Stories Best Told in the Dark

By Frank Stroscio

Today there is an increased interest, or should I say curiosity, when it comes to matters of the paranormal. Rarely a day goes by that you do not hear about or see something strange and bizarre either on network television or in the movie theatres. Many television stations now focus their programming almost exclusively on the paranormal. So, this book is very timely in that regard. In this book you will find a wide variety of strange and haunting experiences that I have had spanning more than sixty years. From hauntings to strange sightings to physic episodes of a paranormal nature that I have experienced all over the world. These stories are told in a way that will grab the reader’s attention rather quickly. Knowing that these stores are based entirely on actual experiences makes them all the more compelling. This is a book you will likely not be able to put down. These are “Stories Best Told in the Dark.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781977256782

Frank Stroscio

Hello! My Name is Frank Stroscio, and I welcome you to take a journey into the world of the supernatural with me. Inside this book you will find stories that sound like fiction, but they are not. A lay parapsychologist at heart, I have spent my life investigating and experiencing those things that go bump in the night. Through decades of worldwide travel I have found myself in some of the strangest situations, so strange that I have kept them silent until now.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to stop reading other people’s books and write their own. – Albert Einstein

I HAVE BEEN to many places, done and experienced many different things. Through it all I have learned lots about lots. Having worked in over a dozen different countries at over forty different companies, either as a direct employee or as a senior manufacturing consultant, it was a foregone conclusion that I would eventually have something unexplained happen to me. Little did I know how strange and bizarre some of them would actually be.

A vast majority of my time since the early 1990s has been spent in airports and on airplanes. Out of sheer boredom, I would often sit and daydream while watching other passengers walk around the airport aimlessly. I wondered how many of them were just going through life sleepwalking. Most were glued to their cell phones, totally oblivious to their surroundings, bumping into other people or tripping over things. What were they thinking about? What was behind all of the madness I was observing all around me on a daily basis? There were times when I would see somebody walk by me who didn’t even look human, and I wondered how anyone could perform debaucheries of this magnitude on their own bodies and somehow feel good about it.

Once I witnessed a passenger drop dead in front of me while running to catch a flight in the Philadelphia airport. The other passengers never seemed to notice him, or for that matter care all that much. They were oblivious to everything else going on around them. As the gate agents tried to administer the AED while awaiting the arrival of an emergency medical team, I watched all the sleepwalkers stepping over his dying body as if it were trash on the floor. The TSA agents had to rope off the area to keep people from stepping over his body while they were trying to revive him. I spent time hanging out with the shoeshine man, watching as this event unfolded. We both just shook our heads in utter disbelief. This is apparently what we have become.

Is it any wonder that paranormal activity has significantly increased over the decades? No official statistics exist because most Catholic dioceses conceal the identity of their appointed exorcist, to avoid unwanted attention. According to an article in the January 2011 Atlantic called The Return of the Catholic Exorcism, Bishop Paprocki estimated that there were only around thirty priests in the United States qualified to perform the Rite of Exorcism. He argued that these priests had to contend with a growing number of exorcism requests. Catholic priests I have recently spoken with have indicated that today they believe every bishop is trained as an exorcist, or at least someone within every diocese is.

One only has to look at how people spend their time and money to see that there has been a gradual but major shift in society to a darker more primeval nature. Today the world is a much more dangerous place and getting more so every day. Paranormal activity is on the rise, and not a day goes by that you don’t hear about some heinous criminal act on the local news.

I have always felt that life was like money in a way. You have free will to spend it any way you choose, but once it’s gone you can’t spend it again. Making wise choices therefore is critical if you want to look back on your life with some sense of satisfaction.

So, in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic caught us all by surprise, I decided that I’d had enough. I made the decision to retire from my job and also from all of the traveling that I had been doing. Instead of working I decided to spend my full time with my wife, daughter, and grandchildren. I would now have a different set of challenges but also have the time to do some writing. I’ve always loved reading and writing, and now I had no excuse not to.

I almost immediately began writing three books that I had been thinking about for quite some time. One on eschatology, one a work of fiction, and the other one—this one—based entirely on true-life experiences or stories told to me by some close associates and family members of mine. The main focus being primarily on my brief but frightening paranormal experiences, in addition to some that are simply strange and bizarre and therefore worth mentioning. From hauntings, to apparitions, to miraculous coincidences, this book will detail some of those events. Since this is not a work of pure fiction, some of these events may leave the reader hanging or wanting more of an explanation. That makes two of us.

The basic premise here is that life takes us to many places. We are all trying to navigate our way through this journey called life. We take different paths through a myriad of different experiences. Not all of them are what we expected them to be, and some are quite fantastic. My journey will likely be drastically different than yours.

It is not my intent therefore to convince anyone of the validity of these stories, but merely to tell each one as best I can remember it and let you draw your own conclusions. Life has certainly taken me on a ride. Come along.

This is my story…

Chapter 1

A CASE OF PRECOGNITION

(1943)

Are the voices we sometimes hear in the still of the night just figments of our vivid imaginations, or do these voiceIt started off like any others come from someone or something else?

THIS INCIDENT OCCURRED when my mother, June, was only twelve years old. At that time, she lived in a small apartment on Darlingdale Avenue in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Her house was a side-by-side duplex with two floors and was located in the Darlington area of the city. When entering the front door there was a small foyer or entryway. Once inside you could enter through a door directly into her apartment or go up a flight of stairs to the apartment on the second floor. The other side of the house was essentially a mirror image of this.

June lived with her mother, Mildred, and her grandmother Stella, who was eighty years old at the time of this incident. Her father had passed away from cancer at the ripe old age of fifty-nine, just two months shy of her twelfth birthday. That particular evening her brother Russell, who lived only a few blocks away on Mount Vernon Boulevard, was visiting. He would often drop by the house to see his mother and his little sister. My mother and her brother were always very close. She looked up to him. He was a Navy veteran and after her father’s passing, he became the predominant male presence in her life.

After supper that evening Mildred asked Russell for a ride to the market on Newport Avenue to pick up a few things before heading home for the evening. He was happy to oblige. The market was only five minutes away. She told June that they would be back in twenty minutes or so, thinking she would be fine for a while alone with her grandmother. Oftentimes her grandmother would watch her while Mildred ran to the store. It had never been a problem before. This night would certainly change their perception going forward.

A few minutes after Mildred departed for the store, Stella lay down on her bed and fell asleep. This left June alone to entertain herself. She was used to this since she had no siblings her own age to play with. June knew not to ever leave the house at night by herself. Stella would often go to bed early or doze in and out of sleep while sitting in her chair. This happened more and more frequently as she got older. June’s older sisters—Shirley, Stella, and Lois—had all married and left home years before. My mother was the baby in the family and still lived at home with her mom.

June entertained herself most evenings by listening to the radio. In those days they did not have a television, and listening to the radio was what people generally did back then to pass the time. Although television became commercially available in 1941, it was still somewhat of a novelty, and Mildred did not have one yet. Before her father’s passing, he would sometimes listen to Scottish music on the radio. June did not like Scottish music all that much, but her mother listened to country and pop music. This June liked. She would dance to the music that her mother would listen to. Sometimes she would play with her dolls and sing to them while listening to music. This particular evening, she remembers singing and dancing in the living room to the song Oh, What a Beautiful Morning by Bing Crosby, a song that has always reminded her of this incident.

Shortly after her mother had left for the market, it began snowing outside. It came as a total surprise. The wind picked up considerably, and June wondered how much longer her brother and mother would be gone. June loved the snow, especially if it meant no school in the morning. She walked over to the window to watch the snow coming down when she noticed what looked like a man standing across the street. He seemed to be watching her as she gazed out the window. He had a dark, eerie presence about him. At first, she wasn’t sure if she was seeing a person or something else that looked like a person. Like when you look at the clouds and see a face or a figure of something else. As the clouds move ever so slightly, you realize it wasn’t what you thought it was at all. It was just clouds.

Visibility was quite poor, but as she continued peering into the snow squall, she was sure it was a man that she was seeing, although something about him didn’t sit right with her. He looked to be unusually tall and lanky, wearing a top hat and trench coat. Top hats were quite common attire back then. He appeared to be smoking something; perhaps it was a pipe or a cigar, she thought. It didn’t look like a cigarette to her because of the way he was smoking it. To June the situation was becoming dire.

This stranger was fixated on her, or on something she was doing, as he never moved or turned to look away. He stood completely motionless like a mannequin and just kept staring directly at her. This made June even more uncomfortable. She noticed the snow accumulating on the brim of his hat. He had apparently been standing out there for a while. June thought, Maybe if I ignore him, he will eventually go away. After all, her grandmother was just feet away in her bedroom, and her mother would likely be home any minute now. Besides, her mother had locked the door when she went out. She always did. June continued dancing and listening to music as if no one were watching.

No matter how hard she tried, June just could not shake the uneasy feeling that something was very wrong. She’d had these types of feelings in the past and she had learned to pay attention to them. She stopped dancing to look out the window again only to find that the man had crossed the street and was standing on the corner of Darlingdale Avenue and Burke Street now. She lived in the house on the corner, and he was looking directly at her, peering through the window once again. How odd, she thought. There were no footprints in the snow. She had only looked away for a minute. How had he crossed the street so quickly without walking through the snow? He was creepy looking. Why was he doing this?

Quite suddenly an awful sense of foreboding overcame her like a massive tidal wave. Her body went limp, and she felt like she was going to pass out at any moment. Her eyesight became blurry, and she put her hand out against the wall to stabilize herself. The room seemed as if it were beginning to spin. She felt awful. What is wrong with me? she thought. She went to call out for her grandmother but found she could not utter a sound.

She sensed that someone else was in the room with her. She suddenly heard a loud, chilling voice yell, Go! Lock the door now, June! Hurry! This really frightened her. In some respects, the voice frightened her more than the stranger looking in the window. The voice was not her grandmother’s. It had come from someone or something else, but who was in the room with her? Again, Now, June, now!

Her gut told her to listen to this voice and she did. Even though she was sure the door was locked, the adrenaline had her pumped. After hearing that voice and without giving it a second thought, she took a deep breath and ran as fast as she possibly could to the front door. She surprised herself with how fast she made it to the door after not even being able to speak or move only seconds earlier. Quickly turning the lock, she recoiled as the door lock actuated—the door had been unlocked after all. Oh my God, she thought, Mom forgot to lock the door! She quickly turned to see who had told her to lock the door, but the room was empty. There was no one there.

Someone then grabbed the doorknob from the other side and turned it in a frantic attempt to open the door. A man’s gruff, guttural voice, reminiscent of Boris Karloff or Vincent Price, mumbled softly, Let me in, sweetie. I won’t hurt you. Your mother is going to be late and asked me to check in on you. Whoever it was knew that her mother wasn’t home. He reeked of cigar smoke. Her mother would never have asked a stranger to check on her. Of this, she was sure. She turned and ran back to the window again. The stranger who had been watching her outside was gone now. Again, with several inches of snow on the ground, not a footprint in sight. June reasoned that this must be the same man who was now inside the entryway trying to get into her house. He had certainly gone somewhere. She began sobbing as she realized how alone she actually was. This felt bad. She didn’t want to die. Her eighty-year-old grandmother was no match for this man whoever he was. It occurred to her that maybe she had passed out and was lying on the floor dreaming all of this. That was more plausible than this shadow man outside her door, but of course this was only wishful thinking.

The stranger was definitely at the door and wanted in. After trying unsuccessfully to convince June to open the door, he began pounding and kicking all the harder. It was clear that he was getting angrier by the minute and was not leaving until he got what he came for, but what was that?

Stella, her grandmother, called out from her bedroom, June, what’s all the ruckus out there?

My mother was convinced it was the man from across the street who had been watching her through the window. How lucky she felt that she had locked the door when she did. That voice had perhaps just saved her life. She replied loudly, There’s a man trying to break in. He’s banging on the door. Should we call the police? Hearing her talking to someone else in the apartment and realizing at that point that June was not alone, the stranger bolted up the stairs to the apartment above. June heard him trying to open the door upstairs. Luckily, no one was home.

Shortly after the stranger ran upstairs, her mother and brother returned home from the store. She felt such a sense of relief watching them pulling up and parking the car in front of the house. Her brother Russell was a strong man and would easily make mincemeat out of this stranger. She watched as they got out of the car and carefully walked through the snow up to the house. She immediately noticed their footprints in the snow and wondered how the stranger had left none. When they had left it wasn’t snowing at all, but now it was a full-scale blizzard outside.

Once inside their apartment her brother put a bag down on the counter and turned to hang his coat and hat up on the coatrack near the door. Her mother took out a loaf of Sunbeam bread, a can of Shedd’s peanut butter, and a few other miscellaneous items from the bag. Mildred did not own