Belgium

THE HAUNTED PAINTING

(Lilith)

In 1976, I rented my first apartment with my partner Zach. There was a picture of the Mona Lisa hanging there. It was his inheritance from his grandfather who was a wonderful painter, who often copied masterpieces and so he had copied this work of Leonardo Da Vinci. After a couple of months of living there I all of a sudden started seeing something black coming from that painting. It always happened when I sat in the three-seater (just opposite the painting) to watch television or such. Mostly when I was alone….annoying but true. It started in the triangle formed by her left shoulder, elbow and breast. It was a black "something" coming out and growing bigger with every inch it approached me. I often went almost hysterical with fear when that happened, but Zach saw nothing and simply told me not to act childish. Most of the times, I ran out of the room and when I came back later it was no longer there. But at times I yelled out at Zach, whilst keeping an eye at it and Zach would come to the room at which it often receded and disappeared into the painting again, but sometimes it disappeared quickly when I looked away to talk to Zach and when I looked back it was gone. It happened to me only three or four times when Zach was present, but he never saw it.

The black thing looked like very dense black smoke (although that is still not an accurate description) and started to come across the room towards me. The furthest it ever got was halfway the room (let's say about two and a half metres at which it almost covered the entire painting in size) the painting being some 60 x 80 cm. The movement was similar to the reverse of some black sand disappearing into a funnel, as if you would have taped it on video and then play it in rewind version. And of course the reverse again when it receded again. Sometimes there were weeks that nothing happened and sometimes it happened two or three times in one week. There was no system to it, nothing organized, nothing obvious that could trigger it. We never understood. After I complained about it often enough, Zach decided to hang the painting in the bedroom. Then it stopped. Six months later it happened in the bedroom again at a totally unexpected moment. I had been Hovering round lunchtime, stopped in a stooped position winding the wire and gathering the tubes, you know, and when I got back in the upright position I happened to look straight at the painting and the black "thing", what ever it was, was out of the painting already and coming / floating towards me the size of a soccer-ball. I almost tripped over the Hoover in trying to get out of that bedroom as quickly as I could and I banged the door behind me and I had goosebumps all over (still have while recalling this). I hardly dared to go back to the room to collect the Hoover. I waited for a full two hours before peeking in. And nothing was there anymore. Such strange things. I do not remember what happened after that, but when the next year we moved to the new flat (where the scissors kept shifting places) the painting came along but I never had that bad experience with the "blackness" anymore. Still when after seven years I left Zach I wasn't sad to part with this painting as well, it kept giving me an uneasy feeling.

THE MYSTERY OF THE SCISSORS

(Lilith)

When I lived with my very first partner Zach, we kept losing and finding pairs of scissors (From 1979 on). We had about three pairs of scissors in the house and mostly there was one in the kitchen, one in the living room and one in a back room which was used as an office to Zach. The largest one was normally laying in the living room. There were numbers of times when we couldn't find them in their normal place and even more times when we found the missing scissors in the office. That seemed to have been the gathering room of our scissors; they always wound up in that particular room, even the ones from the kitchen. We jokingly said it must be spooks doing this. But who knows, maybe it was. But I also had a menacing experience.

THE SELF LIGHTING CANDLE

(Lilith)

Later I met an Indian (Rajesh) with whom I lived for about a year, in that same apartment. He was rather superstitious and also a strong believer in all the Hindu gods. One day he had had bad news about his mother's health and he decided to burn some candles for those gods and one especially dedicated to her. It had been burning all afternoon and when we wanted to go to bed, I asked him to extinguish it, because of what had happened to my nightstand before. He readily did that and we were wrapping things up in the kitchen and when we came back to the living room the candle was lit again! So I said, I guess you didn't put it out properly, let me do it this time, to which he agreed. I extinguished it and went back to where Rajesh stood and he looked at the candle making big eyes, so I looked around to see what he was looking at and yes!... The candle lit up again! The other candles for the gods where extinguished before and didn't come on again. We then put a cap over it for more than a minute, took the cap off, saw that the candle was out/dead/finished and went back over the settee where I wanted to take some sweater of mine to take with us in the bedroom. We both looked at the candle one more time to reassure ourselves that it was well and duly extinguished, when it lit again! I got Goosebumps all over and he started praying real hard to all of his Hindu gods, for he was sure it meant something was really wrong with his mum. We then let the candle burn all the way and stayed with it till well past 1h30 at night. When it finally died with a whiff of smoke I felt reassured and also Rajesh said that it felt as if the "danger" had passed. Later we were informed that his mum's health was at one time very bad indeed and as India lives in a time zone six hours before us it was early morning when her condition at first became really endangering and later got over a point where after she recovered well. Pfeewww!! That was really something special and we couldn't find a "normal" explanation to this. The candle was one of a dozen and there was nothing special about it and the other candles next to it, didn't behave at all like this one...

DAD'S CHAIR

(Lilith)

After my dad died (Nov 1997) the funeral was arranged and only a week later some family members came to visit. As my dad didn't get along with the family of my mum, he specifically stated that they where not to come to his funeral. That's why they came a week later only. As my mum didn't have all to many visitors she didn't have very much chairs to offer them, so two sat on the settee while the other four sat around the table and my mum sat on a stool near the kitchen, which was easier for her as she was serving them coffee and thee and biscuits from the kitchen. My aunt Rachel (who's a real hypochondriac) whom my father disliked a lot happened to sit on the chair my father normally sat on. No one saw what actually happened but at one time while everybody was chatting to everybody else - my aunt gave a yell and was thrown of the chair. It looked like the chair was rattled by some invisible person. And although my aunt landed on the floor, the chair was still standing (proudly) upright. And although all the visitors screeched and yelled and yapped about it, my mum stood there calmly and simply said: Well now, Rachel, you know Marcel didn't like you very much, now he's telling you he doesn't want you to sit on his chair. At which Rachel look around at the chair in fright and didn't want to sit on it no more. Needless to say no other person felt like sitting on it either, so they exchanged it for the stool my mum sat on and (of course) she could sit on it with no problem. I wasn't present at that time, but it made me chuckle to think my dad could pester my aunt from across the grave. Four years later when my mum died also, I inherited those chairs. I cannot tell which one belonged to my dad anymore as they all look the same, but when I sit on one particular chair I always have a feeling it belongs to me, more than the other three. So I decided that would be the one I am sitting on when working at the computer. In front of which I spend hours and hours on end. I guess my dad likes that because he has never thrown me off.

THE MAGICK CIRCLE

( Lilith )

~Story contributor wants to hear from you~

I have taken a keen interest in wicca/witchcraft after a couple of people I know, told me they thought I was a white witch. And maybe I already was, before I realised it. For yes, I do have odd things happening to me, I am very sensitive in comparison to most people and I "design" my own rituals for good things to happen (to me or to others). So now that other people believed I was a witch, I also started reading about wicca, the Book of Shadows and more of that. I do not want to join a coven though and rather try to be a good solitary witch. After a while I wanted to try and perform magick as it appeared in the books. First I had to draw a magic circle in which to perform some ritual. I don't know if you know how this goes, but to tell you in short: one puts some candles in the four directions of the wind, (or in five directions to represent the elements) and then draw a circle on the floor (or on the ground when you do this outdoors) and that can be in different materials; salt, sand, small pebbles, flour, nuts, chalk or a rope laying on the ground. Above this ground-level circle, one draws another circle in the air at knee height a second one at about waist-height and a third one at head-height; this is done with a wand, a staff or a sword. One draws the circle at a horizontal level and when the circle is closed at that level move upwards in a spiral direction on to the next circle and so on until one closes the lot above ones head. The sword is then used to centralise the gathered up energy in the chalice or in the centre of the circle. In the books they tell us not to step outside the circle, just like that. Because the circle becomes a world within a world where one can have contact with the beyond and that circle protects the rest othe world from those contacts (and vice versa). The book said; if one had to leave the circle for some reason, one had to lay that sword, staff or wand on a piece of that drawn circle so that it could form a sort of door.You shouldn't forget to open and close that door each time you had to leave or enter the circle. One night, I think it was my fifth esbat, I was performing a long ritual and my incense had all burned before I could finish and I had forgotten to take some extra incense with me in the circle, so I wanted to leave the circle but I forgot about creating that "door" and you cannot believe what strange thing happened. At the very first step I took out of that circle I felt on my knee the sensation as if I had ran into a wire or string being put up at knee-height. I was startled and thought I might trip over something so I looked down at my legs where I felt the string and this.. was.. soo.. weird...!! I was wearing a long gown and you could actually see the indent of a wire just beneath my knee, but when I felt at it with my hand there was... nothing there! No wire, no string, no nothing, I stepped back one step and the gown fell straight along my legs again. It really baffled me. I then made the said "door" with the sword and could step out without any other problems. The proof that one makes an invisible sort of "bell-glass" struck me already on some earlier occasion where I almost suffocated from the hot air those candles caused, but as soon as I un-made the circle the heath could spread through the room again and I felt relieved, realising the invisible bell kept the heath gathered all around me instead of spreading and so it started to use up the oxygen in the circle, which made me feel rather queasy. On the one hand it was spooky to see the indent by some invisible string (I dear say by some imaginary boundry of a circle drawn in the air) but on the other hand it reassured me that nothing "disturbing" could come in that circle while I performed my rituals. Without a door I was quite safe in there. I felt protected and good about this.

If any other witch has had a similar experience, please contact Kimberly so that she may forward me your email. Thank you! kbjbcbjb@verizon.net (Please put in subject line: For Lilith)

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