Small town ghost adventures and dorm room exorcisms
So I finally decided to record some of my... interesting experiences from college that involved the paranormal in hopes of submitting to the fantastic blog @sixpenceee. These are, to the best of my knowledge, all true. My friends and I generally avoided drugs and alcohol so for any story I recount here unless stated otherwise please keep in mind happened entirely to sober individuals.
A bit of background before I get into the most memorable of the stories. My friends and I could easily have been voted, “Most likely to be the opening kill in a horror movie” in college due to our regular habits of seeking out the most haunted or negative places we could find and seeing what sort of ghosty nonsense we could stir up. Our little group was fairly diverse in terms of spiritual ability, ranging between a couple who probably couldn’t have sensed a ghost if it physically manifested in front of them and did the Macarena to one friend May who could possibly be certified as a fully-fledged medium, able to see, hear, and speak with spirits on a reliable basis.
Me? I was at an interesting part of the spectrum where I apparently had a great deal of spiritual power but a fairly low amount of actual “sight” capabilities. I could generally sense stuff but only if I really opened up my mind or if the stuff was REALLY strong.
We lived in a fairly small college town in the heart of Colorado so there weren’t a lot of places to go to. A graveyard that never once turned up any ghost activity (Though we did stumble upon an in-graveyard cremation once that was going on super late at night and THAT was creepy as hell. I now know what burning human smells like.) was the only ghost-oriented place in town, but there were a couple of sites that we found and visited on multiple occasions.
One was a fairly well-known local hotspot which was an old train yard on the outskirts of town. The college kids called it “Devil’s Playground” because I guess nobody could think of anything more cliche to call it. The dangers there were both spiritual and physical because it was well known that cops mostly stayed away from there and there were stories of people who’d been mugged or stabbed there, so add a pinch of physical danger to your spiritual souffle for an extra fun time.
Then there was the other place. This one was known only to my group of friends, or so we thought, but I later found out was actually known to a couple other local mediums who had some nasty experiences there before. See in that town there was a trick you could pull with anyone with any sort of spiritual sense. You could have them close their eyes, focus, and then say to them, “Point at the bad place.” Normally they’d either point directly at Devil’s Playground even if they had no idea where it was, or they would point directly at one of the campus buildings that was known for it’s rather morbid paranormal history. But my boyfriend at the time, our best friend, and I noticed that some people would rarely point to the West instead of towards the other two places. Since we’d felt that before too we started to get curious. One night, very late at night, the three of us piled in my old jeep and decided to find the other “bad place.” Following our senses alone we went about two or three miles out of town and followed the feeling down a dirt road past several small houses and off into some of the farming land. There we found the source, a run-down old stable and a rusty gray bullet of a mobile trailer. It certainly didn’t LOOK that haunted, a bit sketchy maybe, but what we felt was far more intimidating than not. My boyfriend and I immediately got the sense that people had died there, people had been KILLED there, and it had opened up a door and something was still there. We both had images at the same time of this happening. As such my friends and I called that area the “Sacrificial Grounds.” I later found out from an external source that our feelings were true, it actually had happened there. Devil’s Playground was active but it felt mostly like the stuff there was kinda showing off at that point. This, this was something that was BAD and it wanted to HURT whoever came too close.
We would often go to either place (usually in my car since I was one of the few people in our group with a car), ward the car, and then park, lock the doors, and then turn off the engine and lights. There was some creepy shit that happened and I might explain some of it one day, but there was one thing that happened that really made me believe in the supernatural and I’m going to tell the tale of it now.
Now in spite of everything I’d been through I always tried to keep a healthy skepticism about the supernatural and a lot of what my friends and I experienced I could put down to group hysteria, seeing what we wanted to see, etc. Part of me was always kinda afraid that it wasn’t true, that it was all just a game of imagination we’d come up with to make us feel better about our boring-ass reality. But then one night two of my other friends and I decided to go alone to Sacrificial Grounds to do a bit of ghost digging. We warded up the car and piled in. My friends, who I will just call L and R for the moment until I get their permission to use their names, were both in the middle-range of the sense-capable in our group and we thought we had a pretty good grasp on what we needed. R was a bit better at sensing things, she was a bit more empathic than either of us but she was also a bit on the weaker side. L was healthily in the middle.
It was getting to be close to midnight so we thought it would be pretty good even though we ascribed to the theory that paranormal activity is more intense around 3am than 12am. Well, long story short while we were there R got the brilliant idea of opening her senses and trying to reach out as much as she could to sense what was in the abandoned travel-trailer without telling me or L. Are the mediums reading this wincing yet? Yep, she completely opened her senses as hard as she could and in doing so made herself a great big beacon of “HEY THE DOORS ARE OPEN COME ON IN!” Even in spite of the car being warded, anything bad had a direct bridge into her because of that. Sure enough the negative feelings started intensifying, the weird sounds that we’d sometimes hear around the car started picking up, and both L and I decided it was time to BOOGIE out of there, so we took off back to my apartment.
Back in my apartment, R was oddly subdued, usually she was the enthusiastic one but she complained about not feeling very good. We got back into my room and were chilling out. I gave her a fruit cup to try to make her feel better and L was playing on her computer while I was on mine. We were talking and joking about the creepy stuff we’d felt when I threw on Evanescence’s “Haunted” (yeah I’m that kind of dork, so sue me).
About a minute later R, who was sitting on the floor next to my bed while L and I were sitting on the bed, looked up at me and said in an unusually quiet, worried voice that she couldn’t sense positive energy all of a sudden. I put my laptop down and went to help her. I put my hand on her shoulder and focused on transferring positive energy into her, which we’d done many times before if one of us got too big a dose of nasty energy. This time was different though. R suddenly started spasming and flailing around. I thought she was having a seizure even though she had no history of that and my first concern was her hitting her head on my metal bedframe or on the hard tile floor of my dorm apartment. I tried to grab onto her to keep her from hurting herself. I realized it wasn’t a seizure when she started snarling at me, grabbed for the fork that she’d dropped, and promptly attempted to stab me with it. It took all my strength to keep a grip on her arm and keep her from stabbing me with the fork while L just sat on the bed staring at us in shock. I finally yelled at her to help me and she jumped down and helped me hold down R, who kept snarling and thrashing and managed to get in a good scratch on my arm with her nails.
L held her down while I called our friend May to help us. I was greeted with a charming, “Az what do you want? I have to be up for a test at 7 tomorrow.” All it took for me was saying, “R’s in trouble! Please help!” she was at my apartment less than five minutes later. Right away she took one look at her and said, “That’s not R! What did you guys do?” and I could really only respond with, “No shit!” I told her what happened and she figured out pretty quickly that R had done something to let in something VERY nasty. A very dark spirit, or demon, whatever you want to call it. She managed to calm R down and R came back, lying on the floor looking at up us in shock, completely unaware of what had happened to her. May told us that she hadn’t gotten rid of the spirit but suppressed it and we’d need to actually do a real exorcism or it would end up coming back out and taking over R again. We agreed that the following weekend would be a good choice since it was a classic full moon and also we would all be able to get together without worrying about class.
When the day came I went to my apartmentmates (My apartments consisted of 3 bedrooms, a shared kitchen, and 2 bathrooms) and told them, “So I don’t know what you believe, but you know I’m kinda on the metaphysical side. My friends and I believe one of our friends got possessed. Tonight we’re going to try to perform an exorcism. I just wanted to warn you guys so if you heard any thumping or yelling coming from my room you didn’t call campus security or the RA’s or something on us.” My apartmentmates were kinda baffled but they agreed.
That night we got almost our entire group together, myself, L, R, May, and a few others who I’ll call E, A, B, T, and J. We put my mattress on the floor, May smudged the room with some sage, and we got ready. We didn’t have any music or anything, the only thing you could hear was my apartmentmate Josh who was a music major playing his guitar in the next room. The following was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. L and I each took one of R’s legs, T and I think B each took one of her arms and got ready to hold her down. The others were mostly there for moral/spiritual support. As soon as May let go of the seal she’d put on it you could see R’s face change. She started snarling and thrashing and even though she wasn’t saying anything coherent at first it didn’t sound like her in the slightest. R is a good person, a kind girl who would never try to hurt her friends and she legitimately had tried to stab me with a fork, scratched me, and was doing everything in her power to hurt us or get free, it was NOT her.
May started the process of trying to draw the evil spirit out but it was a serious fight, even for the most powerful medium I’ve ever met in my entire life. Things kept getting weirder. There wasn’t any head-flipping around shit or anything like that but at one point R, a 5′5″ less-than-perfect shape girl lifted myself and L, off the floor at the same time with just one leg each! I’m a 200+ pound dude and L’s about the same build as I am but she picked up both of us a good six inches in the air.
Most of what whatever the thing in R said I couldn’t understand but there was a lot of back-and-forth between May and R as she tried to force the spirit out of her. The weirdest thing was that sound went... wonky in the room. We couldn’t hear Josh playing anymore but any time anyone would talk it sounded distorted, especially R and May. And worse off sound was jumping around the room. I’d say something and it sounded like it was coming from the opposite side of the room, or T would say something and it sounded like it was coming from her sister A instead. ALL of us experienced this, it wasn’t any one of us hearing it. Even B and E who didn’t have very good spirit senses were hearing it. The room was darker and the air was harder to breathe.
Finally it took the spiritual equivalent of me getting behind the spirit and pushing and May pulling but between the two of us using all our power we were able to get it out of R and immediately the room changed. May and I both felt it leave at the same time as R collapsed back down on the mattress and everyone felt the change in the atmosphere of the room. R sounded normal again, a bit hoarse, but normal. After May gave her a clean bill of health, we all finally went our separate ways (though a couple of us stayed over because most of us didn’t want to be alone after that). It felt like it took maybe 45 minutes, but almost 3 and half hours had passed when we looked at the time.
The interesting epilogue to this tale is the next morning I ran into my apartmentmates in the kitchen and I apologized profusely for all the noise. Even though I’d warned them I still felt really bad because I knew it was late and we’d been shouting, R (or whatever was in her) had been yelling and cursing, and there was a LOT of thumping and bumping as we tried to restrain her. Both of them just kinda looked at me blankly and Josh told me, “I thought you guys were gonna make a lot of noise and I heard you all go into your room but after that I didn’t hear anything until your friends left.” Not a sound. In those apartments with paper-thin walls, neither Josh nor Paul had heard a peep from any of us in spite of the fact that we were NOT being quiet at all. I asked Josh about his guitar playing since to us it stopped almost as soon as we began and he said he’d been practicing for almost an hour. That was one of the most quantifiable parts of the experience, the fact that my apartmentmates heard nothing while we were all being so loud, the fact that we all experienced the sound jumping around the room, the fact that a dear friend of mine tried to stab me with a fork (yes I’m not letting her live that down). That was what made me believe in what we’d done. That was the experience we all shared that really made me believe that things like spirits and the like do exist, and not all of them are good.
So I guess the moral of this story is that when you’re going to college be prepared for a lot of things. Difficult classes, papers that you totally forgot are due tomorrow and oh my god the professor is a nazi and will never let this slide, meeting new people that you’ll love, meeting new people that you’ll hate, awkward sexual encounters, having awkward roommates, possibly having awkward sexual encounters with your roommates, awkward parties where nobody really has fun, being constantly tired or late for something, and possibly exorcising demons in your dorm room.
