Faith: Mary's Story

By Sharon Richter

Many people have precognitive dreams, others hear voices or see things once in a while, and some get a funny feeling in their bones telling them that something is wrong. It tends to run in families.

In August of 2000, shortly after my sister-in-law, Diane, died, dark shadows started to attack my daughter Mary during the night. At first, fearful of sounding crazy, she didnt tell anyone. Who would believe her? When Mary finally got up the nerve to tell her roommate about the attacks, she was shocked to discover that Lauren had seen things too. Then another friend, Ned, told her evil spirits surrounded her. How would he know that?

When Mary called to tell me that weird things had been happening to her and her friends, paranormal activity was furthest from my mind. They all liked to party so I reasoned that it must be drugs and alcohol causing this hysteria. But when Mary moved out, the weird things stopped for them, not for her. As the attacks escalated, she could see the shadows gather in the corner of her living room. She started hearing voices, and the TV and radio were nothing but static.

Mary hid her problems from me as for long as she could, but I knew there was something seriously wrong. I was having dreams that she was in danger. Even then, I refused to believe her problems were paranormal. Logically, I wanted them to be fixable issues, like bad friends, or a sleep disorder, or even mental illness. That all changed when I finally realized that Mary really was being attacked by evil spirits.

My daughters story is about that year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491898314

Sharon Richter

Sharon Richter lives in Cheshire, Connecticut, with her wonderful husband, Dave. As a bona fide “church lady” she derives great pleasure in volunteering at her church office and being a reader at mass.

Book preview

Mary

No! No! Get away! Mary! Help! Make them go away!

They all looked over in surprise at Ned as he began to thrash around on the couch, wildly waving his arms as if he were swatting at an invisible swarm of bees. All the while he kept screaming for me to help him, to make them go away. Finally, with a loud gasp, he shouted, "Go away!" then fell into an uneasy, twitchy sleep. Except for me, everyone thought Ned’s unusual behavior was a riot, laughing as he struggled with his unseen attackers.

At the time Ned fell asleep, my roommate, Lauren, and I were hanging out with some friends in the living room of our apartment. When Ned had finally settled down, Lauren asked me to tell everyone about my own similar experiences, like they too were a big joke. She was constantly doing that, bringing up my own horrifying attacks. And for some reason, I always did what she asked. Somehow, telling my stories to others and hearing them laugh made the attacks less threatening.

The attacks were real! The way my bedroom lights sometimes flickered or completely turned off wasn’t my imagination. Lauren had seen it happen too. What I couldn’t understand was that if Ned and Lauren were bothered by some of the same experiences, why did they think I was to blame?

Deep down, I knew these appearances weren’t really nightmares, or dreams. When they happened, I’d wake up in the middle of the night from a deep sleep, unable to move, feel, or act. It was like the sensation you get right before a car crash: You could see the accident coming, but there was nothing you could do to stop it. At first, I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. A dizzying sense of nausea and vertigo would flow through my body in seconds: head-chest-stomach-fear. Unable to scream or close my eyes, I would stare helplessly at the dark, menacing shadows gathering above my bed before they whirled down to attack, my heart beating furiously, straining against the confines of my chest. I could open my mouth slightly, but the effort made my teeth chatter like one of those wind-up toys. I thought my teeth and jaw were going to break as I tried to open my mouth to scream. The shadows couldn’t reach my body beneath the covers. Instead, they spun madly around my head and viciously pinched my exposed arms.

The horror seemed to last for hours. Then, just as suddenly, with one big gasp, I would shout, "Go away!" and the attack would end, leaving me stiff, dizzy, nauseous, and covered in sweat. Exhausted, my arms bruised and aching, I’d just lay there. Forget sleep. Afraid to get out of bed and go into the darkness beyond, I waited for daylight. I felt safe during the day.

At first, the shadows only attacked me in the bedroom at night. So each time I sensed a presence, I slept on the living room couch. It wasn’t very comfortable, though, and kept me awake most of the night. Leaving lights on helped too, but only for a short while. Eventually, it didn’t matter if the lights were on or off, the shadows always returned to torment me. Their attacks seemed worse because of the false sense of security I had gained between those early episodes.

Afraid that Lauren would freak out, I waited a couple of weeks before saying anything to her. Maybe the attacks would just go away. I was shocked when Lauren described similar experiences. Lauren saw wispy things like broken smoke rings above her head, but she could move. When she sat up, Lauren could see a woman digging a hole in the far corner of the bedroom. Another time, she opened her bedroom door and saw a woman in a rocking chair at the foot of her bed. Lauren screamed when she saw her. And during this particular incident she wasn’t asleep; Lauren had just come home from work.

At the time Lauren saw the woman in the rocking chair, I ran to Lauren’s side when I heard her scream. There was no one else in the room when I got there. When I asked Lauren to describe the woman, she told me that the woman’s features were too blurry. We both felt scared and thought the apartment was haunted. When Lauren checked with our landlady, the landlady confirmed our fears. She told Lauren that the apartment complex had been built over an old Indian gravesite. The construction crew had found bones almost as soon as they started digging. But previous tenants never mentioned anything strange. We’d been living there for almost a year, and nothing had happened to us. So why were we being bothered now? We wondered what we should do next.

Sharon

Mom! Mary blurted out when I answered the telephone. Something really weird has been happening. All of a sudden I wake up at night and am attacked by these dark shadows. I can’t move. When my friend Ned slept over, he kept shouting and screaming in his sleep for something to go away and for me to help him. He could move. Lauren’s seen the shadows and some lady in her room, but she wasn’t attacked like me and Ned. They thought it was because of me, but the landlady says the apartments were built on an old gravesite, so maybe the apartment is haunted and it’s not really me! What do you think, Mom? What should we do?

The panic in Mary’s voice came through the phone like a physical blow. What, I wondered, is going on now? A bleak feeling of fear bored into my stomach. Dave and I were used to bailing out Mary. It just never seemed to end. For such a smart, beautiful young woman, my youngest daughter had the worst taste in friends, and trouble always seemed to follow. If Mary had more people sense like her sister Theresa, we wouldn’t have worried so much. She possessed a childlike quality and zest for life that drew people, especially children, to her. This wonderful quality, however, was easily taken advantage of and had caused Mary much heartache over the years.

It suddenly became important to me to keep the lines of communication open and not alienate Mary by sounding accusatory or disbelieving in any way. So, humoring her and keeping my voice as neutral as possible, I asked her about the attacks. As Mary described her inability to move, the hallucinatory qualities of her attacks, and the experiences of her friends, I could feel my right hand start to cramp as it clutched the phone. Maybe, I thought, it was stress. Recently laid off from her job, Mary was having no luck finding another one, and her unemployment compensation had only weeks to go. At the rate things were going she would be forced to move back in with Dave and me for a while until she got back on her feet.

Unless I spoke to Ned and Lauren, I had no way of knowing the truth. Then again, if Mary’s friends really were involved, what were they all doing that could cause such psychosis? As a teenager on the fringe of the drug-culture movement of the sixties and seventies, I remembered stories of mass drug-induced hallucinations. I wondered if drugs and alcohol could account for my daughter’s and her friends’ eerie collective madness. Although Mary admitted to drinking more and smoking pot, she insisted she was doing them because of the nightmarish attacks. She figured if she were drunk