My Supernatural Experience! The Creature In The Woods-Part 1 (SWC)

I have always had a connection to the supernatural world.....

This all started 23 years ago.

The year was 1994, I was 3 years old, my grandmother who was my absolute best friend, had cancer suddenly spread throughout the vast majority of her body. Prior to her passing and succumbing to her illness, she purchased me a cute little brown teddy bear as a keepsake and memory of her. I have held onto this teddy bear tightly my entire life, even into my adult years. Even to this day it still has a place to sit near my bed, if almost gazing off at my family at times. Of course, when I was 3 I did not remember her giving me "Fluffy". I actually don't have any real memories of her at all unfortunately, being I was so young when she was in my life. Once in a while I hear stories from several of my family members about how I used to have another toy that would light up and play music on it's own. My family tells me that after my grandmother died, every time I cried for her, the toy would light up. It didn't play music, it didn't move in the middle of the night. It didn't do anything considered above and beyond the call of duty of being creepy. It would simply just light up for a few seconds, only when I would cry for my grandmother.

I also used to see my grandmother after she passed away according to my mother and many of my other family members. We could all be at a family gathering and here I am, sitting on the couch with grandmother, despite the fact nobody else could see her or feel her presence at the time. Lord forbid if someone came to that couch to sit down where she was because I would literally throw a fit if someone sat down on my grandmother. It was so bad that my family gave me a cotton ball so that I could place it where mommom was and let everyone know. It made it so nobody sat on her anymore and everyone was aware of her presence.

I've always heard that children and animals have senses heightened to the supernatural and are able to see and comprehend spirits easier than an adult. I can't say for sure that's true but according to the stories through my family, I was frequently visited by my grandmother after her death. The bear she gave me, has something different about him. I've always felt it and to be honest it has bonded with me in an unexplainable way. Every single person that has seen this bear has told me that they get an uneasy feeling with it and can sense something not entirely right with it. My husband is one example. Just imagine a 200 pound, tattooed tough guy scared to be within arm's reach of a little teddy bear, it's quite the experience. Despite the fact myself and others have always felt tremendous amounts of energy from this bear, it has never once scared me or gave me an uneasy feeling.

Fluffy

Growing up, I sporadically attended church sermons with my family. I've always leaned more towards there being a God or higher power, but my faith was never fully grounded where it should have been. I've always doubted it in the back of my head, you know, the whole idea of there being more to life than this. Even with theological doubts, I've always been incredibly drawn to the supernatural world. In 2012, I still had several doubts about the existence of God, but due to some unexplainable events that occured in my life, I no longer doubted the existence of the supernatural and more specifically, spirits. I'll save that discussion for another day.

I met my now husband the end of 2011 around the end of October. I think it was the third or fourth time of us hanging out at his place when I had my first encounter with a spirit. I walked outside late one dark November night to get something from my car. I grabbed what I needed, shut my car door and started walking back to his place when I heard the strangest sounds from off in the distance. I stopped and really focused, making out the distinct sounds of horses galloping and a man speaking very loudly but with words I couldn't recognize. I looked in the direction of the noises, wouldn't you guess it, there was nothing there. I thought maybe I was just tired from work and hallucinating at first, trying to shrug it off. Once I realized I had really heard those noises, I ran as quickly as I could into the house in some form of fear and disbelief. I spent the rest of the night in my mind replaying this and pretending that it did not happen.

A few months after moving in with my husband, things started slowly happening that had no reasonable explanation. The boundaries of reality and everything we knew and believed in were tested time and time again. In fact, I remember the very first time we witnessed an inanimate object move on its own. It wasn't like what you see in the movies, cabinets didn't fly open and the doors weren't opening and shutting repeatedly for no reason at all. No, this started out with one small encounter and progressed to something more.

One night my husband was standing in front of the bathroom door talking to me as I was standing in the bedroom. These rooms were adjacent to each other, so there maybe was a 6 foot difference in space from door to door. My husband was standing outside of the bathroom door, back towards the bathroom and was in and out of conversation with me and something on the TV in the living room which he was leaning over to see periodically. In the middle of his conversation, I noticed my husband lean up to look at the TV, turning away from me and out of nowhere I see a hair brush of mine fly out of the bathroom and hit him on his foot. He spun around and asked me "Why the heck did you just throw a brush at me and hit me with it?" He swore on everything holy that I threw that brush, but the fact was that I didn't. What I did do was watch it fly out of the bathroom as if somebody threw it while standing in there. From that moment on, things got worse and even my sanity had come into question.

There was one occasion when we had a dog bowl sitting on the top of the entrance to our place, right at the top of the stairs. We were both at the bottom of the steps on our way out to go do something when the dog bowl flew off from to top and landed right in between us on the stairs. It never touched a single step on its way down nor did it hit the walls or anything of the sort. It appeared to have almost jumped in-between us and the insane thing is neither of us or anything else touched that bowl. At least anything that we were able to see. Fact is, that bowl didn't fall because of gravity. At this moment my husband realized it wasn't me playing tricks on him or being mischievous. This was a game changer.

In between these small supernatural experiences were obvious signs that something in this equation was not right. I would frequently hear things that weren't there and would see things that weren't there. This made me and my husband question each other's sanity, so we would frantically find excuses or explanations as to why these things happened. We had convinced ourselves that this was not real, until the big guns came into play. This next experience is the start of the evil entities coming out to play and the moment we realized everything we thought we knew and understood, was wrong.

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FEAR FEEDS EVIL.That saying is true. If you don't believe in the supernatural, I need you to remember those words just in case you ever do experience these things. The movies we all see, they don't make that part up. Evil feeds off of your fear. Fear opens up a completely new world, whether you believe in it or not. Don't forget it.

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Back to the story...

We used to have this cactus sitting on the top of the tank on our toilet. It was left by the previous owners so we ended up "adopting" it more or less. It looked cool and was supposed to be low maintenance, so I kept it. I don't know why though because I don't have anything close to a green thumb. In fact, my sister-in-law laughs and says that I have a black thumb. I can't keep a plant alive to save my life, which is unfortunate because I love gardening. By this point, close to a year had passed since I had adopted this cactus. Mind you, I don't even know how to care for a cactus, but I know that I never once gave that thing water and it still remained healthy so I left it be. Don't fix it if it isn't broken, right?

One fine day I walked into the bathroom and I find this cactus sitting up right next to the toilet. It seemed odd but there was no dirt spilled or anything at all put of place other than that. I placed it where it originally belonged, on the tank of the toilet. Over the next two weeks, this cactus keeps ending up in that same exact spot no matter how many times I put it back. It was one of the most aggravating things to be honest. Clearly, my husband was playing tricks on me and toying with my emotions or so I thought.

I was home alone on day and I walked into the bathroom. It was no surprise to find the cactus on the floor so I put it back, as I had been for weeks now. I kept this "game" going that my husband was playing one me. I went back in there a few minutes later and that damn cactus was on the floor, after I had just put it back on the toilet. There it was, in the same exact spot, on the same exact tile, just sitting like it belonged there and I had never touched it.

Okay, now I'm scared.

I laugh about this now because it sounds ridiculous, but if you lived through something like this, with objects moving all the time like this, it will freak you out. I don't care who you are, this will unnerve you. It was at that moment fear sat in. That was the moment these things realized that I let them in. I had just given in and let my misunderstanding of the supernatural turn to fear, which turned into a feeding frenzy. Now the real scary stuff starts to happen. This was just the beginning.....

Being scared to death of what was going on, I decided I needed to seek help or advice from someone who would believe me. I asked around to see what I could do about this "magical cactus", as me and my husband branded it. My moms friend who was in tune with the spiritual world told me that sometimes ghost get bored and perform mischievous acts to entertain themselves. I thought to myself "Great....I'm the center of a joke in the supernatural realm". I was advised that though things like this happen, there are ways to stop these occurrences. I was told I needed to firmly speak into the bathroom and ask it to leave me alone. Great....another thing to make me look like a complete nut job to my husband. I took her advice in, but I already knew I wasn't going to talk to the walls and look crazier than I already did, so I left it be and moved on.

There has got to be an explanation

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We were about to leave for vacation not long after I had sought out advice. We were busy getting things in order and I went to pack my things from the bathroom. The cactus was gone leaving behind nothing but the dish it sat on. At this time we lived in a very small place, a single bedroom studio apartment, and it certainly wasn't hard to search around the house to look for something. The cactus had completely vanished, as if into thin air. At this point I'm so freaked out by this stupid cactus that I started to cry hysterically. In the state of mind I was in, I was relieved that I was leaving this place for vacation, so I finish packing as quickly as possible. So I get home a few days later and finally found the courage to talk to the air. Why? Because the cactus was right back where it should have been before we left. I felt like I was about to have a mental breakdown...

I screamed, "Please leave me alone. You are not welcomed here and I don't find this funny!"

The cactus got thrown outside by my husband not long after. It was shrivelled up and completely dead by the next morning for some reason that is still unknown.

From there on out, these entities made their presence known to the both of us. One night I was in my bed trying to fall asleep and my husband was out in the living room watching tv. I felt someone or something get up off the bed. The bed moved just as if a person was standing up off of it. There was even a mark on the bed that would make one think someone was sitting on it. I called for my husband who came to my side immediately. Though he didn't feel the motion or movement, he laid eyes on the area where "something" was sitting.

After a while of small encounters like these, the big guns finally showed up. By this point I have told my husband about the horses I heard in the beginning of our relationship. We have also had numerous conversations about the brush, dog dish and cactus. We both have agreed something really is not right with this place. Boy, were we right.

According to local legend and history regarding the village of Harmony where we resided, we had learned Harmony sits on top of dozens of ancient indian burial sites. Just miles down the road, one of these burial sites was unearthed during a construction project. Scary huh? It gets even better. Harmony has always been plagued by odd events that make no sense. One event is the unexpected murder just blocks away from where we lived in the early 90s, where a teenage girl stole her father's shotgun and killed both her mother and father, seemingly for no reason. Another instance is the story of Old Miss Tilley, a lady born and raised in Harmony who one day out of the blue had a complete mental breakdown that changed her life forever. From that moment on, she believed she was an indian priestess, dressing the part, speaking in tongue we have never heard and even doing rituals through town.

The real prize of them all however is the gruesome murder story of an innocent 7 year old girl in the late 1800s. This little girl was the child of two pillars to society and she had the world at her feet locally. One day she vanished from Harmony, so a search party was assembled. This search found her, sadly, raped and murdered, down by the creek outside of town. She was brutally beaten, molested and killed by the local blacksmith, who had reportedly "went mad" and he indeed paid for his crime. The school she attended and was abducted from prior to her murder, wouldn't you guess, was built on the property next door to where I lived. Ask anybody in this small town of Harmony about Lydia and they will tell you, that little girl still comes out to play and has visited most of the town folk at some point. Several of the neighbors have seen her or know someone who has. Maybe she moved the cactus?

The creature in the woods

My husband and I used to be big UFO hunters. We were outside just about every night watching the sky. After a while, we started to get that uneasy feeling of somebody watching you. Not just looking, but staring at you. This is very frightening feeling to be completely honest. Because of the feeling of being watched, the woods became to unbearable to be near, so we took our UFO hunting on the road. Naturally, we still had to walk near these woods to get inside the house so regardless of where we went, we still had to feel that uneasy feeling every time we returned home. It was so strange out there that sometimes at night time we would hear what sounded like a large animal walking up and down the wooded area behind the house.

One night we walked to where the woods started on the edge of the property. Both of us walked down side by side, walking the edge of the property parallel with the edge of the woods. We had heard the noise in the woods, which really is what prompted us to walk the edge of it this night. This night was different though. The noise we would hear had gotten much closer this time, but just out of our sight, maybe 20 feet away from us in the darkest part of the forest. Strangely enough, as we walked, so did this thing. It was almost if it was mimicking our movements. One thing is for sure, it followed the exact direction we traveled, at the exact time. We turned the other direction, it walked with us, we'd turn another direction and it would do just as we were doing. This wasn't any normal animal, you could tell by the sound of it walking and by the feeling of it's presence. You could hear by the sound of the leaves crunching how large it was, which is what really freaked my husband out. Just to shed a little insight, this area only has smaller animals native to it that travel the woods. Deer, raccoons, squirrels... nothing larger. Whatever this thing is, my husband guesses must have stood at least 6 foot tall and weighed hundreds of pounds. There were even a few times that we seen this things big bright yellow eyes staring back at us, sometimes on the ground, sometimes way up on the top of the trees.....

We would stand outside with flashlights and search for this unknown creature.

A few months before we moved out of the town for good and after years of living in the house, we finally had an inside experience with the creature in the woods. My husband had just gotten done having surgery to remove skin melanoma on his back just a week before so I would check his back every night to be sure there were no more suspicious spots. This one particular night, his back was all red with white spots all over it. It was one of the weirdest looking things I have ever seen. I had no idea what was going on with him and was concerned he may be sick again, so my first instinct was to freak out!

I told him what his back looked like and we immediately went into the bathroom to look into a bigger mirror. When we went into the bathroom, what we both saw was enough to change our lives forever. The white spots had moved into the shape of an actual hand on my husbands back. Not just a shape, like looking at clouds for shapes, but a VERY distinct hand print with these sharp looking fingers. This was an usually large hand print with a very unusual shape, roughly twice the size of my husbands hand. At that moment we both knew my husband was touched by something we don't understand. Minutes after we had seen it, the hand print vanished with no harm or ill effect we know of. I did take pictures of the hand but unfortunately no longer have the memory card, though I may be able to unsurface some of them off of a cloud IF I can get into the account.

Yea, big surprise huh? I have no proof to show you right now.

I went onto Google and I searched to see if anyone else has discussed a story of a red hand print mysteriously appearing on their body. A few of the articles say that it means you were touched by an Angel. This was no Angel. At least not any angel I have heard of or felt the presence of!

Check out this article that has a few similar situations with large red handprints appearing on the body - Hand Prints On Body A Message From Beyond

The very last supernatural encounter we had was with another handprint.

I had just mopped the floor so we stepped outside to let it dry. Plenty of time had passed to allow it time to dry and once we had went inside, the floor was dry as expected and planned. Once we had walked to the living room, a single shiny handprint stood out on the living room floor. Wait....it couldn't be. No doubt, we walk over to get a better look and this handprint is the same size and build as the one on my husband's back months before. We put our hands up to it just to compare and let's just say that it was much larger than our hands are. We even went as far as to touch the handprint on the floor, only to find out that it was ice cold and sticky. I tried to look this up online as well, I had no luck with this one go figure. After that, we decided it was time to find another place to live. After years of these unexplainable, frightening events, we finally moved out. Enough was enough.

This story takes an even bigger twist

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After living in that house, I no longer had doubts that spirits were real. I had some major life changing events happen while living there as well. A few months after leaving the house, I had a spiritual awakening. I don't know what is out there beyond us, I just know we're not alone and I embrace the idea of being in touch with the spirit realm. I started learning about meditation as a way to deal with life's struggles and as a means of balancing myself. From there, I found my love for crystals. I utilize crystals for their natural healing properties and energies. The more I have studied about spiritual awakenings, the more knowledge and drive I obtain to help me on my journey. Once I found out who I really am, I even started to learn how to connect to the other side.

The very thing that I was once the most afraid of.

I've learned through my own experience that if we don't believe in the supernatural, we more than likely won't experience it. That is why some people don't believe in it. Their subconscious mind isn't open to it, therefore they don't experience it. For some people, it is easier to pretend the supernatural doesn't exist and not deal with it entirely, rather than embrace it and experience events such as my husband and I have. Like I stated previously, I always had doubts about God and spirits existing. I would have never truly believed in it had I never lived in that house and experienced it first hand. Honestly, if someone told me this story I probably would have never believed them, just like I don't expect some of you to believe me. Seeing is indeed believing, I can attest to that statement! I have come to believe that there is a little truth to every religion and maybe things we don't understand or don't see aren't as far fetched as once thought. Just like I used to not believe in anything after death, now I believe in some form of heaven, but not in the "traditional" burning hell.

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Believe it or not, I left out some crucial detail about the creature in the woods. My husband and I both had a few really close encounters with it. Be sure to follow me so that you don't miss Part 2! Part 2 will contain some of his statements, believe me, you do not want to miss this one!

If you have made it this far, thank you so much for reading my story!

Do you believe in spirits?

Because I am open to all religions and all beliefs, I love hearing about what others believe in. Even if your belief is nothing at all.

This is my entry into @jerrybanfield's supernatural writing contest.

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If you would like to read about my near death experience, you can do so by clicking this link The Hospital Left Me To Die.

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