When the “impossible” is happening right before your eyes

And it changes your life

Have you ever seen a dog get so frightened that the hair on the back of its neck bristles and stands straight up?

I had no idea that this could happen to a human, until it happened to me.

It was the dead of an icy-cold winter night, beyond 3 a.m. in mid-December, in a big, run-down Victorian house from the 1880’s in an old run-down part of Denver, Colorado.

Mike, my roommate, and I were standing in the high-ceilinged kitchen of this house, trying to relax after shooting scenes for a short film I was making. The intense chaos of the shoot was over, the crew had all gone home, movie lights — still warm — were still scattered through the place, along with cables and cords and sandbags, and we had popped open a couple of cold beers to celebrate our fun but exhausting night of shooting. It was time to wind down.

But that’s when the sound began.

The sound was that of a woman, moaning in fear, but which soon turned into horrible screams of terror and pain. We both froze, eyes locked, speechless, listening, realizing that these sounds appeared to be coming from inside the house. Which was impossible. Because there was nobody there but the two of us.

The screams continued, grew more horrific, and we both bolted into action, frantically searching through the old Victorian house, trying to find the source of these increasingly desperate and gruesome screams. But no matter where we looked, they were coming from elsewhere, from all around us, above us, below us, behind us. Finally we rushed to the back door of the house itself, and threw it open, believing it must be coming from outside — maybe a house next door — but no: everything outdoors was utterly silent — the dead of a cold winter night — dark, still, and icy cold. The front door gave us the same result, the street silent and empty of traffic, frozen.

We shut the door and stared at each other, as the screaming continued, and both of us having the same realization: The sounds were undoubtedly coming from within the house.

That’s when the hair on the back of my neck bristled like that of a frightened dog — something I’ve never experienced before, or since.

Because I realized at that very moment:

I did not believe in “ghosts”. The idea of “ghosts” flew in the face of all the education I had had my entire life, from my Christian mother, to my scientific engineer and weapons-designer father, to years of chemistry, and pre-med biology in college.

But at this moment, I was twenty-four, and my life had just changed: the world was not what I had been taught.

I was being forced to experience something I didn’t believe could possibly exist.

Helpless, we both stood at the bottom of the staircase by the heavy wooden front door, and could do nothing but listen as the screaming finally weakened, then faded into a series of what I can only describe as “death gurgles” before stopping altogether.

In the silence, we were both changed people.

Later, I had to admit that the house had given me signs few times before …

The first time was a a month or two before, again very late at night, when I had come home after having been out with both our dogs, for hours, and upon returning to the house — which was pitch black - I had forgotten to leave any lights on - and deserted (both my roommates were out of town far away), I clearly heard someone walking just inside the dark house. Yes, footsteps, of a human, loud and clear, walking over the old creaky wooden floors, just out of view, hurrying away from us. I quickly turned on the lights and watched both dogs react to the intruder — my Shepherd mix, and even my roommate’s clueless little Shit-Tzu — both barking indignantly and aggressively giving chase, in hot pursuit of the footsteps, with me right behind them. The footsteps quickly moved even faster, as if aware they were being pursued, and hurried through the big front room, to the bottom of the main staircase, then rapidly pounded up the old wooden stairs, just far enough ahead of us that I couldn’t quite see whoever it was, and the dogs, muttering little barks of indignation, quickly followed, with me right behind, and as we reached the top of the staircase, the footsteps turned and ran down the upstairs hallway, then, just as we created the staircase and turned the corner to see the hallway ourselves, we heard the footsteps ascend a narrow staircase which ascended into the big, dark, spooky attic. The three of us reached the attic door, which was now closed, and I paused: because whoever was up there would find themselves trapped in the attic. There was no exit except for these stairs. I took a breath and ripped opened the door, ready to confront anybody. But there was nobody; the empty wooden staircase disappeared into the blackness of the attic itself. And all was silent. The dangling string that when pulled would turn on the light was at the top of the steps, and I considered climbing up to it, but to do so would involve rising head-first, into a dark empty space where anyone waiting could easily just smash me across the head from a position I wouldn’t see until it was too late.

So I decided to wait for reinforcements.

As I waited for my roommate Mike to get home — the other roommate was out of town — I contemplated the situation, and an odd certainty gradually fell upon me: that we would find no one in the attic. It made no sense, but I could feel it — that the house was now devoid of humans except for myself. Maybe what we had chased was actually an animal? Maybe the nature of the old empty house amplified the sound of its movements? Maybe it just a big raccoon! But no, it had heavy footsteps like a human! Well, then, maybe if it was a person, perhaps they found a way out, and had climbed out and were gone now. And sure enough, when my roommate finally came home, we carefully ventured up there with flashlights and clubs and discovered that it was, indeed, devoid of any humans.

We had no choice but to forget about it.

In retrospect it’s odd that I was able to dismiss this experience from my mind. Even though the footsteps sounded completely human. But sometimes, when you can’t explain something, you simply have no choice but to shrug and move on.

A subsequent night had dropped a big hint, again a freezing cold night — below zero, after midnight — when I came home alone, to find every single window in the house wide open, both levels, top floor and bottom, every room, all the lights out, and an icy wind — nearly zero degrees outside — blowing through the entire structure, and upon calling both my roommates, and learning that both were out of town and had been nowhere near the place, once again realized there was simply no explanation.

But now … hearing this woman screaming. And realizing it wasn’t my imagination, it wasn’t coming from outside, and feeling something I had never experienced before, the hair bristling, erect, on the back of my neck, like a terrified dog, and the horror of what truly sounded like a woman dying, including the death-gurgle … this was not going to be something I could ever choose to overlook and forget.

The only choice I had at this point: to reluctantly change my belief systems about what is possible, and real, in this world.

It changed my life. In many ways. Mostly appropriately. But also:

I finished, with Mike’s help, the short film that we were making when the screaming occurred …

The film, which I had only dreamed up after moving into this house, was inspired by my other roommate, who was a businessman and sales rep who did a lot of traveling. He had claimed for himself the big room downstairs, a “parlor” where he kept his home office and would often work late at night. He said that late one night, alone, he was working there and put his head down on the desk, eyes shut, to relax for a few minutes, when he suddenly thought: wouldn’t it be weird if he fell into a half-sleep, and felt somebody lovingly rubbing his neck and shoulders, only to realize there was nobody else in the house, and to bolt fully awake and realize nobody was there?

So my short film was about a depressed, divorced man who buys this spooky old house and discovers it’s haunted by the ghost of a shadowy but seemingly beautiful woman from the Victorian years, who, in the dead of night, plays a decrepit upright-grand piano that was left behind in the empty house. And whenever he approaches her, as she begins to turn around and face him, he wakes up and realizes it’s just a dream. Maddeningly, he never gets to see her face. But as the dreams continue, he becomes obsessed with this elusive mystery woman, and makes an effort to befriend her. Eventually he awakens from the dream one night to find her standing at the foot of his bed. They make actual contact, and the film hints at a sexual encounter, but … ultimately it ends horribly for him.

This is where things in real life get even weirder:

In this film, his bed is located in the big master bedroom upstairs, the bedroom which overlooks the roof of the front porch, and which was the bedroom of my other roommate Mark, who was very often out of town. We rearranged the room so that on this one night, in the film, he would suddenly wake up to see this beautiful shadowy ghost enter his bedroom from the hallway and stand at the foot of his bed, lit from the side by the light from the hallway.

In the film, the man would finally have an intimate encounter with the ghost, but —he would ultimately end up mysteriously drowned in the big claw-foot bathtub, which we shot in the old tiled bathroom down the upstairs hall, down from his bedroom.

We finished the short film, and my buddy Mike (the roommate who had heard the screaming with me), who worked at Denver’s cable TV company, started playing the finished film on the Public Access Cable TV station. He played it a lot.

Imagine his surprise when one day he got a phone call from a woman who tells him that she saw our film on public access, and excitedly tells him that she used to live in that house, just before us, and had “the same thing” happen to her.

This made no sense. What could she possibly mean by this?

But of course I said “holy shit we have to meet her.”

So we all met at restaurant one day for lunch. And I remembered her! She had been moving out the day we were moving in, and, well, she was young and attractive and it was a hot day, and she was dressed accordingly, and my testosterone-fueled 23-year-old visually-oriented self remembered her quite well. As we chatted, it was clear that she was a completely normal, straightforward no-nonsense kind of person. And she told us the following:

When she lived in the house, she had had the same bedroom as the guy in the film, and her bed was in the same position as his, and one night she woke up in the middle of the night to find a girl, exactly in the same position as the ghost in our film, standing at the foot of the bed and staring at her. She said the girl looked completely real and solid, but was dressed in very plain clothes that appeared to be from the late 1800’s, perhaps dressed like the daughter of a maid or something. She says she tried to talk to the girl but the girl just stared at her, didn’t respond, then turned away and walked through the closed bedroom door. Yes, right though the solid wooden matter of the door itself. She had clearly been shaken by this, adamantly insisted she was not dreaming, and seemed relieved to be able to tell it to people who would take her seriously. At one point I asked her if any other weird things happened, and she thought for a bit, then told us that, well, there was one weird thing: she and her roommates had found a couple of stray little kittens in the yard, and couldn’t find the mother, so they had taken them in to raise them, but one day they came home and found, in the same upstairs bathroom where I had filmed the corpse of protagonist staring at the ceiling from his underwater grave, both kittens were dead, drowned in the toilet. She said they were so young she didn’t know how they could have possibly climbed high enough on the smooth toilet to have fallen in by themselves. But they did.

I decided to adapt the kitten story when I wrote the feature film script based on the short film I had made in this house.

We all moved out of the house and went our separate ways, and when I finished the feature film script, I was pretty astonished to find, through he help of another good friend who had helped me make the short, a local film production company that decided to produce the film, with me writing and directing it.

In the summer of 1989 we shot the feature film based loosely on the short. It was finished later that year, was distributed world wide, and was called “The Forgotten One.”

Of course, in preproduction we had to find a house to shoot it in. I thought that we should consider the actual house from real life.

The producers made an appointment with the new owners, a pair of gay men, and paid a visit. The men had made great, colorful headway in fixing the place up, and it was clear that it was no longer suitable for shooting without extensive work to return it to its former destitute self. As we all finally grouped in the backyard, to chat, for a while, where there was a back door to the kitchen, for some reason I found myself staring at this back door, realizing I had a straight view though this open door, to another door inside: a door which led to an extremely creepy cellar.

Now, in this feature film I had written, the body of the murdered woman whose ghost haunts the house was buried by her jealous violent husband 100 years ago in a similar cellar, behind a new brick wall that he builds to cover up crime.

And, as I was standing in the yard while we all chatted, I was astonished to watch the door to that cellar slowly swing all the way open … all by itself.

And I realized that I didn’t actually want to shoot the movie there.

We produced the movie later that year — in a different house — and finished the film several months later, and it was released worldwide under the title “The Forgotten One.” Oddly enough, it’s the only feature film I both wrote and directed, and I was only twenty-seven when I made it.

And here’s a thing I did not expect:

So many people, countless people, who had either heard about the movie, or worked on it, or who had asked me how I got the idea, would then confide in me about their own experiences with ghosts and hauntings. It’s shocking how common this is, and how few people are willing to talk about it, unless they know the person to whom they are confessing their story will believe them.

I suppose that the emotional aspect of being able to tell your “unbelievable” story to someone who has experienced a similar story, and will believe you, is a powerful thing — their whole demeanor of these people would alter, their voice would change, they would become softly quiet, but emotional, knowing that it’s something most people simply won’t believe, and which they themselves might not want to believe, but they don’t have a choice to believe it or not — because it truly happened to them, and finding someone to tell who they know will believe them is so very special and even cathartic.

It led me down a path I may not have otherwise travelled: to become aware of how much in our life is unseen, unexplained, and unknowable. That physical, visible, tangible aspects of our existence are merely the surface of reality. Reality goes far deeper, into realms we can only sense but not see. Until we experience what we label “the supernatural.”

And realizing that God is in this non-physical reality, as well, along with goodness and evil, love and hatred, fear and suffering, and premonitions, and reading people’s minds, feeling their thoughts, and knowing what a person is going to say before they say it, and the way toddlers commonly talk plainly and openly about who they “used to be” before they were born, that other dimensions of some mysterious kinds exist — And that heaven, and universal love, also exist, beyond the physical, and maybe, some day, we will be finally be allowed to learn for ourselves, when we have successfully moved on, released from this physical incarnation of flesh and blood and bone, the truth of life.