More Tricks from the Tricksters

Anyone who has followed my continuing stories of weird happenings will recall our reoccurring encounters with entities I've called "tricksters". Their most common trick involves the sound of keys in the side door, often followed by the sound of the door opening. However, whenever anyone goes to investigate, they find the door closed and locked and noone there. And these goings-on happen much more frequently when I'm out of the house than when I'm home.

Well, it has happened again. And this time, the tricksters are definitely trying to fool people into thinking it's me!

Yesterday, I was out because I've been roped into serving on a grand jury for the next several Tuesdays. On this particular Tuesday, my wife and daughter were home. Stephanie is off from college for Spring break this week, and Michele decided to take the week off from work.

There were a lot of cases presented to the grand jury yesterday, and they kept us past 5:00. We didn't get out until 5:30, so I was just getting out of the judicial building at that time. I would rather have been home, but dem's the breaks!

Apparently, according to what Stephanie and Michele both told me once I did get home, at the same time I was walking out of the jury room, they heard a sound as if the side door opened, sticking on the bottom like it often does. This was followed immediately by the rustling of heavy fabric and the sound of someone heavy pushing against the door, as if I were stepping through the threshold in my long winter coat, shoving the door open with my shoulders. My wife went to the door to investigate, called out "Daddy?", and thought she heard an "ugh" in reply (my typical tired and disgusted moan). However, no one was there. Our shepherd-chow mix was alert, but not reacting as if it were a stranger breaking in.

Subconscious astral projection? Poltergeist? Doppelganger? Changeling? Cosmic trickster? I don't know what to make of it, but it does worry me a bit. My gut tells me whatever it is, it's not something to invite in for tea. Our normal spiritual crew, relatives and former fur babies, don't need to knock. They come in without needing to be invited. I worry about something that needs to be invited across a threshold.

That is certainly a fascinating experience. How long do you suppose this has been going on? Has anyone ever been hurt by the presence? What other occurences can you tell us about. I know you have had many strange things happen like the images on your computer screen etc.

The person at the door - keys in the lock - footsteps on the porch - sort of thing has been going on since we first lived in our previous home, a dwelling we became convinced contained a portal to elsewhere. However, both my wife and I had childhood encounters with the paranormal. Things may have grown more frequent over the past ten years, and earlier encounters may have been rare occurrences, but we are no strangers to the supernatural.

The exact phenomena of someone at the side door has been going on pretty much since we moved into our current home, although similar things went on at our former home. I don't know if something followed us, or if we just attract entities from beyond.

No one has been hurt by the manifestations at home, thank goodness, but I think I was once psychically attacked by an angry spirit in one of the barracks buildings in Fort Ticonderoga. It was a weird experience, one in which I found myself unable to focus on the items on display in the museum cases. I felt as if the weight of the building was bearing down upon my shoulders. I sensed anger, and almost blacked out. At the same time, my daughter (a young child at the time) got extremely nervous and wanted to leave the room. Later, she claimed she saw a green thing in the room. As soon as I crossed the threshold into the next room, the feeling left like a retreating wave.

I haven't experienced a similar feeling before or since, so I seriously doubt there was a medical explanation.

You and your family are cetainly sensative to the spirit realm Richard. You realize that if you don't want them in your home, you can demand that they leave right? It is up to you at this point wether or not you want them there. Personally, if they are spirits, I myself would wish for them to find the light and move on to where they belong and can find peace. If the spirit is evil, obviously, they need to go.

In any case, I find these experiences fascinating and am more than willing to hear more.

I've had weird experiences with tricksters too. One day when I was around 13 years old, had the place to myself, I had a strange encounter. It was a bright, sunny day. I was in the living room, walking and thinking, when I noticed through the window that there was a very thin white bed-sheet-like cloth outside the window moving slowly to the right. There appeared to be nothing supernatural about it; it looked as real as the window curtains, or the back of my hand. To make it stranger, there was a very strong wind that day, so much so that the few clothes on the clothing line were pulled to their limits from the line. And this thin, light cloth was hanging loose, ripples in the fabric moving gently as if in a very mild breeze, and moving against the wind. It should have been caught by the force of the wind and been thrown away.

I pulled my sneakers on as quickly as I could and ran outside and looked up on the roof, around our property and out at the street. No one was to be heard or seen. I went back inside. Then, while in the washroom I saw the cloth moving outside the window, again to the right. At this angle, it should have been pushed flat against the window. But instead it just moved as it had before. Again I ran outside and looked everyone. No one. How could someone have taken a ladder and climbed up on a ladder and then got down and took off with the ladder before my knowing? Who would do this? And how did they manage to bend the laws of physics? Obviously this was a paranormal encounter, and the only other thing I've been able to deduct from this encounter is that someone (or some thing) was having fun with me.

There was another experience too, when I was about 12 years old or so. In this case, I was on the school bus as it came upon our road. There weren't many kids on the bus because our place (my sister and I) was one of the last stops. Usually I daydreamed or sketched pictures on a notepad, but on this day it was so sunny and beautiful that I was gazing outside at the beauty of it all. This was the country, and so there was only one vehicle to be seen on the road. It really stood out because it was the prettiest red sports car I had ever seen, and by far the nicest car that I had ever seen on our road. So I took a close look. It was driving fast and wasn't slowing down as the bus did, and curved around to pass (which is of course illegal.) So when I got down off the bus I got my sister to wait a second, and was surprised that it didn't shoot right by. When I looked around the front of the bus the man drove by...on a red bicycle!! It was the same man, but I believe he wore some kind of glasses and wore the kind of shorts that only tourists wore around here (can't quite remember how he was dressed in the car, not sure if he had shades on or not but I remember that he looked cool.) I had never seen him before...in either version.

These are what I have come to call my "Truman Show Experiences" because they defy reality, and like in that film I used to wonder if this reality was all a set-up due to experiences like these. Makes you wonder.

Definitely weird!

Are you sure it was really a bed sheet, or could it have been a white apparition looking something like a bed sheet? It sounds so cliche, bud I have heard of ghosts appearing as white mists, which might be interpretted as a "white sheet"

Blue, you have the strangest experiences. Wow!

Strange, yes. But it was a white sheet. There appeared to be nothing paranormal about it (besides the fact that it defied reality.)

The strange experiences with the sounds of someone at the door may be a vardogr. And apparently these things aren't so much ghosts as astral projections or psychic projections of some sort. This would mean that I am the one causing it, since it sounds like me!

Here is a link to the Monstropedia entry on the vardoger:

http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Vard%C3%B8ger

Thanks for the link Richard - I had not heard of this before. Very interesting!

The description of the vardoger sounds hauntingly similar to what my wife and daughter experience. It seems more than likely that I'm creating some sort of astral double of myself, especially when one considers the fact that I almost never hear the sounds myself.

However, there could be more than one explanation. I could just be tapping into existing energies.

I have never heard of this either. Thanks for the info RH!

ah! That is fascinating! You could very well be spot on the money with that RH. A doppelganger!

This is the same sort of theory I have with poltergeists too. I think people manifest it themselves, but they don't even realise they are doing it. I remember reading about a poltergeist case in an old factory where researchers found that the activity would only occur (things getting violently thrown around the factory floor) when a certain young worker entered the facility. Another wild aspect of the psi phenomena!

It appears that these entity(s) get some kind of personal satisfaction out of playing with your family's minds. If I were in your shoes, I would be pretty annoyed, you seem to handle it well. One experience I had caused me to be late for work, which was no laughing matter: I went to the garbage can to throw some papers away, only I accidentally dropped my car key into the garbage as well. However, after searching through the garbage, the key was nowhere to be found. I ended up dumping the garbage onto the floor and searching through it several times. I had no spare key at the time, so the only option I could consider was to have a locksmith come out and make me a new car key. I went to the den to look up emergency road service on my computer. While the computer was booting up, I noticed my car key on the floor, hidden halfway under a garbage bag full of old clothes. Thus somehow it went from being dropped into the garbage to another room in a completely different area of the house. I think this qualifies as a trickster story. I think the entities responsible for what is happening in your household, are passive aggressively playing out some sort of anger their souls may be harboring.