Brian. (Spring, 2003, Kingsbury NY)

I've written about this (although heavily masked for certain peoples privacy) years ago on my other blog. I will retell it here briefly and coldly with some dates and names slightly changed to maintain that privacy.

Kingsbury, NY is mostly farmland. Patches of trees and brush outline large and mostly empty fields.

I was living in a modular home with my then girlfriend (we will call Lynn), her parents, her sister, and her sisters boyfriend, Brian.

On the night of April 8th, 2003 Lynn and I had the house to ourselves. Her parents were out on a date night, and her sister and Brian were line dancing in Saratoga NY. We made a bed on the living room floor and watched a movie. We fell asleep and just before midnight Lynn shook me awake.

She was sweating and distraught. When I asked her what was wrong she recounted a dream she just experienced;

She woke up (in the dream) and saw Brian sitting on the couch behind us. He was all black. Like ashes, and not shadows. He looked at her and said it was okay. Then she woke up.

I assured her it was okay, and then ten minutes later the phone rang. Lynn answered it and it was her mother.

Brian and the sister had been driving back from line dancing. It was freezing rain on the interstate and their defroster wasn't working. They pulled off to the right on the interstate and Brian had stepped out of the car to scrape the windshield.

As he did a car tried to pass between them and the guardrail and hit Brian. He was thrown into the air over the car and hit the pavement. He was rushed to Albany Med.

Lynn cried and I assured her he would be okay.

We got dressed and drove to Albany med.

Brian was brain dead. He was bruised, swollen, and though alive, gone.

We wept around him for two days until they took his body off of life support and declared him.

I am skipping over personal and private details.




The activity began almost immediately, though I equate much, if not most to mourning. Grief is a monstrous emotion and wreaks havoc on sensibility, reason, logic, and even perception. However;


It began slow. Lynn, her sister, and I would sit either on the back porch or in her car facing the dark if the nights were too cold and talk. It wasn't a few days after the funeral that we began to see Brian. At first only a shape of a person in the field behind the house in the dark. The first night we were scared it was something more nefarious, a person staking out the house was an early thought. The shape stood in the field, then walked into the dark. It moved like Brian.

We brought it up to Lynn's parents, who thought as I do now that it was a trick of the brain.

This "trick of the brain" continued.The shape would be seen in the field from time to time.

A week or so later Lynn's sister came into our room crying because she had walked into the kitchen for water and Brian was standing behind the counter. She ran and when we got up to look nothing was there, of course.

Then, leaving the bathroom, I saw Brian walk from the living room into the parents bedroom. Only a glimpse, and at this point, I could easily chalk it up to me becoming wrapped up in the excitement and grief.

Lynn saw him in the house.

Her parents.

The dogs in the house began to act oddly. For example one would be in the living room and begin rolling and shaking her leg as if someone were playing with her.

Then Lynn's father felt someone grab his shoulder. When he turned around he said he saw a glimpse of Brian and then it disappeared. By the time he relayed that story it had already been a few days since it happened.

We were all seeing him.

However, I still contend that this could all be grief and hysteria.

To that point.

A couple weeks had passed and now it was the end of May.

We were all home and just going about our normal routine. A phone rang. A ring unlike the normal ring. More of a bell sound than a digital ring.

In the house there was a landline connected to two wireless handsets. One in the kitchen, one in the parents bedroom. We were unable to find the kitchen handset and so Lynn's mother went to the bedroom to get the other. She came back out confused and holding the extra handset. It was not ringing or lit up, but the ringing continued. She even went so far as to answer the handset, but of course was met with a dial tone.

Soon, Lynn's sister realized it sounded as though the ringing was coming from her bedroom and as she led the way there, we all followed, first Lynn, then me, then the parents.

The ringing was in the sister's room, buried somewhere in the closet. She pulled laundry out, boxes, everything. Eventually finding a box and opening it up and emptying its contents all over the floor. The ringing was louder.

She pulled out an old regular wired telephone, wrapped in a phone cable, unplugged, and it was ringing loudly.

She unwrapped it quickly and answered it.

She asked hello twice, her face went white.

She handed the phone to Lynn, who seemed to be listening intently but confused.

Lynn handed the phone to me, and on the other end was silence.

Not as though I were listening to an unplugged phone, but as though someone on the other end was just remaining quiet. Their was an atmosphere. Then it clicked off, as if they hung up.


There was never any more activity.

The Black Entity, 1987-2019

As is usually the case, I wish I had kept better records while I was growing up. 

Throughout my life I have been witness to many, many strange things. Most of which I am sure that the majority of people have also been through but never quite paid attention to. Missing Object Phenomenon, disembodied voices and sounds, the occasional shadow in the corner of the room. All of which seem to be fairly run of the mill "brain trickery". Except when it just can't be.

This entry will be a brief recounting of a number of those moments throughout my life. Though, as I said, I wish I had better record keeping skills when I was younger, because a lot of this entry will be very loose dating.

From my perspective (more on that in a minute), the beginning of the story is in Granville, NY, 1987. My family (Mother, Father, newborn sister) had moved into a three bedroom apartment on Morrison Avenue. I was starting pre-school. The apartment was two floors, with the three bedrooms on top. My sisters at the far end of the hall, then mine, then around the staircase and at the other end of the hall, my parents. 

I had always had nightmares and odd dreams. In fact, my earliest memories are from when I was in a crib and dreaming. Maybe a year or so old, 1984 or 1985. In that first memorable dream there was a car. A convertible (though I'm not sure I would have had any reference point for one at that age). In the car are four large male or genderless yet imposing creatures. The driver is a large bird like creature. Beak. Grimey and unhealthy looking green feathers. Behind him in the back seat is an entity I can't quite make out or remember if I ever could. In the passenger seat is a pig-like creature. Thin, though with loose and mashed skin, a snout like nose. Could even be described as dog like, I suppose, though my brain always labels it pig-like. The last in the car is a thing all black. Imposing. Featureless. The group all wanted me to get in the car. To come with them. I remember nothing else of the dream, though I have one memory (dream?) shortly after of the bird-like character in my room and looking into my crib.

A recurring theme in my dreams has long been (and continues to be) getting lost in labyrinthine versions of the houses where I live. The first occurrence of this to  my memory is the house in Granville, 1987, shortly after I first encountered the all black entity while awake.

I had climbed into bed. The light from streetlamps meandered in and my room was all fairly visible. My closet was directly in front of my bed. 

I remember hearing clothes move and I looked at my closet as the entity (whom I assume is a male) exited and stood in my room. He was the size of an adult. On the other side of the closet, a second entity came out, who was a bit smaller of frame and I felt was female. They stood in my room for a moment then came to the foot of my bed. They both took my blankets in hand and dragged them into the closet and disappeared. 

I remember being too terrified to move.

I have memories of this happening multiple times in that house. 

I do not know if I ever told anyone at the time.

(An important, and odd side note; 20 years later, the fall of 2007, my youngest son, who was five at the time, came to me frightened one night that a large all-black person had come out of his closet and stood over his bed. This also terrified me because I had absolutely never recounted what happened to me two decades before. On top of that, I recently was speaking to my mother about some of these events and she told me a story of when she was a little girl, about seven, black creatures, she called them ghosts, would float out of a hole in her bedroom wall. My mother was seven in 1967, twenty years before my encounter.)

I never saw the female again after leaving that house. Only the male. However, years later my sister took me aside at a family gathering and asked me quite concerned if I ever felt like someone was with me all the time and messing with me. She then described many things that I had also seen and felt. I playfully assume that the male took me, and the female took my sister. The theory will have to do for now.

Making a rookie mistake, I began to associate the entity with all odd occurrences in my life. Voices in an empty house. Footsteps outside of my door. My name being called from time to time. A general sense of not being alone. I attempted to name it a few times, but nothing ever stuck and I am glad for that. 

It has seemed to become active when I am either in turmoil or about to be. People have suggested it feeds on that but I don't have any evidence of that. For a long time I felt like it was looking out for me. Friends saw it in my apartments without me telling them about it. Some heard their names called. One former roommate ran from his bedroom in the middle of the night and into mine because "something was in [his] room". Later, an ex of mine would have art thrown at her from across the room. A tea kettle once flew from the kitchen and into the living room toward her. We would see doubles of each other walking through the house on a semi-regular basis. The activity was strong in that time (2009-2013ish). At one point I was on a twelve hour shift at work and got a panicked call from her because she had seen its face staring at her from upstairs. She described it as large, pale, unhealthy, and angry. This was the first time a "face" had ever been a part of the equation and I wondered if she made it up, but I knew her well enough to know she was terrified and she did not go back in the house until I came home. After, I wondered if there was more than one thing following me around. 

A cell phone went missing for three days and reappeared one afternoon on my pillow. 

A decorative "witches ball" that we had purchased from a yard sale had begun snapping and popping. 

The relationship didn't last and after that the blatant activity seemed to stop. However, my own well being quickly deteriorated, not just emotionally, but physically as well. Mold was discovered in the apartment and I attributed what I could to that. My declining health, my paranoia, my poor memory. All are symptoms of mold poisoning. 

Months later, bringing Elizabeth to my apartment for the first time, I had of course not told her the tales, she said heavily upon entering; "the air is thick here." I moved shortly after that. 

The first night (Christmas eve, 2015) in the new place I had a dream. The black entity was sitting on my couch in the new house. I came into the room and we had a discussion. I lived there. He lived with me. We would be good to each other. We would mind our own business.

Activity was at a minimum for a while after that. 

Occasional footsteps. 

Occasional voices. 

At one point I heard my son come down the stairs at night and begin using the computer. The hard clacks of mechanical keyboards. When I opened my bedroom door he, of course, wasn't there. At one point My son was home alone. When I came home he ran downstairs and asked me if I had come home just before. He had been in his room and heard me call up to him. He replied but I didn't. He heard me walk through the house (creaky old floors) and he called to me again. Then he heard the front door open and shut and I called to him again, this time, the actual me.

These sorts of events slowed in recent years, however they still make their presence known. I, apparently, sat up in bed one night after a few months of sobriety and meditation, and in "someone else's voice" told Elizabeth sternly "I'M BORED."

I don't know if I will ever sort out if all of these things are connected, and I am sure a large number of them can be explained away as "brain trickery", however, some in my experience just can't.