Time to take a break from our Halloween cryptid adventures and get a little more personal. Here's an actual experience I had with the unexplainable!
I'm a fairly rational dude. I mean, yeah I like supernatural horror stories as much as the next guy, but for the most part I like to think I live in this reality. I'm not superstitious, I've really got no use for religion of any type, and I'm pretty sure Queen Elizabeth isn't a reptilian alien, so I'd like to think I'm more or less levelheaded and not particularly credulous when it comes to the paranormal.
Still, there has been some shit I've experienced that for the life of me I just can't explain. There's maybe less than a handful of incidents that I still puzzle over to this day, trying to figure out a rational explanation, that I haven't been able to just yet. Since Halloween is looming on the horizon and it's a great night to tell spooky stories, here's a personal experience I've had with the unexplainable.
The Ghost That Tucked Me Into Bed
When I was a kid, I did what most goofy, white, middle-class suburbanite boys did - I joined the Boy Scouts. For me it was more of a chance to shoot guns and use machetes and wood axes than it was clambering through the underbrush and getting all hot and sweaty, but I enjoyed going on overnight adventures once or twice a month.
One winter, my scout troop (Troop 310, Suffolk County NY represent!) went into the wilds of northern New Jersey for the weekend. It was bitter, bitter cold, so we set up in a two-story building right on the shore of a lake that was used as a mess hall during the summer months. It had no windows or doors, but it did have an enormous stone fireplace; we set up several tarps around the fireplace as makeshift walls to keep some of the heat in.
That evening, we all go to bed. I had chosen a spot for my single tent on the second floor, figuring it would be slightly warmer up there because, hey heat rises, right? It didn't help all that much though, as this was well outside of the radius of those tarps below. Still, you could only get to the spot by going up a creaky wooden ladder, so I thought it was cool.
I snuggle into my sleeping bag and zonk out for the night, only to wake up in the very early pre-dawn. You know when you wake up and you're a little disoriented for a second as you try to remember why you're not in your bed at home? Well there I was, curled up in the fetal position inside my sleeping bag, staring at the inside of my tent.
I was completely motionless lying on my left side, uncomfortably cold but not cold enough to get up and move around, when I felt something move inside the tent with me. Not only did something besides me move, but it was behind me. I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing.
What I felt was the fabric of my sleeping bag tighten around my right shoulder. The only way to describe it is like when someone grabs the blanket you're under and tucks it in around you. I was in complete shock and absolutely terrified to let on that I was awake, considering I was probably about thirteen years old at the time and I had been reading horror novels and comic books for years at that point. The old rule of if you don't see it, it can't see you kind of kicked in, and I just played possum, squeezing my eyes shut and concentrating on slowing my heartbeat, which had begun to race.
To this day I don't know what the hell that was. I certainly wasn't dreaming, because I remember it incredibly vividly. It wasn't snow or ice falling off the outside of the tent fabric and rubbing along my shoulder, as I had a dome tent that left plenty of airspace between me and the tent walls. It certainly wasn't another person, because I had been pretty insistent on a tent of my own that trip, and I'm pretty sure I would have heard someone coming up that creaky ladder and then zipping/unzipping my tent to get in and out.
In other words, what the fuck was that? The ghost of some weird pedophile Boy Scout troop leader getting a spooky boner over my thirteen-year-old shoulder?
