Ghosts: True Hauntings In Montana

By David Francis Curran

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A Final Old Hag Story

It was early October in 1985 in Missoula. Snow had fallen in September, but now a warm Indian summer had the mountain town in full autumn color. Twenty-year-old Dave Brown*, a sandy-haired young man with a medium build, had lived in his new apartment near S. Fifth and Orange for about a month.

He was in bed just waking up. Half-way between sleep and wakefulness, he didn't really feel like opening his eyes.

And, then, an unwelcome idea stole into his mind. "Is someone in the room with me?" It grew into a feeling, a solid presence he could sense, and the question became, "Who is in the room with me?"

Forcing himself, he opened his eyes just a little. His head was turned to the side, and he thought he saw a face on the wall. But because he wore contacts, and did not have them in, he did not trust what his eyes told him was there. Was he imagining things?

He tried to turn, to see what it was that was there. It was then he found to his horror that he could not move, not a muscle. At that instant he realized he was paralyzed.

"You are dead!" a voice said. And Dave understood it to mean, not that the voice was going to kill him, but that he was already dead. "But, I'm not dead, I'm not dead," he said, his voice changing in confusion from conviction to a pleading for confirmation. He was not dead. He was just asleep.

Trying to move, he found himself powerless. Legs and arms would not move. He tried to fight off this dream he seemed trapped in, but it persisted in long, incredibly slow, frozen moments. Finally, with a effort that seemed to drain him of all of his bodily energy, he managed to turn his head, just a fraction of an inch, toward the wall on which he had seen the face.

The face in that half-formed, contact lensless vision, changed then, back into a wall poster. Dave found his body relaxing. The ability to move arms, legs, all, came quietly and quickly back in an instant.

It didn't happen again until the morning after he had heard about Old Hag experiences in Neil Kettlewell's ESP class.

Lying on his back--thinking Kettlewell had said it happens when you are lying on your back--and wondering if it would happen, he began to feel a roaring, like a mad Montana wind whipping through trees, in his ears. He thought, "If I can roll over, if I can get off of my back, then this will stop."

With a slow, tiring effort, he managed to roll his body over. As soon as he had moved, the noise stopped.

These were the only two old hag attacks Dave had experienced by the time of the interview.