It started when I was about eighteen years old. I was home alone one afternoon, reading a terrifying book on ghosts, which was scaring the living daylights out of me. My curiosity was stronger than my fear – up to a point. It changed, as my fear, which had been growing fast as I was reading, got to a point, where it got out of control. Quite literally, as it would soon show itself.


I shoved the book away from me and more towards the middle of the table, away from its edge. I could no longer read, the panic was so strong, that it felt unbearable. I sat there for a few more seconds, staring at that book and wondering what to do next to calm down. I decided to go for a walk and perhaps to talk to somebody, so I wouldn´t have to be alone with that fear. But I would just go to the bathroom first.


I got up and headed for the bathroom, but after just few steps, I heard a bang behind me. I jumped up startled and turned around to see what it was. The book, which hadn´t been anywhere near the edge of the table, was now lying on the floor open. I stared at it aghast, trying to convince myself, that perhaps I accidentally nudged it down somehow and I remember, that I desperately wanted to believe that. But no matter how hard I tried, I knew, that it just couldn´t happen that way. First, I was pretty sure, that I hadn´t come in contact with anything as I stood up. Then it was the sound of the book hitting the floor. It didn´t sound as if the book had fallen down accidentally, it was lauder than that, much lauder. It sounded as if something had thrown that book on the floor as hard as it could. There was more, that didn´t add up: the time. The bang, which startled me, came when I was already walking through the door, out of the room, several seconds after I stood up from the chair.


I was panic-stricken, but I continued towards the bathroom. When I got that far, I grasped the door handle to open the door to the bathroom. The door opened about 8-10 cm (3-4 inches) and then stopped. No matter how hard I pulled, the door just wouldn´t open any more. It was as if somebody or something was holding that door from inside. So I tried to shut it instead, with the same result. The door just froze in that position (3-4 inches open) and it would not move in any direction, no matter how much force I used. I looked in the gap where the door was open, between the door and the wall to see if there was anything there, which could explain that, but there was nothing, nothing at all. Just the air.


I ran out of the house in panic. I went straight to one of my friends and told her the whole story. She listened intrigued, but she didn´t have any explanation for what had happened. For all we knew, my house suddenly became “haunted”. It didn´t make me feel any safer. I spent several hours with her, waiting for my mother to return home, because there was no way I was going to be there alone that evening.


I did my best not to think about it and tried to forget it. I hoped, that if I stayed away from spooky books, I wouldn´t have any more of such frightening experiences. Unfortunately, I was wrong.


Several years passed. I was now in my twenties. I had moved to another house, in another country. I started to have another kind of strange experiences, totally different from the one described above. These ones were somewhat unusual, but not frightening. From time to time, all of a sudden, my back would start to itch like mad and when I looked at it in the mirror (before I started to scratch), I saw that the whole back was very red and full of long, red lines, which went in all directions. The redness and the lines usually disappeared in about one hour, as suddenly as they came. For all I know, that could be some skin condition. In any case, I didn´t linked the skin problems with what happened in my teens. After several years with it, the condition just disappeared, but was soon to be followed by other mysterious skin problems, these ones much stranger.


But before that, to my horror, “the haunting” returned – and this time without help from any scary books or movies. It was another house again. There was persistent knocking in the wall, which came and went over many years. It was only in one particular room – the bedroom, and in one particular wall – right behind my head. We would hear it daily for several weeks or months, then it would disappear for few months and after that it would return. I didn´t tell anyone about it, but this story would take a strange turn. One day I was visiting my neighbour who lived right beside us in a house identical to ours. At one point she came to mention that strange knocking in her bedroom behind her head. She used the same room as her bedroom and her bed was positioned just like mine. The knocking in our respective houses was in the same wall, in the same room. Some time after that, I screw up my courage and asked the other neighbours, who lived in the third and last of these identical houses, whether they experienced any knocking in that wall. They, too, use the same bedroom. They looked at me surprised and said no. They have never heard anything like it in their house.


One evening, when I returned home after a healing, there was knocking on the window in the bedroom. This was the beginning of a several weeks long period with various poltergeist phenomena, which scared me silly.

Another time I was sitting in the living room one evening and having one of my panic attacks. I decided to go to the kitchen, hoping that changing rooms will help a bit. As I was getting up off the sofa, there was a very laud bang on the window right behind my head. It was so laud, that it was strange the window didn´t break.


Last year, on two different occasions I had a new type of experience, which truly terrified me. I heard quite clearly somebody turning the key in the lock of the front door, walking in and shutting the door behind whoever it was. Then stillness. No more steps. When I went to the door to inquire, there was noone there. Nobody went in on those particular occasions. The first time it happened, I checked the door and it was unlocked. So I had heard right – the key had been turned in the lock and the door got unlocked. But by whom or what? Also – the door handle was hanging in a strange way, there was something wrong with it and it wouldn´t work anymore. We had to replace one part of it in order to repair it.


Sometimes my mattress and sheets turn black or dark grey where I have my upper body, as if I went to bed very dirty, which is not the case. We have some periods with persistent, rotten smell in two of the rooms, without any reason for it. There are also times, when food goes bad unusually quickly. Or some vegetables freeze nearly solid in the fridge, as if the fridge was a freezer. There is nothing wrong with the temperature in the fridge and other things and vegetables there are just fine. Or one day, suddenly, there is not enough space on the shelf for all the plates, which have stood there for years. Nobody has moved the shelf and the number of plates is the same, but for some reason, the last one just won´t fit at the top anymore and it´s not even close. Sometimes electrical and other equipment failure rate hits the roof. On several occasions, when we came home with new equipment, the new one wouldn´t work either and we had to drive back to the store to get another. We get a lot of different damages in the house, in which water is somehow involved. Once, the telephone started ringing and it wouldn´t stop. When I picked up the receiver, there was nobody there, but the telephone continued to ring as I held the receiver in my hand. I pulled out the plug, but the telephone was still ringing, however it could manage to do that.


And then there are the scratches… For more than a decade now I have been getting spontaneous scratches all over my body, but mostly on my legs, face and arms. They look like cat scratches, but I haven´t had cats in recent years. They come so often, that I have more than one visible at any time. They are mostly scratches, about 5 cm (2 inches) long, but sometimes longer and on some occasions they look like small stub wounds made by the tip of a knife. They appear while I am awake and most of the time I can both feel and see them coming. I can feel a sting or burning on my leg or other part of my body and when I look there, there is a new scratch forming. At that point it´s still faint and rose color, but if I keep checking every few minutes or so, I can watch how it gradually becomes deeper and darker. Some two months ago I sat at my desk and felt the familiar burning sensation above my right ankle. I looked there and discovered that my leg was bleeding. There was a new “stub wound” forming there and it´s still visible today as I am writing this. They take a long time to heal. One scratch, which appeared about one and a half years ago and which was particularly deep, left a scar.


The little that I have read about poltergeist phenomena isn´t supported by my personal experience. They say, that the usual source of it is a teenager and that it tends to go away or at least get better with time. It did start when I was a teenager, but got worse with time. In fact, the older I become, the more of it I experience. Some also say, that it can be a way to deal with difficult feelings, but my experiences show something exactly opposite: my difficult feelings get worse (much worse) as a result of it. If I am having a panic attack and a poltergeist phenomenon occurs (which it often does on such occasions), then the feeling of panic immediately gets magnified several times. And it takes longer time for it to go away.


Sometimes it may look and feel as if one is under attack or cursed, when everything that can go wrong, does and then other things, that nobody would believe could go wrong, start to do so as well, however they can manage that. But then come those other times, when it looks and feels exactly opposite. Things, that I want or need just fall into my hands, some apparently impossible problems just solve themselves miraculously, I find money, which I didn´t know existed in some book or other and people around me behave like angels. What´s more – these opposites seem to be somehow connected. And throughout it all, no matter what kind of experience I am having and whether I like it or not, there is this feeling, that it´s all intimately linked to… me.


With most, if not all my poltergeist experiences I have always had this feeling, that somehow it all comes from myself and that it has something to do with my feelings. It doesn´t make me less afraid though and I don´t get used to it. It´s terrifying every time, perhaps because I can´t control it. These experiences often seem to follow some pattern, even though it´s not a clear one and not perfectly consistent, so it´s difficult to figure it out. They often (but not always) come in challenging times, when I have a lot of intense feelings, especially fear. There is this feeling of some kind of strange resonance around them, a feeling, that it isn´t coincidental, that this particular phenomenon occurred at this particular time and showed itself in this particular way, even though I can´t quite put my finger on it. It´s the case with all these experiences, but I feel it strongest with the scratches. It feels, like some of my emotions become so strong, that they start to write themselves on my skin. On other occasions, when matter around me behaves as if it had a mind of its own, the feeling is, that some of my emotions become so dense, that they somehow crystallize in the world of matter – and start to affect it.


When I read or hear some people saying about this kind of phenomena, that one should fight that evil entity or protect oneself from it, it sounds meaningless to me. It doesn´t feel true. It sounds like one part of me should fight another in hope of peace or like my right hand should protect itself from the left one. How far can one get away from oneself?


I hope, that in the future, we will learn more about the nature of these experiences and that, in time, we will find out how to deal with them in the best possible way.


Who knows, maybe one day somebody will form Poltergeist Anonymous Group…


Or even better: perhaps one day it will form itself… Just out of the blue…

Boooooo…


Copyright © 2008 Aida Gundersen
20 June 2008


Parts of the horoscope active:


Aida in Aquarius in 11th house, Retrograde
The Handle of the Bucket Saturn in Aquarius in 11th house, Retrograde
Moon square Uranus
Moon Square Pluto
Moon square Saturn
Moon square Chiron
Moon opposite Medusa
Aida quincunx Uranus
Saturn opposite Pan
Neptune conjunct Descendant