The scary result of subconsciously summoning ZoZo?

[box] Winning submission to the BWC Talisman Competition.[/box]

Readers Story: by Christina. G

I have had a sensitivity to the supernatural for as long as I can remember. My parents won’t tell me much about my childhood experiences but I believe it all stemmed from a near drowning experience when I was in elementary school. I tried to see how long I could hold my breath under water and when I surfaced for air, the pool and everyone in it looked just as it should be but I no longer recognized anyone there. When I realized even my mother was gone from the bench directly to my left, a voice in my head calmly told me to go back under the water and wait. When I surfaced for what I thought was the second time, all my friends and my mother where back. She insisted she never left the bench and that I had not come up for air before that moment.

My “sensitivity” was a thing of the past after that.

I started to see shadow figures in my bedroom at night. The most common visitor was a hunched over old woman who stood sideways at the foot of my bed. Then I saw a fluffy white dog in the kitchen late at night when I went to sneak a midnight snack. We didn’t have a dog and he disappeared before my eyes just as that realization dawned on me. This escalated to disembodied voices calling my name in the middle of the night and seeing an older man calmly sitting on my bedside table while I slept. I often felt my grandmothers spirit on the staircase and she has saved me from a few nasty falls over the years.

But things didn’t always stay so innocent.

In my early teens, after the shocking discovery I could launch a picture frame across the room just by looking at it, I found witchcraft. I was young and stupid and spirits took notice. One night, when I was trying to connect with my spirits guides, I heard a low but very threatening growl come from the corner of the room. Stupid me in all my fright never closed the circle.

Thanks to that misstep I soon had the wallpaper designs rearranging to show faces staring out at me. I had to rearrange all the furniture in my room because the wood grains would change and faces would appear there too. I thought I was loosing my mind. But that was nothing compared to waking up in the middle of the night pinned to my bed, unable to move or speak, to find a seven foot tall black shadow with red glowing eyes staring down at me. I was only 13 and it took me a long time to come to terms with that night. As a result I put witchcraft behind me for many years. However my “sensitivity” never left me and the scariest moment of my life occurred just a year ago.

The TV show Ghost Adventures is a very guilty pleasure of mine and last year one of their episodes focused around a home haunting involving the demon ZoZo. His name became stuck in my head after that airing and I must have repeated his name up to 200 times a day because of it. It was like I was obsessed, I couldn’t stop! I even placed a rubber band around my wrist and would snap it every time I repeated his name but nothing ever worked, and not long after he found me.

I woke up in the middle of the night to three quick knocks on my bedroom wall just under my window. Thinking it was just the house settling in the winter I ignored it. But the knocking continued downstairs. At first I thought someone was knocking on the front door! But as a single woman who lives alone without a pet, there was no way I was answering the door in the middle of the night.

A few minutes later the knocking came again, same spot, same repetitions, but louder. Something wanted my attention and when I noticed the swishing sound of what I can only describe as a silk cape leaving the window area and moving across my room, through my hallway, and down the stairs, my attention was certainly caught.

I laid there, frozen and half believing I was dreaming, when I heard the knocking again downstairs. It dawned on me that whatever was causing this wanted me to follow it. As soon as this thought occurred, two very large and strong hands pushed down the edge of my mattress lifting it up in the air. If those hands pushed any harder I would have slid to the floor. Just as my mind was registering the fact this was actually happening the hands let go and the mattress fell back into its normal position.

That’s when I felt something grab my ankles. I quickly yanked my legs up but the hands landed on my thighs instead. Feeling trapped, I curled myself into a little ball on my side and the hands then pressed down on the mattress on either side of me. Trying to ignore what was happening I pulled my blanket up to my eyes. That’s when the smell hit me, rotting meat, the exact smell the guys on the show smelled when he joined them in the home. As I was realizing just who was in my room with me, I oddly thought very calmly but very firmly, to myself in my head: NO. More so to myself as I couldn’t believe what was happening.

I don’t know if it was the lack of an outright terrified response, the firm NO I thought, or the convenient time of the month….but the hands and the smell disappeared and the feeling of being alone in my room came back. When I woke up the next morning, it all felt like an awful and weird dream.

Later that night proved me wrong when the three knocks woke me up and once again I felt his presence. Being half a sleep at this time, all I did was roll over and fall back too sleep.

He never visited me again and from that moment on I forced a mental block around his name. Even writing it solely for this story I can feel my head grow heavy and foggy, trying to stop myself from accidentally summoning him again.

Experience submitted by: Christina. G