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Memories from the Crib
I have a few lingering memories of early childhood, most are comforting…some are not. A smile lights up my face when I remember my mother singing and playing folk songs on her acoustic guitar, my father wrestling with myself and my four older brothers (all at once), and me dancing through the lawn sprinkler on warm summer afternoons. Other feelings surge within me, though, when I recall my very first memory in this life, the night the odd visitor came calling.
The memory I am about to recount has stayed with me always from the day it happened. There is no question as to the when of the event …it was the spring of 1973 and I had just turned two years old. The weather had warmed enough to open the windows at night and I was still sleeping in a crib.
One night during this season, I awoke very late and my parents and brothers had already gone to bed (my father was always one to stay up, often past midnight, to watch television and even he was in bed). During the stillness of night, a bizarre sight approached me. As I peered into the darkness at the foot of my crib, a "skull" appeared through the shadows and "floated" up to the foot of the crib. I knew what a skull was. My brothers had ghost Halloween costumes with skull masks (this was much more hideous than one of those masks, though). It stared at me with a gaze deep and horrific. The eyes could see through me and I didn’t see a body supporting its head. This wasn’t anything natural and it was entirely real.
I did what any normal two-year-old caught in a crib and being stared down by a skull would do, I screamed. I screamed for my parents. I screamed bloody heck.
My mother spoke back calmly from her bed in her room across the hallway, telling me that it was all right and to go to sleep. There was no response from either my father or any of my brothers. Why wouldn’t they come? The skull looked at me for another brief moment and then floated back into the darkness.
This was the way the memory went and I remember many times telling my parents and brothers of it over the years. They would always listen and then just sort of shrug their shoulders. Two of my brothers had many strange experiences at that house we grew up in and it was commonly agreed that the house probably had a ghost (my other two brothers of the four claim that nothing unusual has ever happened to them). I think that my family probably believed me, probably thought it was "the ghost," and didn’t want to confirm my story out of concern for my comfort.
After years of growing up in the house and having occasional "ghostly" encounters throughout, I received Whitley Strieber’s "Communion" as a 17th birthday present in 1988. It made me begin to question the true basis for the haunting of the house. I sought out more information on the subject. By the time I had finished books like Budd Hopkins "Missing Time" and David Jacobs "Secret Life" over the next few years, I knew there was more to what-goes-bump-in-the-night than ghosts at my old house.
In 1993, I sought some help and advice for the ongoing experiences in my life and my search brought me to a MUFON member named Shirley. After a telephone interview, followed by a face-to-face at her home, she convinced me to undergo hypnosis to revisit some unusual episodes.
On my way to her home for my first of what would turn out to be many hypnotic regressions with Shirley, I bounced details of many of my life’s events around in my head, wondering what Shirley would want to investigate, first. I thought of the event in my crib and a question popped into my head that I had never considered before. I asked myself, "If I remember always sharing a room with one brother or another while growing up, how come I don’t remember which brother was sharing the room with me at that time and how come he didn’t help me?" This puzzled me on the hour and a half drive to Shirley’s and I thought I had better figure it out and quickly, or else my memory under hypnosis might be incomplete. I didn’t really know how hypnosis worked and I thought that I’d better remember as much as I could, up front, or else risk skewing the results.
I arrived at Shirley’s, having narrowed my roommate down to one of two likely possible candidate brothers. After a brief chat, she led me to her office and I sat in a plush recliner. The session began. After the hypnotic induction, she asked me if there was any particular event I felt compelled to revisit and I said that I didn’t know. The "beginning" was where she suggested then and I found myself back in my crib in 1973.
The night was warm and the window was open in the still house. A breeze made the curtains quietly flap and from the hallway, I heard the drone of the ceiling fan (one of those models that opens up the ceiling and draws air into the attic). Quickly, the encounter began, though. A small being walked into the room with a face somewhere between a corpse and an army ant. "His" flesh was gray and his eyes were large, dark, and menacing. He looked down at me from the foot of my crib with what I felt was no more than a casual interest. Whatever he was here for, I was just a moment’s distraction. I tried to see his body and was annoyed that there appeared to be something wrong with my recall. For some reason, my mind replaced the bars I was sure were at the foot of my crib with a solid, flat, board, shielding the being’s body from view. As hard as I tried, I could not "fix" my memory and turn the flat board into bars that I could see through.
I screamed and got the sleepy-voiced reply of my mother to go back to sleep. I tried to remember which brother must have been in the room during this and my memory told me that, at this time, I was the only one who slept in this room. Trying hard to visualize better for a brother, I came up with nothing. The being, unaffected by my screaming, slowly walked out and headed in the direction of the bedroom down the hall where some of my brothers slept.
After Shirley awakened me, we discussed the session. A little bit disheartened by the results of the hypnosis, I told her of the two sticking points in my mind. With regards to the "missing brother" she said that maybe I couldn’t accept the fact that my big brother couldn’t protect me and that it was possibly just easier for me to erase him from the scene, altogether. About the crib that "altered its construction," she offered that maybe my mind changed the bars to a flat board to protect me against seeing the being’s body. She knew more about hypnosis than I did, so I tucked away her insights to chew on a little.
I drove home confused by the session. It ALL seemed so real, but I was puzzled why my memory wouldn’t listen to reason and do what I wanted it to do and fix the scene.
When I got home (I was still living in the same old house with my parents at the time) I told my mother everything of the session. She had two things to say to me. First, she told me that during that time in my life, none of my brothers would share a room with me because I would sometimes wake up screaming in the middle of the night (eerie!). Secondly, she told me that my crib did in fact have a flat board at its base and that, if I wanted to, I could go in the attic and see for myself. I did. It did.
I was convinced. As hard as I tried to challenge the memories that came out under hypnosis, they would not let me get them wrong. I saw many more bizarre things in ensuing hypnosis sessions, revisiting other episodes in my life, but I had faith in the power of hypnotic recall.