The Encounter That I Want To Forget

by Jodie Bares

To this day, I am still very frightened to watch The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  I made it a good forty-five minutes into the film and once this demonic face melted onto the screen, I had to shut it off.  This was a movie, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen something like that.

The other evening, my husband and I were talking about the film and he asked me why I like paranormal things if I don’t like to be scared watching horror movies? My answer: “because I’ve seen things that are very similar to the things they show in that movie.” I only ever told him part of the story, and I’ve done the best to suppress a few little details, but that particularly demonic face on the screen triggered a memory that I thought I had deeply buried.

It was summer and I was about eight or nine. I went next door to my neighbor’s house. She was my babysitter at the time and I used to play with her brother a lot who was a year younger than me. My half-cousin lived a few doors down from us and she frequently came over with kind of crazy ideas. That day, she brought a Ouija board.

It was like the perfect setting from a horror movie.  A thunderstorm had moved in and the news was saying it could get pretty intense. We sat in a circle in her (the babysitter’s) basement room and held hands around lit candles and the board. My babysitter’s biological father died when she was young, so it was decided we call upon him. After a short time, it didn’t really feel like anything was happening, so we abandoned the seance and went upstairs.

Suddenly, we heard glass shattering. We ran downstairs to find the framed picture of her dad laying shattered on the concrete basement floor. We stood around, mouths agape at what we saw. But we didn’t have time to react because the tornado siren sounded and four of us had to pile into a small interior room. The lights went out and I was afraid. I had my eyes closed but suddenly felt something to the side of me. I thought it was my friend’s brother so I nudged it and said to stop. When I got no reply, I turned my head and all I saw was this thing with a wide mouth gaping open to the right. There were no eyeballs in the face, only empty sockets that seemed to ooze something down its cheekbones. I screamed and dunked down, my friends thinking I was freaking out because of the tornado siren. Thankfully we weren’t hit with a tornado and we got the all-clear signal not but a moment after this encounter. I don’t know what we opened and let in that day, but it was nothing benevolent. And though I can’t be entirely certain, nobody else mentioned the demonic face to this day that I’m aware of, aside from me.

This is the closest image I could find to what I saw that day in the basement.

I have been in that house since that time, but every time I went after that seance, I always felt like I wasn’t wanted there or like I was being watched. Once, I was even scratched with three marks on my arm, and not knowing how to explain it to my mom, I just said I was playing with the neighbor’s dog. 

I have never seen the weeping demon since that day, but the memory lingers on.  It is something I would give anything to forget. However, it is an encounter with something unknown that I felt I needed to discuss in this context with other true believers and truth seekers, if anything, to start a dialogue and to reassure others that have seen other similar things that things will get better and the memory won’t always be so in your face. So, if you’re one of those people that have come face to face with a real life horror monster, then you are not alone.