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I’ll try to stick to the facts, at least as I saw or remember them. Though I’ve heard when someone is fearful their memories often don’t match up to what happened, like during a robbery someone may remember differently from what security cameras captured.
What could these have been, if it turns out I had encountered something other than my own sleep paralysis or the like? I’m convinced such beings (and “other planes of existence”) exist in reality, but in forms neither humans nor our scientific instruments can (yet?) perceive under normal circumstances. Like we don’t see infrared (like snakes), electrical fields (sharks), or ultraviolet (honeybees). Then there’s the whole can-o-worms of quantum mechanics I barely understand beyond a few Kurzgesagt videos, not to mention so many coincidences like nearly all ancient cultures speak of a worldwide flood in the distant past and how pretty much all religions (despite very different gods and beliefs) speak of at least one trickster/tempter/seducer, usually male and with red flesh and horns, often likened to a snake or a goat in anatomy and behavior, who will lead you towards some sort of fiery punishment (metaphorical, or literal) if this devil (artistic representation of base human instinct, or resentful and wrathful principalities hiding in our blind spots?) convinces you to chase hedonism, pride, hatred for living beings…
But in any case, hopefully one or more of these anecdotes (if they weren’t mere hallucinations from stress, lack of sleep, or a touch of undiagnosed mental illness) can help convince someone of the validity of other beings in realms or states humans can’t perceive under normal circumstances, especially if they themselves have had such unusual experiences.
To be upfront, but without going into specifics: my brain was injured via external factors in infancy. No one I know has any medical documentation anymore, but at some point I had ultrasounds or something like that revealing damage to my brain stem. And while this I’m sure is significant to note, I’m also including a few experiences from others close to me; some of their like encounters might suggest (I’m not sure if “evidence” is the proper term here?) that maybe at least one of the below events weren’t only due to developmental impairment. My maternal ancestry, in particular, has a long history of several of us being “psychically sensitive”: rarely seeing or interacting with “ghosts” and “demons”. So I may have also inherited .. whatever that’s all about. And my mom was into witchcraft before any of us were born, if that’s pertinent.
Sorry for the length of many of these. I have difficulty writing in a way that’s both succinct and comprehensive, even trying to leave out embellishment; didn’t want any of these to seem like an attempt at writing an anthological horror novella, but my best try at “clinical” description, of “sticking to the facts and data” with some speculation.
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1) The first of these was when I was either a teenager or at the most my mid-20’s. I’ve come to call what I saw the “oil-rag banshee”. Something tells me this was an evil entity with nothing to do with humans, but that may have been my fear talking.
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This was at one of my old homes (my dad’s house at the time) I’ve not seen for at least 15 years. I think I was either alone in the house (my dad at work) or my brother was still awake on the downstairs computer. It happened at night, trying to sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms with no curtains on the windows. I could see everything dimly but clearly thanks to flood lights from a penitentiary less than a block away. To my left was the stairwell, at the top of which was the doorless way (but with a hanging blanket over it) into another bedroom (the only other room up those stairs). And at some point I saw someone big and tall clumsily walking up. I thought it was my brother, but those stairs creak loudly and this being was completely quiet.
As whatever this was slowly ascended, I noted a few more details. The thing wasn’t translucent, its back was hunched far enough that I couldn’t see its head, and it swayed like it was carrying a heavy load on its broad shoulders. It had thick and short arms with no discernible elbows, with equally odd legs like knobby tree trunks. Then I finally made out that it seemed fully wrapped in what looked like oil-soaked rags. “Oil” is probably a misnomer (for color, not texture) as, if I recall correctly, these supposed rags were dark grey. Like they were soaked in mixed greasepaints, or maybe a corpse yet to dry out.
When it reached the top of the stairs, it paused for a moment. Then it whipped around towards me faster than anything that large should be able to move, then bellowed a bizarre scream-snarl unlike anything I’ve heard before or since. Like its oily rags, my memory of how it sounded is still in my memories, but I’ve no analogy this time: nothing like an angry man, nor any wild animal I know of, nor even a horror film monster. It took a few moments of it bellowing for me to notice it had no head atop its shoulders. Instead, at the end of a long and thin neck sprouting from the middle of its chest, was a head small and round (maybe the size of a baseball, or smaller) and from its front a large but thin and hooked bird beak. This beak was the only part of it not wrapped in oily rags but was still about the same oily grey as the rest of it.
After maybe several seconds it went silent again. This being seemed to regard me for a moment or two (I couldn’t see its eyes, but I’m certain it was looking into mine), then it slowly turned and walked into the other bedroom. In a detail that may be comical, but even without a head atop its shoulders it barely fit through the doorway. It didn’t need to push aside the blanket as far as I could tell.
When I finally worked up the nerve to stop laying in bed and staring at where it stood, I also entered that room then flipped on the light. The “oil-rag banshee” was nowhere to be seen, and the only other way out was through windows it couldn’t have fit through if it were as physical as it looked.
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Assuming this wasn’t a standard sleep paralysis hallucination, I believe this might have been a peta. Its bizarre features seem to match up to the wildly wrong anatomy of hungry ghosts according to Ajaan Lee’s description.
A distant candidate is some sort of fear-eating yakkha, as opposed to the anger-eating yakkha who enraged the thirty-three gods in the Dubbaṇṇiya/Ugly Sutta (SN 11:22). But I barely know anything about yakkhas other than they remind me of certain creatures (in appearance and temperament) from both Japanese and Tibetan mythologies, which might not be a coincidence.
There’s also, after casual research, an obscure legend known as the the blemmye (pronounced BLEH-mee), also known as akephalos (Greek for “headless one”). These creatures are described in classical antiquity and medieval legend, one of many not recently popularized like vampires and werewolves. It’s about as good a match as hungry ghosts with its tiny head, large and bent body, and weirdly thick and stiff limbs.
While I call this thing the “oil-rag banshee” (based on what an anonymous poster said when I first told this tale maybe 10-15 years ago: “bro you saw a mf banshee”), several key details don’t line up to the Irish and Gaelic monster. This creature wasn’t some mournful wail in the distance as a harbinger of your death, but more of a hostile being that wanted to terrify me. But its greasy, corpse-like appearance match many myths like the greasy appearance common to demonic or undead entities like the Orang Minyak of Malay folklore.
But as for the blemmye or peta? If this was only a sleep paralysis hallucination, it’s strange that my subconscious seemed to manage to assemble several anatomical details which coincidentally matched up to relatively obscure folklore or beings which I recently learned about.
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2) Never came up with a name for this event, but “disembodied clown laughter” will do. Details forthcoming.
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This time, in the same home as above, I was downstairs watching television, and only me and my dad were in the house. (He was upstairs asleep in the second bedroom.) I left the lights on in both the front room and the dining room. No doorway as downstairs was mostly open concept, but I couldn’t see most the rest of the house around the corner.
Without warning, quietly from the dining room, I heard nearly this same laughter.
Unlike that artificial sound effect, what I heard was more like a person doing their best to mimic that pitch and cadence with only their mouth. I was really into that video game so many years ago, but if it weren’t for the lights in the other room flickering a few times (both like faulty wiring, and as if someone was quickly flipping the light switch) I would have eventually dismissed this as the overactive imagination of a child.
Perhaps it was and I imagined the lights going on and off, too. Or someone broke into my home and wanted to mess with whomever was there? I don’t think anything was stolen, and I can’t remember if I heard any window or the back door open or shut… But I was watching TV, still clearly recalling the Flintstones episode I was focused on.
In any case, this time I screamed and ran upstairs to dad.
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3) This is the third event in that house, and it happened hours right after the “clown laugh”. Unlike the above I can’t come up with any rational explanation. I can’t remember if these two were before or after the “oil-rag banshee” encounter.
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Still terrified by what I thought I saw and heard earlier, I was on a pile of blankets and pillows on the floor of my dad’s bedroom.
Unlike the other bedroom my dad had nailed blankets over the windows (just like the doorless entrance) so it was just above pitch dark save for a bit of blue glow from his alarm clock. I think we only had corded landline phones back then (I don’t think even flipphones had been invented yet, and analog caller ID was fancy new tech to us!) so there was no other source of light.
I was, as fearful children do, I was under a blanket from head to toe. But for some reason I felt the need to peek out of the blankets. And what I saw close above me was a dark swirling mass even darker than the rest of the room. It was barely under a second of starting at this thick inky swirl that it emitted a piercing squeal-sneeze that left my ears ringing. I covered my head until next morning, and I don’t think I got more than a few hours of sleep.
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4) My mother had a near-death experience during surgery. I believe this was before I was born or when I was a child. There’s not much to say about this one, as it’s along the lines of many NDEs.
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I don’t remember what kind of surgery she was getting but she was under anasthesia — might have been open heart, as both sides of my family have histories of heart failure, I think two of my grandparents dying of heart attacks. At some point during the operation the machines flatlined, and during the rush to revive her my mom saw herself and the surgeons from above. After a while, everything slowly faded away as she felt herself being pulled upwards towards what she described as a white light past what she thought were clouds. She saw and spoke with a few of her recently dead ancestors along the way, and she swears she saw Jesus near the end.
But then she felt herself suddenly yanked back “down”, with many painful electric shocks in her chest. And then she suddenly woke up in the waiting area outside the surgery room. The nurse told my mom that she nearly died on the operating table until the doctors revived her with repeated applications of a defibrillator.
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5) While I’m speaking of my mom, she’s told us a few times when she was hanging out with her friends before we were born and they played with a ouija board.
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I remember even fewer details this time, but she and her friends had several experiences that sound like your standard tale of a haunted house. The most distinct was my mom, felt something grab her shoulder and when she turned around no one was there. Sorry, that’s all I got for this one.
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6) In my mom’s house (the place I grew up in before I moved out) me, my brother, my sister, my mom and dad, and others like my sister’s husband had plenty of distinct encounters. Most of which were nowhere near as terrifying as what I (and only I) experienced at my dad’s house near the correctional facility. A few of the shorter events are as follows.
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I walked by this house’s living room, from the hallway connecting the bedrooms and bathrooms to the kitchen, and (this was also at night with most the lights out) I heard my name aggressively whispered from the direction of the living room. It sounded like someone would if they were angrily muttering “HEY!!” barely centimeters from one of my ears.
Another time I saw and heard either my mom on the phone in her bedroom through the slightly open door. But when I opened the door to ask her something, “she” suddenly disappeared and the room went quiet.
As a child my brother encountered what looked like a walking corpse with glowing red eyes and white fangs from his bedroom closet. It looked over its shoulder at my brother then turned and walked deeper into this closet and disappeared. About 30 years later my sister and her husband were over and asleep in that same bedroom. My sister’s husband awoke to, as he later described, an exact match to that red-eyed ghoul or demon staring him right in the face and he woke everyone up in the house with his panicked reaction.
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7) These last two from my mom’s house are benign encounters, of the same being I now believe to have been a gandhabba.
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At night again, but this time with the lights in the living room on (passing my sister, who was watching TV), I was walking towards the kitchen. But as I was about to switch the lights on in there, I stopped in the doorway because I saw what seemed to be a two-dimensional, translucent, yellow glow roughly the size and shape of a child. It was standing in front of the refrigerator. I flipped the light switch on, and the glow disappeared. I flipped it back off and the glow was still gone, no matter how many times I flipped it on and off. My sister muted the TV and asked what was with me, why I looked so nervous.
Some time later I saw this same yellowish glow but this time the encounter was endearing. I was in a rush to the bathroom, nearly running down the hallway not bothering to turn any lights on. At the end of the hallway right in front of the bathroom door was the same yellow glow. I didn’t notice until I was about to run into it. I saw it turn its head up to me, no features on its face (maybe 15-20cm from mine) but I could somehow tell it was curious. Then it blinked out of existence, and it wasn’t until I was done in the bathroom that I stopped to think about what I just saw.
I later told my mom about this ghostly yellow child and she told me she saw it a few times too. I forget if she said it was a little boy or girl but I believe she identified its gender somehow. I forget the time frame but she was specific in how many decades or centuries ago it was. She was never able to explain how she knew that.
Born in a dark class, seeking brighter results.
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Thank you for sharing your unique experience.
- Such ‘encounters’ will be reduced as one learns more about the Buddha’s teachings.
- Yes. The world is a very complex place, but we can shield ourselves from such ‘uncomfortable experiences’ by understanding how the mind works. The mind tends to be attracted to such phenomena when delving into such subjects.
- It is best to avoid thinking about such topics and to focus on finding out why such living beings exist.
- The following is an old post somewhat related to the subject: “Abnormal Births Due to Gandhabba Transformations.”
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And thank you again for everything! In particular your advice to try and not dwell on such subjects anymore. I’ve thought deeply about the “occult” and so on my whole life, to the point of one time downloading thousands of PDF scans of such books and instruction manuals I intended to read at some point. But it seems a good idea to delete that huge collection of “animal arts” ASAP so I’m not even tempted! As buddhas_disciple posted a while back, such animal arts would only pull me away from learning and seeing through the illusion.
That and, as you said about philosophers (also a subject I did a few deep dives into for years), such reading and contemplating would only muddy the waters in trying to understand tilakkhana and other important topics. Hard enough without wanting to draw parallels with foreign concepts like “carnal mind of the flesh” and “heteronomy of the soul”.
Also wanted to add that my aunt recounted even more disturbing experiences of her own when I shared the above with some friends and family. Seems we and others in our ancestry might have some latent puñña iddhi? Regardless, I paid forward your advice to not dwell on such events in the hopes she doesn’t, for example, “encourage” any more dreams telling her when people she loves are going to die.
Born in a dark class, seeking brighter results.
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Yes. While it is good to be aware of such aspects of this complex world, we must focus on the goal of stopping future suffering. By this, I don’t mean only future lives, but this life itself. It is possible to overcome almost all of the ‘mental suffering’ in this life itself.
- We can do that not by following certain rituals or learning more about the external world, but by understanding how the mind works.
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