There's a huge world out there, and we all have had unique experiences from living in it. Some of them are comical, some are sad, some are disgusting - but they're all worth sharing. This thread is dedicated to recording the tales from space. Long, detailed stories are encouraged. They can be about anything from computer hacking to your first kiss - so long as they're true (SWIM is welcome)
I'll start with a weird one.
Back in 2006, I was an active member of a fundamentalist church group. While at a youth center they had built in the downtown district of an impoverished farm community, I met another young guy named Sean. Sean was really bright, had a great sense of humor and was a talented guitarist, so we got along very quickly. We hung out around once a week and, on a cold December night, we were at the youth center when a girl there brought up the typical fundamentalist Christian talking point that all secular music has ties to the occult. Now, Sean and I both were big fans of the band Black Sabbath, and we didn't really take these claims seriously because they're typically predicated on poor arguments. At any rate, Sean mentioned that he actually had an experience with the occult and said it left him with no interest in ever pursuing it.
I asked for more details.
He went on to explain that the little rural farm town we all grew up in actually had a longstanding history Traditional Satanism and devil worship. I didn't know anything about this because I lived in the next community over (which was about a half hour away with nothing but forest and farms betwixt them). His demeanor became quite serious as he explained to me that, before he became a Christian, he hung out with group of other low-life teenagers. You know the kind - no real parental supervision, no direction, wasted potential, impending teen pregnancy, etcetera. One of the particularly odd members of the group wound up getting involved in the occult for some reason or another. One summer day, he showed Sean and his friends that he had erected a shrine to Satan in his attic - complete with a large, old, Victorian-style vanity mirror in the center.
So the story goes, strange things started happening around town after this. Namely, people around the community reported seeing these strange apparitions that they had no explanation for. The legend was that these apparitions had the appearance of being somewhere around seven foot tall and had the basic shape of a bipedal primate (like a man - walking upright with two legs, two arms and a head). They were described to me as very dark. They had no features beyond that of looking like a shadow, yet nothing was casting it. They always mentioned a deep-seated pair of colorful "eyes" that were bright but wouldn't glow. The tale goes that they were most usually colored red, sometimes greens, and very seldom blue. One of the friends was riding a bicycle through a park when the rest of the group supposedly saw one of these things chasing after him faster than any animal in the area could possibly move. He claimed that the group had seen these apparitions several times, usually while the friends were in groups. This supposedly continued up until the point where the odd fellow that wound up heavily absorbed in the Satanic Arts (who had isolated himself and stopped seeing his friends) was discovered by the police hanging from the apex of his attic (in front of his shrine). Police ruled the death a suicide, but did so reluctantly as they had no explanation as to how he managed to get to the top of the high ceiling with no latter.
Although I was a fundamentalist Christian at the time, I wasn't stupid. I was extremely skeptical of any kind of story like this. After all, legends have a tendency of being repeated and exaggerated, especially among young or uneducated hill-folk like we were. So I earnestly told Sean that I didn't believe his story and wouldn't unless I saw some proof. He said that he could show me the house.
The vapors of my breathe were visible against the cold night air as we approached my sky-blue Oldsmobile. It was a short ride passing through abandoned houses and dilapidated businesses that pockmark depressed farming towns. I parked on the curb in the small neighborhood, and we through moon-kissed snow as walked towards the house. We stood a few feet away from its eastern side, which had an abnormally large window. It was dark, so Sean and I sat talking about the account of these black things. The conversation droned on for about five minutes, until we reached the part that I will never, ever forget.
I pulled the collar of my trench coat closer to the biting cold on my neck. "So who lives here now?"
He responded calmly without taking his eyes off of the building. "It's been abandoned since the suicide."
No sooner did he say this that a pair of small red lights lit up in the window.
The night was too dark to see into the window, but the two red lights came on right next to each other like eyes. They were very close together and shined no light into the rest of the house. It was almost as if the light was within the glass of the window itself.
Then there were two more.
And two more.
Within less than a minute, the entire windows was covered in pairs of glowing red lights. Many were blinking.
"I don't believe this..." I said aloud in a lost kind of way.
"Believe it." Sean said patiently.
Suddenly, a bright light inside the house (from the attic) came on so that the staircase ascending towards it was visible. Little, green glowing orbs that looked lightning bugs appeared as if they were flying from the attic into the sky.
I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you honestly and literally cannot believe your eyes, but it's a surreal place to be. I slowly took a step forward to get a closer look, at which point Sean grabbed my shoulder tightly with a firm "No."
Then, all at once, it stopped.
That story was ten years ago, but I still think about a lot. I've returned to that house about four times now. Sometimes with the company of Sean, other friends, and even alone. I've since moved away but have done a lot of careful reading about the house. The satanic history of the town checked out. The town was a hub of occult activity, and even had a doomsday sex abuse cult operating within a couple of miles from the house. It's been something of a plague on my mind since I've seen it. I've tried to rationalize it away, but it's just no use. I saw something I cannot explain that night. I lie awake sometimes wondering if all that supernatural stuff is real and if I was lucky enough to be one of the few people on this planet to see a part of it. It make me think a lot about hell, heaven, God, the devil, and it teases the boundaries of what's real and what isn't. It really changed my life forever.
I don't expect you to believe this story. In fact, as I honestly reported, didn't believe it until I saw it for myself.
