A Stern Reminder From The Other Side

To begin with, I am new here but have always been interested in anything and everything paranormal since my early teens and have followed and read so many stories on the site. Thought it might be time to finally share one of my own.

For a brief bit of background on me, to help set up my story, I study paranormal things and have always been fascinated (and respectful) of the things we cannot always see or don't entirely understand. My mother studies the topic and everything related like you wouldn't believe and there is no paranormal topic she doesn't know almost, if not everything, about. She shares her knowledge with me and is very spiritual. So I am no stranger to these things and fairly well educated on them. However this knowledge of hers is from a purely textbook angle. Not a psychic one. On the opposite end of the scale, my father was incredibly psychic, to the point where he saw full apparitions that were completely verified and proved to be real' however, strangely he denied this natural gift and brushed off the paranormal entirely. Never made sense, but I suppose some prefer to be that way about these things rather than think on them in the late hours of the night.

I am a creative type admittedly and my mind is quite a place to see. I've had a few strange happenings in my lifetime that I try to write off as dreams or my mind being bored and making up things and in most cases I have been successful in convincing myself I'm just nutty. I'm not the kind to run around claiming to see things or have any psychic ability. However it has been said, more than once, after relaying a few of my experiences to close friends, that I may have a sliver of my fathers natural ability. I still think of this as debatable myself, but I cannot deny some of the things I've witnessed nor pass them off as my flamboyant imagination. I have a few good personal stories (by which I mean experiences) that I will perhaps share over time for opinion from others and for readers to have a think on. But this one in particular remains quite strongly in the forefront of my mind. So I'll start here.

A few years back, when I was about twenty, I was living in a small flat in the woods outside town with my partner at the time. It was a nice little place but could admittedly be a little unnerving at times, when a storm blew and everything creaked, or the wind howled around the trees, or the night animals scratched around the house in the darkness. And not to mention the eerie shadows the trees cast when the sun retired at the end of the day. But I lived there with my partner so it was worth the weird nights here and there.

We were quite well together and had been so for a few years, not a teenage romance or anything but a proper relationship with intentions to be engaged. I was very close with his family as well, who lived in anther house on the property a few hundred meters away. My partner's mother was like a second mother to me, so we were quite close. Her mother (my partner's grandmother) had passed a few years before, and was sorely missed and very beloved. She had lived in our small flat in her last few years to be close to the family. My partner moved in a little while after her passing.

Even though we had lived there a while, we still referred to it as her place. They would often say how she would have liked me and I should have met her, they joked she was around and I would have known if she didn't approve of me. I felt happy to hear this and wished I had met her but somehow I felt she still lingered from time to time and wasn't far. The family believed she was sometimes around as well, so it wasn't unheard of for them to make reference to her. Every now and again while alone there, I felt as though I had company, benign, and barely detectable but present. Not at all unwelcoming. I even spoke softly about daily things sometimes to nobody in case someone was listening but with no extensive past experience in these things, and doubting myself most times, it was more just for the sake of 'in case someone was listening' that I couldn't see.

As I mentioned I was very close with my partner, but a time came about well into our relationship, where we started to grow apart a little and started not seeing eye to eye on things. I didn't deal with this very well and in my mind I have the bad habit of going a bit mental and thinking the worst and not being easy to converse with, so with this continuing and becoming more difficult to fix, I started to find myself becoming somewhat depressed and dark in my mind about my future with him and in general. Late one night after a particularly stressful and negative exchanging of words, I went away from the bedroom area in a seriously dark mood.

To quickly paint a picture of the layout of the small flat in your mind, it was like one of those granny flats where there are hardly any walls, just small but open spaces between areas as opposed to closed off rooms. The kitchenette, lounge and bedroom were all visible from each area and open with only a partial half wall between the lounge and bedroom. With a secluded bathroom. Overall, it was quite a small space not giving a lot of privacy.

I left from the bedroom and stormed into the lounge, flicking the light on along the way so as not to be by myself in the dark loungeroom. I sat on the couch brooding and thinking. A particularly dark thought, not normal for my usual bright bubbly self, passed through my mind then (dark towards myself). I began to entertain these thoughts when I was suddenly pulled from them by the sound of a loud pop. Within the few seconds I looked up I seemed to watch the whole thing in slow motion and I recall every detail clearly. I watched with certainty the light bulb (not a screw in one but instead one with two little pegs that fit the grooves) twist ever so slightly and drop out of the light fixture. While it still remained lit. Halfway to the floor it shattered and the room went dark. Then the pieces settled and shattered over the ground. Immediately after the bulb blew, I felt a cold feeling of dread like a very imposing figure standing nearby me, and surrounding me, filling the lounge, almost a warning or a slap to the senses snapping me out of my thoughts and plunging me into remorse for my dark thoughts and fear for my safety. I shrieked like a mad thing and wanted to run, but for all the glass over the place trapping me on the couch. I sat shaking violently feeling surrounded in the dark, calling for my partner, who had by then sat up in bed and called out thinking I had broken something.

Even in the few seconds it took, I recall this incident so clearly as it didn't make any sense, and was the first time I felt an overpowering sense of being in trouble. Those lights could not remain on when the two pegs were moved out of their grooves. There's no way. It should have gone out the second it was detached from the ceiling socket. Then the shattering and the cold force with it.

I cannot say for sure what this was, and that's why I am putting it forth for interpretation, but I know for sure it wasn't an act of imagination nor was it a freak of nature/weather/electric fault.

It scared me silly at the time, due to the suddenness and apparent violence of the act and the feeling of warning after the incident overwhelming me. It passed after a few minutes and I returned to bed praying over and over in my head to my beloved St Michael to keep me safe and help me be strong and also apologizing to whomever it was for my thoughts and swearing I'd never entertain them again.

A few years later it doesn't affect me, nor haunt my thoughts but I sure am still curious about it. I no longer live there sadly, nor am I in contact much with the family due to growing apart but I still think there may be truth to their suspicions that she, or something, is there keeping an eye out and making sure family members are happy and nothing disturbs their wellbeing. I think I was warned not to do anything silly that would hurt the family but still... I cannot be sure.