From: "crystal heckel" checkel@email.itt-tech.edu
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
Sent: Tuesday, July 6, 2010 5:35:43 PM
Subject: Things I've seen and experienced, chronologically

When I was 3 yrs old I used to walk around the 5 acres of woods we had. I had a little clearing about 100 yards from home that I called my "fort". One day I was playing and saw a shadowy grey-black mass with several dog heads sticking out and moving like they were running in a pack. All the heads had red orb-like eyes. I hid behind a tree while it went past.

When I was 6, I was convinced the ghost of an old man lived in our attic. We had moved to a house in the city, and the attic had no staircase to it; just a panel opening that could be pulled down for a ladder to be used. We didn't have a ladder at the time. I had noticed there was a hole in one of the small window panes in the attic window over-looking my backyard. I had been hearing footsteps up in the attic for several nights and finally went to see if anyone was actually up there. Well, the hole in the window would vary from day to day. So all my friends and I would gather in the backyard each day to see what size the hole was that day. One day we had gathered in back and looked up; there was a greenish black face of an old man glaring down at us and it was see-through. Of course we all ran screaming from the backyard. We didn't live long in that house. My parents even thought the place was haunted; the chimney top broke (actually shattered like it had exploded) in the middle of the night one night and pipes would burst randomly even in summer. They also heard footsteps sometimes too.

When I was 11, my dad moved in with a woman, and he had me move in too. She followed sort of a new age path, and thought it a great idea to create in her mind's eye a column of white light going through the center of the condo we lived in. (think new agey type ritual) I discovered after the first few nights of being on edge in a new place, there were these little furry looking see-through creatures that remind me a lot of tribbles from star trek that would come sit on the foot of my bed and stare at me. Also, there was a white smoky skeletal figure once in the hall on my way to the bathroom- it was standing outside my then step-brother's room. I told it he had already left for the day as I walked in the bathroom to get ready for school, and it was gone when I came out. Another time, I woke up in the morning to find myself roughly a foot above my bed and fell back down upon waking. I always felt like I was being watched in that condo.

When I was 12, my mother lived in an old house converted into a duplex. This duplex had been the site of several drug busts in the 70's, or so I found out after I noticed things: red glowing eyes would peer into the window opposite my bedroom door. My room was always super cold, unless I moved the furniture around- even when I turned the heater full blast. My mother would comment on this as well. Then came the night I startled out of a sound sleep. The walls were covered in some dark substance- it was everywhere. I sat up and put my feet on the floor- the floor was wet and had the same dark stuff on it. I was still in shock when a dark haired teenage girl walked out of my closet and out into the hall between the bedrooms. She stood there for about a minute facing away from me and then vanished, along with the wet dark stuff everywhere. I never slept in that room again. A few weeks after that I was talking to the neighbors and they told me a young woman had been murdered in that room, so horribly the walls and everything had been covered with a thick layer of her blood.

When I was 13, I went with my dad, step-mom and step brother to San Juan Island. They have some memorial site that looks like a round table with stone chairs around it and columns around it. There’s no better way to describe what I found down one of the trails there, I ran into a wall of anger. I could hear screams and people crying. My attention was brought a ways off in the brush and through the trees to the remnants of a chimney standing among the charred remains of what looks like, what used to be, an old-style house/cottage. I ran back and asked about the burned down house. Apparently a long time ago, there was a house fire and some people died in it, but no one remembers where the house stood. That house is what I found.

Experiences when I was 15 at the first high school I attended, a hand grabbed my backpack as I was walking out on the lawn toward the buses to go home. I turned and no one was within 15 feet of me. I was alone on the track field near the road one night waiting to be picked up from school and felt like I was being watched. I was bored so I thought I'd check out some trails leading off the field in to the woods- I got to the head of one such trail and heard an unearthly voice call my name. After some searching, I determined I was the only one there. I never felt alone at that school, no matter how deserted it got while I waited for a ride.

When I was 17, my 2nd step mom got me a new Ouija board, never used. I created a ritual and bound the board to only allow friendly spirits through. 3 months later, my friend wanted to try their own board instead of mine as an experiment to see what sort of difference it would make. I was uncomfortable with this but went along anyway. After that night I had some sort of shadow following me, I could see it just in the corner of my eye sometimes. A couple days later my step-mom decided out of the blue she hated Ouija boards and told me I had to get rid of mine. So I threw it out. Four months later she came back from a garage sale with another Ouija board (this time used and therefore non-bindable), saying she thought of me when she saw it. It sat in my closet for a month un-used before I burned it.

The summer shortly after my 18th birthday, I went on a trip with my uncle to Europe. During the last 2 weeks there, I was alone in London. I went on a London walk through some of the haunted places of London. I'd been to several places throughout my travels that summer which should have had the feeling of ghosts, but all that I noticed is how very old these places felt. So I was curious to see if these places in London were the same. Two places stood out over everything. The basement of a pub we went to had been a prison holding cell where someone had died.

When I was 18, the basement apartment in my parent's house was cleaned out and set up as my room. After a week down there, one night I was just drifting off when it felt like someone was staring at me...I sat up and saw an old lady standing there, transparent, that I did not recognize. I told her to leave my room, and her figure vanished. I put cedar bows in the corners of my room and she never came back into my room. However, sometimes I could hear her on the steps, going up and down them.

I moved out of my parent's house and in with a friend when I was 20. I had been staying there for about a month when one night, we had a friend over watching some movies, and I had decided to sleep. I had a long day ahead of me the next day at work. I had lay down, and just shut off the lights. Light was coming in through my doorway. I had the sudden feeling like I was being smothered. I struggled with the feeling for a few minutes before I was able to get up. I backed up away from my bed and toward the door. That was when I noticed a tall skinny shadow figure in a trench coat and wide brimmed hat standing next to my bed. This of course freaked me out, and I called to my roommate and our friend. They came, and could see the shadow figure too, which ignored us. We watched as this shadow figure started doing some weird dance around my bed. It looked like he was chanting. It went on for about 5 minutes, and then he went up like smoke and disappeared. I was up for at least another couple hours, and I slept in the living room that night. It never came back.

When I was 20, my parents refused to give me tax information for college funding, so I went to job corps to get college money. I wound up at Fort Simcoe outside Yakima Washington, in the middle of the Indian reservation. Experiences I had there: -actual human sounding whistles around the old fort (500 feet away from where I was staying). -sounds of a little girl playing with her ball in the girls dorm bathroom. -saw the local "lady in white" along the ridge in the direction of the old burial ground. -had a very vivid dream of a native man telling me how he sold his wife to the white people to keep himself safe, then got killed later anyway. When I woke up from this dream, I saw his shadowy figure (he was a big man, easily 6 ft) standing briefly in my room, looking at me. -occasionally something would fly across the room, like a hair dryer or a vase. Once I saw a radio fly into the wall of the hallway from an empty room. -felt as though I were watched every second I was there. Experiences I heard from others there:

A spirit of a female prostitute feeling up the guys in the boy's dorm while they were trying to sleep. Sometimes she left scratches.

Other stories of seeing the "lady in white."

Other stories of hearing the whistles.

Other stories of objects being thrown. One of the girls in my room woke up with scratches on her stomach twice.