At the risk of sounding superstitious and childlike (which I already do to many here, already, I'm sure), I want to share with you a little story of the night...
There came a time when my life would be changed forever. Everything I knew would be left behind, left for memory's feasting. My childhood was spent mostly in
Bismarck, ND, but I always had a "feeling" that things would change... We moved to
Delta Junction, AK, when I was 17 years of age.
Just to give a background to my recollection, I'll share with you a little bit of history. We drove from North Dakota all the way to Alaska (there and back four times, actually), and began building a house from the ground up. In three months, we had cleared the area of all the trees (of which there were very many), dug and lay the foundation, and built the walls and roof of the house. That is when winter hit in Alaska. Outside was -30 or even -40, but inside the house it was even colder because we had no insulation in the walls yet, no sheetrock, and just a small wood stove which was sluggish to heat up even a small portion of the house; the walls were supposed to keep the cold out, but instead they kept the sun out and in effect made the building into one massive freezer. I remember going downstairs to the "kitchen" and pouring myself some tomato juice---if I didn't drink it in half a minute, it would become a red block of ice. Every morning I dreaded, knowing I would have to get up and immediately get back to working, building and toiling. I thought that period of my life would never end. I remember sleeping in the car because the house had no walls yet and the mobile home was too crowded; I remember sleeping in the house when there was no roof yet nor heat; I remember freezing and shivering, hoping that it was just a bad dream... Ah, those were the days---ones that I never want to go back to. A few of our rooms we had managed to insulate, and we bought portable heaters which we had in each room. I and my brother shared a room, and my sister had the room next to ours.
In Alaska, during the winter, it gets
very dark, sometimes
pitch black. So there I was, laying in bed, my feet pointed towards the window. I stared up at the dark ceiling for a while, thoughts running through my mind. My brother, John, was fast asleep on the other side of the bed. The only thing I could hear was his soft breathing amidst the roar of
dead silence. The night wasn't pitch black, and a soft light filled the window in front of our bed.
I thought to myself,
Well now, why don't I glance out towards the window and see what's going on. As my eyes lowered from the ceiling to the window, a tall and black figure filled my view. It appeared to wear a
robe of thick
darkness, not cloth. Its head was hooded by this darkness. I could not see its face. It just stood there at the foot of my bed, staring down at me. At first, I thought I was just "seeing things," so I looked away. My mind would not allow me to rest, I knew. So to clear things up, I decided to look back and bust this temporal
myth my eyes had conjured up. It was still there.
This troubled me greatly. I frowned and turned to my side, not daring to look back. This shouldn't be happening. This isn't real! I kept telling myself that I was just seeing things, that maybe the tomato juice was spiked with a hallucinogen, that maybe I was just tired! My feet were suddenly engulfed in a frosty cold... All and any rational thoughts in my mind were shut up in less than a moment, and were replaced by raw perturbation. The frost began to move up my legs, and the dead silence was pierced with the screaming in my mind. As the cold slowly moved up the back of my body, unhindered panic began to dominate my mind. Mercilessly, the dark presence proceeded to come closer---I felt it moving down the side of the bed towards my head. At first, breathing was a chore, but then it became a struggle as panic had begun to ensue. What I felt can only be described as my soul being slowly torn from me.
The end of my life, my sanity, was nigh. When the cold had reached my spine, I could barely breath, I could not think, I could not speak, I could not move---I was fully paralyzed. My eyes were wide open, but were not registering anything beyond half a foot in front of them. As the cold neared the back of my neck, somewhere in the distance I heard a phone ring. Somehow, I recognized it to be the one in my sister's room on the other side of the wall. It rang only a couple of times before she picked it up, and as soon as I heard her voice, the presence vanished! It was as if something had let me go, and I was left there, panting, my mind once again alive and racing.
I do not know why I was visited by Jack, and I do not know how he was allowed near me, but I do know that that was an experience I would never forget. Whether it was an apparition or specter or what have you, it almost drove me into the merciless realm of insanity. I thank my Lord for delivering me. Since that night, nothing so ferocious has come near me. Jack is out there, somewhere, maybe even watching me from a distance. I know, however, that he is no longer within the right to take hold of me like that again.