The other day I was perusing the comments when I noticed that one commentor thought it might be cool to have information that was less about the mechanics of spirit lovers and a little more personal and fun. That comment inspired me to create some new categories after I was done with my last blogpost.
Today I’ll introduce the first of these: “Personal Experiences“, which is pretty self-explanatory. All the other bloggers do it, so why not throw my hat into the ring?
In this blogpost I’ll be talking about my earliest experiences, hitting the high points of the first three months afterwards. I’ve written it as a narrative for fun and as an excuse to practice writing. The details within are an accurate representation of what I experienced.
How It All Began
I slumped back in my chair, the light from the screen shining across my face. My eyes slid shut, and I listened to the rain patter against the roof. I was staying up too late. I had class tomorrow. I repeated these thoughts to myself like a mantra, and then shut off my PC.
Why was I even putting so much preparation into this? The idea of summoning a spirit was fascinating, but probably amounted to made up nonsense. I had more important things to do than put this much time into my little experiment.
“At this point I may as well just follow through…” I thought. Saturday would be the day, and if I didn’t do the ritual correctly I couldn’t come to any kind of fair conclusion. Even if I was 99% sure this was made up, I had to be rigorous.
The plan was simple. First, see a psych and make sure I’m mentally sound. There was no use doing an experiment like this if some mental illness would warp my perception.
Next, grab a ritual off the internet, figure out how it works, and attempt it. If – when – nothing happened, I could be more confident in my atheist stance.
Then I’d repeat the ritual a few times to account for variance. When it inevitably kept failing, I could finally close the book on spirituality. It would be Atheism for me until the day I died.
That was the idea, anyway. So far I’d visited a psych and grabbed some sort of Letter ritual from a weirdo off the internet. As dumb as it seemed, it was no worse than anything else out there. Plus, on the off-chance that it did work, having a succubus didn’t sound so bad.
The only thing left to do was to perform the ritual. My domicile would be empty of everyone besides my pets this weekend, so I’d decided Saturday was as good a time as any. I’d already gotten everything I needed: Paper and pen, a stone bowl, a candle and lighter, and something to draw some blood. It felt a little weird to go in and buy one of those diabetes lancets, but the ritual called for blood and I was hardly going to take a knife to my hand.
As I dozed off, I felt well-prepared for what I thought would be an exercise in self-humiliation. I was not at all prepared for what would actually happen.
The rest of the week flew by in a boring haze, and I soon found myself seated on the cold, concrete floor in the garage. I was hardly going to burn anything in the kitchen or living room, and there was plenty of space down there to do whatever I needed.
I set out the bowl and writing gear along with a clipboard so that I could write a little more easily. I lit the candle and began to focus. Focus turned into inspiration, which quickly turned into frenzied writing. I knew what I wanted, and had intuited that the contents of the letter themselves were secondary. It was mostly about how I felt when writing the letter.
After covering the paper in sentences that would have been considered an insult to the English language, I pricked myself with the lancet and bled a few tiny drops of blood across it. Then came the flame, which burned the paper to ash within the bowl. With the paper burned to cinders, the only evidence of this humiliating ritual was the tiny wound on my thumb, which would be gone in no time.
I waited. Nothing. Not a single touch, nor a tickle of arousal. As I cleaned up and climbed into bed, I was content. There was no spirit world, and there certainly wasn’t some otherworldly creature waiting for me across the veil. This was conclusive enough for me; any additional attempts would just be formality. That was where this story – this episode of personal embarrassment – ended.
It Did Not End There
The next few days were back to business as usual. I had a presentation Wednesday in one of my business classes; It was the sort of presentation I had to get all dressed up for. On came the suit-coat, tie, and dress pants, and I made for the door.
On my way out, I stopped to check on my pets. Rosie, the vibrant half-corgi, and Molly, the relaxed border collie, were both lounging in the downstairs bedroom. It was tradition for me to harass them for a few minutes before leaving.
As I went in to greet them, I began to hear squeaking. It wasn’t a squeaking I was unfamiliar with; this was the same squeak that the dog toys made. Normally this wouldn’t be a sound that even registered, but all of the pets were laying right in front of me. I was the only one in the house.
A little weirded out, I went for the door and noticed something else had fallen down in front of me. It was a brown, cylindrical neck pillow. We’d hung it from one of its loops on a hook on the garage stairs walls.
This also struck me as odd; due to the shape of the hook, you’d have to push it up a fair bit to get it to flop down like that. I checked the loop and it hadn’t broken. While it was weird, it was the sort of thing I could chalk up to coincidence. Perhaps some mundane coincidence had caused the squeaking as well.
I made my way down to the car, which was sitting in the driveway outside of the garage. As I turned back to lock the door, I noticed what seemed like a shadowy figure in the center of my vision. It didn’t persist for long, and I figured it might be a trick of the light or something of the sort.
Still, all of these things happening at the same time? I guess I should at least investigate. After I’d finally made it back home, I decided I should issue the presence, if there was one, a challenge. After all, if it could squeak toys and knock things over, surely it could do something more to prove its presence.
“If you are real,” I whispered under my breath “Then give me a dream tonight”. Succubi give people dreams after all, don’t they? Resolute that my challenge was appropriate, I pulled the covers over myself and went straight to sleep.
That night, I did have a dream. A dream of a girl.
She was shorter than me, with long dark hair. She was cute and had a wide smile on her face. We were in a church-like setting, though everything was wispy and transparent. The pews looked like they’d been fashioned from fog, as did the altar. There were no walls or doors to speak of. The only things that were solid were myself and her.
The dream was not even remotely sexual, but it did feel romantic. It was like some of the dates I’d been on before, when everything clicked and it was effortless to get along. We talked about little unimportant things and made eyes at each other until I awoke, morning sun warm upon my face. I couldn’t remember any of the conversations we had, the words we spoke fading away with the dream itself. I did remember how it made me feel.
Was I convinced? Had I proven to myself that these spirits exist?
If you know me, you know that the answer was a definitive No.
I Was Not Convinced
As time went on, things continued to happen and the two of us settled into a little dance of sorts. She would show up in dreams, interact with me via touch or temperature, cause light-based phenomena right in front of my eyes, and eventually even start stimulating me sexually. I would experience these things, and then do whatever I could to doubt them. This was the logical thing to do, I told myself. I was being skeptical.
This continued for a few months. We weren’t able to communicate outside of dreams, and even in the dreams we often wouldn’t speak. She would usually just hug me or hang out with me or snuggle. When we did speak, I would not remember it come morning. To this day, the dreams we have are only rarely sexual. They are almost always romantic.
Things continued in this way for quite a while, until she began to take more drastic measures to overcome my skepticism. The first of these was some time in the middle of December, around 2 months after I’d summoned her in the first place. I was in the hypnogogic state. She appeared visually before me, and screamed ‘Hey’ into my head. It felt incredibly loud, like a bomb had gone off inside my cranium.
I was not brave. That simple word combined with what I was seeing turned me as white as a sheet. I buried my head in the pillow to shield my eyes against what I was seeing. The experience soon faded, and I was about as awake as you could be afterwards.
You’re probably wondering ‘how could anyone discount that? Surely that’s enough proof?’ It wasn’t, not for me. I was in the hypnogogic state. Of course I could experience an auditory hallucination. While I’d never had a visual hallucination in that state before, I knew that would also be possible. I chalked it up to a bit of cranial weirdness combined with the imaginary spirit lover.
She was forced to take even more drastic measures.
January 4th. My brother was returning from a mission trip that evening. He was as much a Christian as our dad had been, and had elected to spend a few weeks spreading the Gospel in some nation in Middle America. He’d also had an intimate experience with some unclean water, a fact we’d all learn soon enough when the parasite made itself known.
I was still on vacation from University, and was piddling away the hours waiting for mom to bring him home. It was around 2:30 in the morning. I had slept in the previous day knowing my brother would be coming home in the wee hours. I was fully awake and making dinner for myself, having had little chance to eat earlier.
Sliding the contents of my meal into the toaster oven, I walked into the living room to take a break. All the lights were on, and the dogs were lying limp on the floor, behind the couch. They looked as though they were begging to be put to bed. Unfortunately they’d have to persist a little longer.
I crouched down to pet them for a few moments. They were as unresponsive as I expected, begging me to leave them be with their lack of motion. I eventually relented and stood back up.
What I saw in that moment changed my life forever.
There she was, standing about as tall as she had in my dreams. She looked like she was formed out of fog. Despite this, her body didn’t shift or move. It was as solid as a being made out of fog or air could get. I could make out her long hair and most of her facial features. She was clothed, but because she looked like she was made of fog, it was impossible to make out any details about those clothes, aside from the fact that she seemed to be in a long skirt.
She stared at me and I stared back. My fight, flight, or freeze response took over and decided that there was no fighting or fleeing the figure in front of me. Freeze it was. We continued this staring contest for the next minute and a half.
After this the figure dispersed. No screaming, no movement, no throwing things around or beating at squeaky toys like they’re drums. Just a stare-down and silence.
This was convincing. I had never hallucinated while fully awake before. I’d always been a teetotaler, and was as boring a human being as could be according to the psych. There was nothing that could explain something like this away. Yet there I was, faced with absolute evidence that she was real.
I would never again doubt her existence.
Reading it like this after all this time really emphasizes how silly some of this was. Yes, the squeaking dog toys were the first sign, four days after the ritual. Yes, she gave me a dream that same night, and yes my stubborn ass doubted literally everything until she visually manifested while I was totally awake and aware. I can still vividly remember that scene where she was standing in the living room corner, lights on and everything. It’s the kind of thing you can never forget.
Maybe Aquinas was onto something with the whole ‘spiritual beings forming a body of air’ thing. That was certainly what it seemed like. Whatever the mechanics of it actually were, it was enough to convince me utterly. As much as I’d like to pretend that I was brave in the face of my first genuine paranormal experience, I was as scared as everyone else is.
By the way, you probably noticed I use the word ‘succubus’ a lot in this story. Back then I just sort of assumed that the succubus summoning ritual would summon a succubus. I don’t tend to believe very strongly in spirit races now, and even if I did this is not what I would consider my spirit lover to be.
That’s all I have for you this month. I’m scheduling posts as I go so that they come out more consistently. Feel free to ask questions or comment down below. If you liked my writing or hated it, let me know too. Even if you aren’t into the whole spirit lover thing, I love getting feedback about that.
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