Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai

Started by Spookie Monster, September 30, 2008, 06:41:22 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Inkidu

Redd Kelly

This is supposedly a real story about a local mayor's son. Anyway here goes It's in old papers and everything. I'm not quite sure.

There once was a mayor of Huntsville around the time of the American Civil War by the name of John Kelly. His wife gave birth to a thirteen pound baby boy and she died from obvious childbirth complications. The baby had flaming red hair and his father called him Redd.
Redd grew up a quiet child. Never really talking to anyone. One day at school some children made fun of him. Calling him big, fat, and stupid. He finally snapped and beat the other kids.
Time went on and Redd grew into a young man. He got a job cutting wood at the local mill and was quite good at it. He would stand by as the wood slid down the chute and he could cut it with one swing of his machete.

There was another man by the name of Thomas Greene. Greene was another woodcutter. Quite smaller than Redd who was a big man, he was a nasty cuss. Redd used to get people lined up to watch him cut wood you see, because he was so good. Finally Mr. Greene couldn't take it anymore and he told Redd one day, "You killed your mama." Redd snapped and beat the man nearly to death.

Time went on and Redd went back to his job but it never held the same joy. Months went by and October rolled around. Several people woke one Fall morning to find piles of cats and dogs chopped up on there stoops. No one could figure out who it was. Years rolled around, and dogs and cats kept dying, a cow here, a rooster.

Then a year to that October day the town's grandmother was nowhere to be found. Everyone knew this grandmother, Granny Smith was her name. She taught piano and backed pies. Well eventually the found her along the path to her secluded little house. At the start the found a foot, then a leg, then a torso, then an arm, neck, head! The granny had been crippled and cut up as she dragged herself away.

The town was terrified they all thought it was Redd but the mayor protested that Redd was a good boy. A month went buy, and a young couple disappeared while on a carriage ride. They found them in the woods but couldn't separate them from the chaperon or the two carriage horses.

The mayor had no choice. He sent his son away. Had a cabin built in secret and had a large iron bar set in the ground with yards and yards of chain. He sent his son away chained to that property.
Years continued to churn on and not one ill tiding crossed the town. Until that October day when then another resident went missing. Next month another, and so on. Until October rolled around once more. That day a baby went missing.

The former-mayor now, had to do something. He hired three Civil War veterans to go to the property and kill his son. He payed them each one thousand dollars. So the three men rode out to the cabin. Dismounting they affixed their bayonets and went looking for Redd. The first thing they found was the post with a broken chain.
The men tightened up their formation. Redd Kelly was loose. The three men entered the cabin. They were assaulted by foul sights and smells. A pallor of filth hung about the room. One man made his way to the pot over the fire and lifted out the ladle. In it was a human finger and an eye...

Suddenly there was a horrible howling, and a stomping across the roof. A rattling chain. The first man panicked and ran for the door. When he flung it open Redd leaped down and cut the man nearly in half with practiced skill. The second and third men shot at him but missed and had to spend a precious minute reloading.

Redd entered the cabin and quickly gutted the second man. The third man ran for the woods. sun was low in the sky. The man ran with the howling in his ears the giant man with the flaming devil hair fast on his heels. There was a small bluff and the man turned his back to the small canyon and finished reloading his musket. Redd smashed through the brush and the soldier gut-shot his attacker.

Despite the grievous wound in his stomach Redd walked hunched forward. The soldier charged and stabbed Redd in his shoulder. Redd laughed maniacally and chopped off the Union soldier's arm at the elbow. The soldier jerked in reflex and the blade of the bayonet was caught. Redd tumbled over the cliff and the soldier heard the smack.

The soldier tied off his wound with a tourniquet and managed to live. He stayed until morning to see if Redd was dead. He looked over at first light and saw the blood but no Redd. The man returned to former-mayor Kelly and collected his thousand and the other twos' thousand on top of it. The soldier retired to Virginia, but he continued to tell this story.

According to him if on that October day (he never said which) but if you had the misfortune of the gall; and you called out Redd Kelly's name three times. You'd hear his demonic howl and see only a glimpse of his red hair.
Redd Kelly, Redd Kelly, Redd Kelly...
If you're searching the lines for a point, well you've probably missed it; there was never anything there in the first place.

Valerian

Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's second and most famous wife.  It was for love of her that Henry broke with Rome and eventually formed the Church of England.  But her reign over his heart was brief -- after only about five years, Henry had tired of her (and her failure to produce a male heir) and had her framed for witchcraft and adultery, both capital crimes.

While in the Tower of London, awaiting execution, Anne penned this poem:

Oh Death
Rock me asleep
Bring on my quiet rest
Let pass my very guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast
Ring out the doleful knell
Let it sound
My death tell
For I must die.

But Death brought no quiet rest for the spirit of Anne Boleyn.  She has been seen in various places, particularly at the several homes where she once lived, and accompanied by the phantom coaches and headless horses that have always been associated with witchcraft.

At Blickling Hall in Norfolk, Anne Boleyn makes a spectacular appearance every year upon the anniversary of her death. She drives up the avenue to the Hall in a coach, drawn by headless horses and a headless horseman, holding her severed head in her lap.  Sometimes the whole grisly equipage vanishes into the air, sometimes Anne alone enters the Hall and walks the corridors until dawn. A similar ghastly vision has been seen driving furiously along the roads of Norfolk, followed by an otherworldly blue light.

Every Christmas-time, the ghost of Anne Boleyn has been reported in Kent, being driven up the avenue of Hever Castle at a furious pace and in a funeral coach drawn by six black headless horses. It was here, in this thirteenth-century castle, under the magnificent oak,  that Henry courted both Anne and her sister Mary.

Also during Christmas-time, the Rochford district of Essex is haunted for twelve nights by a headless witch, dressed in a rich silken gown. Anne Boleyn lived at Rochford Hall when she was a girl.

The ghost of Anne Boleyn has often been seen standing at a window at Windsor Castle, but Anne’s most persistent (and gruesome) hauntings are in the Tower, where she met her death.

More on Anne's ghostly visitations can be found here.

Seventy-three candles left.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Spookie Monster

Thank you very much, Inkidu and Valerian!  Spooky stuff indeed!

I'd actually like to snuff out a couple of candles in a row, if I may.  My first offering isn't really a story, I guess -- more a series of notes -- but I think that it will prove interesting nonetheless.

When people talk about cursed movies, they usually mention the Poltergeist series, the The Omen series, and the Superman series.  Lesser known is the curse that reputedly seized the movie IncubusIncubus is a 1965 horror film starring William Shatner; it's performed entirely in the constructed language Esperanto.  For decades it was believed that all prints had been destroyed, but in 1996 a single print was "discovered" to exist at the Cinémathèque Française.  I'm going to quote some stuff from this article on Salon.com; it has a fair amount of information on the movie in general, however, so if you'd like to learn more, check it out.



Curse of the "Incubus"

[Incubus] was invited to several film festivals, which gave it rave reviews.  The program for the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival of that year describes the scene in which the Incubus emerges from underground as "one of the most splendid pieces of horror since the late James Whale conceived the idea of Frankenstein's electronic monster."  But all the producers could notice were the gruesome fates that befell their comrades.

The Incubus -- a lumbering, craggy-faced giant -- was played by Milos Milos, a buff actor from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, who'd spent some time as a stand-in for decadent French superstar Alain Delon.  At the time, he was dating Barbara Ann Thompson Rooney, Mickey Rooney's estranged fifth wife.  In 1966, Milos murdered her, and then shot himself.

In the film, Shatner's virginal sister, whom the Incubus violates, was played by Ann Atmar, a sometime girlie-magazine model.  She committed suicide a few weeks after the film wrapped up.

A few years after the film was released, the daughter of the woman who played the elder sister succubus, Eloise Hardt, was kidnapped from her Los Angeles driveway and murdered.  Her body was discovered a few weeks later in the Hollywood Hills.

Those were the most gory manifestations of the "Incubus" curse.  But there were others: Director Stevens' production company, Daystar, went belly up not long after the movie was released.  (He ended up marrying Allyson Ames, who played the young succubus.  The couple later divorced.  Stevens passed away from complications of a blood clot on the heart in 1998.)

Even the film's premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival turned into a disaster.  The brand-new print of the film turned out to be missing its soundtrack.  Taylor, tipsy from a pre-screening reception, had to scramble to find another print while the audience waited for nearly an hour.

And there were other, more remote but still eerie events.  Special guests of that premiere were director Roman Polanski and his date, actress Sharon Tate, who would be killed in the Manson "family" rampage in 1969.

And in the 1970s the film's music editor -- Dominic Frontiere, one-time husband of St. Louis Rams owner Georgia Frontiere -- landed in prison for scalping thousands of Super Bowl tickets.  ("That's pretty amazing for someone who had gone to Juilliard," says [Tony] Taylor.)



If Incubus sounds interesting to you, track it down -- it's worth catching, in my opinion.  In the meantime, let me snuff out a candle and move on to "The Darkness Which Dwells in the Ambulance Bay"...

Spel


Turn around!
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Spookie Monster

I'm relaying this one from Pastor Swope, "The Paranormal Pastor."  For more creepy tales be sure to check out his blog!



The Darkness Which Dwells in the Ambulance Bay

Years ago, just after leaving the Christian and Missionary Alliance I worked for an ambulance company, Med-Stat Ambulance.

I was hired in the fall of 1995 as a midnight dispatcher and my duties were to watch over the sleeping crew and take any emergency calls that might come in during the graveyard shift.

I met a lot of interesting people at Med-Stat, but the most interesting beings that I met there you could not see.  You see the building was haunted by multiple entities.

I was told about the hauntings on my first week by a paramedic named Mary.  She was a young woman who was a sensitive and had multiple experiences with the beings that resided in the second story bunkhouse.

One night she was sleeping on the top bunk by the large front window of the bunkroom.  At about 3 in the morning she awoke to a strange sound.  She thought it was one of the crew talking to her but the sound seemed like it was muffled and came from the direction of the window inches from her head.  As she turned over to look out the glass, she froze in terror.  There hovering over 30 feet above the ground was a green mist which covered a vaguely humanoid form.  It writhed and twisted in the middle of the air as if trying to take a more solid form.  All the while the whispering grew louder, "Mary... Mary..."  The voice whispering sounded like that of an elderly woman.  It seemed to glow in a pulsating fashion as it came into form.  When the face began to take shape it looked vaguely to Mary as that of a rotting corpse.

Her scream woke the whole bunkhouse.

After the ensuing chaos many tried to calm her down but she was hysterical and spent the rest of the night sleepless and sitting in a well lit room without any windows.  Many ridiculed her but she stuck to her story despite the disbelief surrounding her.

A few weeks later during another midnight shift it happened again.  This time she seemed to sense it.  It was afar off and came wafting over the tall grass of the front lawn illuminated by the light of the crescent moon.  This time it did not call her, she just felt the presence.  She woke up again at 3 in the morning and looked out the big glass window that faced Route 19 in Waterford, Pennsylvania.  It looked like just a green puff of smoke as it glided toward the building.  As it neared the window it once again began to take shape.  The arms turned from vague blurry ether to thin bony white appendages as they reached out to caress some unknown form in the shadows.  The entity did in fact seem to be that of a woman, but not decayed as she previously had thought, instead the withered form that was materializing before her was that of an aged and decrepit old lady who had been wasted away by disease or old age.  It came closer to the window and Mary lay there just as afraid as the weeks before but there was another emotion that began to overpower the fear: compassion.  In the withered face of the specter that she saw before her she saw all of the elderly patients that she had cared for who were at the last stages of life.  She did not recognize the face, for even though fully formed it seemed to phase in and out of existence.  But she embodied it with all the sadness and loss that she had seen in her years tending to the elderly with renal failure who withered and wasted away into nothingness.  Then the voices came again, but this time they were not so frightening, a hollow voice that seemed to be familiar, "Mary... Mary..." finally she decided to reply.  With a hesitant half stutter she talked to the visage that came from the mist, "Y...yes?" she croaked out.

The entity faded into the mist and the green ectoplasmic cloud was scattered in the wind.

Mary was sure that this was a former patient whom she had cared for, but she could not specifically place the face or the voice.  There had been many women whom she had tended to who passed while in her care.  And it was no longer frightening, instead it was reassuring.  She felt as if one of them had come through from the other side to just say thank you and to encourage her in her tireless duty.

However the green lady was not the only spectral being that Mary had encountered in that ambulance hall many years ago.

While taking her turn cleaning the ambulances late one evening after a very late hospital run she had an encounter that made her refuse to ever go down in the bay alone again.  They had transported a bleeder from an accident scene to a local hospital.  The person did not make it and the back of the ambulance was full of blood.  She had the unluck of the draw and had to wear her hazmat gear and give the ambulance a thorough cleaning.  She used a hose and swaths of cloth to mop up the remaining blood.  There was a large red tub in which she threw the soiled cloths.  Even though flushed with water the cloths were crimson with human body fluids, and almost near the end of the cleaning the bucket looked as if it were full of meat rather than soiled towels.

Then the towels moved.

Mary was just about to throw in the last one and give the ambulance a dousing of bleach when she saw what looked to be something alive in the blood filled bucket.  The towels swelled and moved up and down as if something was inside trying to get out.

That was when the arm came out.

It pulled itself out of the bloodied rags and covered in goo the hand grabbed for the side of the bucket.  The arm and hand was mangled with tissue and bone protruding from various cuts and gashes.  It flung itself around wildly and Mary screamed frantically and threw the bleach bottle at the gory appendage.  The bucket was knocked over and the soaked towels sprayed all over the cement floor of the bay.  Within minutes the crew who had accompanied Mary had run down the long flight of stairs from the bunk room above to find her cowering in a corner of the ambulance.  She was hysterical and it took a few minutes for her to even begin to tell them what she had seen.  They went over to investigate the bucket but all they found were the soaked towels that she had placed inside.  No arm, no hand, no living tissue-just blood soaked rags.  She was taken upstairs and another crew member took over the job of sanitizing the ambulance.  He and others complained that this was just a stunt to get away with not doing her share of the work.  But to many it was clear that Mary did indeed see something.  A few weeks later after doing some research she found out that in the late 1980s there was a bad motorcycle accident on the site.  In fact one of the other paramedics at the company had been on site.  The poor victim had been literally torn apart and his arms were severed from his body.  Marie was sure that what she saw was a remnant of the accident victim that had somehow been evoked by the presence of the blood.  She never saw it again, but then again she never cleaned an ambulance alone again either.

When she told me these stories I must confess that I thought she was a little crazy.  At that time I had not had any firsthand experience with ghostly apparitions, although I had experienced demonic presences.  But late one night an incident happened to me that blew away all such disbelief.

It was a normal midnight shift and I had settled down to read when at about 2am I heard someone walk up the long flight of steps that opened up to the door of the dispatch room.  It was hard to not notice the heavy steps and they were a familiar sound whenever the crews came back from a run.  But nobody was out, so I turned to see who was making an unexpected visit so late in the morning.  But as the steps came to the door, the door did not open.  Neither did I hear the sound of someone walking back down the steps, so I rose from my chair to investigate.

I opened the door.

No one was there.

Now the sounds were unmistakable, and since the stairway acted as a magnifier of every little sound that was made in there, it was nigh impossible that someone could have made their way down the stairs without so much as a sound.  So I put it down as just a figment of my overactive imagination.

However a few moments after this incident I went to the lavatory down the hall to relieve myself.  I shut the door behind me and as I approached the toilet the hand of the door began to turn and rattle.  It was unmistakably moving.  I quickly opened the door and again, there was nobody there.  The crew room was next door, but everyone was asleep.  And if it was a practical joke (which we were prone to do to each other) nobody came forward to gloat about it.  Everyone was truly asleep.

The door handle had turned on its own.

To me I knew immediately I had just experienced a haunting.  But the weirdest thing about it that struck me was the normality of it all.  I was not frightened, or even scared in the least.  It was just downright odd.

Med Stat Ambulance has long gone out of business.  But that two story building with the large first floor garage still stand off of route 19 in Waterford Pennsylvania.  And I am certain that whoever occupies the residence now has been visited by some uninvited guests.

I pray their nights are peaceful.



I'm snuffing out another candle.  Seventy-one candles remain.  Anyone have a tale to share?

Spel


Go back!
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Valerian

The Chippewa Flowage, in northern Wisconsin, is a wide but often very shallow channel of water, dotted with some 140 islands, created when the Chippewa River was dammed in 1923 for electricity.  The Flowage attracts boaters and fisherman from miles away.  It also, some say, attracts spirits, or at least one particular island does.

One morning, veteran fishing guide and former Milwaukee firefighter Al Denninger took a client out into the flowage, and anchored the boat near a small island.  They had just settled in for some quiet fishing when suddenly the client turned pale, pointing over Denninger's shoulder at a strange shape behind him.

Judging from the nearby trees, it was twelve to fifteen feet tall.  Part of its right shoulder seemed to be missing, though otherwise it was very much human-shaped, even if not human-sized.  It seemed to be made of smoke or fog, but it did not change shape as such things would; and as the men watched, it moved against the breeze.

Denninger grabbed his Polaroid camera, usually used for pictures of freshly-caught fish, and snapped a photo.  When he tried to take a second photo, the camera jammed, though it was normally reliable.  As they stared, the shape moved about fifty yards along the shoreline, then lifted gently up into the air, vanishing against the grey sky.

The client, uneasy, insisted on moving along.  But Denninger's photo made the rounds, and the story spread.  Later, a friend who'd heard the tale spoke to nearby resort owner Barb McMahon about it, pointing to the island on the map and asking if she'd ever seen anything strange there.

"Oh, you mean Ghost Island," she replied, matter of factly.  She explained that she and her husband often heard reports from guests about strange sounds on the island, sounds that all of them seemed very reluctant to describe.  At first, they blamed this on city people unused to the noises of the woods; but as guest after guest told their stories, they had to look for other explanations. 

The McMahons started a sort of "ghost register" to record these reports, and christened the spot Ghost Island.  Bill McMahon, an avid fisherman, tried several times to fish a quiet inlet there, but found himself too uneasy to stay longer than a few minutes.  No other spot on the Flowage gives him the same odd feeling; but there he frequently reports a sense of being watched.  He hasn't fished there for years.

Perhaps it is Barb McMahon herself who sums up the island best:  "Sometimes you talk yourself out of something.  You think that it must have been your imagination.  That's why people will ask those questions but won't tell you what they've heard.  Or what they have felt.  I'll bet there are many people who have been there and, not because they're not catching fish, but for whatever reason one person says to the other, 'let's try someplace else.'  And they won't give an explanation.  But they have this discomfort, this eerie sensation.  This unexplained sense that someone is watching them, someone they can't see."

It is, she says, pure fear of the unknown.




Seventy candles left.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Spookie Monster

Thanks much, Valerian!  Very spooky and very fascinating, as always...

I myself have another couple of tales that I'd like to share.  The first, "Call for Help," I've taken from here.



Call for Help

This happened nearly three years ago, January of 2006, in our home in Porter, Texas.  My husband Mike and I were asleep and woke to the ringing of first my cell phone and then his in quick succession.  Instantly, we thought something really bad had happened.  Nothing but bad news when the phone rings in the middle of the night, right?  I answered my phone at more or less the same time Mike answered his.  We heard each other say "Hello" to each other.  His phone had called mine and mine called his, it seemed of their own volition.  We stared at each other in confusion, wondering what the hell had just happened.

At the same time, we both heard the labored breathing of our seven-year-old son, who's an asthmatic.  He was wheezing and had been trying to call out to us from his bedroom down the hall, but we couldn't hear him.  We helped him right away, giving him his Xopenex breathing treatment and staying up with him until he fell back to sleep, breathing easier.

We don't know what triggered his attack or what caused our cell phones to call each other the way they did, but if it hadn't happened... I shudder to think what might have happened to our son if we had not awakened at that moment.



Let me quickly snuff out this candle over here... ah, there we are...

Spel


Call them!  Call them!
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Spookie Monster

My second story concerns Black-Eyed Kids.  You have heard about Black-Eyed Kids, right?  This one comes from From the Shadows; if you're interested in reading more creepy stuff, check it out!



Black-Eyed Kid at the Door

The knock on the door was strange.

On a day in early April, Beth Stringfield, a stay-at-home mom in Lawson, Mo., was in the kitchen making lunch when she heard a knock on the front door.  No one comes to the Stringfield's front door.

"We usually use the back door and everyone we know knows that and we hardly ever get visitors at the front," she said.  "I opened the door and there was a little girl standing there.  I did not recognize her."

Lawson is a small town of about 2,354 people where everyone knows everyone.

"She was about seven years old and she was starring down at her shoes," Stringfield said.  "She had blond hair and was dressed in an antique-type dingy white dress with blue embroidery birds at the edges."

Stringfield opened the screen door and knelt to talk to the girl.  She was worried the girl was hurt or in danger.

"She looked at my hands and said, 'I need help.  Can I come inside, please?'" Stringfield said.  She was so polite and spoke so well.  She did not sound as if she was from around town.  I suddenly felt very afraid."

Stringfield looked up and down the street, but no one was around.

"I looked past her thinking the fear I felt must be someone after her or that her parents or someone must be upset with me talking to her," she said.  "Thoughts raced through my mind quickly and I somehow could not think very clearly all of the sudden."

Stringfield looked back at the girl preparing to ask where her parents were and where she lived when she noticed the little girl's eyes.

"She looked at me and I immediately noticed that her eyes seemed wrong or something," she said.  "Like they were ink.  Like someone had poured ink in her eyes.  They were not normal kids eyes.  They were coal black and black from rim-to-rim just staring."

The girl again demanded to come inside.

"I could hear a kind of fake sweetness in her voice.  She had a little girl voice but had an adult vocabulary and force about her," Stringfield said.  "I immediately stood up and knew I needed to protect myself and my girls inside and started to close the door."

The girl asked Stringfield what she'd done wrong; why Stringfield wouldn't invite her in.

"That is when my five-year-old daughter came into the living room and I knew that she should not look at her," Stringfield said.  "I closed the door on this little girl and I locked it.  I scooped up Ellen and ran to the back door in the kitchen.  I locked it and sat down at the table.  My 16-month-old was sleeping upstairs and I needed to check her."

Stringfield ran upstairs on shaking legs, holding Ellen tightly in her arms.  The baby was still asleep.

"I got my cell phone out and called my husband and told him about it," she said.  "He thinks my story is crazy."

But Stringfield knows the little Black-Eyed girl was on her porch and she knows the terror she felt.

"This little girl was real.  I had started to feel sorry for her because she had bad breath and really dirty hair," Stringfield said.  "But I somehow know that she meant harm to us.  I am not sure if I want to talk too much about it anymore.  I would rather forget that it happened at all, but I worry that she will return."

Hours after the encounter with the Black-Eyed Kid, the fear remains.

"I won't let the girls play outside now," she said.  "I have not gone out by myself to the store or anything.  I still feel that dread, that sense of fear I felt emanating from the girl on my porch.  I somehow knew that if I had let her in, that I would have regretted it and my girls and I would have been in some sort of real danger."



I'm snuffing out still another candle.  Sixty-eight candles remain.  My, the shadows are getting thick in here, aren't they?

Spel


Glaring through the presage in her eyes...
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Spookie Monster

#32
My goodness -- please don't be too scared!  There are no ghosts or werewolves or Black-Eyed Kids here... I mean, not yet, anyhow...

O.K., O.K., I'll go easy with the next one: A tale about a famous, if ultimately harmless, doppelganger.  If you're not familiar with doppelgangers, know that they're somethings which so perfectly resemble specific living people that they're confused with them.  Their exact characteristics vary.  Some are silent; some speak.  Some seem mindless; some are crafty.  Some, like the one discussed in the story below, seem harmless; some seem malicious.  Certain doppelgangers even appear to believe that they are the people that they resemble.  Many famous people are reported to have encountered their own doppelgangers -- Goethe, Queen Elizabeth I, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Catherine the Great, and Guy de Maupassant, among others.



Emilie Sagée

One of the most fascinating reports of a doppelganger comes from American writer Robert Dale Owen who was told the story by Julie von Güldenstubbe, the second daughter of the Baron von Güldenstubbe.  In 1845, when von Güldenstubbe was 13, she attended Pensionat von Neuwelcke, an exclusive girl's school near Wolmar in what is now Latvia.  One of her teachers was a 32-year-old French woman named Emilie Sagée.  And although the school's administration was quite pleased with Sagée's performance, she soon became the object of rumor and odd speculation.  Sagée, it seemed, had a double that would appear and disappear in full view of the students.

In the middle of class one day, while Sagée was writing on the blackboard, her exact double appeared beside her.  The doppelganger precisely copied the teacher's every move as she wrote, except that it did not hold any chalk.  The event was witnessed by 13 students in the classroom.  A similar incident was reported at dinner one evening when Sagée's doppelganger was seen standing behind her, mimicking the movements of her eating, although it held no utensils.

The doppelganger did not always echo her movements, however.  On several occasions, Sagée would be seen in one part of the school when it was known that she was in another at that time.  The most astonishing instance of this took place in full view of the entire student body of 42 students on a summer day in 1846.  The girls were all assembled in the school hall for their sewing and embroidery lessons.  As they sat at the long tables working, they could clearly see Sagée in the school's garden gathering flowers.  Another teacher was supervising the children.  When this teacher left the room to talk to the headmistress, Sagée's doppelganger appeared in her chair -- while the real Sagée could still be seen in the garden.  The students noted that Sagée's movements in the garden looked tired while the doppelganger sat motionless.  Two brave girls approached the phantom and tried to touch it, but felt an odd resistance in the air surrounding it.  One girl actually stepped between the teacher's chair and the table, passing right through the apparition, which remained motionless.  It then slowly vanished.

Sagée claimed never to have seen the doppelganger herself, but said that whenever it was said to appear, she felt drained and fatigued.  Her physical color even seemed to pale at those times.



I'm snuffing out another candle...

Spel


Then I ran across a monster who was sleeping by a tree, and I looked and frowned and the monster was me...

Edit: Linky-link and formatting.
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Spookie Monster

Hmmm... that one was a little too easy, wasn't it?  Let me try to find a balance by telling a story that's just a bit spookier.  The idea of being attacked in your own bed by demonic forces isn't too scary, right?



The Haunted Bed

This is a true story that happened to me when I was about 11 years old.  My family and I used to live in a old adobe house that was build in the early 1900s.  The reason we knew this at the time was that parts of the wall had old newspapers on the inside.  The landlord had two these house that he rented out.  One to us and to some old lady that lived with about 50 dogs.

I used to share my room with my brothers.  One weekend, I remember my father had brought home some new beds for my brothers.  Since I was the youngest at the time, I got their old one.  The first thing I noticed was that these mattresses where plaid in material, which was odd.

A couple of months pased and I was in the room with my brothers.  They where talking about some bad dreams that they were having at night.  I didn't recall all of them, but one I did -- because it happened to me.

Later that year, the lady next door moved out and we moved into her home.  I had forgotten about the nightmares when my brother gave me his mattress.  The bed was comfortable and relaxing, but soon I was restless and sleepless.

It started off with this weird night I was in my bed trying to go to sleep.  I had the blanket over my head when I felt something rubbing the cover with its hand.  Because the cover was thin, I could make out what it looked like.  It was a small man about two feet in height trying to get the cover off me.  I remember struggling to fight him from lifting the covers.  After that moment I blanked out.

It was then about 2 a.m. when I was awakened by what felt like a bunch of hands pushing upward from inside the mattress.  I was scared out of my mind!  I start praying.  My brother, who I shared the room with, stated laughing in his sleep.  But it wasn't his laugh; it sounded more like a crackling sound, as though he was laughing through a microphone.  I got the guts to look at him and he had the weird grin on his face.

Once I saw that, I let out a huge scream and woke up everyone in the house.  My mother and brothers came running through the door saying, "What the hell's wrong?!"  I told them it must have been a nightmare.  I was so scared, but I still managed to go to sleep.

Early in the morning, I was again awakened by something poking at the side of my body.  When I opened my eyes, I could see the morning sun through my window.  Whatever it was kept on poking the side of my ribs with two fingers.  I wanted to get away fast.  I lifted the covers and saw a silhouette of a person.  It wasn't clear, but I could make out the definition of eyes and head.  I grabbed the covers and hid under them and started to pray hard.

Not one minute later, I heard my father in the kitchen.  With the cover over my head, I ran to the kitchen.  Startled, he asked, "What's wrong?"  I told him what happened.  He believed me, but we never did anything to the bed.  All that day I could still feel the pinch on the side of my ribs.  That's was the last time I slept in it though.



I'm snuffing out another candle.  Sixty-six candles remain...

Oh! -- wait! -- what's that?

There it is again!

There's a glow at the window: Dawn has arrived.  It seems that another witchly season has come to a close.  So be it; there will be another soon enough.  I hope that everybody enjoyed the stories!  Thank you once more, Inkidu and Valerian!

Spel


Nothing has changed... everything has changed...
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~