My paranormal journey begins in college, at the University of South Dakota. It’s 2005. I’m in the Burgess dorm, third floor. My roommate goes home a lot, so I have weekends alone in a small town, Vermillion, far away from my boyfriend.

I feel out of place as I don’t party or watch football, so I throw myself into the literary scene, going to poetry slams often and make a few friends. Nonetheless, I feel I don’t belong, and am battling depression.

A key detail is, I have a pair of earrings with a vintage Wonder Woman on them. One day, I come home from class, and notice one of them is hooked to my stereo. We’re talking, it’s now dangling off the thin gap where the CD player would open, when previously, it was on the countertop.

“Bertha,” I ask my roommate, “did you… do this?”

Bertha raise an eyebrow. “…No.”

At first I brush it off, but the nonsensical nature of it gnaws at me. I didn’t move it, Bertha didn’t. Something is wrong. A few hours later, I risk looking even weirder to her, but I have to take action.

“Hey, so, let’s do a little experiment. I’m going to leave these earrings right here,” I say, setting them on the counter, “and let’s agree not to touch them. I want to see if it happens again.”

Bertha agrees, looking positively perturbed.

So for a few weeks, I check the earrings every time I came home from class. And they don’t move. Meanwhile, when I’m alone in my room, I feel like something is watching me, specifically from the corner opposite my bed, a few feet from where the earrings are.

One October Friday, I walk home from an open-mic night, proud of myself for reading a few poems at Cafe Brûlée. Bertha has gone home for the weekend. I check the earrings. Still there.

I shut the door, sit at my computer with my back to the room. Now, this is 2005. I spend some time on this new website called Facebook. Then I mess around on Photoshop. Around midnight I get up and turn around.

Wonder Woman is back. On the CD player. Hooked on the rim. Looking at me. I freeze, want to scream. Instead I grab my phone and keys and run out of the room.

My mind races. It makes no sense. It’s not like one of the earrings fell to the floor. It floated up there and hooked itself a solid 6 inches above where it just was! The doors and windows were locked. I was sober as a spring day (I’d never touched a substance in my life.) I had not fallen asleep!

I call my brother, stammering about a ghost. At the time, my big bro lived across campus in a rental; he’s always been a real peach of a guy, the kind you call in an emergency. Dave sounds concerned but he also has a skeptic’s brain. I realize he can do nothing for me, so I end the call.

I go to my friend Terri’s room. We do some googling and all the paranormal message boards (am I dating myself yet?) say to open a window and yell at whatever is there to leave. So I walk down the hall, unlock the room, and race in, opening the window.

“Whatever you are, you’re not welcome here! Get out!” Trembling with fear, I race out of the room. Terri attempts to cheer me up so we watch Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” to see if that helps take the fear out of the spooky. I fall asleep around 3:30 am on Terri’s bottom bunk, but I sleep miserably because she sleeps with music on (I still remember it was the Postal Service’s album Give Up.)

The next day, I do some more reflecting, but I’m still too scared to go to my dorm, so I wander around campus and hang out in the cafeteria all day on four hours of sleep. As I stared into my omelette, I remembered that, for the last few weeks, as I was laying on the top bunk of my dorm and hearing footsteps shuffling around above me. But no one lives there. I live on the top floor of the dorm!

After two long days, I creep back into my room. The energy is different. The presence is gone.

And then I spot my camera. Now, this puppy is a Kodak Easy Share, the pinnacle of early-aughts god-awful digital photography. I remember that a few weeks earlier, Terri, Lia, and I were messing around in my dorm and ended up dancing. I sat on the pink chair beneath my bunk bed and snapped some pictures.

But something was off. Every time I pointed it at the corner, the one where I felt someone watching me, the camera would shut off. So I stepped far away, as far as I could, to the opposite corner. I pointed the camera to the wall, it seemed fine. I wonder what would happen if I zoom in on that corner. So I did.

And when I did, the camera shut off. And it happened over and over.

I had forgotten all about that, but now that I remember it, I grab my camera, shaking, already knowing in my core I will find something. There are three surviving photos from that night (since the camera functioned normally so long as it wasn’t facing that specific corner.)

In it, my friends are standing by a desk in front of a window, gyrating to some music. Looking back at the third photo, I nearly drop the camera!

Two figures emerge:

A ghostly image of a female form— a young maiden or almost doll-like image. But I’m most drawn to the odd, fetus-looking shape. It looks like a curled up shrimp, fairy, or imp. I get full body chills.

Within hours, the entire 3rd floor Burgess hears about it and and a gaggle of girls is gathered around my camera. The RAs come and let me know that other people have had activity in their dorms the last few months, and that they had asked the local Native tribe to come sage the room. For whatever reason, I say no thank you; I think if that had happened, it would have become even more real to me.

Here are the pictures— I apologize for the terrible quality. If I ever get around to ordering the correct cord to upload them onto my laptop, I will re-post this essay with the pics. But I don’t think they would look much clearer.

For years and years, I thought it was a ghost. Then a couple years ago, I thought it might be poltergeist activity, as moving objects can, according to research, manifest from angst-ridden emotions in a child or teen. I was, admittedly, going through a major depression.

I held onto the ghost theory for about 15 years. However, two years ago, objects moved in my house, and this time, the some of the entities (they are interdimensional!) introduced themselves to me. And now I know. One entity (I wrote about them in this poem) was feeding on my fear, sadness, and self-loathing, and the other(s) were protecting me.

When I look back, that earring moving shook me awake. My first year of college, my pretentious and judgmental nature stopped me from connecting to those around me.

After the earring, I became a full-on agnostic for many years, but the earring haunted me. It was a source of confusion that kept me up at night, and, strangely, a solace, that there was something bigger than this human soup we’re endlessly heating and reheating. I opened my mind up about social issues, and now, looking back, it was that question, “what moved my earring?” that brought me to my spiritual awakening, belief in a higher consciousness, and a massive opening of compassion for all living things. Maybe out there, there’s a galactic salad bar, made by a higher intelligence, and we could all taste its fruit together.

Ultimately, experiencing Mystery humbled and transformed me from a sophomoric and deeply insecure person (I mean who isn’t at age 18?) into whatever I am today: a mystic, bleeding heart rainbow-lover, with an active inner child who believes in magic and cries about the beauty of the world at the drop of a hat. I used to try to be cool, and wouldn’t let myself live. Well, now I understand, not being cool is the way to truly live.

If you would have told 18-year-old me that at 38, I would be openly writing about the paranormal, and reading tarot professionally, I would have cringed. These were topics I mocked for many years, because deep inside I knew they were true and it scared me. But I’m not afraid anymore. I dwell in the liminal every night and, like the Star card, I have one foot in this world and one foot in… whatever else is out there.

If you have enjoyed this first segment, I promise I will get to the icing on the cake, my inter-dimensional friends, whom I love very much and slightly fear, the objects moving at my house (my skeptical husband, the very same college boyfriend, as a witness!) and what it all means.

But I must go in order. And that means dead people communicating with me through dreams is coming next. Lol. If you made it this far, thank you, Dear Reader. This is extremely hard for me to write about; I fear the judgments of others, as much as I hate to admit it. But I have been called to share, and goshdarnit, I do whatever the voices tell me.

Now friend, if you’ll do me a solid and listen to this song below for the vibes and the themes. I see now, this was the beginning of my departure from my old self (“I was the one worth leaving”), and my return to who I am, an ephemeral spirit in a human body (“I’m just visiting…”)

Edit: If you enjoyed episode 1, check out episode 2, How I speak to dead people.

Lyrics

Smeared black ink... your palms are sweaty
And I'm barely listening to last demands
I'm staring at the asphalt wondering what's buried underneath
Where I am
Where I am

I'll wear my badge... a vinyl sticker with big block letters adherent to my chest
That tells your new friends I am a visitor here...
I am not permanent
And the only thing keeping me dry is
Where I am
Where I am
Where I am

You seem so out of context in this gaudy apartment complex
A stranger with your door key explaining that I am just visiting
And I am finally seeing
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving

D.C. sleeps alone tonight

Where I am
Where I am
Where I am

You seem so out of context in this gaudy apartment complex
A stranger with your door key explaining that I am just visiting
And I am finally seeing
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving

Where I am
Where I am
Where I am

The district sleeps alone tonight after the bars turn out their lights
And send the autos swerving into the loneliest evening
And I am finally seeing
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving

Audrey Anderson is creative writing teacher, tarot reader, and author; founder of the first ever poetry slam at Morningside University and former editor of The Kiosk literary magazine; her poetry attempts to capture the mystical experience and her fiction reflects themes of social justice, inspired by her travels during the Arab Spring.