Paranormal Shenanigans!

Scaring Jane here with a story so horrible it will drag your eyeballs right off your face and send them into orbit around your head. As if that weren't enough it will lengthen your ears and make your tongue poke out of your nostrils. So put a paper bag over your head and bite your fingers in silence as I recite to you a fearsome little tale I like to call,

 

Paranormal Shenanigans!

 

One day a nice couple living in a nice house in a nice suburb made a mistake. It was a mistake anyone could make. It was the man of the couple who made the mistake. His name was Lucas and here is what he did. He bought cameras and set them up all over the house to film anything weird that might be happening. This is an obvious thing not to do and yet Lucas did it.

 

On the first night of recording, nothing happened.

On the second night of recording, the camera showed Lucas getting up to pee.

On the third night of recording, nothing happened.

On the fourth night of recording, the pots and pans in the kitchen all moved one centimetre to the left.

On the fifth night of recording, the pots and pans in the kitchen all moved one centimetre back to the right.

On the sixth night of recording, the couch cushions all changed places.

On the seventh night of recording, the fridge door opened and a single egg floated slowly out of the fridge, through the downstairs rooms, up the stairs and smashed itself open over Lucas' head.

 

Lucas and his girlfriend, Kelly, were not too happy when they reviewed the footage. Kelly told Lucas that it was all his fault for setting up the cameras and this was true.

 

So the next day Lucas came home to find Kelly sitting on the couch with a priest, a psychic and a demonologist. That sounds like a joke where a priest, a psychic and a demonologist walk into a bar, and the priest says, "I don't believe in spirits, but I'll take a small whisky," and the psychic says, "I do believe in spirits, and yours look delicious," and the demonologist says "Begone spirits from this place!" and suddenly all the bartender's bottles are empty and in a rage he smashes off the end of one, jumps over the counter and glasses the demonologist in the face. Sorry, that was a very violent joke.

 

So our boy Lucas was not too happy to see all of these people in his house, and that's before he got the bad news.

 

"Son," said the priest, "your house was built over an old graveyard, and the rotting bodies and restless spirits of the dead are writhing around right under your feet."

 

"Also," said the psychic, "your house used to be a lunatic asylum run by Doctor Rick the Tormentor -- he used to do guest spots on Oprah but they never really caught on. He performed ghastly experiments on his patients and they are wandering around the place seeking revenge."

 

"But really," said the demonologist, "all that is as nothing. because a powerful demon dressed as a nun has latched onto your armpits and it will follow you from house to house until you die and follow it back to hell."

 

"Why is the demon dressed as a nun?" enquired Lucas.

 

"Well some demons aren't too fond of tight trousers, they like a breeze around their nether regions. Some of them keep their faces down there so they feel it's for the best. Then a wimple hides demon pimples!" explained the demonologist glibly.

 

Lucas was getting a little bored by all the exposition, backstory and fashion commentary that the three experts were spouting.

 

"Well, what should we do about it?" he said.

 

"If you want to wait until your girlfriend turns a rusty shade of purple in the face and you find her hanging upside down from the ceiling at four in the morning, caressing your sleeping face with her long forked tongue, you could call me in to do an exorcism at the usual fee: four cans of Guinness, a quart of whisky and two hundred dollars," said the priest.

 

"If you want to wait until your girlfriend gets lost in another dimension and can only communicate through the television, I can come over and ask her to go towards the light," said the psychic.

 

"If you want to wait until your girlfriend becomes fully possessed by the demon nun and her body parts creak and twist in all the wrong directions and her mouth gets too wide and has double the regular amount of teeth and her eyes shine in the dark like glowing coals, I might be able to get her a spot on reality TV," said the demonologist.

 

"Wait a hot second," said Kelly, who had begun to feel very annoyed, "Why is the awful stuff all going to happen to me? He's the one who bought the cameras."

 

"Sorry honey," said the psychic, "that's just the way it is. And now if you'll excuse me I have to run out to my car and vomit hot tacks."

 

"It is God's will," my child," said the priest. "And since the room has suddenly become full of flies, I must hasten out before they all crawl up my nose."

 

"The demon doesn't want me here," said the demonologist, looking around the room.

 

"That's the first sensible thing I've heard about the demon in this whole conversation," said Lucas.

 

So when the three experts had all left, the demonologist slamming the door rather hard behind him, Lucas found himself alone with his angry girlfriend.

 

"I forbid you to have cameras all around the house," said Kelly, clenching her fists, "or to do anything at all that might attract the attention of elementals, entities or the unquiet dead".

 

"Sure, honey," said Lucas, and as soon as she had gone into the kitchen to make herself a smoothie, he whipped out a Ouija board from his trousers and asked it, "Is anyone or anything in the house with us? Do you want to make contact? Can I help you out in any way at all?"

 

The Ouija board quickly spelled out, "YES," "YES," and "MAYBE, HA HA HA" before bursting into flames. Kelly came into the room with her smoothie and was not pleased to find Lucas putting out a small fire on the coffee table.

 

So Kelly called up her mother and told her to come and over right away, which she did while Lucas sat sulkily in the den watching football and thinking up new and unpleasant mother-in-law jokes.

 

Now Kelly's mother was called Hecate Pandemonia which should have been a clue to something or other, especially as she had originally been named Lula-Jo Spettlehatch. However some ladies of a certain age get a little dramatic from time to time so Kelly had disregarded the name change. Great was her surprise, therefore, when Hecate said to her: "You have been a disappointing daughter to me child, I wanted you to have a son and then a daughter so that some demon could possess your daughter, get sick of her, remove her head and then possess your son, and then when he gets married he'll have a daughter who will marry the demon when she's a little girl and when she grows up they'll have a son who will grow up to be a politician, or the Antichrist, if there's any difference."

 

"You have to stop trying to run my life, Mother," said Kelly, typing "coping with narcissistic mothers" into a search engine.

 

"Don't you want to do what Mummy tells you?" said Hecate. "Because even if you don't, I can compel you."

 

"You and whose army?" said Kelly with a yawn, glancing out the window only to see an army of naked chanting women of a certain age whose bodies were all painted over with arcane red symbols, and under whose bare ragged-clawed feet plants were withering.

 

"That army," said Hecate with a touch of complacence.

 

So then Kelly made a vaguebook post talking about narcissists in the family and how she'd have to be the better person. Lucas came out of his den to complain about naked elderly woman scratching their long nails down the windowpanes. One had cut off the head of a sparrow with garden shears.

 

"So sick of my mother's tedious Boomer friends," wrote Kelly on social media.

 

Hecate looked at her and suddenly Kelly found herself running around frantically, only she was on all fours instead of upright, and she was on the ceiling instead of the floor, and then she started banging her head on the trapdoor up into the attic.

 

Squinting up at her, Lucas said, "Well I'll be darned, looks like the priest and the demonologist were right". So he pulled down the ladder and opened the trapdoor, but the attic was empty except for a partly-burnt picture of Kelly as a child, a few decapitated heads and some more elderly naked people. Oh and his old gardening socks that he hadn't seen in a long time.

 

"Well I guess we are really gearing up for the grand finale now," said Lucas, coming down from the attic as Kelly floated in the air in front of him, arms extended, upside-down with her hair all hanging down, and started singing Katy Perry's "Roar", only in Latin. Loud thumping footsteps resounded throughout the house and blood-red clawprints appeared on the floor. Lucas went to the kitchen to get some flour and threw it around in the air until a ten-foot tall demon, covered in flour, appeared in the middle of the living-room. Hecate knelt down in worship and the elderly naked chanting was loud outside the house.

 

"Sorry, just popped back in to get my glasses," said the psychic who had just popped in. "Oh my. I'll just pop out again, shall I, because I predict that somebody's about to be strangled or bent in half and I'm really hoping it won't be me."

 

Unfortunately just at that moment the camera footage cut out and the camera was later found in the empty house, which was a bit of a mess to be honest due to the burnt coffee-table, bloody clawprints and flour scattered around everywhere. There was no trace found of Kelly, Lucas or Kelly's mother, although police were kept busy rounding up elderly naked chanting people for some days afterwards.

 

Now it's true that a little girl called Madison who lived two houses down woke up her whole family one night, screaming that she had seen Lucas' bent-in-half body scuttle across her ceiling and disappear into her closet. And that a young woman called Harriet who lived around the corner saw Kelly's bloated, strangled face in the mirror every time she tried to brush her teeth. And that old Mrs Dodson in the nursing home annoyed the staff with senile ramblings about a woman called Hecate who whispered in Mrs Dodson's ear every Sunday at 7 in the evening, and she whispered some terrible things, oh boy. And that a little boy called Noah who lived across the street had begun to cut the heads off sparrows with garden shears. If the psychic had known about it she would have called it a "diffused haunting" and written it up in her next book. If the priest had known about it he'd have crossed himself and had another whisky. If the demonologist had known about it he'd quietly have booked himself a flight out of town because some stuff you just don't mess with.

 

If the real estate agent had known about it she wouldn't have sold the house to a nice family with three kids (two boys and a girl) and a cute dog.

 

But none of them knew about it because the only one who knows about it is YOU who are reading these words.

 

So what are you going to do about it?

 

Scaring Jane signing off and wishing you sweet dreams and a Happy Hallowe'en!

 

 

 

Done