High Strangeness From My Youth

Apr 11, 2025

Over the past few years, I’ve been paying more attention to high strangeness — the paranormal or the supernatural. The more intellectual part of me wants to say this impulse is related to highbrow themes of reenchantment and a sacramental vision of the world, but the honest part of me will tell you that it probably comes from listening to things like The Exorcist Files, Blurry Creatures, Michael Heiser, Haunted Cosmos, and Dark Holler.

But it’s also got me thinking about some of the paranormal things I’ve personally experienced, or that have been experienced by those close to me. I’ve taken a little time to write down what I remember, though I haven’t had experiences like this for more than 20 years. (I’ve changed all of the names below.)

If these experiences seem to be disconnected, it’s because they are — I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through these things, and I can’t quite pull together a clear common thread. I’ve marked my specific experiences with headers below, but first, a general introduction and some general strangeness.

General Introduction & General Strangeness

I grew up in a small, conservative town in a Dutch Reformed pocket on the west side of Michigan, a few miles from the big lake. We lived in an old house close to downtown; it was nice but a little tight for our family: dad, mom, four boys within five years of age, and a tagalong sister who was born 10 years after my youngest brother, when I was 12.

In a lot of ways, mine was an idyllic ’90s childhood — lots of outdoor play, free range of the town, football in backyards, and neighborhood street hockey in church parking lots. I remember wading through flooded road construction sites after heavy rains; we would walk to the gas station for cans of soda and bike to the drugstore for nickel candy; we used to sneak out to put dish soap in a large fountain in the park next to one of the churches, and then go look at all the bubbles the next morning. It was a safe and quiet childhood in a safe and quiet town. I should also note here that I was raised in a Christian home.

But there were strange things that happened in that house, too. To be clear, there was nothing especially creepy about the house itself. It was built in 1900, so it was old, but I’m not aware of any local legends about murders or Indian burial grounds or anything like that. Still, my family experienced a sort of general creepiness that I would now consider to be demonic activity.

One brother had waking hallucinations, getting terrified by visions of flying bats or other creatures that weren’t actually there, all while wide awake and outside in the midafternoon sun. Another brother had repeated night terrors and would scream in his sleep; my parents relayed that one night in particular, after he woke them screaming, his skin was ice-cold and blueish and he couldn’t be waked. My own childhood was filled with horrific nightmares until one night, when I was maybe 12 or 14 years old (I don’t quite remember when), I prayed in desperation asking God to either take away my nightmares or make it so I don’t remember any of my dreams. Since that prayer some 30 years ago, I remember exactly four dreams; three of them are nightmares.

As I was reminiscing about these things, I asked my brothers if they remembered any high strangeness at the house. One of them asked my mom (with whom I’ve largely lost touch); she told him she remembered seeing “an old Indian woman sitting in the corner of Jessica’s bedroom” as well as “lots of shadowy figures moving in my peripheral” and that she “just sensed a lot of darkness.”

Shadow People

That mention of “shadowy figures” brings me to the first time I remember any sort of high strangeness: I regularly saw shadow people in our yard, multiple times over several years, and always in the same place.

Our house had a winding staircase between the main floor and the upstairs: Go up three steps, turn left on a landing, then another few steps to a second landing, then turn left and several more steps to the top. On the lowest of these landings was a small, square window that faced north, overlooking our side yard: a rectangular patch of lawn between the house and the driveway. Often — not always, but often — as I was going up or down the staircase, I would see out of the corner of my eye and through the window the dark, shadowy shapes of several people milling about in the yard. If I turned to look more directly, they would disappear; there was nothing there, so I dismissed it as a trick of the light or a blip in my peripheral vision.

Until. (There’s always an until, isn’t there?) One afternoon, my mom was backing out of the driveway in a wood-paneled minivan full of kids — me and my older brother and two of our friends. (We would’ve been in early high school, here, which puts us in the later ’90s.) As my mom is slowly backing out of the driveway, one of our friends suddenly shouts, “Stop, stop, stop!” My mom hits the brakes and the car lurches to a stop.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“You were going to hit those people,” he explained.

“What people?”

We all turned to look and, of course, there was no one there. Our friend insisted that he had seen two people standing in the driveway — exactly where they would’ve been visible from the square window in the winding stair.

The Black Dog

Years later, when we were old enough to drive on our own, I enlisted a couple of friends to help me steal a street sign with the last name of someone we knew. (We’d already stolen the first name from an intersection in town.) The only road that matched was a few hours away, in the north and middle of Michigan, so we took off, timing our trip to arrive under the cover of darkness. Terry was driving, and I was in the passenger seat, with J.D. in the seat immediately behind me.

We’re on one of those county highways in Northern Michigan, a winding road with grassy shoulders and dense woods pressing close on both sides, broken only by the occasional intersection or the odd general store or propane company set back from the road. The speed limit is 55, but everyone goes 65 or more if there’s no traffic, which there isn’t, because it’s at least 10 o’clock at night, and pitch black; the only lights out here are the headlights of oncoming cars, and there aren’t very many of these.

We’re talking and laughing, listening to the radio, and I glance out the window on my right. There, running next to the car on the shoulder of the road, is a massive black dog with shaggy fur — it looked like a black wolf, but it was huge, the size of a small horse, and when I say it was running next to the car, I mean it was keeping pace with the car, galloping along next to us with a long, easy gait. Its front shoulder was next to me at the passenger door; its head just ahead next to the hood, and its body reaching behind.

I whipped around in my seat to look at J.D., to see if he was seeing it, too. He was staring out the window, his eyes wide with disbelief.

“Terry!” he said. “Terry, Terry!” He smacked the back of Terry’s seat.

At the wheel, Terry turned his head to look. He immediately slammed on the brakes, and the black dog kept running, through the headlights and into the night.

We have wolves in Northern Michigan, but nothing that big — it would’ve had to be a prehistoric direwolf of some type — and I don’t know of any American mammal that can reach a pace of 65 mph or more, much less sustain it. And, it doesn’t match the description of any Michigan cryptids that I know of.

One final note here: Remember those dreams I prayed about? Of the four dreams that I remember, the single dream that frightened me most and has haunted me for decades features several large, black dogs.

If I hadn’t been with my friends, I would’ve thought I’d made it up. But I’ve talked to Terry and J.D. in the years since, as if to reassure ourselves and each other that we weren’t crazy, and we all agree: We saw a black creature running next to the car.

D.J.

We’re moving ahead into late high school and early college for my final experience. Turns out J.D., who was in the back seat of the car when we saw that dog thing, had some sort of ghost or spirit living in his house. The only thing is, this spirit looked exactly like J.D. Naturally, we all called him D.J. — and when I say “we all,” I mean the half-dozen or so friends who saw him over the years.

One story I remember was when one friend was brushing her teeth and glanced up into the mirror to see J.D. standing behind her. She bent to spit out the toothpaste and rinse her mouth, and turned to say something — but J.D. wasn’t there, and he insisted he never was. We all chalked it up to D.J.

Electronics would turn on and off with no one around; from the basement we’d hear footsteps upstairs when no one was home; once we could hear someone taking a shower — water running and all — but the shower was bone dry.

Still, despite all of this, I only half-believed in D.J. until I saw him myself.

I was sitting at the kitchen counter, eating a bowl of cereal after a sleepover. I was the first one awake, alone on the main floor of the house. The layout was basically a long hallway with rooms off either side: Imagine that you’re walking out of the kitchen where I was sitting: on the left will be the living room and on the right is a small dining room and front entrance, essentially one, wide-open room. After that are the stairs to the basement on your left. Then two doors: the bathroom on your left and a bedroom on your right; this was J.D.’s bedroom. Then two more doors, one bedroom on either side, for J.D.’s parents and brother, all of whom were out of town.

I glanced down this aisle during breakfast, and I saw J.D. leave the bathroom and walk into his bedroom. “Oh good,” I thought. “J.D.’s awake.” I got up from my breakfast and followed him into his bedroom. It was empty. Strange — maybe he was further down the hallway than I thought. So I went to the next room down, his brother’s room. That was empty, too.

At this point I was starting to get weirded out. I hadn’t just seen J.D. out of the corner of my eye; I hadn’t thought I saw him — I know I saw him, eyes wide open, in full daylight, looking directly at him. Maybe I transposed things in my mind, though, and he was going the opposite direction across the hall, from his bedroom into the bathroom or from his brother’s bedroom into his parents’ room. But no, every room was empty; I was still the only person on the main floor of the house.

Finally, I went down into the basement, where J.D. was sound asleep on the couch. He hadn’t been upstairs at all. I’d seen D.J.

Conclusion

So, that’s it. Those are my three supernatural experiences. As I said earlier, I’ve thought about these things for a long while, and I can’t come up with a common thread running through them.

For a while, I wondered if it was related to the house. In her exchanges with my brother, my mom said that these sorts of things started when they bought the house, but were not there when they were only renting before the purchase. She also said they stopped when they sold the house. (No, I have not asked subsequent owners.) The only problem with this theory is that the black dog and D.J. both happened elsewhere and after we moved out of the house.

But I don’t have any real answers to what was happening or why. All I know is that these things happened to me. They were real.