So this is an event that happened maybe 10 years ago. While not paranormal or supernatural in anyway, a lot of the details are rather like something straight out of a horror story. I want to point out that obviously I didn’t witness any of the weird shit described to me in this encounter, nor am I in anyway trying to suggest that they were real. All I witnessed was a mentally ill homeless man in the throes of an incredibly disturbing psychotic break, the details of which I found really creepy and fascinating.
A little background first; I’m from a little town in Northern Ireland, which is a scary place, but for entirely worldly reasons (think violent paramilitary scumbags). The night this happened was a typical night for 18 year old me; I was walking my then girlfriend home at around 1am. She lived on the other side of town, and our walk home passed by a couple of rough estates. A long, unlit lane called Love Lane served as a shortcut between our two homes so I walked it almost daily.
It wasn’t an unusual event to witness some strange characters being that this ran by one of the dodgier parts of town. One I would see frequently was Jim, a homeless guy in his maybe mid 50’s, who was always walking around drinking a bottle of white cider. Anyway, he actually seemed harmless enough and was just a familiar face around town.
He was always friendly, usually shitface drunk and making conversation with anyone that walked by. I knew from previous encounters that he was living in a rather creepy place that we called The Witches Cave. Close to Love Lane, there is an old stately home, with a long glen running up beside it. A mile or so into this glen, there was a thick walled brick building going into a hillside that once served as the smokehouse for the nearby mansion.
A smokehouse for anyone that doesn’t know is a place that was used to smoke and store meat in the 1800-1900’s, before refrigerators. The smokehouse walls were pitch black from the years of smoke, and there was old white paint on the wall of a pentagram and the words BLACK END. Anyway, the place was creepy as fuck, hence the nickname Witches Cave.
This night as we walked into Love Lane it was an unusually bright night as there was a full moon and the sky was cloudless, and I could see Jim off in the distance. He was pretty animated, apparently shouting at someone we couldn’t see yet. As we approached him, I realised there wasn’t anyone else there, and that Jim was just shouting profanities at a couple of bushes. He seemed to be genuinely distressed, and given that he was usually an amicable character I stopped to see if he was alright.
First off I noticed that he had a real rabbit-in-the-headlights kind of look, his eyes were wide open and glazed. He was pointing towards the bushes, and asked ‘can you see him?’ There was no-one there, and I assumed it was just the silhouette of the bushes against a street light in the distance, playing tricks on his alcohol pickled brain. But he insisted there was someone there, and described a man holding a rifle, wearing what sounded like an old military uniform. And this soldier wasn’t the only figure Jim could see. He described vivid array of figures all around us. Strangest of all perhaps was ‘a naked woman with a bearded baby sat on her head, and a black man sucking her tits’.
I was actually really intrigued by the surrealness of what he was describing. It seemed as if he genuinely believed it too, and wasn’t just trying to wind me up. Partly out of morbid curiosity, and partly out of concern for this guy’s wellbeing, I decided to stick around and listen to as much of his story as I could. So I asked him to slow down, and go back to the beginning and explain what was happening. This is where the details got really creepy and bizarre, and I will try to describe his account as best I can here.
So Jim told me he had gone to sleep in The Witches Cave earlier in the evening, and had been awakened by something dripping on his face. He wiped it with his hand, and looked at under the little moonlight that shone through the entrance; it looked like wet black paint. He looked up to see where it was falling from, and to his horror he saw slaughtered pigs hanging from the ceiling above him. When he realised that it was pigs blood that had been dripping on him, he ran frightened out of the cave and into the glen.
As he walked along a track that runs parallel to the river, he saw a woman standing not far ahead of him in the dark. She was facing away from him, but he could tell she must have been old by the way she was standing. As he was preparing to pass her on the narrow path, she turned to face him and he saw that one side of her face was terribly disfigured, like she might be a burn victim. Without saying a word, she pointed with a bony finger directing him further into the glen; then suddenly her form became liquid and was washed away in the river.
A little further into the glen, he said met another figure, ‘a clean-shaven young man’ that had looked a lot like me apparently! Despite the mans innocuous appearance, Jim knew that he was, in fact, the son of the devil. As you do. The man blocked his path, then raised some sort of horn to his lips and blew loudly. Upon the sound of the horn, a half-man, half-animal form rose up from the dirt beneath him. He only referred to it only as ‘the man with the black book’; but it was fairly obvious from the story up to this point that this was, in Jim’s mind, the devil.
‘The man with the black book’ then told him that his name was in the book, and that he would die soon. Jim asked what he had done to deserve such a fate; he pleaded that his name be taken from the book and begged to be given another chance. But ‘the man with the black book’ refused him all of his requests, and left Jim to make his way out of the glen, alone and seemingly desperately bargaining with the world.
Having gotten no sympathy from ‘the man with the black book’, he felt his only hope was to ask the dead for clemency. So he decided to walk to a local graveyard, which is around a mile from the lane where he is now stood telling me this story. When he got there and asked that they hear his case, the spirits of the dead buried there appeared to him. There he tried to plead his case, hoping he could get his name taken out of the black book.
However, when he had finished pleading for his life, the ghosts wouldn’t go back into their graves and had been following since. I can’t say how long this had been going on for, but for at least as long as it took him to walk the mile from the graveyard. And evidently, they had been there long enough for him to go from pleading for his life to shouting belligerently at them. And that’s where I left him; in Love Lane shouting nonsense at some bushes in the wee hours of the morning.
I was pretty disturbed, not because I was afraid of bumping into Satan or a bearded baby, but because he was so delirious I was worried he might actually hurt somebody. I was saying to my then girlfriend that I think I should call the police, have them come and section him for his own, and others safety. Shortly thereafter, I bumped into a couple of guys I knew around town sitting on a bench at the far end of the lane. I explained to them what I’d just witnessed, and they were pretty amused by the strangeness of it all. When I told them I was going to call the cops, they were like ‘you can’t do that dude, we have a load of weed on us’.
So I didn’t bother calling the cops in the end. As I was walking back home, around 3 am by this point, Jim was gone. Most likely wandered off into the glen for another psychosis sightseeing tour. When I got home, I wrote the details down so I would remember it all for when I decided I could be bothered to tell it properly. I think the thing that struck me most was how incredibly elaborate and creepy a hallucination can be. I also found it pretty sad that someones mind can just snap to such a degree that they go from being an otherwise affable character, to a frantic fucking lunatic.
Submitted August 17, 2017 at 08:23AM by Don_Sackloth http://ift.tt/2i9AVFo LetsNotMeet
No comments:
Post a Comment