I figure since Halloween is right around the corner, there’s no better time than right now to tell my one and hopefully only encounter with a malevolent spirit. Take away from it what you will.

During my time at college I was staying at my grandfather’s place. It made for a fairly decent walk from there to Chaminade University, and I got to hang with him and my uncle. Pretty much my entire time there was fairly chill, aside from some messiness here and there, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

While readers are probably aware that I am a Christian and believe not just in the Most High God, but also of the existence of lesser spiritual beings–both the good and the wicked ones–I’m never one to seek out paranormal or supernatural experiences. I have for brief moments entertained the notion of having an angelic encounter a la the prophets or in John’s revelation, but given the intensity of how those experiences were recorded, I quickly brushed such thoughts aside.

My guardian angel can do his job in the background thank you very much.

But there was this one time…

In my second or third year in college I came back to grandpa’s place towards the end of the day. Me being utterly lazy, I decided to delay doing homework (again) and just browse YouTube and take a nap. If I remember correctly it was around 5-6PM.

I was sound asleep, but around 7PM, when the sun was pretty much down and my room was darkened, I suddenly woke up, but in a sort of lucid dream. For those that don’t know, lucid dreaming is the phenomenon in which you “wake up” but can’t move. You can vaguely see things, but your body is still frozen and you try your best to wake up, move a limb, yell, get claustrophobic, or a combination of those things. Now, this still wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for me since I’ve been having those dreams for years before and years since, though they’ve become significantly less common now.

Some people say that they see shadow people roaming around when they lucid dream. I thankfully have never once seen them, just a murky rendering of my immediate surroundings.

But this time it was different. Much different.

As I woke up around 7PM, a black and amorphous entity was hovering (standing?) right on my chest and near my face.Though it was dark in my room, this thing was so dark that it seriously stood out, even in spite of the fact that it lacked any form, though it may have been vaguely circular.

And unlike my normal lucid dreaming, I was much more awake and “aware” than I usually was.

Now this…thing. This thing I could definitely feel an insane feeling of hatred toward me. Why? Who knows. Despite not having a face, or much of anything identifiable, it radiated the same energetic, murderous contempt as if you came across a guy with wide bloodshot eyes, teeth clenched, and veins popping out his neck and face; all id, no restraint.

I’m sure it’s hard to wrap your head around this yourselves, dear reader, if you haven’t experienced this sort of thing first-hand, and I hope you don’t either. Typically we humans read emotions through faces, specifically the eyes. We even do this to an extent with our dogs and cats.

However, this faceless, empty thing of pitch-black darkness gave off the most heinous, dreadful, and directed feeling of hatred I’ve ever felt in my entire life, and I’ve met and known people with anger management issues. Heck, I’m unfortunately well acquainted with anger myself.

But this was on a completely different level.

This thing just hated me like I killed his entire village or something. How did I know it was me? Well aside from the fact that it appeared before me, it was also aiming at my neck. With hands? Arms? Tentacles? Again, I have no idea; amorphous remember? It was something like arms that vice-gripped my neck.

I don’t know how long this encounter was, but it felt way too long. Having never been the target of a freakin’ attempted murder by an evil spirit, and seemingly out of nowhere, I went into Fight-Flight-Freeze mode.

So you know how I mentioned I was a Christian? Yeah, thankfully my immediate response was something along the lines of, “Lord Jesus save me! God save me! Jesus Christ, help me!”. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was along those lines, and it definitely was crying out to God for help.

I also was saying this for probably seconds if not a couple minutes.

Meaning the help didn’t arrive immediately.

But it did in fact arrive.

After what seemed like forever, the entity just vanished and I woke up. I wasn’t in a cold sweat or anything, but I probably was afterwards after I began to process what the heck just happened.

Now what happened after that I remember even less. I clearly went back to sleep some time later, and I even stayed in the same room for the rest of my time in college.

Clearly, I was stupid.

But probably what I did, at least on the same night, was hook my laptop on the charger and play worship music on repeat the entire night. That sounds like something I’d have done at any rate, but like I said, I can’t remember.

You want to hear something really strange? When I came back home on the weekend, my pastor during the sermon asked the congregation if anyone had an encounter with an evil spirit sitting on their chests. Nothing came from it, just a weird synchronicity that you seriously can’t make up. I didn’t even talk to him or anyone else about it outside of my parents and brother.

What lingered for years though were nightmares. I tend to associate the past with my childhood home, and those sorts of dreams usually occur during the morning when the sun just comes up. Happy memories of my dog usually.

However, my nightmares now began to take place for the most part at my grandfather’s house. The typical scenario is that I’m on the first floor and need to walk to the second floor (where my room was) to get…something. Like a book or album or tool. But upstairs had this oppressive darkness, like seriously haunted, becoming much stronger as you go deeper down the hallway.

This persisted for a long time, but thankfully in recent years the nightmares have stopped.

What I came to find out much later on is that my mom, aunts, and grandpa all had some sort of paranormal encounter either in their childhood home, the original house on the property before my grandpa’s current place, or this other place on the west side of the island.

The common feature of their experiences was seeing a shadow-man. For those that don’t know, the shadow-man is some sort of entity that takes the form of…a man, sometimes wearing a cowboy hat. No distinctive features could be discerned such as a face, and people who’ve had encounters with it typically see it standing there. Watching.

Does this thing have anything to do with what I experienced? Again, who knows, but I figure I throw that in there as another notable data point.

But also because of the spook-factor.

And that’s pretty much it. That’s my one and only encounter. I know I couched this whole thing like a campfire story, but I’m being as honest as possible here–hence all the hedging language of “I think” or “possibly” with a lot of the details.

I’m sure a lot of people, both Christian and non-Christian, may raise an eyebrow. They might say, at best, there’s some sort of psychological or bio-chemical explanation that Science™ hasn’t gotten to the bottom of yet. At worst, this is all just a ploy to “make Christianity seem legit” or some covert evangelistic tactic to scare people into coming to church.

Trust me when I say that I’m not doing that. While I do like a good story, I’m not interested in sensationalism and trying to get a rise out of people to get them to do X, Y, and Z. If you want a reason for the hope that is in me, I take a much, much different approach that’s beyond the scope of this article.

All that being said, I do believe that there is in fact power in the name of Jesus Christ, not merely as a verbal token that wards off evil spirits, but because He has been given authority over the whole cosmos, is head of the divine council, and trumps all watchers and territorial spirits. The universe is under New Management, so it’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to call upon Him on good faith.

There. There’s your evangelistic ploy, if you want to call it that. But look, at the end of the day, all you have is my word, and you’re free to be skeptical or lean in as you fancy.

Happy Halloween. May your goodie-bags be loaded.