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Bad Vibes & Heart Bags

A

Anonymous

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When I was about six or seven years old I remember waking up in the middle of the night on several occasions and standing up in my bed to look at the top of the door frame, on the upper righthand corner over which was laying a small, black (or very dark), furry-ish looking creature-like thing that was kind of thin and probably a good five or six inches long. Well, I had this wooden heart-shaped purse from who know's where that had lost it's strap but had a green shoelace instead, that I called "the heart bag" and it hung on a hook on the wall sort of low down so that I could take it down and play with it if I wanted. And this little dark thing, which I thought was a "bad vibe" (lol), on the corner of the door frame that I would wake up and look at in the middle of the night somehow either lived in the heart bag or was associated with it in some way, because after this went on for a while, I told my mom and she thought it was funny, naturally, but she said why don't we just hang the heart bag somewhere else so the bad vibe doesn't bother you. So we did. And though I woke up in the middle of the night a few more times, I never saw that thing on the doorframe. I kind of missed it, actually...I mean, it never did any harm, really. But even when, years later, I brought the heart bag back into my room to hang in the same place it used to hang in, I never did see the bad vibe again. So, my mom thinks it was just a shadow, but she never saw it and it sure didn't seem like a shadow to me...I always swore that the heart bag was haunted, but of course I don't really know...what do you folks think about it? Just a shadow? Or something more (or less!) supernatural than that?

Oh, and by the way, I'm new here -- this is my first post. :D

Sojie
 
fuzzy bad vibe

In what way did you connect the 'Bad Vibe' to the wooden heart bag? (if you can remember) Did it live in the bag? Did the 'vibe' move when you looked at it on the doorframe or did it just lie there? Did you hear something that woke you that would make you get up in your bed and look at the thing or did you just wake up and seem to know to look there?
I've spent many years researching the paranormal, especially Ghosts and Haunting activity. I never really paid much credence to so called "Haunted items" and basically ignored the phenomena. Since I've begun researching stories of true paranormal occurences on the internet I couldn't help but notice that there are hundreds of accounts of "Haunted Items", ie; Furniture (often beds, tables and chairs), trunks, pictures, jewlry, Dolls, etc. So many accounts in fact that I have been paying a lot more attention and figure that there's got to be somthing to it...

blakta2
 
My first response to this story is: That's a picture book. You'd want more of a resolution, but key elements are there - familiar setting, a near universal situation (entity child believes in but adults can't see), striking visual and verbal elements with metaphorical potential - the heart bag, the "bad vibe."

But if your ambitions lie in that direction, do it properly. Don't pull a Madonna.

This sort of experience is very common among children of a certain age. See also The Doll That Crawled, Evil Muppets on TV, the haunted wardrobe, etc. The brain is not fully developed until the early 20s, when the last bits of the temporal lobes grow in, so it is not surprising that children perceive the world differently from adults and from other children of different ages. Whether in cases like this they are failing to distinguish between fantasy and reality (as the adults around them usually assume) or whether they can see bits of reality that adult brains filter out is an open question.

The fact that animals often react to the entities children see is evidence of an objective basis for the sighting - but only in those cases involving a reacting animal. Bedtime monsters may also be hypnagogic hallucinations - to which adults are equally susceptible. It's a question to ponder.

Welcome aboard.
 
Well, I never remember there being any sound that prompted me to wake up and look at the top of the doorframe -- as I remember, the first time I saw the bad vibe was purely by chance, the following times being that I woke up knowing that the bad vibe would be there, and looked at the top of the door from force of habit, as it were. Several times I remember talking or whispering to it and also trying to touch it (I was too small at the time to reach it, even standing on my bed), but I don't remember it ever doing anything except laying there. As far as how it was connected to the heart bag, I thought of it as living in the bag, not exactly inside it, but rather in the actual wood of the sides and top of the bag. I distinctly remember being afraid of the bag after it had been put in another room -- I certainly never played with it, only opened it from time to time to look inside and to smell it (it had a faint odor that I thought was the smell of the bad vibe). Later on, when I got a little older, like seven or eight years old, I stopped being afraid of the heart bag, maybe because I never smelled that odor again when I opened it (I still have the bag, and it just smells like wood, that's all). It's funny though, that I was afraid of the heart bag, but not really of the bad vibe when it was on the doorframe at night.

Unfortunately, I never had a dog or cat or any other sort of animal in the house until I was 15 (I'm 17 now), so I didn't have a back up to prove the reality of that bad vibe who haunted my wooden heart bag. But maybe it was just one of those whatchamacallit hallucinations. :p Perhaps Oliver Sacks would have an idea...

Sojie
 
What did the heart bag smell like?
 
As I remember, it was a sort of non-smell smell, if that makes any sense -- it was rather like a chilly draft, like from a door or window when it's really cold outside, but scarier. That sounds kind of silly, I guess, but that's all I can remember about it.

Sojie
 
smell

So would you say it was "smell" that, in addition to actually "smelling" you felt in your bones and on the nerve endings of your skin?
 
smell

That's a rather interesting way of putting it, but yes, I suppose so.

Sojie
 
Don't worry. It doesn't sound silly to me. I think I experienced the same thing or something similar when I was young. A "non-smell" is a good way to describe it. In fact, I can remember two. Each was distinct from the other.
 
That's a good question and I don't know how to answer it. It was like a smell that I felt in my heart and my blood. It was quite horrid. When I was young there were two entities who used to come after me in my dreams and sometimes in that state in between sleep and waking consciousness (they didn't come at the same time, though). I could sense each of their presences before I even saw them because of their "smell" - their essence you might say. Each of their smells/non-smells was unique from the other and I can't think of what to compare either of them to. The smell was like a feeling or a vibe, but it did have some sort of effect on my olfactory senses.

Whatever it was, my choice of words for it as a kid when contemplating it was "smell."
 
Certain things are hard to communicate because they don't have a vocabulary. When we lived in Alaska, I experienced a "cold smell" which properly speaking wasn't a smell at all, but I felt it in my nose and things you feel in your nose are smells, right? I get "nausea" in parts of my body that can't be nauseated - arms, during bad sugar fits, and eyeballs, when extremely tired. I also experience a debilitating lack of energy in which I feel exactly like a mound of mashed potatoes. Doctors understandably can't make anything of these sorts of symptoms.

This "non-smell" is probably something like that - a real sensation for which the percipients lack vocabulary. If you're talking to someone who's had a similar experience, the idea gets communicated; otherwise, not.
 
Peni said:
This "non-smell" is probably something like that - a real sensation for which the percipients lack vocabulary. If you're talking to someone who's had a similar experience, the idea gets communicated; otherwise, not.
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Agreed.
 
fuzzy bad vibes and Plastic Man Comics

I remember as a child being terribly afraid of (I know this may sound stupid) a comic book about "PLASTIC MAN". My mother worked in a grocery as their bookkeeper (still does) and I had access to the store. I wandered around the place freely. I must have taken the comic from the magazine stand. I would open it and stare in horror at the Plastic Man character, seemingly unable to tear my eyes away from it. I would roll the comic up and then hide it all the way in the back of the store, somewhere near the butcher shop underneath cardboard boxes. Later on I would go back and get the comic even though my heart was pounding with fear and force my self to look at Plastic Man. Somehow your story of your Fuzzy Bad Vibe and it's Wooden Heart Bag reminds me a lot of my Plastic man comic fear.
Also when I was very little I swear there was a disembodied hand that wouldn't let me out of the bathroom if I were in it with the door closed. The hand would grip the door knob and I would sit in the bathroom and scream until my mother came to get me out. I remember seeing the hand on four separate occasions, one of which I was sure it shoved me down a flight of stairs while I sat playing in a large cardboard box. Being so little it is hard to know for sure what was happening. I don't recall being asleep or supposed to have been napping, I don't recall any irrational fear of floating hands at other times during my life...I mean that I don't remember being afraid of the hand unless it appeared to me. I don't recall waiting for the hand, etc. One more thing that I remember is that one time when the hand appeared I purposefully lied to my mother about why I was afraid. I told her that I had fallen asleep and dreamed of a Giant Crab and that it was going after me in my dream...I felt it was important that I not tell her about the hand. Even at a young age I seemed to instinctively know that this Hand issue was not normal and it might stir up problems. Funny.
~Kim~
 
Re: fuzzy bad vibes and Plastic Man Comics

blakta2 said:
One more thing that I remember is that one time when the hand appeared I purposefully lied to my mother about why I was afraid. Even at a young age I seemed to instinctively know that this Hand issue was not normal and it might stir up problems. Funny.
~Kim~
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This reminds me of the ghost in Christopher Isherwood's memoir of his parents, *Kathleen and Frank.* The ancestral home was haunted by a lady. Everyone knew about it and it was generally accepted as the ghost of a particular lady from a portrait, in traditional ancestral-home style. Christopher and his little brother Richard both had encounters with it, though when Christopher grew up he could only remember the family story about his encounter with "the muzzy lady," rather than the encounter itself. Richard's dramatic screaming fits encounter, of which Christopher had a primary memory and a load of resentment (since it resulted in a room change - important in family politics), seemed to be different in kind, so when they were both adults he asked Richard about it. Richard then confessed that he hadn't see the muzzy lady at all, but had lied because he knew that his mother and grandparents would believe him about the muzzy lady, but would only laugh at what he had really seen and would make him stay in the room, which completely terrified him.

So what had Richard really seen? A dressmaker's dummy, hopping up and down!

Richard was about three at the time of his encounter, and you'll note that his reasoning about what to tell the grownups was already pretty sophisticated. Young children are generally considered to be unreliable witnesses because they have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality; I think stories like this point more readily toward their being unreliable witnesses because they understand adult psychology and lie to them effectively when the occasion warrants it.
 
Hmmm

I think I will reconsider the way that I question my children about certain things from now on. An interesting point you made.

~Kim~
 
Evil Muppets on TV,
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Peni, Can't find this thread, any chance you recall where it is (wouldn't mind but I read it last week and wanted to send it onto friend, now I can't find it.

Help!;)
 
RachelVK said:
Peni, Can't find this thread, any chance you recall where it is (wouldn't mind but I read it last week and wanted to send it onto friend, now I can't find it.

Help!;)
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Although it's referenced a couple of places, it's most easily accessed from Obi-wan's page, to whit:

ghosts.org/stories/tales/muppet-dream.html
Link is dead / obsolete. The original version of the Muppet Dream story can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/19980125122107/http://ghosts.org/stories/tales/muppet-dream.html

Though the author, as a grownup, assumes that it was *probably* a dream, it's plain he thought of himself as awake at the time.

No bets on whether the creative staff of *Angel* read this story before coming up with the recent episode on the same thing. (In context, "My nose comes off" is about the funniest line they've ever had on that show.)
 
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Though the author, as a grownup, assumes that it was *probably* a dream, it's plain he thought of himself as awake at the time.
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Thanks Peni, beginning to think I'd dreamt reading it!!:eek:

I used to love the Muppets, now I'm not so sure.
 
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