the second time Phoebe visited me, I started working on a novel about a girl trying to find the meaning of her life (she concluded it was love)
was this really you Phoebe? am I wrong to be so intimidated by you??? I hope so ❤️
Listen to audio for details about these extracts
first possible encounter with Phoebe:
“That night long ago, I was sleeping alone in a room at my grandparents’ secluded cabin in a Washington State forest. I woke up hopelessly tangled in my sheets. After a few uncomfortable jerkings, I finally sat up, grabbed the blanket, and untwisted it from around my legs. Now I just needed to straighten it out.
“Hold this,” I said. I handed one corner to the pitch-black fingers which I saw beside me. These fingers took the corner of the blanket. At first these fingers’ presence seemed natural to me, as if it were self-understood that something was here with me.
But then I froze in terror as I beheld that the blanket had not fallen when I let go. There should not be fingers there, I realized. There cannot be fingers there. Yet the blanket’s corner remained firmly in the air. It was held up by a hand attached to an arm attached to a body which was with me in my bed, breathing right beside me.
My eyes rose from the fingers to the face. This creature seemed just around a couple feet tall. It was crouched by my pillow, looking at me. Although its entire face was pitch black, it was entirely level with mine, just inches away from me, and I could see the pointed shapes of its long ears. These stuck out half a foot in both directions.
Screaming, I jumped off the bed and ran into my grandparents’ room. They let me sleep on the floor beside them. But they paid no heed to my story.”
second possible encounter with Phoebe:
Years later in college, I was visiting a friend in Ann Arbor. I had by then ceased to believe in God, in the Nephilim, and in demons. In fact, by that time, I was an atheist extremist who denounced God on Facebook and told my Christian grandma that I hated Jesus. I was sleeping on the floor of my friend’s bedroom, while she and her boyfriend slept in the loft above me.
I woke up to a bang against my head. I sat up quickly with a shrill gasp, sucking in air as if I had been suffocating. There it was again, the same small creature. I instantly recognized those same ears. It was standing with its legs straddling mine, its feet planted on either side of my blanket. But this time, it was crouching menacingly while leaning toward me. One hand lifted into the air behind it; another reached out toward my face. It breathed. It bent its knees as if to jump.
I kicked it in the face. This knocked it backward into a waste basket, which tipped over onto its side. Then the lights flicked on and nothing was there.
“Are you okay?” my friend asked me with a frightened whisper from up in the loft.
It must have just been a dream, I said. I am not sure how much I revealed to her.
“It sounded really scary,” she said.
I couldn’t fall back asleep in the dark. I left her room and slept on a couch in the living room with the lamp on. But even once the light of morning came streaming through the windows, I was still far too terrified to fall asleep.
I had spent the last two years zealously regretting and demolishing my former faith. I was a radical materialist now, I claimed. I only believed in things that could be experimentally verified by the scientific method. The human mind, I said, was easily deluded. Any time someone has one of these supernatural experiences, I reflected, it is too dark to see clearly, or the person is half asleep. Their brain, wired by evolution to identify dangers and threats, makes terrifying interpretations of harmless visual and auditory inputs, building photographic memories into our consciousness of things that never happened. I knew all this, but nevertheless I could not fully suppress how real the whole affair had felt. My senses would not allow me to believe that it had been a hallucination or a nightmare. I was certain this little creature was real.”
