The first time I saw a hole in the world was outside of Seattle in 2007, in a shed on a farm where people were playing with mirrors.
I know that sounds kind of funny when I put it like that, but there's a practice called psychomanteum, which is a chamber made for contacting the spirit world. The room is usually set up with candles, a chair and one or two mirrors, at angles to each other so you can sit and not catch your own reflection. The ghosts are supposed to speak through the mirrors, but the problem with that is, mirrors can be portals, not just communication.
I get involved with the supernatural a lot. I'm a practicing witch and psychic and have been for most of my life. I'm 36 now, to give you an idea of my resume. I've been a healer, a consultant, a hunter, and an exorcist, specializing in protective and nature-based magic. It's not well known in my world, but it is real and I have plenty of stories to back it up, all my own direct experience. This is one of them, now that my credentials are out of the way.
A young woman named Sandy learned that there was a history of the supernatural, more specifically occult rituals, on the farm she'd just moved to, so she decided that she was going to try conjuring up some spirits. Because she took the whole supernatural thing pretty seriously, she skipped the Ouija board and crystals and went straight to the big guns, building herself a psychomanteum chamber in a shed on the back of her property.
This turned out to be a bad idea. At first, it seemed like nothing happened, but after several sessions in the room, Sandy started feeling like she was being followed. Things would move around her house without being touched, there was knocking and banging at night, shadowy reflections appeared in any mirror she looked in. Whispering voices showed up on all her media, and electrical appliances started breaking down with alarming frequency.
By the time Sandy got in touch with me, it was a full-blown haunting. Several shadows had attached themselves to her and the moment we sat down to talk, I could feel the presence around her.
The presence was not happy to see me. Usually, ghosts and spirits don't like being seen for what they are, and they tend to attack or drive off Talents as soon as they're aware of them. The poltergeist activity- things moving around or flying across the room- started immediately as the shadowy little shits tried to hit me with whatever was small enough for them to move. The knives didn't start until I went to the house itself, but the hostility was pretty obvious right from the first encounter, and didn't get better.
Whatever Sandy had let into her house, it was stuck to her and did not want to leave. Of course, the root of the problem was the psychomanteum chamber, which was the portal point for everything. So that was the first thing that I checked out after I did my normal, standard walk through the house.
I don't do mirror divination and conjuring because it's dangerous, and that's as someone who usually knows what he's doing. What Sandy had brought through wasn't just spirits, but shadow entities from through a tiny pinpoint hole that her "studies" had opened.
I consider them demonic, for the record. There's normal human spirits, which can be good or bad, but demonic beings and shadow creatures are straight-up malevolent entities. Worse, they're alien beings with their own motives and ideas. Usually those ideas aren't great for humans: they seem to thrive on fear and chaos and all those negative emotions that come with really severe hauntings.
Anyway, I knew there was something wrong as soon as I stepped into the chamber. The mirrors and chair were still set up the way Sandy had originally put them, but the angles of the room were wrong. When you looked one way, they were straight and normal, but out of the corner of your eye, everything slanted in disturbing ways. Shadows moved in the mirrors if you looked away for a moment, and a ball dropped on the floor would roll back and forth or in circles, no matter how level the floor seemed.
At the center of it all was one tiny little pinpoint hole in the air, floating between the mirrors. It made my head hurt to look directly at it, and it followed me when I looked away. Like something was watching through that little tiny hole, something sick.
It feels like I'm explaining that really badly, but that's what it seemed like. I'd dealt with dozens of hauntings, but up until that point, I'd never run into something that wrong. Everything about it felt like an open wound, like something that simply didn't belong there.
I couldn't even begin to figure out how to seal it up, so the best I could do was burn down the psychomanteum and do a ritual cleansing over the entire property. It took probably four or five visits to remove the spirits from Sandy and calm down the haunting, and I laid protections around the hole to...hopefully...keep it from spreading any further. Damage control, as best I could manage.
Sandy moved some time later, and I eventually left the area: I don't know if anyone else moved in but I wouldn't be surprised to hear the house is empty. Some things can never quite be put back where you got them from.
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Statement of Jared Rhys
I know that sounds kind of funny when I put it like that, but there's a practice called psychomanteum, which is a chamber made for contacting the spirit world. The room is usually set up with candles, a chair and one or two mirrors, at angles to each other so you can sit and not catch your own reflection. The ghosts are supposed to speak through the mirrors, but the problem with that is, mirrors can be portals, not just communication.
I get involved with the supernatural a lot. I'm a practicing witch and psychic and have been for most of my life. I'm 36 now, to give you an idea of my resume. I've been a healer, a consultant, a hunter, and an exorcist, specializing in protective and nature-based magic. It's not well known in my world, but it is real and I have plenty of stories to back it up, all my own direct experience. This is one of them, now that my credentials are out of the way.
A young woman named Sandy learned that there was a history of the supernatural, more specifically occult rituals, on the farm she'd just moved to, so she decided that she was going to try conjuring up some spirits. Because she took the whole supernatural thing pretty seriously, she skipped the Ouija board and crystals and went straight to the big guns, building herself a psychomanteum chamber in a shed on the back of her property.
This turned out to be a bad idea. At first, it seemed like nothing happened, but after several sessions in the room, Sandy started feeling like she was being followed. Things would move around her house without being touched, there was knocking and banging at night, shadowy reflections appeared in any mirror she looked in. Whispering voices showed up on all her media, and electrical appliances started breaking down with alarming frequency.
By the time Sandy got in touch with me, it was a full-blown haunting. Several shadows had attached themselves to her and the moment we sat down to talk, I could feel the presence around her.
The presence was not happy to see me. Usually, ghosts and spirits don't like being seen for what they are, and they tend to attack or drive off Talents as soon as they're aware of them. The poltergeist activity- things moving around or flying across the room- started immediately as the shadowy little shits tried to hit me with whatever was small enough for them to move. The knives didn't start until I went to the house itself, but the hostility was pretty obvious right from the first encounter, and didn't get better.
Whatever Sandy had let into her house, it was stuck to her and did not want to leave. Of course, the root of the problem was the psychomanteum chamber, which was the portal point for everything. So that was the first thing that I checked out after I did my normal, standard walk through the house.
I don't do mirror divination and conjuring because it's dangerous, and that's as someone who usually knows what he's doing. What Sandy had brought through wasn't just spirits, but shadow entities from through a tiny pinpoint hole that her "studies" had opened.
I consider them demonic, for the record. There's normal human spirits, which can be good or bad, but demonic beings and shadow creatures are straight-up malevolent entities. Worse, they're alien beings with their own motives and ideas. Usually those ideas aren't great for humans: they seem to thrive on fear and chaos and all those negative emotions that come with really severe hauntings.
Anyway, I knew there was something wrong as soon as I stepped into the chamber. The mirrors and chair were still set up the way Sandy had originally put them, but the angles of the room were wrong. When you looked one way, they were straight and normal, but out of the corner of your eye, everything slanted in disturbing ways. Shadows moved in the mirrors if you looked away for a moment, and a ball dropped on the floor would roll back and forth or in circles, no matter how level the floor seemed.
At the center of it all was one tiny little pinpoint hole in the air, floating between the mirrors. It made my head hurt to look directly at it, and it followed me when I looked away. Like something was watching through that little tiny hole, something sick.
It feels like I'm explaining that really badly, but that's what it seemed like. I'd dealt with dozens of hauntings, but up until that point, I'd never run into something that wrong. Everything about it felt like an open wound, like something that simply didn't belong there.
I couldn't even begin to figure out how to seal it up, so the best I could do was burn down the psychomanteum and do a ritual cleansing over the entire property. It took probably four or five visits to remove the spirits from Sandy and calm down the haunting, and I laid protections around the hole to...hopefully...keep it from spreading any further. Damage control, as best I could manage.
Sandy moved some time later, and I eventually left the area: I don't know if anyone else moved in but I wouldn't be surprised to hear the house is empty. Some things can never quite be put back where you got them from.