Experiencer

Neither my brother nor I will ever forget what we saw at Oak Drive, though believe me, we both wish we could. When I was asked about my first intuition story in 2020, this was the memory that rose to the surface. We were asked if, as children, we had ever experienced something that scared us, something we could see that made us decide to turn down the volume on our perception, to block things out.

Within days, I checked in with my brother to confirm that my grandmother’s house had been as creepy as I remembered. His response was emphatic. The details of what he told me blew my mind. I had no idea he had experienced the horror too. We had both been terrified in that house, though in completely different ways.

The house on Oak Drive was the home my mother grew up in. After my parents divorced, we moved east with my mom and stayed there while she searched for a place of our own.

My grandmother, Doe, welcomed us into the large white house in the seemingly peaceful street. My memories of that time are mostly positive. I remember toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches stuffed with potato chips, and afternoons playing baseball in the backyard diamond with our cousins. I remember my grandmother’s Bridge club, sipping the bright greem Crème de menthe after dinner drink, lots of boiled broccoli. and the first time Coca-cola tickled my nose. I remember the dawn of MTV, Land of the Lost, The Bugaboos, and Go Speed Racer. I remember my grandmother’s ceramic cookie jar and the smell of the stale Fudge Stripes within.

But I also remember the basement stairs. Going down into the “cellar” was like going down to Hades. Every single time I traversed those stairs, I would run as fast as my legs could carry me, positive that ghosts or spirits were chasing after me, reaching for me, trying to touch me.

It was like a fleet of them lived right below the stairs, just waiting to terrorize me. The fear of god would flood through my body, goosebumps. It was a visceral fear, like my body understood something that my mind could not. I made hundreds of AI images trying to capture these moments.

Even more terrifying than the stairs was what I saw as I laid in bed at night. I’ve never had sleep paralysis, but these memories mirror aspects of it. And although I don’t suffer from it, I’ve always been skeptical of how casually people wave it off as “normal.”

How is it normal to feel paralyzed, to sense a presence in the room, or to feel as though you’re being stalked or hunted while unable to move? That is not normal. I believe sleep paralysis deserves far more study than it currently gets.

What I remember is lying awake in my bed, my mother already fast asleep beside me, while my brother slept across the hallway on the other side. I was so aware of the presence in the doorway. A menacing shadow stood there, night after night, never crossing the threshold but always watching. I wondered why it was there, why it was watching me. I knew, even as a child, that it was alive in some way. The fear was paralyzing.

I had no name for it at the time. I told myself it might be the spirit of my mother’s father, who had died about ten years earlier. Every night I prayed to him, believing he was watching over me. It wasn’t until about ten years later that my mother remembered and told me what he had done to her. To me, he had been painted as a saint, and I prayed to him while that dark figure stood in the doorway. Maybe it was Santa, we were told he was always watching, and this figure fit the bill, only it wasn’t jolly at all. It felt alive, intent, and anything but safe.

When I began looking for my monsters in 2020, before I even knew the word “experiencer,” this was the first scene I returned to. I imagined myself taking the director’s chair, replaying this moment but surrounding my little girl self with a bubble of protection and safety. I stood between her and the darker energies. I held her safe. It felt like time traveling to care of my past self.

It wasn’t until several months after realizing I was an “experiencer” that I began hearing people speak of “shadow beings” or “the Hat Man.” I never saw a hat on my shadow dude but the energy described by thousands of people is an exact match. These shadowy figures, it turns out, are common in the lives of experiencers and in sleep paralysis.

A childhood horror I had carried alone for decades was, strangely, part of a much larger pattern. I had found my people.

My brother never saw the shadow being, but he did see other fantastically weird and unsettling things. In the space between his bedroom and the attic, he remembers a room full of creatures and monsters. And just as I once saw the Easter Bunny, he swears he saw Santa Claus on the roof.

Freud wrote about “screen memories,” vivid, often whimsical images that the mind creates to hide or soften a more traumatic underlying experience I think it’s highly possible both of our memories were exactly that. Still, he agrees with me one hundred percent about those stairs to the basement. Every time he went down there, he couldn’t leave quickly enough. The bad vibes down in that cellar were just palpable.

My mom is gone now. I wish more than anything I could ask her what she saw in that house, what she felt, what she had to turn down the volume on just to survive. What did she experience as a child within those walls? Were the spirits already there, or were they born of the pain and cruelty that lived there in her youth? Sometimes I even wonder if her childhood abuse and these beings were somehow connected. It sounds far out, I know, but who can really say where darkness comes from?