Clifford and the Doorways to Elsewhere
Date 12/11/2003 | Topic: Other...
| An extraordinary tale of a strange entity, time slips and channeling
The occult should not be taken lightly. Blithely entering into such practices as channeling or the Ouija without proper precautions or real understanding can open doors to things we don't expect or cannot comprehend. Consider this true story from Anna C., whose parents once experimented with channeling and might have opened a door to other realities, dimensions and times.
Here is Anna's extraordinary story:
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WHEN I WAS around five or six years old, my family lived in a small town in Kentucky. My family consisted of my father, mother, sister and myself. I don't remember the first or last experiences exactly, but there was a time in those early years of childhood that the "real world" and the paranormal walked hand in hand.
My sister and I had a little friend who "lived in her closet." Anytime we wanted to talk to this "man," we would simply open the hinged closet doors and wait for him. Soon, my sister's small clothes hanging in the closet would separate and "Clifford," as we called him, would appear, leaning from behind the clothes, revealing his head, shoulders and chest. Looking back on it, Clifford was a rather thin, small fellow. I wish I could tell what he looked like, but Clifford was odd in his appearance. He seemed to be "wrapped" as a mummy is wrapped, but the wrapping itself was rather strange. The material covering Clifford seemed to be like wax paper -- thin strips of white wax paper with a dull sheen.
To this day, I can remember my sister and I talking to Clifford, but I can't remember what about. Clifford spoke with a whisper, but oddly I can't recall anything he said. My sister and I don't even know if Clifford was his name or if it was a name we gave to him.
The only other person who knew of Clifford at that time was a cousin of mine. There was a family gathering at our house and my sister and I wanted to talk to Clifford, so we ran outside and told my cousin to come in and see him. When we brought my cousin to the closet... there was Clifford. My cousin was slightly startled at first... but then something strange happened. Clifford leaned from out of the closet and kissed my cousin on the cheek.
Around this same time, I had vivid nightmares and heard voices in the middle of the night. The strangest thing I saw during that time, however, happened one day when my father was doing some work on the house with some other men. I was on the back porch, and the small door that went to the crawl space had been left open.
I had seen that door open many times before, of course, but my father would always tell me to stay away from it, and to not go under the house.
Looking back, it is easy to understand why he wouldn't want me under the house: it's filthy. This time, though, I knew my father was on the other side of the house and that there was nothing to keep me from kneeling down and having a good look at that crawl space that fascinated me so much.
I looked underneath the house -- and in a split second the three-foot crawl space turned into an open field with an early evening sky as far and wide as I could see. In the middle of that field was a black man with a gardening hoe working the soil. He was dressed in khaki pants, a white, button-down shirt with long sleeves. He had his sleeves rolled up. He was also wearing a hat typical of the ones worn by men in the 1930s and 1940s.
I watched him in amazement for a few seconds... then he stopped working, looked up and turned his head to look at me. The look on his face was one of, "What in the world?" He seemed to be just as curious of me as I was of him. This scared me, and I can remember running inside to mother. The only explanation I have is that some other dimension in time opened for me -- and, I guess, for the black man, too -- for just a few seconds.
The last time Clifford was seen was after my family had moved to Tennessee. My sister was in the attic, which sat behind a loft in our parents' bedroom. My sister remembers Clifford telling her that we were safe now, and that we did not need him anymore. My sister sat crying, sad at the thought that she would never see him again.
Then I was to discover the possible reason for Clifford's appearance and my vision of the black farmer.
Some years later, my father gave a lecture at a church we were attending at the time. I had no idea what he was going to say, but what he did say chilled me to my bones and it explained everything.
His lecture was a warning to teenagers about the occult.
He began telling them about the time he, my mother and a group of people from our old church in Kentucky were led into an occult practice known as channeling. He explained how a man from the church had convinced this group that channeling was a spiritual practice used to communicate with God.
My father went on to explain how he became the channeler and that the spirit of a Native American took over his body and spoke through my father. What the Indian had to say, or what my father experienced during the "visit," isn't really all that important. But the channeling had apparently opened a door between our household and the paranormal. It wreaked havoc on friendships, the church and my parents' relationship so much that when my parents had had enough and broke from the group, it caused a fight that, to this day, neither my mother or father can remember what it was about.
The result of that fight caused my father to get into his 1969 Buick and drive headlong toward a stone wall that ran alongside a curve on an old country road. He intended to kill himself.
My father says that when he saw the stone wall, he hit the gas and headed straight for it. He came within ten feet of the wall... and what happened next is quite remarkable. My father said it was as if someone had grabbed the top of the car and shoved it downward into the ground to make it stop completely, then turned the car around 180 degrees!
After hearing this story, many things began to make sense. But I still wonder what or who Clifford was. A lot of things during that time scared me... but Clifford wasn't one of them.
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