Category: Personal

The Gods (?)

March 23, 2024
PersonalUncategorized
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One of my earliest childhood memories is waking up in my bunkbed one morning (I slept in the upper bunk since I was older than my sister). The head of our bunkbed was against the southern wall of our bedroom, and the right side was against the east wall. The walls were painted pale blue. We were living in a small white house that my parents rented around the corner from my maternal grandparents.

When my grandparents moved to the next town over, my parents bought their house, and we moved into that house when I was 6. When I had this experience, I was probably either 4 or 5 years old; I lean more towards 5 because I’m approximately 2 years older than my sister, and if I were 4, she probably would have still been in a crib and not in a bunkbed.

When I woke up one particular morning, on the wall beside my bed, I saw three figures in all I can describe now as bas relief. The first figure was a sun, the second a moon, and the third a deer (at least that’s what my child-brain interpreted it as; it had elaborate antlers, so it was a stag). I’ve tried to find images that most closely resemble what I saw. I am pretty sure the sun and moon both had faces.

Was it a dream? A hallucination? I can only say that it felt very real to me, and when I got up that day and was sent outside to play, the very first thing I did was run around to the east side of the house to see if the stag’s body was sticking out of the side of the house. I recall a feeling of confusion when there was nothing there, as well as disappointment.

I can still see these figures in my mind when I think on this memory. They were not “colored” in that the sun wasn’t yellow, the moon wasn’t white, and the stag wasn’t brown. They were all the same color as the wall, that pale blue, with shadows that made them appear 3-dimensional, or bas relief.

The sun was on the left, the moon in the center, and the stag was on the right (and closest to my face). The stag also protruded out from the wall, almost like a hunting trophy mounted deer head that people hang on their walls. If I had to guess at their size, they were all probably 16″-20″ across and the same top-to-bottom, not overly large, but not very small either. I’m trying to judge the size as an adult comparing their size to the size a twin bunkbed would be.

I’ve kept this memory for my entire life and often find myself wondering if it has any significance. I can easily say, “Oh, maybe that’s why I love symbolism and the occult,” but who knows. It could have just as easily been a dream.

The Bonfire

March 5, 2024
ParanormalPersonal
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I grew up in an area of Massachusetts that is part of the Bridgewater Triangle, which is a large area in the state where weird, strange paranormal and other events occur more often (supposedly) than outside of that area.

When I was 20, I was dating a guy named Ed. I related this story several years ago to a Bridgewater Triangle researcher, so this story appears elsewhere on the web somewhere (or it did at some point). Not sure if I used a pseudonym for Ed, but anyway, Ed was his real name.

Ed and I were parked in the main parking lot at Lake Nippenicket, which is also known locally as The Nip. We were in my 1975 Ford Mustang, probably making out. Across the lake from us, we noticed a huge bonfire on the beach, with several people dancing around it. Ed thought it might be some friends of his, so we decided to drive over there and check it out. He drove, since he knew the way in and out of that part of the Nip. It was bumpy old dirt roads (not ideal roads for a Mustang).

Once we reached the area where the bonfire was, there was no sign of a bonfire, nor did it look like there had been one there anytime recently. We stood on the beach, gazing across at the parking lot where we’d been parked before, certain we were in the right spot, but we looked up and down the beach and saw nothing. It was also dead quiet. If it was further along the shore, we’d have at least seen a glare from the fire reflecting off the water and we definitely should have heard voices. We saw and heard nothing, and there was just this creepy feeling while we were there.

We sat in the car for a few minutes, looking at the water, and we saw something rise up out of the water. It looked like a snake or turtle head, definitely something organic, maybe about 6 inches across….with one giant eye in the center of it, staring at us like a periscope.

That was it for us! Ed started the car and we drove back out and back over to the parking lot across the lake. Once back on the opposite shore, we could again see the bonfire as well as the group of people dancing around it. We had definitely been in the right spot, there’s no doubt in my mind.

The Ouija

February 23, 2024
OuijaPersonal
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I was listening to the Belief Hole podcast recently, to an episode they did on the topic of Ouija boards, so I thought I’d share a couple of my experiences.

There is a Ouija board that hangs on the wall in my home office. I’ve had this board since I was a kid. I still remember what the box looked like. I don’t remember where or when we got it, but I remember the box was tattered and broken. It was the box pictured below, though this one is in MUCH better shape than ours was.

From what I have been able to find, this packaging was used in the 50s and 60s, and the box image changed in the 70s. Our board, this would have been in the very late 70s, early 80s that we got it, probably picked up at a yard sale or flea market, because my family was big into those things back then.

I remember my sister and I “playing” with it a few times, and my mother said it was evil and tossed it in the trash. I found it under the bureau in our room a few days later. I think I may have mentioned in a previous post that I had an abusive mother. Of course, she assumed we pulled it out of the trash, so I got a beating for it being back in our room, and she tossed it again. A week later, she found it under my bed. Another beating, another toss in the trash. When it turned up under our bureau again, this time I just hid it away in the top shelf of our closet, way in the back. Mom being only 5’2″, she wouldn’t have known it was there lol!

By this time, because it had been trashed so many times, the planchette had lost its little plastic pointer. The round clear plastic part was still intact, but the little pointer had broken off, so there was a tiny hole in the center instead of that little pin thing hanging down.

Years later, when I moved away from home, I left the Ouija board behind, forgotten way in the back on that top shelf of the closet. With my sister and I both gone from the house, our younger brother (9 years younger than her, 11 years younger than I) knocked the wall down between his tiny bedroom and our bigger bedroom. Doing so, he emptied out the entire room, closet included. The next time I saw him, he handed me the battered old Ouija box and said, “You left this in the closet.”

So I brought the board home and it moved with me, buried in the bottom of some box or another, from our first apartment to our second apartment to our third apartment and finally to our house when we bought it (closed on Halloween 2003!), at which point, I found it. I think the box is still in the house somewhere, I don’t remember. I don’t think I’d have thrown it out. I’ve heard enough stories about Ouija boards being destroyed that looking back, I realized that the thing belongs to me, whether I want it to or not, and I’m okay with that. It has a nice home and someone who respects it, doesn’t mess with it, doesn’t treat it like trash.

Pulling it out of the box in the early 2000s, though, the planchette is fully intact, pointer and all, which is weird. I mean, I know we never replaced the planchette. The board pretty much just languished in the back of that closet shelf until my brother gave it back to me. I know the pointer was missing in the 80s, but now it’s fully intact. The Ouija board now hangs on the wall of my home office behind me (actual pic to the right here), and I have the planchette hanging from a piece of fishing line. I haven’t actually used it since I was a kid. After the Belief Hole episode, I’ve thought about pulling it down off the wall and giving it a go, but I don’t know if I will. BUT, I will share a story about an experience that I had with a Ouija board in high school.

As I said, I grew up with an abusive mother. It made me weak…well, maybe meek is a better word. I was meek and mousey when I was a kid. I was also small and skinny. I got bullied incessantly, from grade school right up through high school. I guess I was an easy target. In high school, the marching band was my saving grace. I wasn’t in the band, but I was in the color guard (I spun a rifle). So most of my high school friendships were there. I still was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, even with them, but the glory of it was that they didn’t care. They accepted me for my weird self.

One time after a band competition, there was a party at one of the band member’s houses. In the family room in the basement, a bunch of us girls started messing with a Ouija board that was down there. There were two sisters – I’ll call them Carol and Lisa Quimby. Their last name did begin with a Q and Carol’s first name did begin with a C, and I’ve kept those initials because they’re important to the story. Carol was older than me by two years, and Lisa was younger by a year. I think at the time, I was a sophomore, Lisa a freshman, and Carol a senior. The board seemed to respond especially well to Carol, and when the older kids decided to go upstairs and left us younger kids downstairs, we kept trying to talk to the Ouija board. I asked it if I’d ever get married, and the board responded with “CQ.” We rolled our eyes, thinking it wanted Carol Q. to come back, and I asked again, and again, the board responded with “CQ.” The third time I asked, the board then kept responding “CQ CQ CQ CQ CQ” over and over again. We all just thought it would only respond to Carol Q., so we lost interest and put it away.

Fast forward about a decade, and I met the man who would become my husband, and his initials are CQ. I didn’t remember the Ouija board incident at the time; it wasn’t until a few years later when it popped back into my brain and I remembered. I even brought it up to Lisa Q. at some point, and she remembered. Her sister had passed from cancer a couple of years before, and we were talking about her, and that’s what made me mention the Ouija board incident.

Interestingly enough, I’ve also since learned that CQ is an amateur radio call essentially meaning ‘Calling all stations.’

So do I believe we can communicate with spirits through the Ouija? I don’t know. Was the CQ just a coincidence? I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, if the initials were something more common, maybe I could completely write it off as a coincidence, but last names that begin with Q aren’t all that common as say Jones or Smith or Brown. So who knows. And maybe…whomever or whatever was speaking to us through the board that night was simply putting out a call to anyone who was listening… “Calling CQ, CQ, CQ, CQ…”

Moth

October 26, 2023
Personal
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For most of my childhood, I languished in a cocoon of my own making, hiding from a monster that was trying to pass itself off as a “mother” and mean kids who mistook my meekness as a sign of weakness rather than a sign that I was just hiding from monsters.

When I finally left home, I began – slowly – pecking at the inside of that cocoon, trying so hard to emerge from that shell of loneliness and false safety. As I grew older, I started to poke through the shell and let the air and sunshine, the mist and moonlight, in a little bit at a time.

Moth created with MidJourney AI

2023 Skat / MidJourneyAI

What finally emerged from the cocoon was strange and weird and newborn and fresh and raw, a soul seeing light for the first time but also fully aware of (and embracing) the shadows. I don’t think it was a butterfly, colorful and bright, emerging from a chrysalis. I think it was more likely a strangely beautiful moth, fluttering by night under the light of the moon, flittering around the world and alighting on the weird and beautiful ugly things that other people shun. When it flits around, finding its way through the world, it lands on things randomly, fascinated with the wonders of the world.

There is little structure in its wanderings; it finds joy in simple pleasures – it plays and frolicks as it sees fit, spontaneously and serendipitously; sometimes it lands on one thing for a while, stays for a bit and becomes enraptured. But then it’s off again to the next big adventure or the next beautiful thing, where it might land for a moment or a lifetime before moving on again. These are the games I play, the books I read, the shows I get addicted to and spend a month binge-watching, the weird conspiracy rabbit holes I dive into.

People often misunderstand this moth and try to catch it in a net and put it in a cage or, worse, pin it to a board to enjoy it at their leisure. Then they label it and decide what type of moth it is, how it should behave, what its likes and dislikes are, even though they haven’t taken the time to watch it in its free state…only as it’s pinned to their board. The moth stays because it’s contained there or pinned there, but it yearns to fly and explore. It stays there because it’s expected to stay there, and instead of protesting, it simply stays there, maybe fluttering a wing every now and then, maybe escaping for a brief amount of time.

I’ve spent a lifetime learning to love myself and embrace myself for exactly who I am and who I have become. That person is not someone who is set in routine and structure. She’s spent decades learning to keep her inner child alive, to be a free spirit and enjoy the things that give her pleasure. She spent the majority of her first 17 years almost completely friendless – her only friends were her dog, books, and music, in that order, and she lived inside her head. The older she got, the less closed off she became, and she began, bit by bit, to allow people into her world. Even all these years later, the number of people in that world can be counted on the fingers of one hand…because it’s a very exclusive world and only very special people get to enter the gates. They’re the ones who see her weirdness, acknowledge her weirdness, and love her anyway. When one of those people turns against the world – they (exes, ex-friends) get shoved out the front gates, and the world inside shrinks a little; she pulls it inward and the gates remain locked for a good long while.

This is to say, I’ve been burnt by a lot of people in my life, people I thought were friends, but who for whatever reason could not understand who or what I was. They mistake my silence for coldness, my inability to deal with conflict (I freeze) as non-caring. The more they badger me to explain my words or my actions, the more I shrink back into myself, all but retreating back into my broken cocoon.

It took me all these years to realize that other people’s reactions are not my problem. Other people’s inability to understand me is not my fault. The fact that I don’t fit into their way of thinking or being isn’t something I should feel guilty about. I’m happy with my small circle of friends, and I won’t let anyone fuck that up again. Quality over quantity…and finding people who “get” me is more important than holding onto people who don’t care to try.