I haven’t written a lot about my paranormal experiences. That’s maybe because I had too much of them. Also, maybe because they were generally scarring. I might be evading the subject subconsciously. In this chapter, I’ll write all of them down.
The first paranormal experience I had was when I was 10 or 11 years old. Before telling the story properly, I must introduce you to the situation. Give a tidbit of information about the place where this happened.
One day my father told me and my kid brother that a neighbor, that he called “The Mad Mason”, was a Satanist. That there were rumors in the neighborhood that he performed black masses.
I remember that this impressed me very much, I wondered how a black mass would be sometimes. This was way too much crazy for a kid like me, imagine being told a thing like that at nine or ten years old! Once I nagged my father so much that he took me and my kid brother there one night to spy on the Mad Mason.
We went there, my father, by then in his early thirties, carried his Smith & Wesson revolver with him when we went. He carried it concealed on his waist. Tucked under his belt. He kept his hand ready to pick it up all the time we were in the immediacy of the Mad Mason’s house.
But we didn’t see anything that night. We must have stood like five minutes outside the Mad Mason’s house. Yet, nothing happened.
Enter a day like one or two years later. I was playing in the street with my kid brother and his friends. My father’s dog was with us. The dog wasn’t tied or even wearing a leash, but he was generally behaving and didn’t need much supervision.
But suddenly it was as if something had possessed him, and he jumped on the road and started to run the faster he could. I had never seen him run so fast.
He ran like thirty yards to the corner and went around it, disappearing from my sight. I chased him running but still not catching up with him. He ran a whole block and turned in the next corner again. All the way not paying attention to my calls.
I reached the next corner and went around it. I saw the dog was motionless, he was standing in the middle of the road watching towards me. I grabbed him, turned around, and started to carry him back in my arms.
The first thing I saw when I turned around and started to return was the Mad Mason’s house. I noticed something strange in one of the windows. What I think I saw was a flying arm outside the first floor. It had a feather duster in the hand, but without a body at the other end.
The blinds of the first-floor windows were down. The arm wasn’t protruding from a window, quite the opposite. The extreme where the body should have been wasn’t on the side of the window. It wasn’t on the inner side of the house. It was actually floating in the air. In the void beside the outer side of
the building. The feather duster was mechanically dusting the closed window blinds in a way that didn’t make sense.
It didn’t make sense, because the arm didn’t seem to have intelligence. For the brief moments that I could bear the vision, it didn’t seem to be dusting the blinds intelligently. It looked really stupid and mechanical. It stood dusting the blind all the time in the same spot.
Years later, when in the years before the internet went commercial I already had a modem and I used to download a lot of text files from bulletin board systems. I remember I used to call to a few systems that were hosted by satanist hackers. I remember I download a set of text files from one of those systems that were all about magic.
One of the files, servitor.txt, had an explanation on how to create a magickal servitor; a golem/tulpa that the magician could use for a specific purpose. To see that kind of entity, performing a chore, in the house of a suspected satanist makes me think it could have been one of those manufactured entities, I don’t know.
Still, I never forget that event as my first paranormal experience. You could argue that it might have been my imagination, because children have a mind that is more open to the world than grown ups, especially opened to imagination. Yes, I have had hallucinogenic visions as a child that didn’t make sense, but I would not classify them as paranormal.
The event of the disembodied arm, though, that was not a hallucination, it was a very real-looking thing.
