4. Out of the Box, Out of the Body
Perhaps it was my dysfunctional amygdala that made me fearless, as the amygdala manages the alarm system that goes off when a threat is perceived. It is worth noting that the experience of fear, as opposed to the feeling of being threatened, originates in a different part of the brain. Threat and fear are not synonymous. One can feel fear when there is no threat, or not feel fear when there is a threat. Lacking the alarms that nature provided I had the natural tendency to accept any new experience without question.
For whatever reason, around the same time as this sun-gazing-fusion experience, I began to have out-of-body experiences (OOBE). I found them incredibly beautiful and pleasant, and I was happy to have the opportunity to experience them. As a child I took for granted that this too was normal. Well, of course it is normal, but not easily accepted in our culture and certainly not in the culture of early-sixties WASP suburbia.
My first OOBE happened spontaneously when I was seven years old as I was floating in our pool in the backyard. While I was floating face down in the water, I felt myself entering deeper into the pool, swimming more like a fish by my will rather than the somewhat spastic flapping technique I used with my hands and feet. I realized I was able to breathe as well, also like a fish. After what felt like thirty seconds, I found myself back where I started, face down in the water. I jumped out of the pool, eager to tell my mother of the amazing experience I’d just had.
Her reaction was not what I’d expected, as one can imagine. When I explained that I had been swimming like a fish and breathing under water, she freaked out, insisting it was impossible and making me promise to try never to do it again. The disconnect between such a beautiful experience and such a horrible reaction caused a lot of confusion in me. I quickly learned not to share such things with my mother, or anyone.
In time, and given my inability to express or share this experience, my OOBE ability faded away. Perhaps it would be better to say I eventually suppressed this particular form of OOBE. The approval of my mother seemed more important to me. I enjoyed OOBEs, but I needed my mother.
Like as with most compromises, the thing we hoped to gain must now fill the void of our loss. This never works out the way we hope it will. In addition to feeling isolated and, in a way, rejected, new energies began to grow inside me. I suspect now that this energy, ability, and/or need that used to be able to express itself in OOBEs was now finding other channels to push itself through. As my OOBE ability went away, a strange, unfamiliar, powerful energy, that can only be described as sexual in nature, grew in me. At the age of seven or so, I was in no way prepared to understand or deal with this. I also could not stop it. Perhaps in my sun-gazing fusion and OOBEs, I had touched something, or perhaps was touched by something. A door was innocently opened that could never be closed, a door through which something greater than me began to trickle through and over time that trickle grew unnoticed into a river that would slowly fill my world.
The Jamestown flood was one of the more spectacular floods in history. When the South Fork Dam on Conemaugh River broke from overswelling on May 31, 1889, twenty million tons of water ripped down the valley toward Jamestown, Pennsylvania, population thirty thousand. On the way, the water tore through the industrial section first, carrying its debris, including lots of barbed wire from the barbed wire factory. As the flood ripped through town, the debris and barbed wire effectively dragged the town with it. At the base of the canyon, where Jamestown sat, were also petroleum storage facilities, which when destroyed spilled flammable contents into the river, which caught fire. People, animals, property all caught up in barbed wire drowned in a raging inferno. It was a messy show and a good metaphor of the pitfalls of trying to control nature, including our own. Nature—the energy of life, that perfect machine of unfathomable power—does not concern itself with the human consequences of its actions, and we all know that if it keeps on raining, the levee’s goin’ to break.
All this took place in a house that had a dark history—hidden from me until I was in my teens, at which time my parents revealed a story that they’d deliberately kept from me so as not to frighten me as a child.
I was about two years old when we moved into this house in California. One evening after my sister and I had been put to bed, my mother thought she saw one of us leave our room and go into the bathroom across the hall. Concerned, she went to the bathroom, but when she entered, it was empty. Some days later, she saw this again around the same time in the evening, and again she found the bathroom empty. This time it was clear that she had seen a child leave my sister’s room, which was next to my room, and when she checked both rooms, she saw that we were both in bed and asleep. When this happened a third time, she got so concerned that the next night she decided to wait and watch.
Her confusion quickly turned to shock when she saw a little girl walk through the closed bedroom door and into the bathroom! Both my parents were beside themselves as to what to do about this and what it could possibly mean. Was the house haunted by other spirits as well? Was the family in danger? They had no idea how to deal with this new mind-blowing reality and were equally at a loss about who they could even tell. In the world they lived in, ghosts were right next to fairies and leprechauns on the believability spectrum.
Unable to ignore this otherwise unbelievable situation, they searched for someone who knew about paranormal activity. They found an expert in such matters. This young man heard their story and went to the house to watch for himself; he indeed saw the same ghost. Agreeing to help, he told my parents to find the previous owners of the house. It was then they learned that the previous owners had sold the house because their daughter had died of a brain tumor in bed around age six. The ghost hunter speculated that the spirit of the girl was not trying to go to the bathroom but was looking for her parents, whose room was adjacent to the bathroom. He found the parents, told them this amazing story, and explained that by allowing the child to “find” her parents she would find the peace she was looking for every night. The parents agreed to cooperate. This may sound surprising, but it is easy to imagine what they might have felt when they were told they might have a chance to help secure their daughter’s peace in the afterlife. They waited in the bathroom at the hour the girl went searching for them, so that this time, finally, she would find them and be able to move on. This seemed to be exactly what happened: the ghost never appeared again after that night.
The ghost hunter was the well-known Hans Holzer, author of more than a hundred books about ghosts and the paranormal, including the infamous Amityville Horror. He also invented a number of ways to photograph ghosts and was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the supernatural and occult until his death in 2009.
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Duncan Stroud can currently be found dancing tango in Argentina. His book, "Legally Blind", is available in eBook and hardcopy