Children are intuitive natures - till the adults dissuade them from their view of the world.
Like many children I felt the presence of shadow creatures in the darkness. I could recognize their motions from the corners of the eyes and sometimes I distinguished noises which couldn't be heard in the day world. Nobody had prepared me for the existence of this creatures and they frightened me. When I asked an adult for help, I felt not taken seriously. "It´s just your imagination - there aren't any spirits."
Shortly before my ninth birthday a friend of mine died by a tragic accident. As his closest friend I was assigned to the little delegation of our school class, which accompanied him on the way to his grave. It was a foggy cheerless morning and I just thought that my friend will have it too narrowly in his small, white casket, when I suddenly felt him next to me.
I wasn't in his proximity at the time of his accident, but I felt guilty of his death. Panic came up in me, when I became conscious of his proximity now. I was afraid of his revenge.
Like through a veil, I notice my surroundings, distortedly and as a scene from a nightmare: The voice of the priest, the yell of the mother, who had broken down at the grave. All this seemed unreally to me. Merely the presence of my friend was real.
Cemeteries had become a place of the horror for me. I avoided them.
My friend, however, stayed with me. He didn't seem bound to any particular place. He followed me, where I went. He had become one of the shadow creatures around me, a shadow creature with a name, but this didn't make it less terrible for me.
Years later: During my first marriage we had had a toy poodle. He died in an car accident.
I was divorced and lived with my two children alone in a big four room apartment. One night I woke up because I heard a familiar galumphing in the apartment. Something jumped on my bed and cuddled up to my back softly. I felt a feeling of peace and cosiness and felt behind myself. Nothing!
A look at the watch: two o'clock at night.
I got up confusedly. I searched the apartment. It seemed emptier than during the day. However, I didn't discover something unusual. Calmed I went back to the bed, lay down and fell asleep fast again. During the next day, I also hardly thought of my nightly visit. But the fear started with the beginning of the darkness. It grew and got greater so that I didn't dare to fall asleep when bedtime finally was.
For a vacation with my children in Brittany I had rented a house, which was cheap, but had almost the dimension of a small castle.
Apart from the fact that I had the feeling of coming to a strange world, when I entered the building, nothing seemed unusual during the day. At night, however, like in a fairytale blows regularly roared through the house as if somebody wanted to ram in the solid doors. In the morning the doors, which I had locked the evening before, were open and we found mountains of dying or already dead insects inside and on the outside around the entrance. The shadow world had always frightened me, but here I felt directly physically threatened. When we departed, I was glad to have survived. The house didn't appear in the travelling catalogues any more.
I still remember a comment of a friend. He usually didn't believe in such things, but he seemed to take my report seriously: "What ever it is, which met you there, it didn't want to harm you seriously. You can be sure that it have had the possibility."
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