Magic (Baltimore, MD - Age 5)

I had a Matchbox pick-up truck, fluorescent green.  I’d somehow gotten it into my head that the light of a full moon could duplicate things, so I left it next to the armchair in the moonlight one night.  When I woke up, there were two identical trucks, nicks and scratches and all.  The fact that my secret experiment worked never struck me as odd until much later.

What He Saw (Location Withheld - Age 2X)

I’m talking to a guy I know, and he tells me about something he saw a few years back.  He was in one of those desolate mid-western states, and he was in security.  With his co-workers, he was patrolling the fenceline of a facility.

Before they had a chance to secure said facility, they saw a stereotypical flying saucer-like object, spinning and shining multi-colored lights, hovering less than a few hundred yards away.  This guy and his friends, they’re heavily armed, as their particular job requires something a little stronger than pistols.  Heavily armed, and yet, at the sight of this thing, they jump in their vehicle and double-time it the hell back to their central post.

They tell their supervisor what they saw, and he doesn’t appear impressed.  He sends them back immediately to finish securing the facility.  They go back, windows down, guns ready, but there’s no further incident.

Gooner (Columbiana, OH - Age 5)

Staying in Ohio with Uncle Matt was a week-long highlight of my summers.  One week in particular, when I was seven years old, I was walking down the street with Uncle Matt and his friends.  Since they were five years older than me, they were the authorities on everything having to do with everything. 

Matt’s friend Graham’s older brother had a picture of a NAKED GIRL in his ROOM.  These kids were truly the source of useful information.  So, walking down the street, they proceeded to tell me about Gooner.  He drove a green Ford Bronco with no license plate, and he kidnapped kids and did who-knows-what to them.  For years after this, I would be on the lookout for the suspect vehicle on every trip to Ohio.

Candles and Ninjas (Kameyama, JP - Age 20)

My host mother was taking me to Kameyama, the antithesis of modern Japan.  As the train went deeper and deeper into the mountains, cars kept uncoupling until we were on a single car with only a few other people and a conductor.  He took our tickets when we made it to the station, and we met my host mother’s sister there.

They told me that Kameyama was famous for candles, so we headed to a gift shop to pick up a few candles shaped like things.  I got one with a four-leaf clover, but they said that wasn’t impressive enough and got me another one shaped like a snowman.  Kameyama, it turns out, was also famous for its proud heritage of training deadly female ninjas.

Hot.

After driving on dirt roads for the greater part of a half-hour, we finally made it to the homestead.  The house was a few hundred years old, had a traditional Zen courtyard, and a dozen relatives inside.  Tomoko, my host mother’s niece, told me we shared a birthday.

She was pretty cute, too.  Is it incestual to date host relatives?

Soon it was dinnertime.  We had a fifty-six-course traditional Japanese meal, and I got into a deep conversation with host mom’s father, the paterfamilias.  Here was an impressive 80 year-old man, old enough to remember World War II and Hiroshima and he was graciously hosting me in his house.  He offered me a cigarette.

“He doesn’t smoke,” my host mother chimed in.

“I’ll be polite and have one…” I answered.

Host mom and I went through three bottles of wine.  We drank all the wine in the house, and then she raided the wine cellar and returned with brandy.  Host mother can drink.

Sometime after 11pm, we cleaned everything up and they converted the room into a guest room for me.  They set me up with a futon and retired to the other side of the house.  It was less than a minute before I realized it:  I wasn’t alone.

There were sliding panels at the foot of the wall that led outside.  We were miles and miles from anything resembling civilization.  There were paintings and statuettes of demons and dragons throughout the room. 

I finally managed to fall asleep for about an hour when I had the strangest nightmare I’ve ever had.  There were these white kitten-like tiny demons with huge human eyes.  They never moved while I watched them.  When I’d glance away and glance back, they’d shift positions, multiply, run away…but while I watched them, they never moved.

And then I remember a giant human face with eyeballs inside the nostrils and mouth. 

I woke up at 5am, and I haven’t slept since.

2006, Pitt Campus (Pittsburgh, PA - Age 22)

I’m walking from the Cathedral of Learning down Fifth Avenue towards Craig Street when I see the motorcade to end all motorcades.  The first line is police on motorcycles, followed by cop cars, followed by flatbed trucks carrying soldiers.  In the air, a police helicopter and a news helicopter.  At the center of all this authoritarian attention is a semi-trailer with a dozen extra load-bearing tires. 

Atop the bed of the trailer is a huge steel box only slightly smaller than a boxcar.  The box is chained down.  The news says they are transporting a transformer.  During my time at Pitt I’ve seen other motorcades: Kofi Annan’s was a Lincoln Towncar and two bike cops, Bush’s was two limousines surrounded by police in cars and on bikes.  Neither had such a visible military escort.  According to the news, the transformer weighed something like seven hundred thousand pounds…so how would one even go about stealing it to begin with?

Meet Me at the Station (Katsutadai, JP - Age 23)

I’m walking to the little school where I teach English.  The shortest route requires me to cut through the train station to bypass the tracks.  As I approach the station, a white-haired old woman leans out of the doorway (I’m approaching it from the side) and peeks at me.  My first impression is that she’s a ghost.  Not that she was transparent or anything, it was just a cold, shuddering feeling. 

As I walk through the doorway, she tries to block my entry by moving back in forth.  I start jogging down the stairs and she follows me, cackling.  Rolling a tiny suitcase on wheels, I have one of those bad horror movie moments where I’m walking fast and she’s going slow but somehow keeping up.  Screaming and banshee laughing incoherent words, nobody pays any attention to my plight, though the tunnels are full of people.

Daycare Daydreams (Baltimore, MD - Age 5)

At daycare, we took naps on cots and played with blocks and toys.  One of the ladies who worked there had this terribly mashed-up face.  In my cot, instead of sleeping, I tried to imagine a car running over her face and leaving it that way.  I never did determine if she was hideous due to genetics or as a result of some unlucky incident.

Flashes in the Sky - July 21, 1996 (Moon Township, PA - Age 12)

Matt Miller is an intern where my aunt works.  I’m 12 and Grandma is working nights, so my aunt pays him a few bucks to babysit.  It’s 2:30 in the morning and we’re playing MarioKart when we see a flash of light like lightning…but it’s pink.  A second later, another flash, this one green.  A few more flashes of different colors and then the lights go out. 

Without candles, we drive around the neighborhood.  We end up driving 12 miles until we find somewhere with power.  The next day, the news says the outage was caused by a blown transformer.

Karaoke at BanBan Part I (Yachiodai, JP - Age 23)

It’s something like 2am and I’m super need-to-pee drunk.  I step out of room 7 and see, coming down the hallway, something that fails to register.  Karaoke bars are places to smoke cigarettes and get drunk.  Karaoke bars are cheaper than love hotels and have better room service. 

They’re shady. 

And coming down the hallway, from the direction of the girls’ bathroom, I see two little girls.  Identical twins, not a day over five.  They don’t say or do anything, just file by me with blank expressions.  I don’t watch where they go.

The Green House (Moon Township, PA - Age 8)

My dad bought this house for my mother.  For some odd reason, she fell in love with it, with its dilapidated façade, with the old kitchen and old bathroom.  The house was close to total decay, a short step away from condemnable.  But it wasn’t dirty, and everything worked, it was just really…old. 

The neighbor kids told me that the former owners were an old couple who had recently died.  In the basement, there were still cans of vegetables they’d stacked there.  Behind our closets, a secret passage of storage space connected my room with my sister’s.  Another passage went from the back of another closet to somewhere behind the walls.  I was afraid to explore that one any further.

The Lottery (Moon Township, PA - Age 12)

A week or so after my grandfather died, my grandmother had a dream she was hovering in front of a giant digital clock beaming the time, 12:54 in big, red numbers.  The next day, this number hit on the lottery’s Pick 4.

Masami’s Story (Katsutadai, JP - Age 23)

One day in class, we start talking about our paranormal experiences.  He’s on the train one day, and there’s a woman.  Everybody is paying attention to her, her vibe making them uncomfortable.  She finally gets off the train, but none of the people standing near the seat will sit there.  Masami sits there, and it’s cold. 

On the Air (Moon Township, PA - Age 12)

My grandfather liked to sit at the head of the kitchen table and smoke cigarettes and listen to the radio.  Not a clock radio, just a regular radio.  One day, my grandmother returned to her empty house to find the radio on.

Defensive Bedwetting (Moon Township, PA - Age 8)

I never slept at the Green House. We lived there for something like a year and a half, and during that time I never got a single moment of sleep there.  One summer, my grandmother and I went to this discount book warehouse, and she bought me ten pounds of books, a stack of short novels nearly half my height. 

Living in the Green House, I spent my nights reading, my bladder filling until the point of bursting, and then I had to pee on the end of the bed--I would NOT go down the stairs to the bathroom, I refused to go even three feet away from the light in my room until it was time to leave.  Above me, I could hear creaking that sounded like a three-legged dog walking in circles.  The floor below scared me to the point of becoming physically sick, even in the daytime.

To make matters worse, I saw the show Sightings and was convinced that aliens were coming to abduct me.  Burglars I could hit with a blunt object and have some fraction of a chance, but there’s nothing an 8 year-old can do against aliens.

The Pink Chameleon (Katsutadai, JP - Age 24)

Sitting at an izakaya with my manager and a student and Naka at 3am, Naka tells us about the ghost of the Pink Chameleon.  Supposedly, the son of the former owner liked to come in, order a drink, and go to the restroom.  He never came out of the restroom--he’d been dead for years.  The bartenders were forbidden from discussing this phenomenon.

It’s possible Naka was pulling my leg.

Rolling Pin (Moon Township, PA - Age 10)

She never told me about it until she moved out of the place.  When my mother lived in the Green House, she was awakened one night by the sensation of a rolling pin moving up and down her body.  Her baby (my little sister) upstairs started screaming immediately after she woke up.

Crash (Moon Township, PA - Age 9)

I was across the street from the Green House, playing with the neighbor girl, Amy.  We watched Turner & Hooch, and then we were outside doing something when we heard the horrible screech of brakes.  We peeked our heads through the hedge to see a car smash into a telephone pole.  I remember seeing the rear driver’s side window smashed into shards by a bloody head that looked like it was attached to its body by a string.

Before anyone showed up, I ran across the street to tell my mother, who immediately put me into the car and drove me away from the imminent drama about to unfold in front of our house.

The Green House Claims another Victim (Moon Township, PA - Age 11)

In either 1994 0r 1995 (nobody’s ever really wanted to clarify this for me) my father rented out the Green House to a woman after my mother moved out of it.  She lived there for a few months, and then one day she took her kids to meet her ex and he shot her to death.  It’s a shame, because she was really good about paying her rent on time. 

The tenants to occupy the house after her didn’t pay rent for a long time and then skipped town.  I remember helping to clean their house and seeing stacks upon stacks of pornography in their bedroom.