When Reality Breaks

Everything makes sense… until it doesn’t.

Hell’s Jingle Bells?

In 2003, right before she suffered a stroke that would put her in a coma for two weeks and then eventually take her life, my grandmother ordered an artificial Christmas tree from QVC (a home shopping network on cable television). Since she had been living at my mother’s house at the time she placed the order, after she passed, the tree was eventually delivered there.

My grandmother’s death happened right before I moved to Uzbekistan to start my Peace Corps service. I was still in New York to attend her funeral, but I was long gone by the time the tree showed up on my mom’s doorstep.

The following December, in 2004, I began receiving emails from my mom, claiming that the new tree was “haunted.” According to her, she would turn off the lights that were on it before she went to bed, only to wake up in the middle of the night to find them back on again. When I asked her if the lights had a timer that was set incorrectly, she said that they didn’t.

I politely humored her claims. It wasn’t something worth challenging her over, and I had my own life and work overseas at the time to worry about. In the back of my mind, though, I believed she was probably mistaken and that the lights likely had a timer setting that she didn’t understand, or perhaps a loose wire of some kind that was causing them to switch on.

In 2005, thanks to the Uzbek government massacring over a thousand of its own citizens in what history now dubs “the Andijan Massacre,” Peace Corps abruptly cancelled its mission there, and I was sent back to the United States. With nowhere else to go, I lived with my mom for a period after. By the time that year’s Christmas season came around, I was now witnessing the Christmas tree phenomenon for myself.

Indeed, the lights on the tree would be turned off, but sometime in the middle of the night they would turn back on again.

My mom was correct in reporting that there was no timer feature, at least none that I could find.

The occurrences were weird but were nothing more than a Christmas tree turning on when it shouldn’t have. Having no electrician’s knowledge, my vague “loose wire” explanation still seemed a good enough one to me. The whole affair was certainly nothing worth fleeing the house in a panic like the family at the end of Poltergeist over. It was just a strange anomaly nobody could explain.

Then came the night of December 23rd.

It was already a spooky week.

The pizza place that was near our house had just burned down. Rumor had it that it was because of some electrical issue originating from their telephone (I had never heard of that happening before). I had called to order a pizza on the night of the fire, only for them not to answer, leaving me to wonder later if my phone call had triggered the blaze.

At 2 AM on the 23rd, my mother was in her bedroom, fast asleep. I was still up but preparing to retire for the night.

My mom loved decorating the house for Christmas. Among the many decorations that she had collected over the years was a battery-operated toy reindeer—Rudolph, specifically. It was from the 1970s. It’s “on” button was a slide switch on its belly—the kind you had to move a thin knob to the side rather than push a button. When the reindeer was activated, it would begin walking forward and playing jingle bells in loud, electronic tones while its nose repeatedly flashed red like an ambulance light.

The reindeer toy was incredibly durable. When I was a kid, we had a dog that would attack it whenever we switched it on. She would grip it with her teeth by one of its legs and violently throw it around for several minutes. It would land hard against the wall, against the floor… it had a very sturdy mechanical structure and could take a hell of a beating.

That night, I turned off the Christmas tree, walked past the reindeer toy—which was placed in the middle of a large table in the hallway—and made my way to my room. With all the lights in the house turned off, I closed my bedroom door, lay down on my bed, and began to fall asleep.

Twenty minutes later, my eyes suddenly came open.

A loud slam! along with the electronic melody of jingle bells blaring outside my room in the hallway, roused me from my bed.

Still half-asleep, I threw open my bedroom door.

Down the hallway, in the living room, the Christmas tree lights were now on. As jingle bells continued ominously playing from the shadows, my hand went to the switch on the wall that turned the overhead hallway light on.

I flipped it.

Pop!

With a white flash, like a lightning strike, the lightbulb inside the glass globe on the ceiling violently blew. I could hear the glass shards rattle inside it.

My heart racing, I cautiously walked down the hallway.

“Hello?” I called over the playing music.

No answer came.

As I reached the middle of the hallway, I looked down and saw the reindeer toy on the floor, the music playing from it, walking in place against the wall, the red light on its nose flashing.

It must have been around eight feet away from the table on which it had sat… seemingly a distance too long for its little legs to have traveled in the time from when I heard it turn on, and the crash sound, to when I finally reached it.

Slowly, I bent over to pick it up, its legs still moving as I held it in my hand.

Turning it over, I flipped the switch on its belly to turn it off. The music and motion of the reindeer toy abruptly stopped, leaving now only an unsteady silence around me.

Nervously, I placed it back in the middle of the table that it had previously stood on and then checked both the front and back doors of the house to assure that they had been locked.

I walked about the house—it wasn’t a large one—to make sure no intruders were present. I also checked the hallway closet, the only place where a person could hide. There was nothing but coats and boots inside it.

I didn’t know if it was just my sparked nerves affecting my perceptions or not, but as I walked the house, there was a malevolent feeling in the air… something several shades darker than the cheery Christmas season atmosphere that I had turned the lights out on when I went to bed. Now the house felt like the middle of a dark wood, and as if some unseen predator was watching from its place of hiding.

It seemed irrational to believe that, of course. My patrol confirmed that the house was empty except for the souls that occupied it.

But the feeling was there.

Before I went back to my own bedroom, I gently opened my mom’s bedroom door.

There, I saw her and her little dog on her bed—my mom with her head on her pillow, and the dog at the foot. Both were fast asleep.

I quietly closed her door and entered my bedroom. I lay on my bed and closed my eyes, knowing I had left the Christmas tree lights on and not caring to resolve the issue. Whatever had just happened, I told myself, I could think about it more in the morning.

A period of calm followed.

Darkness. Rest.

Eventually… sleep.

A half hour later, as I hovered in that state between wakefulness and dreaming, there was another loud slam! This one was more violent than the first.

The electronic jingle bells music filled the air once again.

Ever since around the age of fifteen, in fight-or-flight moments, my instincts have tended to make me choose “fight,” as somewhere in my subconscious is an unspoken belief that running away often makes an immediate threat worse. It’s not always a wise instinct, as some experiences have taught me, but over time, for better or worse, it has always seemed to be my default reaction.

“Jesus Christ!” I snarled in the dark as my eyes flew open.

I sprang from my bed and out of the room, into the shadow-lit hallway.

On the floor of the hallway, closer to my room than before, and an even further distance than it had traveled earlier from its original place on the table, the reindeer toy now lay on its side, three of its legs walking against the air as it played its now maniacal-seeming melody.

I wasted no time in picking it up.

As I did, its right arm flopped loosely, held on only by the cloth that made up the animatron’s skin.

It was broken.

As mentioned earlier, the toy was durable and had survived several years of playful but violent dog attacks. The only seeming way that the arm could have broken off is if someone with considerable strength had grabbed it and deliberately snapped it.

I checked the switch on the toy’s stomach… I had earlier turned it off.

It was now slid into the “on” position.

I turned it off once more.

“I’ll fuck you up,” I hollowly said to the seemingly empty house, not knowing who or what I was even threatening.

A mocking silence was my only answer.

In the living room, the Christmas tree remained alight… a silent witness to what occurred, unable to divulge the secrets it held… perhaps even a willing accomplice in the dark conspiracy of unexplained chaos that had just taken place.

Skeptics and True Believers

The preceding story is true, recalled to the best of my recollection, without any embellishment or any speculative explanation.

The event I described is a mystery that continues to linger in my mind.

One of many throughout my life.

For years, as one of the figures representing the leading organization in the 9/11 Truth Movement—AE911Truth—I chose to keep that bizarre story, as well as others that I’ve experienced or collected from other people in my life, out of public mention. Considering the obstacles that AE911Truth faced while simply using straight science to disprove the official explanations for why the World Trade Center towers came down on 9/11, I didn’t feel I would be a good representative of the organization by sharing tales of incidents that science and reason simply could not explain.

One unfortunate reality of our modern day is how quick people are to render a verdict when it comes to matters in which a mystery stubbornly maintains itself. In the fog that conceals any simple explanation, people scream from within it, scrambling to be the chosen one who definitively provides it.

A staunch skeptic will throw out a dismissive theory—often far-fetched but still grounded in known reality. If a mystery doesn’t fit into the box made from the science that humans have already chronicled, then they must mutilate the logic surrounding their hypothesis so that it can fit.

Indeed, there are often logical explanations for many events that are hastily claimed to be paranormal, and skeptics play a noble role in our society by keeping it from flying off the handle into superstition and overall wackiness. Without skeptics, our society would still be putting people on trial for witchcraft in the aftermath of an epidemic, when a bacterium residing in the yeast at a local ale house might be the true culprit.

But skepticism can also become its own superstition.

How did that toy reindeer turn itself on and travel the distance it did in mere seconds?

How did its arm snap off?

A skeptic might say that a living human being repeatedly bypassed all the locks in my little house, turned the toy on, and then quietly slipped out of the house again with a superhuman swiftness that would more than qualify him for Olympic gold… all the while managing to silence whichever door they used.

Each door in my house made distinct squeaks and loud suction sounds whenever it was opened or closed, which I would have heard.

And for what reason? Yes, there are a lot of crazy people who do crazy things for crazy reasons, but considering that we didn’t know any at the time, how probable is that explanation?

On the other side of such debates are the true believers— the ones who put immediate faith into whatever they hear if somebody claims it with enough authority in their voice.

These are the ranks from which such unscientific hogwash as the flat earth theory and the “Mandela Effect” beliefs perpetuate. (The Mandela Effect is the claim that just because a lot of people remember some trivial thing from the past differently, such as a character’s line in a movie, they must have unknowingly transitioned into a parallel universe.)

In the circles of true believers, the areas of a mystery that have no immediate answer are filled with speculative conclusions that are jumped to without question… the random hypotheses of the most vocal being assimilated into a shared lore and spoken as fact.

One thing that paranormal communities have in common with many conspiracy communities is the existence of charlatans in their ranks. This is because these communities are also industries from which money can be made, spinning exciting fiction under the guise of truth to keep audiences engaged and money flowing.

A paranormal charlatan, for instance, can invent a fantastic but untrue tale of a haunted house, or embellish one, all the while driving traffic to their website in which they sell “haunted dolls” for hundreds of dollars a pop. (There’s nothing to stop someone from buying discarded dolls from Goodwill for two dollars each, inventing a story around them about a person who died and possessed it, and then listing them on the net for some sucker to buy, believing they’ve acquired a genuine paranormal artifact.)

In the same spirit, in the conspiracy community, an internet podcaster can exaggerate their projection of future trends, based on a vaguely described conspiracy of unnamed elites seeking to destroy the world, in order to whip their audience into a frenzy believing nuclear war or complete economic Armageddon is right around the corner, selling survival gear and gold coins to protect their savings.

Where these two communities meet is in the UFO world, in which many hucksters have taken simple examinations of unexplained things in the sky and spun tales involving various alien races… some even claiming to be whistleblowers who have visited other planets themselves… selling their stories through books and speaking fees while offering no evidence whatsoever to substantiate their claims.

At times, some of these people are outed as complete frauds, not having ever served in the military, for instance, after they claim to have, where they say they witnessed the government’s “secret space program” and its diplomacy with interplanetary beings.

Given the inclination of humans to exploit the fog of lingering mysteries for profit and for some marginal fame, the genuinely curious are often discouraged from digging deeper. After all, who has the time to investigate what’s for real, and what’s not?

How did that toy reindeer turn itself on?

A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On…

Around 2007, I worked as a customer service representative in a call center for a dental insurance company. I learned a lot about teeth, and about keeping a smile in my voice while taking verbal abuse from random strangers who were pissed off about their claims being denied.

In jobs like that, it’s always wise to make friends with at least one coworker with a sense of humor like yours so you can commiserate. Luckily, the person who shared mine happened to sit in the cubicle right next to me. She was a quiet, middle-aged woman who was married and had two daughters in middle school. She always thought the comments I made when off the phone were downright hilarious.

One day, during an unusually slow afternoon on which fewer calls were coming in, we started talking to pass the time. While typically we would joke around about calls we had taken, and about people in our office, somehow the subject of ghosts came up.

It was me who introduced it. While I can’t remember what I said, whatever it was, it was meant as a joke.

When I said it, however, her demeanor suddenly changed. While normally jovial, her wilted smile and unusual shift in tone were startlingly serious.

“My daughter’s bed lifted off the floor,” she said in a nervous, hushed tone.

“What do you mean?” I asked, dropping my own smile, realizing she wasn’t kidding by the now frightened expression on her face.

“In the middle of the night, me and my husband heard banging from my daughter’s room, and she was screaming. We ran in, and the whole bed was shaking and kept lifting off the floor.”

“Oh… wow,” I said, not knowing how else to respond.

“There’s been other weird things happening,” she continued. “We don’t know what to do.”

Could So Many People Be Lying or Wrong?

According to a YouGov poll from 2022, 67 percent (roughly two-thirds) of Americans believe they’ve had at least one paranormal experience in their lifetime. (At least one of the 13 specific paranormal experiences the poll asked them about.)

Among the occurrences cited in that poll, 25 percent claimed to have seen lights or other devices turn on without explanation (like my experience).

22 percent said that they’ve seen an object move on its own.

For decades, countless books and television shows have documented the stories of various individuals and families who claimed to have endured extreme instances of paranormal phenomena, often leaving a traumatic and lasting impact on them that alters their outlook on the world and changes what they once believed to be true about it.

While it is not only possible but likely that some of these narratives have been exaggerated or fabricated, how probable is it that all of them have been?

Can so many people over countless centuries that have reported such experiences be lying, or just plain mistaken?

Thanks to the advent of the internet and of user-driven sites like Reddit and YouTube, along with the increased prevalence of surveillance and cellphone cameras in our society, not only have people been able to share stories like these with each other, but they’ve been able to capture them on video as well.

BizarreBub—a YouTube channel currently hosting 112 videos, each featuring up to seven or eight clips—has documented numerous instances of unexplained occurrences caught on camera. Collected from various individual sources, the videos represent an array of isolated cases from all over the world.

While it is possible that internet pranksters could have faked some of the documented clips on that channel… could all of them be hoaxes? Especially given the fact that several of the videos take place in public settings… some shot in the early 2000s or even the 1990s, before internet notoriety and “going viral” were ever a consideration.

Not a Romantic Moment

For a period in 2016, I dated a woman from Sacramento, California. It was a long drive from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived at the time, to where she lived, but she was very beautiful, had a nice personality, and I had a lot of fun when we got together.

On one of our earliest dates, somehow the subject of ghosts came up in conversation. We were at a casino at the time—she had wanted to go there. While we walked through the main gaming room, the ringing and clanging of various slot machines filled the air as we talked.

I don’t recall how the subject of the paranormal came up, or exactly what I said in relation to it. However, just like my coworker from the call center job I had earlier in life, my date’s demeanor suddenly shifted as she said:

“Me and my son see shadows.”

Her eyes now looked nervous, like a child hiding from a threat. They seemed to prod me, as if gauging how I would respond to the comment.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She looked down and away, as if immediately regretting what she said.

“Nothing,” she said.

Trying to ease her mind and show that I didn’t think she was a kook for saying what she did, I smiled and put my hand on her back.

“It’s fine,” I said. “What do you mean?”

Slowly, she looked at me again.

“We see shadows walking around sometimes. They’re like people, but they’re shadows. They walk around our house and then disappear.”

“Really?” I said, genuinely interested, making sure I conveyed that in my voice. “Tell me more.”

She looked away again, shaking her head.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

I shrugged, not wanting to make her any more uncomfortable than she was.

“All right,” I said reassuringly.

She never mentioned it again.

The Unseen World

Most anthropologists agree that in prehistoric and early human societies, people practiced animism, which is the belief that spirits inhabit animals, nature, and objects. Burials with tools, food, and ornaments from that era suggest a wide belief in an afterlife, while cave art portrays spiritual and supernatural ideas.

In that early world, there was no separation between the natural and the supernatural. Both were lumped together as the general perceived reality of the time.

In many ancient civilizations, spirits and the dead were believed to influence daily life, with an afterlife often described in detail by the priests of those times. The unseen world that early people believed in even shaped law, politics, and war.

In medieval times, all throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, belief in angels, demons, spirits, and miracles was practically universal. Christianity, which dominated Europe during the medieval era, treated the spirit world as more real than the physical world, while the Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist religions widely accepted the existence of spirits, jinn, and the concept of reincarnation.

Only in the era of Enlightenment, beginning in the 1500s, did science start to challenge supernatural explanations.

However, even one of the most celebrated thinkers of that era, Isaac Newton, devoted much of his work to the subjects of theology, alchemy, and hidden forces, writing more about those topics than about physics, for which he is more widely known.

This is not to say that just because people believed in something in the past, it was necessarily true. Unlike many cults and new age production companies pushing esoteric lore that claim our modern world has closed its eyes to some metaphysical “truth” they’re pushing—which only those who follow them are awakened to, of course—I do believe humanity is more knowledgeable about the world today than it ever was before.

Science and logic are usually the best paths to follow when discerning any situation.

But do we know everything?

Nobody knows everything.

And if we were to look scientifically at paranormal experiences from the stories documented in TV shows, books, and in online videos (assuming they’re sincere), then we would need to look for similar elements shared among them.

One of the most striking common details that emerge is from the many accounts of people who profess to have seen a paranormal presence.

This detail is the specter’s appearance.

Most often, people describe the beings they see as featureless, humanoid shadows walking or floating as they travel. Called “shadow people” in modern discussions of the subject, accounts of this presence stretch back several decades.

In his book, Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us, author Jason Offutt interviewed dozens of witnesses who claim to have experienced this phenomenon firsthand. While the descriptions of these alleged beings vary in some ways, their overall silhouette appearances remain consistent throughout.

Even the YouGov poll cited earlier, which lists personal accounts from some of those surveyed, includes one that seems to reference shadow people without specifically calling them by that name:

“We purchased our home back in 2010. Within the first couple of weeks, we started to hear noises, things moved, and certain items disappeared. The items usually came back after a few days, but sometimes it was weeks and months before the items reappeared. Have seen our ‘friend’ several times: shadows that moved, etc.”

In several of the clips featured on the YouTube channel I cited earlier, BizarreBub, human-shaped, shadowy masses can be seen. Often their appearances are fast and fleeting, but when the videos are slowed down, their presence is apparent, and seemingly unexplainable.

I Never Heard Her Scream Before

I’ve known my best friend since 2009, and we’ve talked for hours on the phone every few days since I met her, even after I moved across the country in 2015. Despite me living in California and then Arizona, and her remaining in Central New York, in all that time it was like nothing ever changed between us.

Outwardly very feminine, privately she’s one of the toughest, most badass women I’ve ever known, not afraid to speak her mind or rise to the occasion during any crisis. She’s the type of woman who ends up wearing the pants in any relationship she’s in… not easily intimidated or manipulated by anyone. Very down to earth and no-nonsense, she doesn’t joke around much. She’s just not the kidding type.

One afternoon last year, while I lived in Arizona, she called me, as she often did. She was the only person in her house at the time and was making herself lunch while we talked.

As she was telling me about something, she paused.

“What the hell?” she said.

“What?” I asked.

Another pause by her, as if her mind was buffering.

“I’m making this grilled cheese sandwich,” she said. “I put the cheese on the bread in the pan and covered it with another slice of bread, but I didn’t turn the stove on yet. I turned my back for a minute to get something, and when I just looked again, the cheese was pulled out and laying in the pan like somebody messed up the whole sandwich.”

“Whoa,” I said. “That’s weird.”

She started to say something else. I don’t remember what.

Suddenly, in mid-sentence, she let out a piercing scream.

Startled, I sat up on my bed.

“What happened?” I asked.

In all the time I had known her, I had never heard her scream before.

After a moment of silence, her voice returned to the line.

“I turned around again, and the refrigerator door just flew open in front of me… like somebody pulled it!”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Whoever’s here,” she said to the empty house, “you’re not welcome. Please leave… now.”

Coexisting with Mystery

One thing I’ve learned in life is that the world is stranger than most of us even know. While people believe that wisdom equates to knowing everything, I believe wisdom really means coming to grips with how much you don’t know, and probably never will.

As mankind pushes forward, modernizing our society further with each passing decade, learning more about the world and the universe that we inhabit, stories like the ones I’ve shared in this piece continue to persist. While it’s easy to look the other way from tales like these because they are infrequent and often rely on the testimony of only one or two witnesses, when they happen to an individual, they become harder for that person to ignore.

Most people are discouraged from sharing experiences like these because of the reactions they might receive. They may be accused of lying, or of suffering from mental illness, or their intelligence may even be questioned by dismissive others, certain that every unexplained event must have some logical answer to its origin.

It certainly doesn’t help that many people are guilty of fabricating tales for personal gain or of jumping to conclusions because the conclusions are more exciting than the basic facts themselves.

I have no agenda to push… no product to sell… nothing to gain from my accounts besides offering them as a piece of content that someone out there might find interesting and want to read.

While these stories are bizarre, I haven’t shared everything strange I’ve encountered.

You see, another reason people keep such stories secret is because they themselves may be disturbed by them and may choose not to think about such incidents after they occur. I’m just as guilty of that as anyone else, and for that reason, my most disturbing unexplained experience will have to wait for another day… if it is ever shared at all.

I’ve been openly critical of people who take unexplained events and immediately attach definitive, often outlandish explanations to them.

I still am.

Proudly.

But there’s a difference between claiming to know what something is and admitting that something happened that one doesn’t understand. What I offer isn’t an answer… just accounts.

Maybe there is an explanation for events I’ve described here. Perhaps someone in a field of study I’ve never touched has it.

Or perhaps nobody does.

Sometimes, we must live with mysteries.

While I’ve spent most of my life valuing clarity, evidence, and explanation, not every situation provides it.

It’s in moments like those that we learn about the limits of human understanding and the fluid nature of reality… and accept that some questions may just never get answered.