char *(null)="
headless.lady
headless.lady
From netcom.com!pcm2 Tue Nov 15 01:33:56 1994
Xref: netcom.com alt.horror:21851
Newsgroups: alt.horror
Path: netcom.com!pcm2
From: pcm2@netcom.com (Neil McAllister)
Subject: Re: Horror films are great but 'real' life exper.....
Message-ID:
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <31888LNNOYTMMIRQOTK@sunyboard.org> <39p228$9fi@news.delphi.com> <1994Nov9.203649.1981@ultb.isc.rit.edu>
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 1994 10:30:09 GMT
Lines: 102
Okay, you want 'real life' creepy horror stories? This one was not
mine, but it happened to horror comics artist Bernie Wrightson, and I
quote it (without permission, I might add), from the retrospective book
on his art, entitled A LOOK BACK, published by Underwood Miller. Check
this out:
"My earliest strange experience: The Headless Woman. I used to think
of it as a dream, all through my childhood, growing up, whenever I
thought about it I would think of it as the strange dream I had three
times as a kid. In the past couple of years I've become quite convinced
that it wasn't a dream at all, but one of my earliest remembered
experiences was a close encounter of the third kind. I had an
experience with a ghost when I was four years old!
"When I was very young, four years old or thereabouts, we lived in the
city. We had a comfortable, kind of run-down house in the city -- a row
house, one of twenty houses on the block. Each house was a
cookie-cutter replica of the one next to it. We lived there until I was
about seven years old. The layout of the top of the house was three
rooms. The front room was my parents', the middle room was mine, and to
the right of my room in the back was the bathroom. My room was a kind
of combuination room and hallway on which the stairs came from the first
floor so that one whole wall was the stairwell coming up and the
bannister. My parents kept a light on down on the first floor which
would shine up through the railings, throwing these long, spoke-like
shadows on the wall. Very, very 1930's horror movie stuff.
"It was here that I was visited by a lady on three different occasions.
"I've never had a recurring dream. I've had dreams that mght be
similar but never the exact same thing, never the same sequence of
events, before or since. That's what made this strange, each time in
occurred everything was exactly the same and everything was crystal
clear. Usually when you have a dream there are distortions of some
sort. At the very least distances distort. The room you dream about it
bigger or smaller or changed somehow, more or less furniture, different
furniture. A lot of things get jumbled up in dreams. The whole thing
is symbolism and your subconscious places elements in your dream for
whatever reason. That didn't happen. This was my room exactly. That's
what has me convinced now that it really happened. Also, the fact that
I never dream in terms of dreaming that I am asleep and then wake up
from the sleep to see something or participate in something. But that's
what happened here. I would be asleep and then I would wake up.
"The way I was lying, I was facing the wall. I just looked down past my
chest and there was the wall with the railing and the shadows coming up.
I would see her shadow being thrown up on the wall as she came upstairs,
just walking very slowly, very purposefully up the stairs. She had no
head. A very tall woman woman with no head, wearing a long green gown
of some sort. It might have been a nightgown. It was very low cut,
very simply made and kind of like green silk. She would come up the
stairs. When she got to the top of the stairs she would have to turn to
come into the room.
"The first piece of furniture she encountered was the dresser. The
dresser had four drawers. She would start with the top drawer, pulling
it open and then looking in, then closing it.
"She would then start with the second drawer, open it, look in , then
close it. She would then stoop, open the third drawer, and so on all
the way down. Opening each drawer, looking in, and then closing it.
She didn't make a sound.
"Then she would walk across the room, up to my bed where the toy box
was. I had a big, maybe two by three foot, toy box with a hinged wooden
lid. She would open the lid, reach in, and start moving my toys around.
Obviously looking for something -- and what else would a headless woman
be looking for?
"This happened exactly this way, that same sequence of events, exactly,
as if you would run a movie three times. But the third time, instead of
turning around after she had looked through the toy box, then going back
and walking down the stairs, she came over to the bed I was in. I was
still sleeping in a crib when I was four because we couldn't afford a
bed. On the side that faced the room, the bars were lowered down. But
the side that faced the wall and the head and foot of the bed had high
bars. The effect was like being in a small cage. You have to keep this
in mind -- it's a very important psychological thing. I was trapped
inside this cage and here is this headless woman coming over.
"She comes over to my bed and grabs the mattress and lifts it up and
bends over to look under the mattress. I've got my hands over my mouth
so I don't scream or vomit or whatever. As she bends over, I get my
first look at the inside of her neck. Imagine cutting a piece of salam
in half. That's how clean the cut was. It was like a cartoon cut --
very clean. But when she bent over and I looked inside her neck, I saw
exactly what should be there. I'm for years old, I had no idea. As far
as I'm concerned, when you're four years old, your idea of eating is
that this whole thing your head sits on top of is a hollow tube. You
put food in, it falls down. To you, there are no organs or anything,
you just don't know about that. A big emptiness and the food fills you
up making you feel heavy as you eat. What I saw was vertebrae chopped
clean. In front of that, a windpipe. To either side, large veins.
This thing was exactly what you would see in an anatomy book, a
cross-section of a human neck. That's the last time it happened. We
moved away later but not because of that."
--
Neil McAllister (pcm2@netcom.com) | Santa Cruz, California, USA
"Great art comes from the pit. Where do you think you are headed?
The souls of the damned live in failed works like this. You
owe it to them to succeed." -- Jim Woodring
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