things started to happen. I was talking on the phone when a black mass, more opaque than smoke but definitely not solid, floated from above my head into my range of vision. I gasped and it immediately disappeared. I brushed it off as a hallucination.
One week later I was lying in bed when I was overwhelmed with the feeling of a presence in my room. Although I was too terrified to look at it. I knew exactly what it looked like. It was a black mass like before that loosely took up the shape of a man standing next to my bed. After approximately one minute, it left me alone.
The next day Jacob began to tell me of the strange events that occurred that morning. Apparently he had woken up to the feeling of someone sitting on his chest holding his arms. He opened his eyes to see a black shadow figure kneeling on him, holding his arms so that he couldn’t move. It lasted a few minutes and was definitely startling.
We were trying to make sense of it when I suddenly remembered my two encounters which I hadn’t connected until that moment. The ‘coincidence’ seemed too unreal and we began to get worried. We tried to forget about it but all evening we couldn’t calm down. A friend of mine gave me the phone number of a real psychic named Kathy who was a friend of his mother’s. As I dialed her phone number I was fully aware of the novelty of the situation. When I explained, Kathy assured me not to doubt myself because there were spirits in the apartment, and they were there at that very moment! She told me I could communicate with it and she would learn about it on the phone through my experiencing its response. We learned that there was one male spirit just under twenty years of age who wanted us out of there. There might have been a second spirit, a young girl, possibly a sister who was tagging along.
We were told to let him know that we had love for him but that he was scaring us and that he didn’t belong there. He had to go. Kathy was very kind and I felt safe talking to her even though she was assuring me that there was a ghost in my home. She had to end the phone conversation and she said she would call back later that night. I hung up the phone and sat there dumbfounded – just hours earlier everything had been normal and suddenly I was dealing with supernatural activity in my very own apartment! I watched one specific spot in Jacob’s room where I had felt the spirit to be throughout my phone conversation. The feeling died down and I dismissed the feeling to being “worked up” by Kathy. About five minutes later with a gasp I suddenly knew they were in my room. At the exact second I gasped, the phone rang. It was Kathy. She said that they had just visited her for about five minutes and would probably be returning now!
For the next entire week Jacob slept in bed with me – we were certainly uneasy. There is no way that we can know what the shadowy figures were for sure, but surprisingly, the more faith I laid in Kathy’s theory, the safer I felt and I knew it wasn’t going to hurt me. Doubting brought on paranoia. Kathy was definitely for real…even if she was wrong, she certainly believed herself. She never asked for any money and often called to check up on us and make sure that were okay. She insisted that we should call her any time we were scared, no matter if it was 4am. One night at 12:30 I did call her and she patiently talked to me for forty minutes. She even offered for me to spend the night at her house.
Both Jacob and I have seen the ghost several times since. I saw him more often and when I did he would sometimes dart through the room and other times stay still for a minute or so. One time Jacob thinks he saw his face. He couldn’t describe him any better than fair hair and a very ‘regular’ face. As our need for counsel died down so did our correspondence with Kathy. I was getting pretty comfortable with the ghost, he could come into my room and I would continue whatever I was doing and would often forget to tell Jacob that I saw him. Both Jacob and I have the same experience that we feel him first, then we turn around and he’s there.
I told my story to my Buddhism Professor who was a kindly lady who happens to be named Catherine. She recognized this phenomena as something she calls ‘shades’. Her advice was similar to Kathy’s. Our visits are rare lately although he was watching me sleep about a month ago. I asked him to leave me alone, and he did.