Editorial Note: Mongoose once wrote for this site and isthisthetruth.com and may or may not share a brain with “The Analyst”. He sleeps now. Do not speak his name. Not tonight.
The host of this website (Mongoose) and I have been friends since we were knee high to a grasshopper. One thing I have always admired and envied about him is his endless creative storytelling. We share a passion for the paranormal, and our neuro-divergent minds have imagined all sorts of scenarios over the years – I dread to think how long we have spent together talking absolute nonsense. The story that stands out the most was a windmill at the end of his lane. Now given the name of the lane it was more than likely that a post windmill once stood there but had since been taken down many years before our time.
In our story that ghostly windmill could still be seen at night with an eerie glow coming from skulls within it. Not sure what the skulls had to do with ghostly flour making but that was the mystery. What were these skulls and who did they belong to? I don’t think we ever came up with a satisfactory answer. The ghostly windmill and its skulls were awesome in of themselves, filling the break times at school and our minds pre-pubescent with dread.
We must have told this story at length for over a year. Yet it wasn’t my story to tell, it was the Mongoose’s. I was the audience who asked questions and engaged with him on the subject. He was the eye witness to these paranormal events. Which were almost certainly fictitious not that he would ever admit it. I craved that paranormal experience for myself, so I created it with my own imagination.
One day I told the mongoose about the cellar in “my” house. The house belongs to my mother and there is no cellar but that’s not the point. I said that we had discovered a slab of concrete under the utility floor and underneath were the remains of steps to a long abandoned cellar. The “discovery” of the cellar was the catalyst for a mysterious man appearing in my family home. I caught the shadow of his form at the bottom of the stairs or along the landing beyond my bedroom door.
I must stress that this story was complete and utter nonsense, there was no cellar and no man. Well not at first anyway. I created this story as a reaction to the Mongoose’s. I did not expect for it to take the turn that it did. Many years later when mum changed the carpet in the utility room, I spotted that the concrete did indeed have lines that indicated it was not all poured at the same time; and when we broke up that concrete layer…
There were no cellar steps underneath but a pretty red quarry tile floor which was identical to the one in the outbuildings so was probably also of the late Victorian period when the property was built. I was tempted to ask the builder to rip this up too but I think my mother would have gone ape.
No cellar, but that didn’t mean no shadow person. You see, I had willed this thing into being or so I believe. I was very introverted and spent a lot of non-school time playing by myself in the house. I also developed a magical way of thinking – I jumped and believed I was swinging on an invisible rope. I laid in my bed and believed I was able to move it and myself – gaining the ability to float (or astral project) around my house.
I was frightened of everything and I think this is where the shadow person of my story was able to manifest, within my fear. I told this story too much, I began to believe it. The cellar part I could see had no basis in reality but I sprinted into my bedroom at night with the sense of eyes watching me from the shadows. This continued long after the Mongoose and I had gone our separate ways. Weirdly fate seems to keep drawing us together. Perhaps we need to finish the stories that we started as children to banish the shadows that draw long across the floor of time.