I am actually more used to other people telling me about their paranormal encounters than in experiencing the supernatural directly. I have had acquaintances tell me about their haunted house, or about having been haunted or even possessed. (A few acquaintances have also claimed to have been abducted or at least contacted by aliens, but that is a different article.) And while I’m convinced there really was something down in the basement and had a terror of the grates and heating vents of one of the houses I lived in when I was a kid, I haven’t “seen” anything like the sort of phenomena my acquaintances talked about.
Of course, that was because it was dark.
If you are talking about random noises and mysterious voices however, I have had those on quite a few occasions.
When I was younger, I would occasionally have moments where I would wake up in the middle of the night, and find that I wasn’t able to move or really breathe. There would be noises like footsteps, and then there would be a dark, looming shape bending over me. Sometimes there would be voices telling me to do something like jump out the window or threatening to kill me. Sometimes the voices would talk to each other about random, ordinary things but that was a lot rarer. Sometimes I’d try talking back, but they would either not answer or attack me verbally with snide comments.
In my twenties, I had a particularly bad series of visitations–I was having them once or twice a month, and it didn’t help that I was also under a lot of stress. The voices were increasingly hostile, and I had trouble getting any sleep on those nights, even after the weird paralysis faded. They upset me enough that I ended up talking about them to a friend, who claimed to be psychic. (She was also a Christian, which does have some relevance to the story.) When I told her about it, she and her husband (who was a Pagan) agreed to see if they could help me. My friend claimed that she could sense that something was hanging around me, as did her husband. Both of them did their psychic/praying thing, to banish the presence they sensed, though I didn’t notice any difference. (My friend also suggested I go with her to church, but since I’m not Christian, I declined.)
Did it actually work? I can’t really say. I still have nightmares and sleep terrors, though I haven’t had a sleep paralysis episode in a long time. The occasional voices I hear in the moments between waking and sleeping could just as easily be the neighbors in the apartment below me as anything else.
