The Pendulum game

 So, my first real experience was at the age of nine. Up until then, I've had plenty of spooky vibes here and there and have heard many ghost stories from relatives. When I was nine, it was my dad, my mom, and one of my brothers, who was three at the time. My parents were divorced, but still lived together and saw other people. My dad worked all the time, and my mom wasn't really the type to really spend a whole lot of time with us. She would be in spurts, but over the years, it would be less and less. Right in the middle of my childhood, she began locking herself in her room for a few days at a time and would not be disturbed.

When my mom would spend time with me, we would watch scary movies, and she would tell me ghost stories that happened, her own accounts, and some of relatives of ours. I would love these moments and had developed a serious interest in horror movies and books.

I'm 36 now, but I remember this like it was yesterday and have told it many times. This is my first encounter. One day, I was nine at the time, my mom asked me, in a very mysterious manner, if I wanted to...play a game. I remember it just warmed my heart to hear she wanted to actually spend some time with me as the more she would distance herself, the more I chased her. She told me it wasn't a normal game, but I would find it useful. My interest was peaked so I agreed. She told me it's called the pendulum game. She then instructed me to get her a piece of paper and some sort of plain necklace or string with something a little weighted at the bottom. I grabbed the piece of paper and I happened to have a cheap necklace that was a thick string with a cool looking rock I had bought, I forget exactly where, but it was at a gift shop at either a museum or some sort of educational place that had to do with geology or fossils.

My mom took the paper and drew a giant circle with a cross on the inside while explaining to never play this game alone. I could only do this with her. She explained that we would hold the "pendulum" from the top and ask yes or no questions. "We get really quiet and focus on the questions," she tells me. We begin by asking test questions to which we already know the answers, and if the answers are "yes," the pendulum swings up and down. For "no," it's side to side. We begin, and to my surprise, it works! We do it enough times that I am convinced and already making plans to go to my room and do this in private so I can find out if my couple of school crushes liked me back. I was very lonely and boiled it down to I'm just not pretty or worth talking to even though I would try to work on these things. I do admitt that nine is a young age to be thinking these kinds of thoughts but, when my mom would sit down and have conversations with me, they would be very adult conversations and she was very open in general about just about everything one wouldn't discuss with a child.

Over a time period of a couple of weeks, I fact played this game on my own and would just obsess over it. One night, not too long later, I was trying to sleep and just couldn't. I was tossing and turning and just couldn't get comfortable and wasn't even tired. My bed was against a wall on the left side and my dresser was on the right due to me being an overactive sleeper my parents put my room together that way in order to avoid me falling off the bed so much. Next to my dresser was my bedroom door that was closed. My bed and dresser faced the side of the room with the window, so my closet was on the complete opposite side as my bed. My closet had sliding doors that wouldn't close because due to my mom being a pack rat, she ran out of space in her room to store her junk, so she would stuff so much crap in my closet that the outer sliding door wouldn't come closed all the way.

Usually I would always sleep on my right side facing the closet, but this particular night it wasn't comfortable laying that way and even though my room was completely dark, my eyes had adjusted so that I could stare into small open part of my closet and for some reason, I just didn't want to stare into it. There was a creepy vibe just coming from there. After tossing and turning it finally became comfortable to actually lay on my left side facing the wall. I was still kind of at the edge of my bed, though, on the other side. I begin to get comfortable. I remember this like it was yesterday. I literally thought, "Ah! Here we go!" As relief and comfort rolls all throughout and my eyelids begin to get heavy.

Seconds later, I hear my name in a very sudden high-pitch whisper, "Rachael!" I'm immediately wide-eyed! It sounded in a way that only my mom says my name. She always says it so all-of-a-sudden-like as if she's about to tell me the worst news of her life. I slowly roll over, kind of half asleep, and realized that it sounded like it actually came from my closet!

"Hello?" I called out. Nothing in response, only silence. My next thought, because I was quite convinced that my mom actually did whisper my name, was that she was pulling a prank on me to scare me, and she was in my closet. That is, until I realized the impossibility of that due to the fact that no person can actually fit in my closet. I layed on my back for a while wondering if it could have perhaps been part of a dream.

Time passes. The nervous feeling that came from the situation has actually subsided, and I decided to roll back over and face the wall again, this time, a little closer to it, and that made me feel better. The comfort kicks back in, and I'm beginning to fall back to sleep when right then another loud pitched sudden whisper, "What are you doing?" Whisper right into my ear! I could even feel the breath on my ear and neck! Intense fear consumed my body in an instant, and I immediately threw my blanket over me thinking, " Oh GOD! PLEASE! PLEEEAAASSSEE!!!" I curled up and surprisingly fell asleep that way.

The next day, I asked my mom if she were pulling on my the night before. She asked, "What?! Why do you say that? No. What do you say that?" I told what happened, and she just scares at me almost glaring at me, " you're playing the pendulum game alone in your room, aren't you? "

I got questions for a second, not able to really put the two together at the moment, so I tell, " What!? What does that have to do with it?"

"Who do you think you're talking to when you play that game?! Who are you asking the questions?" I tell her how I figured I wasn't asking a person, I was just throwing questions out there. " No!" She says.

So I asked her, " All right then, who are we asking these questions?"

"You know, Mr, Howdy." She replies.

"I don't know who that is. That's the stupidest name I've ever heard!"

"You don't know who that is?--You really don't know who that is?!...he is the devil."