So...am I supposed to visit the Twilight Zone?
So, this evening I watched a program on the supernatural and it got me to thinking about the, ah, difficult to explain experiences I’ve had. Now, I neither believe nor disbelieve in the supernatural, but the supernatural seems to believe in me. Sure, I have a vivid imagination, and that could explain some of the incidents, and, yes, some could be chalked up to coincidence, but still… I've had a few kind of odd experiences, and I thought I’d share them with the internet, because, hey, why not?
Mac’s Inexplicable Experiences
1) I seem to be able to predict/know about tornadoes that are a potential threat to my location. I can think of several times as a child (verified by my parents) that I woke up to warn them of tornadoes before the sirens went off, or just knew that a thunderstorm was going to produce tornadoes…and it did. I even warned my grandparents of a funnel cloud that barely missed their house one summer when we were visiting. All of which could be good observational ability on my part (I did grow up in southwest Iowa.), or coincidence. But one incident, when I was fourteen, crosses the border into really damn strange.
In the afternoon of July 17, 1988, I looked out the window of our house at a clear blue sky, and knew there was going to be a tornado. I was so certain that I told my parents, who had just laid down for a nap, and so calm that I then went to play the piano. (Having grown up in southwest Iowa and believing in being prepared, I always kept a backpack of irreplaceable things, a flashlight, and a radio packed during tornado season.)
It took less than half an hour for a storm to form out of the southwest…and for the weather alert to go off, warning us of a tornado warning for Pottawattamie county and the Omaha/Council Bluffs metro area. We scurried down to the basement with my backpack of stuff, and watched the storm on our basement television until the power went out. I then gave my parents reports from my headset radio until the all clear sounded. We emerged from the basement to find a trail of destruction through our neighborhood that passed right beside our house. The twisted damage to trees and the fact that the trees that did break off or were uprooted didn’t fall in the same direction made it pretty clear that a funnel cloud had passed over, not quite touching down. (And the city suffered a good deal of damage.)
But how did I know there was going to be a tornado? Was there something about the clear blue sky that tipped me off? Was it an amazing coincidence? Or what? Hell if I know. From my point of view, I just…knew.
2a) When I was eight, we moved into a house that was either haunted, or settling in a very unusual way. Something seemed to pace in the attic. Creak, creak, creak, across the ceiling of my room, out over the other upstairs bedroom, and back again. The year that we lived there, I slept in the living room, downstairs, away from the creepy creaking. Sure, it was probably just the house settling, as old houses do, but I’ve never encountered a house that settled in such a regular, repetitive pattern before or since. And I hope I never do.
2b) Much higher on the psychic/ghost/Twilight Zone scale was an experience I had apartment hunting in Prescott, Arizona. I was living in a cheap motel and trying to find a permanent residence before my money ran out (ah, but I was a brave and/or dim almost 20 year old). I met the property manager of one small apartment complex at the complex and followed her into the apartment. And instantly wanted to leave. I had the most overwhelming sense of dread and horror; I felt that either someone had been horribly murdered there or someone would be. I played it cool and gave the place a cursory look, following the property manager, just in case there was a dismembered corpse somewhere. There wasn’t, and I politely declined the apartment, and got the hell out of there.
I did try to find out if anything had happened there, but short of asking the Prescott police or reading every newspaper from the time the complex opened to the (then) present, I was out of luck. And I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to know. To this day, I have no idea what prompted that weird feeling. It wasn’t a panic attack - I’ve had those, and this was nothing like one. And if the apartment reminded me of something, well, that’s not much of an improvement. I’d rather I picked up psychic energy of a murder there than think that there could be something to the whole repressed memory business. And, even with my active imagination, I have trouble believing a feeling that strong could be prompted by something reminding me of, say, a work of fiction.
And, of course, there have been any number of odd experiences that weren’t disturbing, but still seem a bit off. Like the time in grade school when a friend and I wandered in the undeveloped wooded area near her house, for far longer than seems possible given the size of the area. Oh, sure, that sounds like just subjective time at work, but on a map, the wooded area is tiny. And the two of us were never able to figure out exactly where we went that day, no matter how many times we wandered that area. It was just one of those things that makes you go “huh?” And it was just one of many times that I’ve had experiences that I haven’t been able to recreate - as though the world subtly changed between the experience and my attempt to recreate it.
Maybe I just have an overactive imagination and a quirky memory, or maybe there’s more to the world than we’ve figured out how to quantify. Either way, I’m taking cover whenever I get the feeling there’s a tornado, and I’m not living anywhere that gives me the creeps - whether because of creaks or vivid bad feelings.