Wednesday 26 September 2012

Stranger Than Fiction - Julia Kavan



There's something spooky about horror writers. We seem to attract weird and inexplicable experiences! My fellow contributors to the new Horror anthology, Touched by Darkness are no exception, and a number of them have agreed to share their strangest experiences with us. To start us off, I'll hand you over to Julia Kavan - author of Dreaming Not Sleeping:


I’ve had many spooky encounters during my life – one of them witnessed by Cat herself earlier in the year - http://www.catherinecavendish.com/2012/08/diavolino-arrives-at-waterstones.html. I’ve heard disembodied voices as a child, I’ve seen ghostly figures walking across the landing at home and we have a phantom cat (or two).



Late one winter’s night I walked up the High Street towards my house, and as I drew level with the house two doors down from mine, I saw the figure of a man walk through the gate and up the steps to my front door (illuminated by the streetlamp right outside), before carrying on up the side path of my house and into the shadows. There had been no one walking up the street ahead of me and I couldn’t say where he’d come from. He just appeared. Stupidly, (don’t try this at home) I followed in his footsteps, expecting to confront someone trying to access the back of the house. There was no one. There was nowhere he could have gone without making a lot of noise – we had a rusty side gate that needed oiling and squealed when opened, and it was impossible to climb over in the dark (don’t ask me how I know that J ). The gate was still shut so I opened it, accompanied by the usual racket from the old hinges, and did a very nervous check of the back garden. Nothing. The only way out was past me and back down the steps.


There had been several nights when I’d heard footsteps walking up the side path – the living room wall backed on to it – and although we had a small window looking out on the side garden in the cupboard under the stairs, I never dared to look through it... just in case someone looked back.

I kind of put it all down to my overactive, creepy imagination. Until the night a friend of mine rang the doorbell. It was late and dark. He told me he was just passing and had just seen a man walking up the steps to the front door before disappearing up the side path...
(He did check the place out for me – there was no one there)


As well as disappearing people, I’ve also had an entire building vanish – at least temporarily. There was a bookshop that I used to visit very regularly – almost weekly – where I would buy books on the paranormal and about magic... except for the day I walked down the hill and couldn’t find the shop anywhere. I walked up and down the hill several times. There was no bookshop. It was as if it had been plucked out of the street and the gap it would have left had sealed up. I gave up looking, deciding that it must have closed down, but puzzled as to why there wasn’t even an empty building. I even remarked to someone I knew who I met later in the day, that it was a shame the place had shut down as it had been there for years. They were as surprised as I.
The following week I walked down the hill to visit another shop....and saw the bookshop sign hanging in the place it always had. I carried on down the hill straight to the door and looked at the display of books they always had in the window. I went inside and bought the book I’d intended to buy and asked if they had been closed the previous week – the owner insisted they had been there as usual, but it had been a quiet day. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t find it....


Dreaming Not Sleeping is available Here and you can find out more about Julia by visiting her website: Julia Kavan 

 
Touched by Darkness is available from:

16 comments:

  1. Fascinating and creepy.
    I wonder if the disappearing man would trigger an outside light on a motion control sensor.

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  2. Hi Keith, thanks for dropping in! We had a motion activated light installed some years after my 'encounter'. The bulb kept blowing :-)

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    1. Ooh, this gets better and better. Especially from a distance. *grin*

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  3. Fascinating. The disappearing bookstore really intrigues me.

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    1. Thanks, Sheila. I've read stories of phantom houses appearing - where someone stops at a house to ask directions, but on the return journey have been unable to find any trace of the house - but have never heard of the opposite happening.

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    2. The disappearing bookstore got me, too. It reminded me of an incident that happened to me. I can't resist sharing it here. I call it "The Cop Who Wasn't There".

      I was driving down the road, one Saturday morning, on my way to Lynnwood, a neighboring Seattle suburb. As I was driving, I was listening to the news on the car radio. The newscaster was relating a late breaking story about a robbery which had taken place at a convenience store located on a corner in Lynnwood. The robber had fired a gun at a police car and the bullet shattered the driver's side windshield. The policeman was not injured.

      By now I had just entered into the Lynnwood area and as I was listening to the news story, I glanced out my window and noticed a policeman standing in the small parking lot of a 7-11 store on the corner. I noticed there was no police car in the parking lot and that seemed odd; just a cop standing there without a car.

      Traffic was moderately heavy and moving slowly. As I drove past the store, the cop appeared to be staring directly at me. It was strange. Only at that moment did it occur to me that this must be the store in the news story that I was listening to at that very moment. Wow, I thought, what a coincidence! Then about two blocks further down the road I passed a police car parked on the side of the road in front of a row of small shops. A couple of these shops were auto repair businesses and one was an auto glass repair shop. Well ok, I thought. That explains why the cop at the store had no car. This was his car at the auto glass shop. The news report said the window had been shot out. It was weird to be seeing the elements of this story appearing before me as they were being told to me by the newscaster. But I had to know for sure if this was all what it seemed to be. I decided to check it out. I would go back to the 7-11 store and ask the cop if this was the store in the news story and if he was the cop whose window was shot out and was that his car up the street at the auto glass shop?

      I turned the car around and was back at the 7-11 store in less than five minutes. Four minutes, tops. But when I got there the cop was gone. I went inside and asked the clerk if this was the store that had just been robbed and where the cop car had its window shot out. She had no idea what I was talking about! I asked her about the cop who was standing in her parking lot a few minutes ago. "What cop?" she said. "There wasn't any cop out there."

      It was just one of the oddest 10 minutes of my life. I say "one of" because there have been many. But those are stories for another time. :-)

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    3. Thanks for telling the story, Gary - just the sort of tale I loved as kid - when normal, every day events take an unexpected twist. Like my aunt who was in the town library one minute and in her own kitchen the next...

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  4. Oh wow Gary! Spooky or what? You lead an interesting life. Thank you for sharing this with us

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  5. Strange. Makes me think. I used to have lots of money in my bank account and now it has vanished.

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    1. The perils of becoming a full time writer Steve...

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  6. Ooh Cat...as ever you don't disappoint. Must post something to you about the spooky soldier who thought our house was his....

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  7. I've had so many weird experiences and the worst part is I'm the biggest chicken sh*t ever! LMAO and the biggest horror fan too lol. I think your experiences would be enough for me not to go to the kitchen or anywhere alone lol

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  8. The spooky soldier who thought your house was his? That's one I have to hear! That, too, reminds me of something that happened to me. The short version is that I was living in a small rental house at the time. I'd been away from home for about 5 days. When I got back home I found a woman (a complete stranger to me) had broken in through the back door and was now living there. She said God told her it was okay for her to move in. LOL

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  9. Steve, we must have the same bank account. ;-)

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