THE BLACK MASS

I’ve been a low level asshole ever since I was a little girl. Please ask my childhood friend, Melissa, who was forced to watch Arachnophobia with me on a regular basis, despite her raging fear of spiders. Her soft pleas to watch The Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley instead usually fell on deaf ears.

See? Asshole. 

But I couldn’t help myself. I liked creepy crap. Goosebumps quickly took over space on my bookshelf where the Babysitters Club used to live. I spent Saturday mornings patiently waiting for Rugrats to conclude so Are You Afraid of the Dark could come on. 

My interest in horror and the paranormal steadily continued into my tween and teen years. I dutifully saw every horror movie in theaters and memorized every episode of So Weird. Ghosts, ouija boards, cryptids…I was down to talk about whatever weird shit anyone would humor me about. 

But it wasn’t until I was nineteen when I finally had a paranormal experience of my own. And when it happened, it scared the utter hell out of me. 

It was 2008. I was a sophomore in college and I was living with three fantastic human beings, just a few blocks shy of Wrigley Field. Our four bedroom apartment was set on the second floor of a classic Chicagoan brick house. The interior had been renovated at some indeterminate time, but the building itself was likely constructed after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. 

The white walled rooms were all boxes, stacked in a line down a long, narrow hallway. The creaky wood floors were scratched and worn. Even now, it’s hard to fathom how many lives dwelled within the confines of that space before we did. Chicago has such a rich, yet tumultuous past and we were young, barely grasping the historical significance of where we called home. 

Spring was slowly approaching, but the sun was still setting too early for my liking. It was dark by the time I got home from my writing class that evening. I tossed my jacket and backpack into my room then trudged down the hallway, intent on finding myself something to eat (which, in all honesty, was probably a super sad Hot Pocket). 

You had to pass through our rectangular shaped living room to get to our kitchen and I remember stopping in my tracks to glance at the three windows that lined the far wall. Orange light from the streetlamps flickered through the glass, but I was all the way across the room, too far to make out any details of the bustling street below. As I looked at the glass and my own reflection, something began to take shape behind me. 

I watched in frozen horror as a black mass blossomed out of nothing and became eight feet tall behind me. It was pitch black and irregularly shaped, like a black hole that somebody had pinched into a longer shape. It was as dark as space and just as silent. 

I stared, dumbstruck, at the reflection in the window as the black mass moved behind me and eased its way down the rest of the hall, where it walked directly into a wall and into an adjoining apartment. The moment it was gone, I ran into my roommate Judy’s bedroom to hide under her covers and relay what I witnessed. Also, to not be the fuck alone. 

The black mass had appeared and disappeared within a matter of seconds, but I felt forever changed. I had an experience that I could neither explain away nor deny. The metaphorical door to the paranormal had been shoved open, whether I wanted it to happen or not. There simply were no alternatives. 

As I tried to sleep that night, images of the black mass kept haunting me. Its sudden, inexplicable appearance kept replaying in my mind like some tragic movie. It was scary. Scary and utterly fascinating. I rewound those moments again and again in my head and realized something. Whatever the black mass was, it moved with purpose. With intent. That black mass had been looking for someone. I had simply been in the way. 

For a handful of seconds, the shapes and planes of my world collided with another, leaving me to witness something extraordinary and frightful. Was it a dead person? A shadow person? Was it some inter-dimensional being? I still don’t know. All I know is that the door to the paranormal never quite closed in my life and I’ve had several experiences since. I intend on having more. I want to know what’s out there.