By Byron Spires
It started out simple enough, just a little investigation into the paranormal.
“Why not,” Bob said to himself as he walked up the steps to the local library about the idea of a mid-term paper on the so-called paranormal phenomenon now sweeping the country.
“The paper would be easy to write for an argumentative piece,” he thought. “Just disprove it in 1,000 words or so and it would be an automatic A.”
“This is almost too easy,” he contemplated, as he sat at his desk and spread the half dozen books out in front of him.
All he needed was four sources to prove his point, six was a little overkill, but he needed to ace the paper he thought, as he started thumbing through the first pages of Cliff Notes on the Paranormal.
A knock came at his door.
“Hey Bob, somebody from the library left this book downstairs for you. They said you might need it,” the voice behind the door said.
It was Jeff, one of Bob’s friends in the dorm.
“Just bring it here,” Bob blurted out.
Jeff took a couple of steps into the room and tossed the book to Bob, who laid it at the back of his desk with no intentions of ever cracking it open.
“Six books are a gracious plenty,” Bob mumbled to himself as he went back to reading the Cliff Notes.
Two hours later, Bob leaned back in his chair and looked at the computer screen in front of him.
“Six sources, 1,000 words and I’ve proved my point,” he gloated as he clicked on the spell check icon.
His mid-term was now history as he made sure it was double-spaced and formatted correctly.
The printer coughed up the appointed four-page document with its perfectly spaced cover page.
Reaching for the paper, Bob inadvertently shifted the books on his desk which sent the book Jeff had brought him careening to the floor.
He picked the book up and laid it back on the desk, where for the first time he noticed the book’s title: “Paranormal: True or False?” by Dr. J. K. Knight.
“Of course it’s false,” Bob muttered, “I just proved it.”
But curiosity got the best of Bob.
More for ratification of his own thoughts than anything else, he justified reading the first few pages.
“Most people don’t believe in any form of paranormal activity,” Bob read. The truth, Dr. Knight insisted, was that paranormal activity is happening all around us; we just don’t have the means in which to understand it.
Dr. Knight had a theory that might help interpret odd and unusual things that happen to people throughout their lives that his book would explain.
Like the hook of a good news story, Bob was caught. Now he had to read further into the book to find out what this so-called theory was about.
To Dr. Knight, those strange feelings people are always having are direct proof that there are paranormal activities all around.
A feeling of pressure on a person’s shoulder or a shiver along their spine, Dr. Knight said, occurred because someone or something was trying to communicate with that person.
“Some of this is just hogwash,” Bob thought as he continued to read Dr. Knight’s book.
It wasn’t until Bob read chapter three that things began to change for him.
Dr. Knight suggested that maybe there was a way in which people could communicate in the paranormal world. But they would have to train themselves to listen, feel, taste, and simply sense these types of communications.
Dr. Knight asked his readers if they had ever been alone in the woods late at night and listened to the sounds of the evening. In those sounds among the crickets and clicking of bats are the sounds of paranormal communications.
“Have you ever, for no reason, been alone in the woods and felt a chill ripple up you spine?” he asked.
Most people run, he continued, when they experience such a phenomenon, but if you wait, he added, you might hear something beyond the regular sounds in the woods.
“I can’t believe I’m still reading this,” Bob said to himself as he turned another page.
Ten minutes turned into an hour as Bob read through the book, not missing a word.
Listening, Dr. Knight explained, was the key to his theory. There are sounds all around and yet we do not hear them, he wrote.
The problem, he insisted, was that people do not listen close enough to the sounds that engulf them.
If you listen to rhythmic sounds, such as fans or compressors running, you can hear the conversations of paranormal activity.
“I’ve read enough,” Bob thought as he closed the book and placed it on his desk.
Bob’s plans had been to meet some of his buddies after finishing his paper, but now he seemed tired and stretched out across his bed to rest a few minutes before heading downstairs.
In a few seconds he had drifted off to sleep thinking about what he had just read.
Thirty minutes later he awoke to the slow droning sound of the ceiling fan above his head.
“Maybe this would be a good opportunity to test out Dr. Knight’s theory,” Bob thought as he lay there watching the fan’s blades make their circular motion.
After a few moments he concluded there were no sounds other than the droning of the fan motor and swishing of the blades coming from the fan.
Then he heard it, a garbled hodge-podge of words mashed together.
“What was that,” he thought as he listened even more intently to the fan above his head.
As he listened he could pick out an occasional word. The sounds were more like a conversation between two people, not someone trying to tell him something.
He continued to listen as more and more words became apparent.
It was a conversation between, not two people, but three or maybe even four people, he thought, as he stared at the overhead fan.
Over the next couple of days Bob would have several other experiences with the sublime sounds that Dr. Knight had written about.
As he took the time to listen, he could hear the faint conversations that were hidden in the world around him.
At first it had been difficult, almost impossible to hear the sounds, but by training his hearing, the sounds became clear.
They were in fact conversations he was hearing, Bob concluded.
There was one lingering question. Whose conversations did he ease drop on?
His answer came in a very unusual way.
Driving the next day, he could hear a conversation going on within the sounds of the road noise his car was making.
“Stop,” a loud voice said.
“I said stop,” the voice repeated itself in a clear and resounding tone.
Bob stopped his car in the middle of the road.
A half-second later a small boy ran out in front of his car with his mother right behind him.
Bob watched in amazement as the mother grabbed the child and ran back to the curb. A near-fatal disaster avoided, he thought, as he started to move forward.
The conversation he was hearing had now manifested into a warning.
Back in his dorm room a few hours later, Bob picked up his mid-term and dropped it in the garbage can by his desk.
Bill, his roommate, had seen him throw away the paper and questioned his reasoning, especially since the paper was due the next day.
“I was wrong about this paranormal stuff.” Bob then explained to Bill what had been happening over the past several days.
He was still unsure where the conversations were coming from, but they were certainly not from this world, he told Bill.
“Oh, and by the way, your sister is going to call you about your parents,” Bob told Bill as he walked out of the room.
Bill’s cell phone rang as he walked down the hall.
“Hi sis, what’s happening,” Bob heard Bill say.
“What title am I going to give my new mid-term,” Bob thought as he turned on his computer.
“That’s a good idea,” Bob said as he typed, “Paranormal: It is a matter of just listening,” over the sound of his hard drive humming.
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