By Harold Egeln
October 31, 2002 -- Once upon a rainy night in April 1972, I woke up from a sound sleep, lulled into it by the symphony of raindrops I enjoy. I went to the window of my second floor room in a house I shared with others in East Orange, New Jersey on Prospect Street near Upsala College.
I looked down into the driveway between our house and Paul's house. I saw a young woman in a flowing whitish gown running in the driveway towards our backyard. She was holding a lit candle, glowing despite the heavy rain.
Curious and startled, I hurried to my window facing the backyard. I saw the woman, whose face I could not see, run towards our basement and actually enter through the wall. What!? I said, my heart pounding. I put it out of my mind.
Two months later, in early June 1972, after moving out of the house to a another house I shared with others in suburban West Orange set in 40 acres of woods at 646 Propsect Avenue, I stopped by the house on Prospect Street in East Orange, paying a visit to the two remaining tenants.
They were a couple from Finland who would tell me of UFO sightings and encounters in Finland, getting the latest news from friends back in Finland. They shared diagrams, stories and details of these sightings with me, with at least one chart I still have somewhere today.
When I arrived, they told of what they said was a strange but true incident. The day after the rest of us moved to West Orange, they heard someoe enter the kitchen. Their room was right next to it.
"We heard a woman laughing, very happily. We heard her room upstairs," said the man. "We followed upstairs as she laughed running all the way up ahead of us. We did not see her. When we got to the third floor behind her, we found nobody. No one hiding, no one running downstairs."
THE LOST MANSION INCIDENTS
Later that June of 1972 I was in the backyard of the house in West Orange with two friends, a young woman and young man, whom I shall call Jem and Ken. It was night and we were looking into the woods, the 40 acres on which the house, a once a servants cottage that served a mansion which had long ago burned to the ground. It was known in West Orange lore as "THE LOST MANSION."
We noticed a strange light out in the woods slowly moving towards us. Someone with a flashlight or latern? we wondered. As t came closer, it was a misty light in a humanlike form, steadily moving towards our backyard.
Thinking it may be a ghost, we ran quickly up the backporch stairs and into the kitchen. I happened to look towards the window on the porch.
A black human form moved passed the window! We closed al the shades in the house. I sat in a rocking chair and went into hysterics all of a sudden, for no reason at all. Within minutes I was okay, but was puzzled by my sudden hysteria, which made no sense to any of us.
Later that summer a friend visited me on a hot day, pulling her car into the driveway. When she opened her car door, a frigid cold filled the car. As she came to our front door, she was shivering and told me what happened. I felt the cold on her arms.
When she when home that evening and ent to bed, she was awaken by her stereo going on downstairs, hearing the Jefferson STARSHIP rock group, led by Grace Slick. Curious, she told me later, she went downstairs and turned the radio off.
Back upstairs, it came on again. With the Jefferson STARSHIP again. She turned it off again. Spooky, she said, not making any sense of it. I thought of my Jefferson STARSHIP poster on my bedroom door, with the WHITE RABBIT.
As 1972 progressed, other visitors told of hearing a young woman laughing outside the house. But no one could be seen nor found. We named what could be a ghost "Madeleine," knwing that not to be possible.
Late that Autumn a man living in the house, a non-believer in ghosts, woke up to see a withered old woman standing at the end of his bed, staring blankly straight ahead. He went to the bathroom, as he had to go, thinking he may have bee dreaming or drank too much.
Back to his bedroom, she was still there, staring straight ahead, but fading away. Using his logical legal mind, he tried to reason with her, telling her that she cannot possible exist, as there are no such things as ghosts. She gradually faded away and was gone, and the man finished a fitful sleep.
He also told me of hearing a woman singing one night downstairs in the living room. Curious, thinking someone left the stereo on, he went downstairs. When he got down there, the singing by the woman stopped. The stereo was off. No one was there or had been there.
In the dark wee hours of Tuesday, December 5, 1972 I suddenly awoke. I was unable to move my body, but found that I could move my eyes, enabling me to see my clock radio, which told the exact time -- three o'clock a.m.
I noticed that the room was filled with a soft blue light. I was able to see that the same blue light was outside the house, but there was no beam. The soft blue light was everywhere.
As panic set in, I was startled to hear a dog barking and scratching furiously at the front door downstairs, desparately trying t enter. We had no dog, just three cats.
Then the barking became a defeaning howl. No, this is a wolf, I thought. It's three o'clock at night, the Hour of the Wolf, as Ingmar Bergman tells in his movie by that title. I panic, try to scream, but cannot.
Suddenly I am able to move. I run to the windows and pull down the shades. I suddenly get overwhelming exhausted and fall into a deep sleep. Next thing I know, it's 12:00 noon. I wake up very nausous with the worst headache I ever had. I slept through the alarm and call into work sick, apologizing.
Within a month later, following a party at our house, we allow one guest, whom I shall call Chris, to stay over, giving him the downstairs living room couch to sleep on. I went to bed upstairs, alone and tired from the party and my stint as the deejay.
In the morning I said Good Morning to Chris, asking how he slept. Okay, he said, adding that he was awaken once in the middle of the night when I and a woman came through the front door. What? I say, knowing that not to be true at all, impossible.
"Harold, I saw you coming in the door. You were staring ahead as you went upstairs. Right behind you was a woman in a long gown with long blonde hair, pushing you upstairs." he said, insisting that this was so, despite my protestations. I saw that he was sincere, as he was bothered by my questioning of the reality he witnessed.
One Winter night, my friend Jem and I were alone in the house late in the evening, with the other four people out. We heard lots of voices outside after awhile. Opening the door, it was windy, the wind flowing from the dark woods. The voices, of which there were many, seemed to be travelling on the wind currents. Enchanted by the musical like chorus of voices at first, we became frightened, and retreated inside and to sleep.
A friend, hearing of these "hauntings," suggested that "two psychics" visit from Montclair to determine what was going on. They had a reputation of tracking down "orbs" that would float through walls.
One of the psychics was named "BUNNY." I decided against this, perferring to leave the ghost "Madeleine" alone.
One Spring night I awoke very agitated and anxious. I came downstairs, went to the kitchen cabinet, grabbed some saucers and plates and began throwing them out like "flying saucers" into the backyard, not knowing why. This was totally ot of character, but something was gnawing me. Many plates broke. I left my cups and glasses untouched. Just the plates and SAUCERS I flew through the night air, not knowing why.
By June 1973 I moved out of the house, saddened by leaving it.
LANDING, NEW JERSEY
On Thanksgiving weekend later in 1973 I stayed over at a friend's house, a woman who said that she loved me, which made no sense to me, since I knew I was unlovable and would always be.
She was determined to have a child with me, although she was married. Sex frightens me, so no deal. So, here I was at her house in LANDING, New Jersey near Lake Rogrene, looking for Comet Kohotek that night. We slept in the basement bedroom, but were awakened by someone who enterted the room.
It seemed to be a small dark shadow, about the size of a 10-year-old boy, we thought, keeping its distance, watching us, maybe. It was like Peter Pan's shadow, but more spooky, even a wee bit sinister.
"It's the spiirt of Brian, the boy I knew as a child, the one who died at age10, my friend said. "He wants to be reborn as our child, our Rainbow Child."
Eventually the intruder faded and we faded into a deep sleep. The next day, back home, I headed to the Willowbrook Shopping Mall, where I had the sudden urge to buy a lot of plants. One I named "Andromeda," after the galaxy.
Then in my journal I wrote an entry in the style of stream-of-consciousness, mentioning MARS and my being an otherwordly SPACE EXPLORER who crash landing in a field in southwest England four centuries ago, my "subtle body" adjusting and merging into the "Earth energy field," -- obviously my imagination run rampant, I thought, all fantasy.
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THE WATERFALL GNOMES
One Sunday night around May Day of 1970, four friends and I decided to go out into the woods in South Mountain Reservation in Madison, New Jersey. We parked the car and walked the trail to the top of a small waterfall, with a clearing and path below, and settled in for some midnight refreshments and chats.
Shortly afterwards we heard some movement below, which spooked us, as no one is supposed to be in the woods at this large Essex County public reservation at night. As everybody hurriedly left down the trail, I, always curious, lingered for a moment.
Looking down the waterfall, I noticed some dim lights moving under the footbridge in the stream flowing from the waterfall. Moving towards the waterfall I saw what appeared to be gnomes carrying lanterns and wearing pointed caps.
Chills filled my body and I felt uncomfortable, although fascinated by this unexpected sight. The chills and cold increased as I looked up to some trees about 50 feet away from where I stood.
There a dark, black horse was looking at me with a vague rider atop it. That's it!
I bolted down the trail to follow my friends, long gone. When I arrived at the car, they were not yet there. They soon followed from the same trail. But what was strange was that I should have caught up with them, as it was not possible to have passed by them. That's weird! I said nothing of what I witnessed.
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Now, given the "journey in time," and close encounter reasearch and personal experience since that time period, I know that much more apparently happened then, and the role of this mysterious "woman" in my life, who seemed to be a central figure in this.
It all subject to INTREPRETATION.
But there are CLUES strewn throughout these "hauntings" that CONNECT with events later and now. IT WAS THESE VERY EVENTS THAT LED ME ON MY JOURNEY IN 1987 TO UNCOVER MY OWN CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, AND OPENED THE DOOR TO S.P.A.C.E. IN 1992.
I simply tell you here what happened, what was the EXPERIENCE of MYSELF and OTHERS, true stories of "Hauntings" for HALLOWEEN 2002.
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Checkout this interesting and informative website on the "True Origins of Halloween:":
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Saturday, March 15, 2003
In my childhood and, later, during the time my two brothers were raising their children, the brothers told a tale of leprechauns which actually happened, when growing up in Irvington, New Jersey.
One of my brothers told me, and later his own children, of the Night of the Leprechauns. He was awake when he saw them, in single file, coming up from the top of the stairs and enter my bedroom. The wee folk, he said, looked exactly like leprechauns.
Our mother had an Irish heritage, all four of her grandparents coming from Ireland somewhere around 1870, the O'Daly's and O'Hallorans.
She told me and my brothers that after my birth at Irvington General Hospital, the doctor who delivered me disappeared, leaving no trace of his whereabouts, puzzling her and the hospital. This did not happen when my younger brothers were born nor when, in her first marriage, our half-sister was stillborn.
In first or second grade, when I was six or seven, one day at 3:00 pm., the class was dismissed at the end of the school day. All left, including the teacher. Not me. I was paralyzed, unable to move nor speak. My eyes were fixated on the clock over the blackboards, staying at 3:00.
The teacher came back in the room, asking why I was still there and soon realized I was paralyzed, calling my parents, who broght me home. They called a doctor, who came to the apartment, and they called my father's father, who I was close to. The doctor found nothing wrong, thinking the paralysis was in my mind, and my grandfather began talking to me, calling me Junior. I snapped out of it, sitting next to our pot-bellied coal stove.
One day while driving my tricycle, I stopped. I was then in two places at the same time (biolocation). On the sidewalk on my tricycle. And in the sky above myself, on a tricycle a few stories above myself. Mystified but awed by this, I next found myself awake in bed, knowing this was not a dream. I still have the photo f me on a tricycle, about age six or seven.
Somewhere around -- of before -- that time my mother took my brothers and I to see the Easter Bunny at a department store in downtown Newark, New Jersey. When I saw the giant white rabbit, I started screaming hysterically.
My mother, angry at my being upset, began leaving the store. Then I saw a second Easter Bunny, more colorfully dressed and staring straight ahead, making me scream even more before we left.
When I was 10 and asleep one night, I became lucid in a dream, fully awake with my daytime consciousness in a dream, and found myself soaring above planet Earth, seeing the Moon passing by, and being thrust into a field a star, filled with wonder at the experience.
As I excelerated, I felt that I was "going home," and became scared of never returning here. At that exact instant, my course was reversed, and I "awoke" in my bed, never losing the stream of consciounesses.
Towards the end of fifth grade, educators at my school found that I was already functioning at the tenth grade level, and they advised my parents to have me skip sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grades and start the next school year as a high school student in tenth grade, at age 11, or my parents could let me progress without skipping fur grades.
Thinking about this alone, I was in a room. I felt like I was looking through a mirror, because I saw myself looking back at myself from "the looking glass," pondering my future directon. The decision was made -- I forget whose choice it was -- but I would next head for sixth, not tenth grade.
Now, if these may, collectively, be interpretated as "alien" encounter experiences, then they are pieces of my own encounter or esorteric puzzle. I would prefer to leave this as stated and leave it open to interpretation.
Perhaps the leprechauns only, truly know!
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