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Children And The Paranormal
Could the ghosts, creatures and psychic visions they see be real?
By Stephen Wagner, About.com Guide
ARE CHILDREN MORE connected to the world of spirit and psychic phenomena than adults? Based on the sheer number of anecdotal reports, most paranormal researchers would probably say yes. They see dead relatives (often those they’ve never met in life), play with “imaginary friends”, recall details of past lives, and see many other strange things that are invisible to their parents.
The rationalist or skeptic doubts or completely dismisses these accounts from children as the products of vivid imaginations – fantasies spun for the attention they receive. Or perhaps they are just the uninformed interpretations of natural events as filtered though immature minds.
What if, however, the ghosts, strange creatures, and psychic visions of children are real? Consider the cases that follow, told by adults as they recall them from their childhoods.
GOODBYE VISIT
Kristin was five years old when she was living with her parents in Trafford, Pennsylvania. At the time, she recalls, her grandmother was in the hospital, recovering from a stroke. “She and I were very close,” Kristin says. “I never got to visit her in the hospital; my mom and dad thought it would be too much for me to handle at such a young age.”
Early one Sunday morning around 5 a.m., Kristin was suddenly awakened and sat straight up in her bed. “I saw a woman’s figure standing at the end of my bed,” she says. Thinking the figure was her mother, Kristin had no reason to be frightened. She called out to the woman, but there was no answer. Again she called, “Mommy?“ but there was only silence. “The woman just stood there staring at me and extended her arm,” Kristin recalls. “I began to panic because I didn't know why my mom wasn't responding to me. I began to scream ‘Mom!’”
Kristin’s mother came running into her room to see what was wrong. “She asked me if I was ok and I asked her why she wasn't answering me and why she was standing there just staring at me,” she says. “She came and sat on my bed, felt my head to make sure I wasn't spiking a fever, and told me I must have been dreaming. She told me she was in bed sleeping the whole time.” Kristin reluctantly accepted her mother’s answer and went back to sleep.
Later that morning, Kristin’s parents received a phone call from her uncle. It was news about Kristin’s grandmother. She had passed in her sleep during the early morning hours. “My mom began to cry, but composed herself to continue the conversation,” says Kristin. “Her brother informed her the time of death was about 5:00 a.m. that morning. She explained to me that grandma had passed away, and now she would not be in pain and she was an angel in heaven.”
It wasn’t until a few days later that Kristin’s mother connected the time of her mother’s passing and Kristin’s waking vision of the shadowy woman in her room. “She did not tell me this story until I was about ten years old,” Kristin says. “I remembered it so clearly as she told it to me, and I realized it was my grandmother coming to see me and to say goodbye.”
GARGOYLES ON THE BEDPOST
It’s an age-old fear children have: monsters in their closets or under their beds. When Josh was six years old, he feared them, too. In his case, however, he swears he actually saw one.
It was the spring of 1990 when Josh, his brother Aaron and his mother were living in a mobile home on a farm outside of Laurelville, Ohio. On this night, Josh awoke from a disturbing nightmare. Today he cannot recall the details of the bad dream, but he does remember that it scared him enough that he had to get out of bed to seek his mother’s comfort. “I walked up the short hallway to my mother's room to try and crawl in bed with her,” Josh says. “She told me to go back to my bed, so I walked back toward my room, which I shared with my brother, Aaron.”
Josh was not prepared for what he encountered as he began to enter his room. “I will never forget what I saw. There on my brother's bedpost was a dark figure that looked like a gargoyle or gremlin. I really couldn't make out anything like its feet or legs. It just had a really square, rigid head, like a gargoyle. It was about two feet tall and was hunched over a bit and was looking at Aaron. I stopped dead in my tracks and gasped when I saw it. It turned its head as if it heard me! I couldn't see any eyes, just the outline of its face.”
Terrified, Josh turned and ran back into his mother’s room. Figuring Josh was just in need of a little assurance, she walked him back to his bedroom to show him there was no monster there. And indeed there wasn’t. Whatever Josh saw was now gone. “She didn't believe me, so I just tried to forget it,” Josh says. “I didn't mention it to anyone after that night.”
So it must have been Josh’s imagination, influenced by his nightmare… right? A few years later, when Josh was in tenth grade, he was sitting with a classmate named Ryan. Josh noticed a few large scars on his neck and asked Ryan how he got them. Ryan said that when he was about eight years old, he accidentally ran through a sliding glass door. He claimed the cuts almost killed him due to loss of blood.
But then he confessed to Josh a strange element to the story: "The strange thing was,” Ryan told him, “the night before the accident, my brother saw a little dark figure sitting on my bed watching me sleep." As Ryan described it, what his brother had seen sounded exactly like the gargoyle-like creature Josh encountered.
TOY PHONE CALL
Kids love telephones. They like to imitate adult conversations on their toy phones; and of course today they have the toy cell phones. Back in 1960, however, when Sandy was five years old, her toy telephone was the old-fashioned kind. But it might have been a very unusual phone indeed.
At that time, Sandy and her family lived in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. And it was Christmas Day when she had this remarkable experience. Sandy wanted to call her grandmother to tell her about the new Chatty Cathy doll and the other presents she had received for Christmas. The house phone was hung high on the wall, however – too high for her to reach without help. Unfortunately, her dad and her brother had gone out to shovel snow, and her mother was in the shower.
Sandy couldn’t wait. She thought she would burst if she couldn’t tell her grandmother right away about all her new treasures. “I was becoming increasingly impatient,” she remembers. “I decided to pretend to call my grandmother on the toy telephone that I got for Christmas. Back then, where I lived, there were no dial phones; all calls were operator assisted, and when I picked up the receiver on my toy telephone, I distinctly heard an operator say, ‘What number please?’
“I was shocked, but I told her my grandmother's number, which I still remember to this day. I heard the phone begin to ring, and soon my grandmother, with her heavy Italian accent, was saying hello. I immediately began telling her all about my Chatty Cathy doll, but she wanted to know where my mother was. I explained that my mother was in the shower, and my dad and brother were outside. She knew that I could not use the telephone by myself, and asked me how I climbed up to use the phone high up on the wall. I explained that I had called her on my toy telephone. She laughed heartily before telling me to have my mother call when she got out of the shower.
“When my mother got out of the shower, I tried to tell her that I had really talked to Grandma on my toy phone, and that she wanted my mother to call her. My mother laughed like my grandmother did, but since I kept insisting that she call Grandma, she finally did. When she discovered that I really had talked to my grandmother, I got in big trouble. My mother insisted that I had somehow dangerously climbed the wall to use the phone. I insisted that I had called Grandma on my toy phone, and I got in bigger trouble for lying.”
Sandy spent the rest of Christmas morning in her room, falsely accused of dangerous climbing and lying. “I was frustrated about that,” she says, “but I couldn't help but smile over the fact that I had somehow called my grandmother on my toy telephone that Christmas morning. It had to be magic.”
SPIRIT BROUGHT ME SWEETS
Adults (usually grandparents) sometimes spoil children by letting them have too many sweets. But what can we say when it’s a disembodied voice doing the spoiling?
In early summer of 1954, Douglas was eight years old and living in an eastern suburb of London, England, close to Epping Forest. His neighborhood was a mixture of terraced 1930s houses interspersed with "fields" – empty lots where the houses had been destroyed by German bombing and nature had taken over, much to the pleasure of the kids.
It was tough going for Douglas in those days. “My dad had left,” he says. “The stress of the war and the lure of a young woman. My mum, two sisters and I lived on, feeding on potatoes, cabbage, eggs, and bread. Mum got a job at the engineering factory just around the corner to pay the home loan.”
One particular day after lunch, Douglas walked his mother back to her job before he was to head off to school. He asked if he could have a few pennies to buy some candy. “I can still see the open handbag and the big leather purse she opened, which was empty,” Douglas recalls. “I can still feel the immense mutual embarrassment that there was no pocket money to be had. I skipped away wishing I had never asked.”
Douglas ran across a field behind some shops, then on a mud path through the grass across another open space. Still craving sweets, he decided to implore a higher authority. “In my grief and childish need, I just demanded of Jesus pocket money for sweets,” he says. “In reply, a deep male voice somewhere above and behind said, ‘Kick the grass.’ I looked about… I was alone. I kicked the grass. ‘Kick the grass,’ said the voice. I did again. This was a clump of solid, wild grass, almost wild oats that seemed to take over bomb sites in those days. ‘Kick the grass again,’ said the voice. I did.”
Out of the grass rolled a hexagonal coin, worth three pence in those days. Elated with his astonishing “luck”, Douglas dashed off to the sweet shop with his coin and consumed the result of his surreal experience.
“I've thought of this occurrence throughout my life,” Douglas reflects, “and have no conclusions except that it actually happened and I consumed the result. To my knowledge, the voice was coming from just behind and above, although no one was there. The voice was deep, English, and male, and I did not recognize it. My further attempts at securing instant money by praying did not work!”
Next page: Lady in the Mirror
