I’m not religious or superstitious in the slightest and I think it’s pretty easy to explain away (probably just a drunk girl or something) but it just didn’t feel right, it creeped me out enough to consider it a potential paranormal experience.

I had a pretty vivid night terror about the same girl sometime later, I woke up and she was tapping on the window (ground floor flat), then she was in the room but had no face. Weird.

22. Grandma’s Diary

After my grandmother died I had a dream she turned up and started screaming at everybody to leave her stuff alone. I had never seen her this angry in real life, man was she pissed. Anyway the main thing she was angry about was her private diary and nobody had the right to read it.

In the dream I explained to her she was dead but she was like ‘it doesn’t matter my things are still MY things!’. I told my mother about the dream and she got upset. Turns out she had found grandmas diary and started reading it. Most supernatural experience I’ve had.

23. Tarot

I got my first Rider-Waite deck when I was 16, at a hippie California wicca shop. I was agnostic, having left the church that year, and didn’t believe in Tarot, overall. (Still don’t, really.) I wanted to learn it, oh yes, and I got quite good at it, because, dun dun dunnnnn… it was a hell of a gimmick to get girls to talk to me.

And it worked. I was a goth kid, long black hair, kinda skinny, and I wore black a lot. With that deck, I went from “that weirdo Junior at the school who listens to devil music” to “that weird guy Buffy Prep Girl wants to see about banging because she hates her parents.” A little bit of hyperbole there, but not much. The deck got me laid at least 4 times outright, because it was a great icebreaker with girls who were way outside and above my high school strata.

After a couple weeks, the rumor was that I was an honest to fuck psychic. Was I? Fuck, no. But I could cold read like a sonovabitch, and memorizing what the cards meant helped my spiel sound REALLY legit. I always did a Celtic Cross, and could do bullshit on the fly.

Say the second card came down five of cups while I’m reading for some cute thing from my Bio class?

“Are you and your family making any plans on traveling this summer?”
If she said “Yes,” she’d also babble a bunch of details. And I would nod, sage as fuck. And I’d ask her if she had misgivings about it, since, let’s be honest, teenagers have misgivings about every goddamn thing. If she said “No,” I’d reply with “I didn’t think so,” and explain that the card showed her yearning to travel, even though she couldn’t. Which was, again, a no-brainer, because it was a small, boring fucking town.

You know what I mean.

In my senior year, I’d filled out a bit, and gained a hell of a lot of confidence. So I stopped doing the Tarot thing as much – frankly, I didn’t need to anymore. But if someone really asked me, pretty pleeeeeeease, I’d do it.

Spending the night at my best friend’s house while his parents were away, we decided to have his GF and a couple other girls we knew over. Time to raid his parents’ bar and water the bottles so they wouldn’t notice! And we were having a grand old time, when my bro, who we’ll call Paul, asked me if I had my magical cards. What ho, I just happened to! Giggity. The girls all made appropriate “oooooh” and “oh, wow” noises. So I decided to do a spread for Paul first. He asked what his future would be.

Big bad shit. Horrible. Three of Swords, crossed by the Tower, Lovers Reversed above, Wheel of Fortune reversed below. Crowned by Death, The World Reversed for the Future card.

I stopped. I stopped my litany of bullshit, and pulled out the next card. Ten of Swords. I put it back into the middle of the deck, collected the cards, and said “You know what? I don’t want to do this. It’s bullshit.” And then I said something about the energy being off, wank wank, and it didn’t take much for the girls to convince us to play Truth or Dare and drink way too much peach schnapps.

That was the night Paul decided to go bare, and knocked up his GF. Being only 18, they had a big dramatic breakup because he wanted to abort, she wanted to keep it. And she did. Paul became suicidally depressed, because he still loved his GF, and she wanted to have nothing to do with him anymore. A month after the kid was born, she fell asleep with the baby on her bed, the kid rolled over and got stuck between the box spring and the wall. It suffocated while she napped. Paul went completely batshit, tried to hang himself, and got committed.

Coincidence? Probably. But he had asked me, months after I did it, why I’d stopped reading his tarot, and I’d been drunk enough to spill that it was strife, loss, heartache, and death. He never forgave me.

24. “The Children Will Be Safe Here”

In 2000, my wife and I had just purchased a large old Victorian style home to have room for our 3 kids, ages 2,5,7. Early one beautiful spring morning, with the sun shining bright, half asleep, I opened my eyes to see a woman in an early 1900s yellow dress with little flowers smiling down at me. She said, “Don’t worry, the children will be safe here.” Still mostly asleep, I thought, OK, good, and dozed off again for a few seconds. Then the realization hit me of what I just saw, and I sat straight up in bed fully awake. The woman in yellow wasn’t there of course. But that’s not the creepy part…