When I was 7 my family moved to a house in the Southwestern part of Missouri. It was a very old farm house, and the wooded area behind the house was very eerie and overgrown. Being a child from the city, it naturally scared me. It was mid-summer when I suddenly was okay with the wooded area and began to play in the trees. I found a stream (we are talking a small sleepy town that was angry the state made us put in a stoplight on the highway crossing, so the wooded area was HUGE) and decided to go for a swim. When I jumped in, I didn't realize how deep it was and nearly drowned. I saw an Native American literally appear in the water just as I was starting to have shimmy vision and pull me out of the water.
The man chastised me for not knowing how to swim, being alone in the land away from my family at so young and that I should learn before I jump into an unknown river again. I thought this strange for several reasons the main being that I was drowning and I knew no one was there and this strange man with handmade pants and moccasins lifted me out of the water, secondly it was a stream not a river and even I knew that. I went home right away and my Mom got mad at me for being wet, when I told her that a man in the woods saved me from drowning, she told me it was impossible as Native Americans didn't dress like that and there were none living in the woods behind us. I asked her if maybe it could be an angel that saved me and she abruptly shouted "ghosts are not real, angels do not look like humans, and stop making up stories!". Naturally I never spoke of that day again, but I couldn't help but feel very safe and I listened to him and convinced my mom to let me take swimming classes.
After that event I also started having really weird dreams whenever I had a problem facing me or a decision ahead of me. I also started to crave being outside alone in nature (I never was a big nature fan before this I was a city girl after all). I also started having sleep paralysis, this is where you will wake up mentally and be able to see but you can't move because your body is still asleep. People report hallucinating and feeling very frightened. I never really hallucinated that I thought of it as, but when this would happen I often would see the same man that saved my life that day I was drowning. He would sometimes just be watching me, or he would be looking out the window or some other seemingly normal thing.
When I was 14 it was the winter and seeing him had become the new normal but not being able to talk to him ever was starting to get frustrating (although when I was scared, or in a bad situation or worried I would talk to him like he was there and often felt calmness or peace come over me helping me, almost like he was always there listening to me). One night (on December 18th I believe it was) I was woken abruptly, I thought it was another experience of sleep paralysis but I was literally feeling like someone was shaking me. When I opened my eyes I was alone in the room, and then I heard his voice in my ear, it was so loud it shocked me as he had not spoken to me since the day he saved me in the stream and often acted as though he couldn't see me when I saw him. He told me "Get up, right now! Get your family up and get out of this house. Do not let them tell you no, anyone who stays will not see the sun rise. Get everyone out!" I felt true panic and fear, and I just jumped up, ran to my mom and dad's room and started yelling we had to get out of the house right now. My sisters heard me shouting at my parents and woke up coming into the room. My middle sister was feeling really dizzy and like she was going to be sick and while mom was fully awake already my dad was really drowsy and didn't want to wake up (this is very unusual as he has always been the first to get up for anything) which got my mom moving. She got my dad up and we all left to take my sister out for "fresh air". We went to the farm down the road and the farmer was getting up to go milk the cows when we pulled up, he let us in from the cold since we were all still in our pajamas. He was also the town farm vet (thus why he was up at 3AM) and after looking at my sister and my dad said they looked almost like they had mild carbon monoxide poisoning and we should really go to the hospital. After going there we found out that all of us had mild affects from it but me. The fire marshal went to check it out and found that our propane stove that heated the living room (and thus the house) was not venting outside but rather inside. My room was the farthest from the living room so I had almost no exposure by the time I woke up. My family however were not so lucky. My dad and sister were in the hospital for 2 days. My mom, my oldest sister and I went home to get the heating stove replaced and tried to act like me waking up like that was normal.
Given my mom's hate for anything she can't prove with a science book I would only tell her that I had a bad feeling every time she asked how I knew to wake them up. My mom finally broke down and told me that night that she didn't believe in ghosts because it was a decision she made as a little girl. She grew up in an old farm house in Mayekawa Illinois and the feeling to the home was very oppressive. They kids bedrooms were in the partially finished attic (her bed sat in an alcove) and the rooms were separated by shower curtains hung from the rafters. In this house they were randomly find things moved, pictures would literally fling off from the wall (not slide off or fall down, but literally fly several inches from the wall and shatter the frames), they would hear people running around the house and would hear laughter and talking in German. Her family is not German, yet due to hearing all of the voices my mom (and I would later learn all of her siblings) speak conversational German.
Her father actually went crazy and became diagnosed with as schizophrenic and his last words were "Heil Hitler" before he went "batty" (as my mom put it) he was a hardworking, God fearing republican farmer with no family or personal history of mental illness.
My mom's grandfather lived in an apartment above the barn and blatantly refused to even go into the main house. My mom's siblings all have some form of mental illness (schizophrenia, depression, attempted suicides, you name it yet there is no history on either side of the family.
My grandmother did not seem affected, but after she died we met the priest that she would go to almost weekly for blessings and at one point he attempted a failed exorcism of the house and that is why they moved so abruptly in my mom's later teen years.
After she told me this I finally told her it was the same guy that saved me from drowning that woke me up and told me to get everyone out of the house. My mom asked if I had seen him between then and now and I told her about the sleep paralysis. She told me not to ever trust what can't be explained, but to understand that if I ever see a little girl run in the opposite direction as she was what shared her childhood home and "ruined her family". But ghosts aren't real, demons that want to kill you are though.
Flash forward to 2011 I am 21 and living with my middle sister (who just got out of the Army after a very rough deployment) when we start having issues in the apartment. Our dog refused to go into my sister's bedroom, the lights would randomly turn on and off, the sink would start running while we were in the living room watching TV. My sister kind of suffered with sleeping issues, so we started sleeping in the living room and I just started working an overnight job. That apartment made us mean to each other, and we didn't feel happy ever in there.
One day we were watching Family guy (I believe it was the week before Thanksgiving 2011) when my sister asked why there was someone in her room. She went into the room and I heard her messing with her closet doors. She came back into the living room and said "that damned old man needs to *expletive* go already, this is our apartment and he needs to just leave us alone". She told me that she sees every now and then an elderly man moving around her closet, or going down the hall. I was thinking the giggles from the little girl in our living-room and kitchen were the only "issues" we were having.
On Thanksgiving our parents came to eat dinner with us, and my mom told me how their lives seemed to get luckier after I moved out. I thought it odd but not weird.
On December 1st 2011 my sister attempted suicide, she said she felt like she was suffocating, that her depression would never let up and that she didn't want to live in a world with no happiness anymore. We switched rooms after that, and not a week later I was placed into a psychiatric ward for a 72 hour hold after having an abrupt mental breakdown at work. I shrugged my sister's depression off as a delayed PTSD reaction and the mental breakdown to the large amount of stress I was under, but my coworker (who was Wiccan) asked to come to the apartment and see if she can help with a cleansing ritual. I reluctantly agreed after my sister said yes. I was worried that it would make my friend (whom I still only see on very rare occasions and never speak to really) would be removed too. When my coworker got there she knew nothing of where the "problem" spots were, or ages of the apparitions or even that we were having issues with the house. She only knew my sister attempted suicide and I was under stress and she just wanted to make things lighter for us in that respect.
She was only there for about 15 minutes when she asked us if we knew our apartment was occupied by more then us. She was drawn to the corner in the living room where we had caught sight of the little girl that giggled and ran all over the place (not visibly, we had only 'seen' her once late at night) and the closet in what was now my room where the shadow man would sometimes be. We started to think maybe there was something more then our over reactive imaginations. She decided not to do the ritual, saying she can call a friend who was better suited instead. We chose to move instead.
The most vivid and real "event" I have had was June 10 of 2012. I was driving my sister and I to New Orleans as a celebratory trip after I was accepted into the police academy when I fell asleep at the wheel. I veered off the highway into a stand of trees just by the Mississippi and Louisiana border. My sister was asleep in the passenger seat (buckled in) when we hit the first tree (we hit 3 total) My sisters seat-belt snapped against her, but kept her in the seat, and her air bag inflated like it was supposed to. In-fact her airbag kept the inflation enough to protect her from the second tree and the third tree before the car finally stopped. That is where the safety features ended though. I was going approximately 75 mph (had the cruise control on) and my air bag failed completely (never went off) it was either the first or the second tree where my seat-belt broke at the buckle as well. I should have died, but when I blacked out I saw a super bright light (probably the black powder igniting my sisters air bag) and then I felt something grabbing me, holding me to the seat while we hit the trees. I had a broken ankle, torn rotatory cuff, sprained knee, and a severe concussion to the point that my sister thought I was dead when the smoke cleared and she got her whits about her. Her door was jammed shut, so she kicked mine open to get out of the car and climbed over me. She swears I did not have a pulse and was slumped over the steering wheel. She began to climb the embankment to flag down a passing car to call for help as our phones and tablets were destroyed in the wreck. I was still completely unconscious, but my sister, the trucker and the off duty officer that came to my sisters aide, said that there was a man who pulled me from the wreck, he said that he found a pulse and wanted to get me to the road and asked for their help. They got me up the embankment but when they went to ask for his name he wouldn't tell them, and went back into the woods (the cop thought he was out there hunting and saw the wreck). When I woke at the hospital I had bruises on me that were in a V shape around my torso, the Dr. Said it looked like someone held me in place but maybe it was from how the seat-belt failed but he had no logical explanation for why I was alive. The ambulance crew had no way of explaining it, the investigators from the fire department couldn't explain it (even after they put out the fire my airbag still had not deployed), and I got asked by so many people that week how I was still alive. I decided that I had a guardian spirit, and I have yet to find any other reason.
The last time I heard my "friend" speak to me was on veteran's day November 11, 2016. I was at work (in a call center) and in between calls, excited to go see my dad and sister in 4 hours when I got off when I heard his voice in my mind tell me to go home. I was confused as to why (it was only 3 hours) so I brushed it off, but the nagging feeling that I needed to take time off and go home early would not leave me. About an hour or so before the end of my shift I saw my trainer (who I hadn't seen since I got out of training 9 months before) walk up to my desk. He motioned for me to go into an aux code but I was on a call that was going to take a while. Something seemed wrong with the look on his face so I convinced to customer to let me place them on hold. I felt the feeling of comfort that I always feel wash over me when I am in a scary or sad situation, and my trainer just released the member back into queue. I asked him why while he was shutting down my computer. He told me to got out of the secure area and talk to my old TL who now worked with my sister in another department. So I did so and I was told that my father had a major heart attack and my family was coming to get me. For most this would be devastating, but my dad's health was so bad that a heart attack was pretty normal so I was surprised they were coming to get me for something so small (we knew most of the paramedics in the larger city we now lived in by first name at this point with how often he was in and out of the hospital). Then the trainer was beside me again, and I was told that my father was dead before the paramedics had gotten to the house. I should have listened when I was told to go home, I could have been there to do CPR or at the very least say good bye to him. Even if it is schizophrenia developing (which I highly doubt) my friend has never steered me wrong my entire life, and I should have known better then to ignore him.
I don't know if these are just a litany of coincidences, or if maybe I acquired myself a guardian spirit as a small child drowning in a stream. Sometimes I think I am crazy, but I researched the "mental illness" in my family, and aside from the people that lived in the main house no offspring have any signs of it and there was no prior family history either (also my mother has no signs of anything other then a staunch belief that if a science book can't explain it then it never happened), so I can't explain it or any of these instances. I still see my "friend" when I have sleep paralysis, nearly every night and at times still feel some sense guiding me through life. But I am wondering if maybe someone with some better knowledge then a google search can shed some better light then I have been able to.
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