Author: wormholewanderer

Updates and Tulpas

It’s been a solid month and five days since I’ve been able to flood my keyboard with thoughts about strange events, but luckily I’m officially done with finals, graduation, and my first college degree. (For some reason I thought it would feel a little more exciting…) Anyway, I’m now ready to take on summer and spend it filling my brain with ghosts, ghouls, aliens and Bigfoot. I’m going to be planning an expedition to go ghost hunting with a few friends of mine to a well known haunted hotel in central-easternish Minnesota, and am probably more excited for that than I was to walk across the stage at my own graduation. I am also excited to announce that while I was at first weary about having to find a dreaded summer job to fill the gap between one school ending and the other beginning, I am lucky enough to escape the cliche of lifeguard or camp counselor and spend my entire summer fixing up my parents very beat up house and taking care of my second youngest nephew. In other words, I have a new goal to avoid minimum wage customer service jobs forever. Because they’re soul sucking and terrible.

NOW. Back to the paranormal stuff….

I have tons of stories to throw up here, but because of my schedule I haven’t been able to yet. Hopefully I’ll get around to that eventually. What I really wanted to do with this post, besides update my non-existent readers on my life, is talk about something I’ve been hearing about a lot lately through various sources which I think it relatively interesting. It seems that once a theme pops up in one place, it catches on everywhere else, too. Today that theme happens to be tulpas. As a basic run-down, these are entities that are essentially created out of human thought, either intentionally or unintentionally. Of course this popped up in the recent January reboot of the X-Files, in the episode titled “Home Again” (which I , like many other die-hard fans, REALLY hoped would reconnect to the infamous season four episode two episode titled “Home”). “Home Again” followed an evil tulpa that goes around gruesomely murdering officials involved in relocating (or preventing the relocation of) homeless people off of the street for their own benefit, created by an artist whose mental energy accidentally brought the “Band-Aid Nosed Man” to life. The artist was played by Time Armstrong, which made me pretty much adore the episode no matter how ridiculously named the monster was, so it was pretty great. After seeing this, and hearing about these things in a number of other places such as internet articles and podcasts, I went ahead and did some research. One site I found described an entire process for creating these entities, complete with naming them and teaching them to speak. Others warned against the practice completely, claiming nothing good can come of toying with the idea. While I’m not completely sold on the belief that it’s possible to create something out of nothing, the entire phenomenon seemed to me very closely related to one other common topic in the paranormal world, which is poltergeists. While there are some obvious differences, the idea of creating a powerful energy, something strong enough to manifest in the physical world, in your own mind, is both intriguing and ultimately a little terrifying. Now that I have been freed of my college-student responsibilities, I intend to finally dig through all these books on my shelves and cram in as much weird knowledge as I can, but for some reason, I have a feeling I’m going to end up scouring amazon for even more books, probably about tulpas. Does anyone else know of any obscure little creatures that would make for good summer reading? Or have any personal experiences with tulpas? I feel that the possibilities for them are endless, but then again, I feel like the possibilities for a lot of things are endless, too.

Here, You’re Never Really Alone

I spent the majority of my day yesterday bumming around my house, going back and forth between listening to Jim Harold’s various podcasts and reading my most recent Half Priced Books find, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter by Nick Redfern. My big house was unusually empty, and I happily took advantage of this to  roam free on the main floor with my Bluetooth speakers keeping me company. It was an uneventful, introverted day, and it wasn’t until my sister dropped by to borrow our moms big old truck that another person came to the house. She quickly left, and having run out of things to do, I decided to take a bath. I sent her a text telling her the house would be locked while I was soaking away, so if she brought back the truck to be sure to bring a house key. I got no reply, but sunk into the warm waters anyway with nothing but silence in my ears and a book in my hand. About fifteen minutes later, I heard the front door open and my dogs go ballistic. They quieted down almost immediately after being soothed by a voice I assumed belonged to my sister. Assuming she would need help unloading things from the truck (hence the reason she borrowed it), I pulled the stopper from the drain and watched the water get sucked away with all my dirt from the day. Having heard her go upstairs, when I climbed out of the tub and into a towel, I called up the stairs outside the bathroom to let her know I would soon be able to help her, but I was answered with simply more silence. Confused, I ascended the stairs, peering into every room at the top to find them empty. Going back to the main floor, I checked all the doors to ensure they remained bolted shut then peaked through the window shades to see if my sisters small Toyota (which she left when she took the truck) was still outside, and sure enough, it was. The truck, as I suspected, was nowhere to be found. Realizing now that whoever must have come over was not my sister, I called and texted every other possible source of the noises, including my mother who happens to be in Florida, with no avail. Having at this point realized it would be wise to throw on some clothes instead of skulking around in a wet towel, I went down to my basement to change. Coming back upstairs about five minutes later, I met my sister just as she and her boyfriend were walking in the door.  They, too, had no idea who had been at my house. This gave me permission to play a game that has become a favorite of mine over the past few years, and realizing this made me pretty excited. My house has security cameras in the front and back, a feature which has afforded us to catch some pretty hilarious attempts at graffiti in the past. Now realizing I can just check the cameras to figure out my mysterious visitor, I hopped onto a chair to reach the in-house recording device that’s hooked up to the TV and began to poor through an unnecessary amount of 15 seconds clips filled with insects and passing cars. I found clips of my sister coming and going, but nobody else. This leaves me with no other option but to consider that either A) due to being constantly surrounded by other people, being alone in my house for longer than a few hours at a time makes me hallucinate another person’s presence, or B) whatever strange things used to happen in this house when I was a few years younger than I am now are slowly creeping back up on me. What I find interesting about this is that while I was hearing these things, my mind didn’t go to the paranormal, to a ghost, or to something strange, it went to a completely logical explanation. I feel like that’s the part that gets me, that these experiences can be so real that it isn’t until after you’ve evaluated them that you realize they had to be something other than what you initially thought. It’s the quiet, insidious way they sneak up on you, a slow revelation. I suppose I’ll never know what really happened, and honestly I’m not really all that worried about whether or not I ever will, but I can say for certain that realizing you’re never really alone in this house is a realization I have made many times, and yet it never fails to make me feel a little more uneasy each and every time.

Too Bad There Isn’t a ‘Paranormal Investigator’ Major at the U

I’ve been away from this blog far to long, because I’ve been awful busy trying to figure out my life. Again. Surprise! I’ve always had this horrible sense of ‘not good enough’, a sense of complete dissatisfaction with every major I declare in school. Yes, even going to school to have a job playing with serial killers wasn’t enough for me. I’ve struggled greatly over the past few years trying to figure out what in the actual hell I am going to do with myself, and have realized recently that maybe I can quiet down all that inner yelling if I just, very eloquently, say “fuck it” and do what I want. So, alas, I have just returned from a meeting with an advisor at the university I’m transferring to next fall. I made this appointment with a woman who specializes in helping students create their own degree programs, as there is no doubt I won’t be able to settle for something everyone else already has (coughcoughbrat). Anyway, I had to come up with an idea to pitch that wasn’t along the lines of “I want to be able to go hunt for cryptozoological creatures in every known country on earth, then probably settle down somewhere in California where I can study UFO’s and Bigfoot from my own backyard.” So, using my creative little noggin, I sugar-coated this, just a bit. “I would like a degree that blends media and television production, cultural and anthropology studies, and history”. That seems normal, right? “I want to produce documentary-style television shows that focus on traveling around the world to explore different elements of different cultures.” I just sort of left out the part that should have included “mostly their beliefs about different things that lurk in the shadows”. This pitch was not entirely bullshit, I have always had a very strong interest in other, mostly non-Americanized cultures, and would genuinely enjoy a job where I could just run around the globe sharing different cultures with people who never get the chance to leave the US themselves. Ironically, the advisor perked right up and said “Oh! You know my husband and I just started watching this show called Expedition Unknown!” to which I immediately replied “Yeah, that host is named Josh Gates, and I very literally want his life. So help me design a degree that will get me that sort of job.” So, in the end, I walked back out onto the lawns of the ridiculously large, intimidating campus (that I had never even seen until today. Oops.) with new hope that I could probably maybe do something with this little life of mine. All that inner screaming that I need to get a MOVE ON with my life has quieted down, at least for the moment, and for the first time, I’ve officially decided to just go ahead and plunge head-on into the mysterious world of attempting to, as cheesy as it is, ‘follow my dreams’. Student loans, be damned, I say. For the most part, I’m just hoping this all goes according to plan. But if I’m wrong, and I end up going to graduate school for something completely unrelated, at least I can one day say “one time in college I graduated with a major I designed specifically to make shows about monster hunting”, and I will forever be the coolest aunt of all my siblings little monsters. And frankly, that’s worth it.

Kelly’s Story

While I have several friends who have agreed lend me their stories for this blog, I am going to start out with that of someone who reached out to me online to share their story. I always appreciate hearing stories from outside of my little circle of life! Today I will be telling about Kelly’s experiences in her new home, which she moved into last October. Since the move in, she and her son have experienced feeling a presence in the house (something I can definitely relate to). She reports having felt something touch her back in her basement, which she had had blessed with sage last November. While that had worked for a while, the feelings have been coming back recently. One story that really gave me chills was one night while watching television, words appeared across the screen that were related to the T.V, but lacked meaning or sense. She had considered the possibility that someone could have been messing with her through their cell phone, but it seems unlikely (and I agree) that someones idea of a good prank would be writing nonsensical messages across the screen. This happened not once, but twice in one night then never happened again. Kelly’s also mentioned seeing shadows consistently in her home, and she is not alone, as her son has seen them as well, even at the same time as her. This also happens often at her computer if shes starts to doze off, she says, seeing a shadow out of the corner of her eye every time. The last thing Kelly shared with me has less to do with the house, but I still think is fascinating. Over the last year, she has been seeing dimes everywhere. At least once a day, and as many as three times a day, dimes seem to appear on the ground constantly for her, and what’s really interesting is that she’s not alone. Her friend, without prior knowledge of Kelly’s dimes, mentioned the same thing happening to her as well.  This reminds me of a phenomenon I see in my own life all the time, where if I meet a person from a different state, suddenly everything revolves around that state! For instance, my current boyfriend moved here from North Dakota after being there for about a year. Since we’ve started dating, I feel like every product I buy, book I read, or person I meet comes from North Dakota. It’s very strange! I like the story about the dimes because it goes to show that if you observe the world the right way, it can show you things other people may have missed. Kelly’s friend theorizes that it’s an attempt from someone in the afterlife to communicate with them.What I personally think is important with any sort of unusual phenomenon is how you interpret it. I believe that what your gut feeling is, generally turns out to be the right answer. For example, there could be several reasons a person could be experiencing something, such as noticing the name of a state everywhere or seeing dimes all over the place. But how a person interprets that is what makes a difference. What would have given Kelly’s friend the idea of the dimes being a method of communication? It seems abstract, but from my view, if that’s the message she got from the dimes, then it’s probably what it means. Life has an interesting way of turning strange coincidences and intuitions into something significant if you pay enough attention. 

Thank you Kelly for sharing your experiences with me!

The Little Boy in the Hallway

I’ve decided to kick off my paranormal story collection with my own first experience. This is a story that I’ve pondered over for many years; was it a hallucination? Did I make it up so long ago that I’ve somehow convinced myself it happened? Was it a dream that just seemed so real that the mind of a five or maybe six year old couldn’t sort it out as fiction from fact? While I maintain my belief that this is 100% fact to this day, I do not dismiss the possibility that my mind and my imagination ran away together. Now, before we begin, I’m going to provide a little background information that is necessary to the story. I am one of five children, although at one point, through adoption, that number grew to six. The order of my siblings is a simple one, the youngest is a boy, with three girls stacked on top, leaving my two oldest brothers (one biological, one adopted) sitting at the top of the totem pole. The difference in age from my oldest brother to my youngest is ten years, and I fall in as second from the bottom, about four years my brothers senior. The only one not born into the house we grew up in is the oldest biological brother of mine, who was instead born in Oklahoma while my father was in school for aviation technician training for the military. When they moved back to Minnesota, where the rest of us were born, they picked a house in Minneapolis that was built in the early 1900’s. While the history of the house is quiet and scarce, the experiences people have had within its walls are anything but. While my parents live in denial of any sort of activity, it has been experienced by nearly all of my siblings, as well as several guests. When my parents first moved into the house, it was large, but not large enough. Soon after the birth of the youngest of their children, my parents decided to ad an addition to the house, creating the six bedroom, five bedroom house that still stands today. My first experience happened shortly after the completion of the upper level of the house, which was converted from a one bedroom, one bathroom floor with sloped ceilings and an attic to a four bedroom, two bathroom floor, which also included the second laundry room in the house. The three rooms at the top of the stairs belonged to me and my two sisters, the oldest to the left of the stairway, mine on the right, with the middle sister’s door at the very top. I spent many nights in the room across the hall from me, inside of my oldest sisters room. We would watch movies until what felt like very late, although I’m sure it was never past 9:00. There was one night, in particular, though, where I had either fallen asleep, or she had, while we watched a movie. It must have been either a Friday or Saturday, because I distinctly remember it being REALLY late (which means past 9:00). When the movie was over, and we were both once again conscious, I asked if I could just stay the rest of the night in her room instead of walking across the landing to mine. I was either five or six at the time, making her either eight or nine, and in proper eight or nine year old fashion, she refused. So with sleepy eyes and a crabby demeanor, I left her room to make the five foot trek to mine. I shut her door and turned around, only to freeze mid-pivot. My heart, I’m pretty sure, literally stopped for a brief second. At first I thought it was my little brother, sleepwalking as he, and I, sometimes did. But this was not my little brother. Yes, he was small, looking to be about two years old,  with blond hair like my brother, but his eyes were not the same dull shade of green that looked back at me. He stood in front of the last pole of the banister, maybe a foot and a half from myself. What startled me most was the green. Yes, the green. No, not like Slimer from Ghostbusters, and not like a martian. There was no gooey residue that covered the child, only a film of green tint, and that is the only way I can describe it. Sort of like a green spotlight was focused only on him, but had no point of origin, as if it radiated from within. I remember reaching back for my sisters doorknob but being unable to open it, then darting into my bedroom and slamming the door shut behind me. The entire experience felt like twenty minutes, but I’m guessing it really lasted about thirty seconds, maybe less. I don’t remember anything else about that night except burrowing underneath the covers and hiding my face in the mane of my oversized stuffed horse (a friend I took on every sleepover and trip with me until I was literally about sixteen, old habits die hard). This was the one and only time I have ever seen the little boy from the hallway, but it’s far from my last experience. While in recent years the activity has died down to a quiet lull, and I have considered the idea of poltergeists causing most the activity I experienced in my later years (there were a lot of very hormonal teenage girls in a small space), I have no explanation for the little boy. Perhaps he was just lost, or again, a figment of my imagination. I can say in all honesty that for me, it was as real as the sun setting in the west, and I will never forget the little boy I met in the hallway that night.

The Begining

 I’d have to say it all started with a crush on a man that many women, including myself, still swoon over. While most little girls grew up (in my generation) watching the Disney Channel (what shows were on at the time, I  probably couldn’t tell you), my attention was focused on two make-believe FBI agents that would keep me glued to the screen every Sunday night with my dad by my side. There he was, David Duchovny, throwing pencils at the ceiling and repeatedly making Gillian Anderson’s character question his sanity. This, I thought, was the man I wanted to marry (and to be frank, Duchovny, if you’re reading this, the offer still stands). But it takes more than just good looks and brilliant story telling to get a girl into the paranormal. Oh yes, I had more than just Mulder and Scully egging me on. There was, of course, more grounded and honest reasons I was fascinated that fell outside of the realm of fantasy. My dad would tell me stories of his friends going missing while flying planes in Panama, and the strange things that flew beside him in the air during his years of service in the Air National Guard.  I was probably the only kid in my Catholic elementary school playing with a Ouija board and trying to hold seances to contact whatever it was that I believed haunted my house, and who could forget the hours of printing everything I could off of the internet about the Loch Ness Monster? Now, where does this leave me, all these years later? I’m in the awkward place I hope more people than just myself find themselves, floating through college, finding there’s no real way to make a career out of looking for Big Foot. Or is there? How did Josh Gates land a gig traveling the wold looking for cryptozoological creatures? How did Jim Harold get from wherever he was to being able to dedicate all of his time to making pod casts about the paranormal? How are these people doing this, and why can’t I figure out how to get there,too? This has left me scratching my head for as long as I’ve had to worry about what to major in in college. So far I’ve been a psychology major, an anthropology major, a creative writing major, and a law enforcement major (because we all known people don’t really call ghost busters when they think something goes bump in the night). I’m coming up on my junior year next fall, and still, I have no idea what I want to do with my life. My go-to-plan, for when the counselors and admissions applications for transfer students ask, I say I want to be a psychiatrist, and my end goal is to work for the Violent Crime Unit of the FBI, because if you can’t marry Mulder, you might as well do his job, right? Kinda? Anyway, this is, at this point where I’m headed. If I can’t find a chupacabra, maybe I can meet a serial killer who thinks he is one. But still, my mind wanders. Maybe I can be an archaeology major, or a zoologist. Perhaps I should study media and production, or broadcasting and communications. As I’ve poured over the information I can scrounge up on the web about the educations of the people I want so badly to be, I’ve realized that they’ve done absolutely nothing to ensure that they somehow end up a paranormal professional. This is pretty discouraging, but also exciting. I can literally take any path I want, and just hope to hell it gets me to where I want to go. I’ve decided on this blog for a few reasons.

  1. To share my bullshit ramblings. They’ve gotta go somewhere.
  2. To connect with other people about the paranormal, and to share their stories.
  3. To start my path, because I can’t for the life of me think of another way to do it.

Now, I cannot guarantee that anyone except a few forced friends will ever read this, or that after this post any more will come, but for now, welcome to Girl Seeks Ghost, a blog about trying to find a way to make a living by studying what is probably the most ridiculed and scoffed at area a person can spend their lives trying to uncover: the paranormal.