Disembodied Voices and a UFO Encounter

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I've always had a great love for horror, cryptozoology, and the paranormal. As an elementary age child some of my favorite shows were things like Tales From the Crypt and Goosebumps. I was the proud owner of the Tales From the Crypt comics and all of the Goosebumps books.

Dracula, Jaws, and other scary/gory movies were also favorites. I had an interest in dead things which I think helped when I had to take biology classes later on in my school life and had to dissect frogs and such. Other kids would think it was gross so I was always the one in my group that had to do the dirty work.

Once, when I was no older than six, a chipmunk had somehow managed to get stuck in our basement. We think it was hurt by a mousetrap then crawled underneath a pile of rags near the washing machine to die. My parents didn't find it until over a week later and that was only because they were searching for the source of the foul odor that had permeated the basement.

The dead chipmunk was apparently stuck to the cement floor and the stench was absolutely rancid. So much so that my father, who ended being the one to have to clean it up, gagged and retched as he spent over an hour scraping it up and dousing the area in various extra strength cleaners.

Despite how adversely it affected my dad, I, being the lover of creepy and gross things, tried to go watch him clean it up and my mother had to hold me back as I begged her to let me see the dead chipmunk.

I don't know if my love for the gross, strange, creepy, and paranormal had effects on the way I saw the world, but I had a few experiences as a child that I still can't get over. I've become more of a skeptic as I've gotten older, looking at my experiences and the experiences of others with a more critical eye, but there are a few things that have happened in my life that even my skeptical brain has trouble explaining.

Disembodied Voices

I was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. When I was about seven years old, my father and I were alone in the house one winter evening as my mother was out with my aunt doing something that I can't recall. It was dark outside and the only light on in the house was the ceiling fan over the dining table in the kitchen where we sat. There was a hallway next to us that led from the dining area to the bedrooms. The hall and the bedrooms were completely dark with only a sliver of light from the dining room reaching into the entrance of the hall.

We lived at the top of a cul-de-sac in a one story ranch style home with a basement. Our back yard butted up against a forested preserve of land between our neighborhood and the neighborhood next to ours. The preserve was about a block wide and made a decent buffer between us and the houses from the neighborhood behind us.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that we lived in a quiet, forested suburban area.

My father was helping me with homework. The television was off and there were no distractions going on in the house so I could focus on my work. It was late enough on a school night that there weren't any kids playing outside either. All was quiet except for the scratching of my pencil on my worksheet paper.

Out of nowhere my mother's voice called my name.

My father and I both swiveled our heads toward the hallway where the voice had come from. We looked at each other and I asked if he heard mom calling my name and yes, he'd heard it too. He confirmed that it sounded exactly like my mother and that it had called my name clear as day.

Obviously my mother was nowhere near the house.

The voice definitely came from the area down the hallway where the bedrooms were and it couldn't have been just my imagination because my dad heard it too. It had been so articulate and clear that if I hadn't known any better I would have gotten up right away and gone to see what my mom needed.

We never heard anything like that again and to this day, some twenty something years later, I cannot come up with a reasonable explanation for both of us hearing that voice.

UFO Encounter

The neighborhood we lived in was full of friendly people and had a real welcoming community feel to it. One of the neighbors near us in the cul-de-sac would host block parties every summer and I and all the other kids in the neighborhood loved it. It was one of the few nights that our parents would be outside late and let us stay out late with them. There was food, fireworks, and games and I remember those summer block parties fondly.

A particular event during the block party of the summer I was nine is something that keeps that night firmly implanted in my memories.

The party was winding down as the hour was nearing probably ten o'clock or so, though a few adults were still chatting around a metal barrel bonfire. Their kids were growing tired and were mostly sitting around waiting for their parents to say it was time to go home. A friend and I weren't really tired yet and with the only other kids that were still there being much younger than us, we were getting bored.

My friend and I decided to go to the neighborhood park/playground that was several blocks away and down a steep hill. We asked our parents about it, they said it was fine, and off we went.

What we didn't tell our parents was that instead of going to the park, we planned to go explore the forested wetlands preserve that was across from the park. You had to go through the playground and across a rarely used dirt road to get to it.

It was a place kids liked to sneak into because we weren't supposed to go there. Animal skeletons of things like raccoons and deer were frequently found there. It was muddy, swampy, and dangerous. That's exactly why my friend and I wanted to explore it at night.

The park had a large sign that said it closed at dusk. I always assumed the reason was because the only light near it was a street lamp on the sidewalk at the entrance. After walking a ways down the asphalt path that led down a steep slope to the playground there were no lights so it got pretty dark.

That made it a little creepy, but also made it a good place to star gaze now that I think about it. It's a shame that never occurred to me back then.

As we walked down the slope and into the grassy area next to the playground I remember that my friend and I were talking about how eerie it was being there at night and how just hearing that word gave us chills. We passed the playground, still discussing things in that vein, and we were a few yards from the dirt road when something low in the sky ahead of us caught our attention.

I cut off mid sentence and we both stopped dead in our tracks. The thing in the sky descended smoothly and rapidly. Lights blinking along the bottom of the craft made it appear to be cylindrical in shape. It honestly looked like the stereotypical UFO seen in nearly every alien movie and UFO report ever.

The craft hit the tree line of the wetlands ahead of us. The tops of trees that were in the way of its descent bent as it pushed them and I could hear the light rustle of leaves from what I guessed was the breeze created by the UFO, but the craft itself was not emitting any noise that I could hear from where we stood.

My friend and I looked at each other wide eyed and we turned and ran before the craft even made it past the tops of the trees. We were yelling back and forth to each other things like "did you see that" "yeah yeah" and "oh my god."

I remember running to my parents, out of breath and trying to explain what we saw. The words might have been blurred and incoherent, but whatever the reason may be, my parents brushed me off with an "uh huh" and pretty much ignored my scared yet excited screeching.

My friend and I talked about it for a little more around the bonfire, but after we went home and slept it off, I all but forgot about it in the coming weeks and shrugged it off when I thought about it thereafter.

My friend never spoke again of it. I ended up moving to California three years later and lost contact with most of my childhood friends so I didn't think about the incident either until a few years later when I confided in close friends who were also sharing their paranormal experiences. Before that I was afraid people would make fun of me or call me a liar so I never bothered to bring it up. I am a terrible liar, though. I can't keep a story straight unless it really happened. It's the main reason I have trouble writing fiction stories, so I can assure you I'm not making the incident up.

I am weirdly calm when talking about it now. Like it was a thing that was normal to see. In fact, 'weirdly calm' is how I reacted to the other experiences I've had with unexplainable things later in life.

I think those particular stories are best left for another time though.