This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 22:45:10 -0800 (PST)
To: guestbook@ghosts.org
yourname Jasmine O'Hara
email llbowe@iastate.edu
This happened my first year at Iowa State U. I know every campus has its ghost stories, and ours is no different. It seems like every building is supposedly haunted, but the truth is-it ain't all fake!
It started when I discovered that the girl next door had the same interest in the supernatural as I did. We started talking magic, and, along with another friend, played this card game to call the spirits. What we did was ask a yes or no question, then flip the card over. If the suit was red the answer was no; if clubs or spades, it was yes. We played around, trying to contact the ghost that was rumored to live on our floor.
Well, I was being stupid, saying stuff like, "C'mon Cora (the ghost's name) you're stupid, you're not there, etc..." gnerally harrassing her, because I didn't really believe. Not surprisingly, she got pissed. We heard noises, nothing big, until the night that I slept in Stacey's room alone. The door repeatedly rattled all through the night, the bed (we sleep in lofts) was shaken several times, and the window rattled.
That just happened to be the room that Cora lived in.
You'd think I'd have learned my lesson, but I'm kind of pigheaded and she ticked me off, carrying on like that. So the next time we played, it was in my room, and I was more abusive than ever. We asked her things like, "are you crazy" and "are you mad at Jasmine?" Both came back yes, so we laughed and harrassed her some more.
Not long after that, things started happening in MY room. The door would rattle, and stuff would fall off my desk. After I came back from semester break, it got progressively worse, to the point where I got abosolutely terrified of my room. Shellee (the girl next door) and I hated to go into the bathroom, as well, because we swore we could feel something watching us. The breaking point for me was when I was alone in my room and my notebooks started to slide off my top shelf. I kept putting them back and finally, now very convinced that Cora was real, yelled "Dammit, Cora!" It stopped, but after I crawled into bed that night, I heard a loud thunk and sat up. I crawled down to turn on the light and almost tripped over something in the floor. When the light was on, I saw that those notebooks were now all in the middle of the room. Needless to say, I was quite shaken.
I need to stress that these things never occured in the presence of my roommate, and she never heard rattling or felt anything, although several other people on the floor did. She was an extremely strong Christian, and I truly believe that Cora, or anything else, was afraid to mess with her. So I always felt safe when she was there.
She got mono within the first couple of weeks after the break, and went home for about a week. One night while she was gone, Shellee and I had come back from a party, and, I must admit, were drunk as skunks. We sat down to watch TV in my room, because I didn't want to be alone, and started talking about the things that had happened lately. It turned out that our floor was not the only place with bad feelings. We both felt uncomfortable in Curtiss Hall, and there was an extremely evil presesnce in Room 3 of Physics Hall (that's for those of you on campus- be on your guard). Shellee heard voices there, telling her that she must die, and I, though never hearing anything, felt watched and hated when I was there.
The whole conversation is way too long to get into, but eventually, after about three hours, we were stone sober and scared shitless. That'll happen when you're being threatened. I think the evil got so strong because, that night, we realized that Cora was not a story, not even a ghost. She was a demon, and we had become far too open to her. As soon as we started to talk along those lines, it was like the room filled with a presence.
The temperature dropped, and the evil in the air was almost visible. There was such a feeling of immense hatred that I couldn't move at first. We isolated the source of it, a corner in my room that seemed to have malevolence flowing through it. We got on the other side of the room and I prayed silently, then out loud, as we clung to each other like superglue. The animosity issuing from this entity was absolutely paralyzing. Its desperate hostility toward us was palpable; it was as though terror had become a blanket that we were being smothered with. We sat up the whole night, and the next morning, we went to Shellee's church and looked through the library for stuff on demons and exorcism. Nothing helped.
From that moment, I could not be in the room alone. Either Shellee stayed there or I slept in her room, if her roommate was gone. When she wasn't, I kept the lights on, praying the bulb wouldn't go out. I never got to sleep until the wee hours, when I would basically pass out from exhaustion.
Finally my roomate came back, and things were better. I still hated the bathroom, and I could barely stand to go to one of my classes because it was in Curtiss. Of course, things couldn't go on well for me like that. My roommate slept in a friend's room one night. Because I expected her back, I had turned out the light when I went to bed. I awoke at about 3 or so, feeling something hovering over me. If it had been an actual person, the feeling could not have been stronger or more terrifying. I opened my eyes, but nothing was there. Nothing visible, anyway. I have never actually felt my hair stand on end. I think that that's probably what it feels like. I prayed harder than I ever have before, and it didn't go away. It stayed with me for hours, literally. I couldn't make it leave, probably because I believed that I deserved it and had no right to order it to go, when it was my fault it was there.
The next day, I broke down and called my mom. She told my grandfather, who sent me a special care package. In it was his mother's rosary, an old wooden cross that had been blessed, and the crucifix that his sister, a nun, had worn when she was alive. I placed these around the room, and never had a sleepless night because of Cora again.
The terrors around other parts of campus are still there, but I've scheduled myself away from those buildings. Shellee and I are roomates now, in a building on the other side of campus. The religious things are still with me, on my desk and around the room, and we don't play with demons anymore. I've grown a lot closer to God through this, too. We don't walk over to Elm too much anymore, though a lot of our friends are still there. By the way, if you live on 3rd floor Elm at ISU, don't mess with Cora.
She's deranged.