Part 1: The ghostly reality in Leetonia

The ghostly reality in Leetonia

This is my reality.  Every word of this is true. You probably won’t believe me, but I’ve learned that I don’t actually care whether other people believe me or not. My experiences are what they are. My perception of these events is tinted with the fact that things like this are more common than most people expect. I do not seek to change anyone’s mind or to have the events critiqued. I make little excuses for their intrusions onto your tidy reality.

I am writing this for those who need to know, those who need confirmation. I write this collection because it already has an audience. The message will always find it’s target. The story is as follows.

I’ve know my friend Jocelyn since we were six years old. There is no doubt in my mind we had to meet in this here and now. If I had not met Jocelyn, I would be a shadow of who I am today. Jocelyn’ was called “spooky” by her classmates in school for a reason, just not the reason she was actually spooky. While by today’s term she might have appeared Goth or Emo, there really weren’t those categories back then. But that is was not why she was actually spooky. She was spooky because she saw the dead, well after they had died. They would appear to her, sometimes ghost-like, sometimes as solid as you or I. Sometimes she wouldn’t know the difference between a formerly living person and an actual living person. But such was our life. I learned to read her body language and subtle differences when she was seeing things that were not obvious to anyone else. I knew when to pull her attention back to the here and now and when she was watching for a reason. She wouldn’t announce her talent or when she was using it. It was her big secret and I was there to help keep her looking somewhat normal.

 

I never saw anything. Sometimes I heard or felt things. At that time in my life, I never really believed it was true psychical talent. I felt I was no more talented than the average person who would have a dream of a loved one. I actually wanted, more than anything, to be able to see things, to receive information about what appeared to be not there. I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world. What I could not see or feel, I researched for her. I was good at that. I always seemed to be able to find just the thing that would help her learn more focus, control, ways to cope and filter. We were a team.

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We were a team right through college. We both went off to college. She studied Criminal Justice and psychology and lived in a small efficiency apartment. I studied anthropology and lived in the dorms. But we always made time for each other. In Jocelyn’s spare time she had made a contact with the regional office of the state police. The officer in charge being a good friend of the university would allow Jocelyn to do some crime scene work every now and again. A series of cases had caught Jocelyn’s eye and she began to follow up on her own time, since they were cold cases. The case was about a series of missing persons, all had gone missing when driving alone through the Pine Creek Gorge, near Wellsboro. The cases spanned the course of ten years, but Jocelyn had latched on to one of the recent victims. It was a female, mid to late twenties, disappeared, taken, from her drive home from work through the wilds.

 

In between classes Jocelyn worked her process, a combination of dreams, intuition, and facts. I rarely knew what she was working on in her own time, unless she wanted a buddy to go somewhere or someone to bounce ideas and lines of logic off. Such was the way it was when Jocelyn asked me to take a ride one night. By this time I was out of my undergraduate school years and taken extra classes for Russian language. I lived in an apartment in a near by town. Jocelyn drove up to me, and we left on her excursion from there. We stopped for sandwiches on the way out of town and drove out into the wilds. The sun was setting and we were headed west. West was the direction of intuition, of dreams, of spirits, it is the direction you go to cross the veil.

 

We were going to take a poke around the Tamarack swamp out in the Allegheny forest. The roads were clear, and we tracked our progress to the swamp area on our map. Jocelyn spotted a sign she recognized from her most current dream. I pulled the car over at the next turn looking for a way to turn around and get back to the road sign she wanted to see. A horned owl swooped at the car, when we startled it trying to perform a 15 point turn on the tight dirt road. It caught us off guard, alerted us to something strange already beginning to happen, a mark that we were standing at the threshold of the veil.

 

Finally back to the road Jocelyn wanted to look at, we found a missing person’s poster stapled to it, for girl Jocelyn was trying to follow up for. The sign was the one from her dream, we continued down the road for a short way. It was an old logging road, tight, wooded. Not finding anything significant we stopped and sat on the car eating our sandwiches. We heard movement off in the woods, but kept eating, listening and watching for anything strange. A buck and doe suddenly darted out, not from where we had heard the noises, but definitely taking flight from something in that general direction. With a growing sense of dread, we both quickly decided it was time to move on. We packed up our sandwiches, hopped in the cars, and locked the doors.

 

Back on the main road, I knew I had spotted a road sign going toward the town of Leetonia. I knew I could get us home from Leetonia, so after a brief debate about the wisdom of heading back into the woods. But I was certain I would know where I was going once I got to Leetonia, I knew there would be road signs back to main highway. While we were a bit on edge and alert for any other strange things, the ride out to Leetonia was uneventful. The ominous feeling had not passed, but we came in to Leetonia feeling better than we had. While we had not yet anything useful out, other than perhaps the validation that Jocelyn was on the right track with her thoughts about the crime, we were happy to head home on such a strange night.

 

We quickly found the road that would take back in the direction of the highway, and began to have the feeling of sliding into home base, safe. The road bent sharply and I aimed the car to slowly cover the curve. I knew roads in the daylight, but it was a dark night. At the edge of the road on the passenger’s side we both spotted a lone woman walking up the road toward us. I debated if she looked in trouble, but considering we were in the woods on a dark night, I figured we should stop and see if she needed anything. But Jocelyn’s voice took on a icy tone. “Don’t stop” was all she said. The woman had no coat, no flashlight, and appeared to be wearing light clothing. It was November, it was cold out, and we had not seen another in quite a few miles. I hesitated and allowed the car to slow. “Just keep going, don’t stop.”, Jocelyn repeated. The woman began to cross the road toward the driver’s side of the car, and I began to think that maybe I should believe Jocelyn after all.

 

The woman came to the door of the car, and I could feel my mind begin shifting in a way I knew spoke of no normal reality. The radio, which had been playing a mixed tape, suddenly began whimpering a child-like voice, begging for help. But the plea was something that reached my heart, my senses went on high alert and all my guards and energy up into defense. There was something so completely wrong about this situation, that I knew we had to get out of there. I turned to look at the thing at my window. It looked normal for a about a second. Then it’s face morphed, it’s eye’s went black and face elongated. I decided not to look anymore at the thing by window. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the motion of it raising it’s arms up above the car, with clenched fists, as if to pound on my roof. While, I had actually never stopped the car, I pressed my foot the accelerator and kept going.

 

Shortly down the road, we passed a blue truck with a cab off the side of the road with it’s doors open. I would have thought that perhaps this validated the thought that maybe I had been seeing things and the poor girl did need a ride to a phone. But I knew the truck was dead, from the dead, it wasn’t really there. The other details of the night begin to blur, we did stop at a diner to call the state police and reported an accident. But, of course, there was never anything there. It was just another strange incident they collected a report about. Jocelyn had put two and two together to realize that perhaps we saw that girl because her story was similar to the victim that Jocelyn was trying to help. I nodded along with that, for that part seemed true. But it did not seem to account for all the happenings of the night.

 

While I have driven calmly and got us out of that situation. I was not alright. I was not alright for sometime after that. If that night, I easily saw something that Jocelyn saw, something that she is used to seeing, what did that mean? Did it mean that I could also see and experience things? If I could see that girl on the road, what else would I be able to see? These thoughts a realizations began a long road for me, of defining what reality was and what was not and what it could be. Today in retrospect, I can see that I was the path to learn those lessons anyway. I was with Jocelyn through a lot of strange things, this is only one story. This was the first personal encounter I had had and it ended up being a door to a reality that was so much more than I thought could be real. It was the beginning of yet another story, a longer, darker one. Something for another day.

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[level-current-students]

We were a team right through college. We both went off to college. She studied Criminal Justice and psychology and lived in a small efficiency apartment. I studied anthropology and lived in the dorms. But we always made time for each other. In Jocelyn’s spare time she had made a contact with the regional office of the state police. The officer in charge being a good friend of the university would allow Jocelyn to do some crime scene work every now and again. A series of cases had caught Jocelyn’s eye and she began to follow up on her own time, since they were cold cases. The case was about a series of missing persons, all had gone missing when driving alone through the Pine Creek Gorge, near Wellsboro. The cases spanned the course of ten years, but Jocelyn had latched on to one of the recent victims. It was a female, mid to late twenties, disappeared, taken, from her drive home from work through the wilds.

 

In between classes Jocelyn worked her process, a combination of dreams, intuition, and facts. I rarely knew what she was working on in her own time, unless she wanted a buddy to go somewhere or someone to bounce ideas and lines of logic off. Such was the way it was when Jocelyn asked me to take a ride one night. By this time I was out of my undergraduate school years and taken extra classes for Russian language. I lived in an apartment in a near by town. Jocelyn drove up to me, and we left on her excursion from there. We stopped for sandwiches on the way out of town and drove out into the wilds. The sun was setting and we were headed west. West was the direction of intuition, of dreams, of spirits, it is the direction you go to cross the veil.

 

We were going to take a poke around the Tamarack swamp out in the Allegheny forest. The roads were clear, and we tracked our progress to the swamp area on our map. Jocelyn spotted a sign she recognized from her most current dream. I pulled the car over at the next turn looking for a way to turn around and get back to the road sign she wanted to see. A horned owl swooped at the car, when we startled it trying to perform a 15 point turn on the tight dirt road. It caught us off guard, alerted us to something strange already beginning to happen, a mark that we were standing at the threshold of the veil.

 

Finally back to the road Jocelyn wanted to look at, we found a missing person’s poster stapled to it, for girl Jocelyn was trying to follow up for. The sign was the one from her dream, we continued down the road for a short way. It was an old logging road, tight, wooded. Not finding anything significant we stopped and sat on the car eating our sandwiches. We heard movement off in the woods, but kept eating, listening and watching for anything strange. A buck and doe suddenly darted out, not from where we had heard the noises, but definitely taking flight from something in that general direction. With a growing sense of dread, we both quickly decided it was time to move on. We packed up our sandwiches, hopped in the cars, and locked the doors.

 

Back on the main road, I knew I had spotted a road sign going toward the town of Leetonia. I knew I could get us home from Leetonia, so after a brief debate about the wisdom of heading back into the woods. But I was certain I would know where I was going once I got to Leetonia, I knew there would be road signs back to main highway. While we were a bit on edge and alert for any other strange things, the ride out to Leetonia was uneventful. The ominous feeling had not passed, but we came in to Leetonia feeling better than we had. While we had not yet anything useful out, other than perhaps the validation that Jocelyn was on the right track with her thoughts about the crime, we were happy to head home on such a strange night.

 

We quickly found the road that would take back in the direction of the highway, and began to have the feeling of sliding into home base, safe. The road bent sharply and I aimed the car to slowly cover the curve. I knew roads in the daylight, but it was a dark night. At the edge of the road on the passenger’s side we both spotted a lone woman walking up the road toward us. I debated if she looked in trouble, but considering we were in the woods on a dark night, I figured we should stop and see if she needed anything. But Jocelyn’s voice took on a icy tone. “Don’t stop” was all she said. The woman had no coat, no flashlight, and appeared to be wearing light clothing. It was November, it was cold out, and we had not seen another in quite a few miles. I hesitated and allowed the car to slow. “Just keep going, don’t stop.”, Jocelyn repeated. The woman began to cross the road toward the driver’s side of the car, and I began to think that maybe I should believe Jocelyn after all.

 

The woman came to the door of the car, and I could feel my mind begin shifting in a way I knew spoke of no normal reality. The radio, which had been playing a mixed tape, suddenly began whimpering a child-like voice, begging for help. But the plea was something that reached my heart, my senses went on high alert and all my guards and energy up into defense. There was something so completely wrong about this situation, that I knew we had to get out of there. I turned to look at the thing at my window. It looked normal for a about a second. Then it’s face morphed, it’s eye’s went black and face elongated. I decided not to look anymore at the thing by window. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the motion of it raising it’s arms up above the car, with clenched fists, as if to pound on my roof. While, I had actually never stopped the car, I pressed my foot the accelerator and kept going.

 

Shortly down the road, we passed a blue truck with a cab off the side of the road with it’s doors open. I would have thought that perhaps this validated the thought that maybe I had been seeing things and the poor girl did need a ride to a phone. But I knew the truck was dead, from the dead, it wasn’t really there. The other details of the night begin to blur, we did stop at a diner to call the state police and reported an accident. But, of course, there was never anything there. It was just another strange incident they collected a report about. Jocelyn had put two and two together to realize that perhaps we saw that girl because her story was similar to the victim that Jocelyn was trying to help. I nodded along with that, for that part seemed true. But it did not seem to account for all the happenings of the night.

 

While I have driven calmly and got us out of that situation. I was not alright. I was not alright for sometime after that. If that night, I easily saw something that Jocelyn saw, something that she is used to seeing, what did that mean? Did it mean that I could also see and experience things? If I could see that girl on the road, what else would I be able to see? These thoughts a realizations began a long road for me, of defining what reality was and what was not and what it could be. Today in retrospect, I can see that I was the path to learn those lessons anyway. I was with Jocelyn through a lot of strange things, this is only one story. This was the first personal encounter I had had and it ended up being a door to a reality that was so much more than I thought could be real. It was the beginning of yet another story, a longer, darker one. Something for another day.

 

[/level-current-students]

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