Personal brushes with the paranormal

October always brings out those stories of ghosts, goblins, aliens and whatever else goes bump in the night.

So, I figured why not share a few experiences I’ve had. The following stories I attest did happen to me and while I can’t think of a valid explanation, I think they make for some interesting reading, regardless if our readers think I’m insane or not.

The earliest brush with the paranormal I can remember happened while I was still in elementary school. I don’t recall the exact year, but I was still in elementary school. I grew up in that small trailer park outside of Reliance. My father had a job at the Stansbury Coal Mine at the time Arch Coal owned the facility, which wasn’t more than five miles away from where we lived. During the summers, I would get to stay up late and watch old science-fiction flicks with my mom while dad was working the graveyard shift.

One night, sometime around midnight, we stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air. Looking from the steps leading into the trailer, we noticed a weird orange light hanging above the desert near the old Halliburton facility outside Reliance. The light just hung there, not moving and it seemed much too high to be anything from Halliburton itself. My mom and I stood there and watched the light as it glowed against the pitch black sky. It never moved during the time we watched it and the brightness would occasionally pulse brighter for a brief moment. After about five minutes, the light slowly faded and vanished from the sky. After it disappeared, the two of us walked back inside and went to bed soon after.

I remember not being frightened by whatever it was because I thought the light was more of a curiosity more than anything else. I’ve never seen anything like that in the years after that sighting either. Maybe it was a UFO, or maybe it wasn’t. I can’t say. I have heard a few stories from other people living and working in the area about strange things they’ve seen in the desert. Someone even told me they think a UFO base could be located somewhere nearby. I’m not sure I would put a lot of stock in that idea, but who knows? Perhaps there’s a base where some sort of advanced intelligence is extracting and utilizing uranium found in some rarely traveled area beneath Sweetwater County.

As far as ghosts go, I have had two experiences that I honestly cannot explain. One happened at the Sweetwater County Library during one of the Ghost Walks the library hosted a few years ago. As a minor experiment, I recorded the entire Ghost Walk with a digital recorder I kept in my pocket. I didn’t tell anyone about the recorder and listened to the entire audio file after I left. At points in the recording, strange voices can be heard speaking at points I know shouldn’t have voices recorded. Also, while a lot of the strange voices are saying unintelligible things, a few come out clear as if someone were talking directly into the recorder’s microphone.

That was weird, but it doesn’t hold a candle to something that happened to me while I worked for Southwest Counseling Service. I worked as a treatment support staffer in SCS’s drug and addiction program. Shortly after I was promoted to the day shift, I was working at the Rosen Recovery Center with another support staffer as we oversaw the center’s clients before dinner. At the entryway to Rosen, a person can see both the kitchen and the stairwell leading into the basement. I stood at the entryway as the clients finished making their dinner and noticed what seemed like a person walking past the basement doorway out the corner of my eye. Thinking a client was goofing for some, inexplicable reason, I decided to walk down stairs. Once I’m in the basement, I barely got a glimpse of someone walking into the downstairs bedroom and I followed along trying to see who it was and what they were doing.

I walked inside the bedroom and no one was there. Nothing beyond an unoccupied bedroom. I quietly walked back upstairs and got a few breaths before I went back to work. It was truly an unnerving experience. A few workers at SCS told me stories of strange things they’ve seen at the Rosen center. As far as why a ghost would be wandering around a small house turned treatment center, I can’t even think of a reason. It was strange and something that I’d rather not experience again.