Haunted Cosmos - The Dusty Tome, Chapter 9: Ghosts, Witches in Mozambique, and Why Sleepovers are Bad

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Please enjoy this Haunted Cosmos special preview of our patron-exclusive show: The Dusty Tome.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!During this period between Season 1 and 2 in the month of August, we will be releasing one episode of The Dusty Tome per week until Season 2 begins on September 6th. That's five episodes! We hope you enjoy it; and we do hope you consider becoming a patron to gain access to 20+ episodes of The Dusty Tome, and so much more.We are pleased to share our sponsor for this episode: White Tree Solutions. Business Owners and IT Leaders, this is your trusted partner from strategy to implementation, harnessing the power of data and AI for your success.Visit their website or send them an email, [e-mail] our Patreon today by clicking this link!Support the show

During this liminal time, that seemingly interminable threshold between seasons one and two of Haunted Cosmos, we didn't want to leave you empty-eared. But how do we accomplish this, faithful listener? Well, Brian and I decided that we would do this by inviting you all into the inner circle, the sanctum, the walled garden of haunted cosmos, something that we call the Dusty Tome. The Dusty Tome is our weekly patron exclusive show, full of listener stories, historical oddities, and much more. We've released actually more than 20 of them so far, once a week,

and you can get access to all of them right now by signing on to support our work here at Haunted Cosmos. So each Wednesday, during the month of August in the year of Our Lord, 2023, we'll be releasing an episode of The Dusty Tom to our main feed for your enjoyment. That's right, five glimpses behind the curtain. We hope it helps you get through the endless days

of Haunted Cosmos' first off-season. And if you like what you hear, or if you just want to help us continue to make the show possible, consider chipping in monthly. Patrons get early access to add free main episodes, of course a new dusty tome each week, like I said, and some other fun stuff too, like my own musings on patristic works, deep dives into the stranger stories and holy scriptures, and access to our private chat rooms. Bottom line, our patrons are the best. They're actually the ones who make it possible for us to keep releasing haunted cosmos at all.

So, sign up today at patreon.com slash haunted cosmos or tap the link in the description of this episode. That's about enough rambling for now. Let's get on with the show. We're glad that you're here. And for this episode, you're going to get another example of those listener submitted stories. This one's sort of a rapid fire, where we have three main listener submitted stories that I then tell for everyone. We hope that you enjoy these. I believe that they're all patron submitted, but some of them may just be listener submitted.

At any rate, they're fascinating. We hope that you enjoy the high strangeness of ghosts, witches in Mozambique, and why sleepovers aren't always that good of an idea. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. The first story is from a man we'll call Drake. He lived in a weird house, basically. And from here, I'll let Mr. Drake tell the story. The first encounter I had was when I was 10 years old.

I was sleeping downstairs and woke up late at night to see this figure. walk from the living room, through the dining room, and into the TV room where I was sleeping. The figure looked like a perfect shadow that you would see of yourself on a sunny day. I could even tell what cadence it was walking, and I could see its outline perfectly, even though it was a dark room. When it got to the room I was in, it walked directly into the wall and then disappeared. The second and final encounter I had was a couple years later with a separate thing. This time it was a woman, where it appeared to be.

I was vacuuming the upstairs and got the feeling someone was watching me, like I wasn't the only person in the house. My parents had left an hour before, and we lived in a safe neighborhood, so the odds of an intruder were actually low. But after a few minutes, I began to hear what sounded like laughter. The first time I heard it, I turned off the vacuum and asked who was there, assuming my parents must have come home and I just missed it. But I got no response.

My mind rebelled the threat, and so I just assumed, it was nothing. This cycle continued for like 10 minutes until the laughter got so loud that it sounded like shouting and I gave up. I couldn't ignore the evil dread and the unmistakable evil laughter that was in the house. So I ran outside with my heart pumping out my chest and looked up at the window at the room that I was in and saw what looked like a woman looking down at me. When my parents got back, we searched the house to find nobody there. This was the last encounter I had before we moved out. At our town's historical society, there's an old picture of the house that we lived in, and in front of the house is a woman who first owned it, and it looked

just like the woman that I saw in the window. This next story is from a man we'll call Jackson. He grew up in Mozambique, Africa, which is a land where the understanding of our world, as a spiritually embattled one, has not yet been fully snuffed out. Jackson's account will take it from here. As a young boy, everyone in my community lived in mud huts. Our house was located about three miles from a river. The concept of running water in the house was literally unheard of. So this river that was three miles away provided water to us for pretty much everything, cooking, dishwashing, bathing, everything. We hauled water in buckets, put it on top of our heads, the whole nine yards. In the rainy season, the river level was always high and sometimes it would overflow into the fields

located on its banks. My friends and I often went swimming in it, and some sections of it, the water current was super strong, so strong that it could push someone downstream and even drown them. Normally, if someone drowned and died, the corpse was found somewhere along the river once the water level had gone down. They'd be wrapped in tree limbs and reeds and everything after getting dragged down the river. But I remember very vividly some stories of people disappearing completely into the river, as in never seen again, dead or alive. As you might expect, our parents hated that we swam in it so much. They always told us to stop, but we always found a way to keep it up.

Kids, am I right? We defied our parents' demands and went swimming anyway, except on Sundays. We never liked swimming on Sundays. You'd stand on the bank and just get a weird feeling. Anytime we tried to muster the courage, we would just stare at the water for a bit before turning around one by one. speechlessly agreeing that it wasn't a good idea to swim. Anyways, there was a lady in our community that was known for being demon-possessed,

supposedly. Every once in a while, she would have these weird episodes, where suddenly she'd start singing songs that only she knew. And every time it happened, everyone just knew to stay away, because we never knew what she was going to do. I don't remember her ever being violent to anyone, but maybe that was because everyone got scared and stayed away from her. She just walked around her house like she was looking for something and she was seeing these manic songs the whole time.

Or sometimes she'd sit on the ground and just sing as she stared into the void, doing nothing. Eventually, though, and this happened every time, she would run to the river. She would run to the river, dive in, and she would stay underwater for 30 minutes. And when she finally came back out, she had something in her hands, like a leaf or a root or something. After she got the thing, the attack would eventually subside, and she'd fall asleep for hours in her house. Nobody knew what the root thing was, but everyone believed that whatever it was, it soothed her somehow from the attack. This happened at least once a month, as far as I can remember, and we saw it every time. I'd like to note that when getting into the water, she didn't have any goggles on, no diving or snorkeling equipment, nothing like that.

I mean, at this point in the community, no one even had an idea that there was such a thing as diving or snorkeling equipment. She got in bare and stayed on her for that long, for half an hour. Nobody knows if she was able to breathe underwater somehow, but she always got out alive. When she woke up from her nap, she'd be totally normal, talking to people, visiting neighbors, doing chores, as if nothing happened. I know, it's unbelievable. That's what I thought too, every time I saw it. Our last story today comes from another patron, just like the others. We'll call her Ophelia.

This story is a little bit more subtle, but because of that, it seems more relatable. Not that we've all experienced the same thing, but sort of like what happens to her in this story, I'm sure most of us are unfortunately familiar with it, or at least familiar with something similar. And before I start, I want to take this opportunity to thank you again for listening to this episode of the Dusty Telling. Thank you for your support. Thank you guys for being the best fan-based ever. God bless you. And remember, fear him and be at peace.

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White Tree Solutions will transform it into a strategic asset, enabling you to better understand your customers, enhance your products, and make smart, data-driven decisions. Take the first step towards unleashing your data's potential. Get in touch with White Tree Solutions to start empowering data for your organization by visiting WTSData.com or by emailing info at WTSData.com. Or better yet, just check the links in this episode's description. White Tree Solutions, your trusted partner from strategy to implementation, harnessing the power of data and AI for your success. From here on out, it's her words, not mine. Before high school, I was what I like to call Holnesian in my approach to the supernatural.

Everything otherworldly, seemingly inexplicable, anything strange, could and should be explained by natural causes. I got the term from some of my favorite books, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Holmes followed the evidence in his famous cases to explain away all fantastical, mysterious deaths, sightings and disappearances. Most famously, he cleverly debunked the strange hereditary myth of a ravenous hound as an evil, clever plot to take hold of a hapless man's fortune. You really should read the Hound of the Baskervilles, by the way. It's so good. As a Christian, I also grew up with the sense that evil powers like demons couldn't attack or affect me anymore since the Holy Spirit dwelt within me. At least, that's what I thought, until my encounter with a high school friend. It was

2012, and one of my friends, let's call her Lucy, hosted her Sweet 16 at an art parlor in town. We all went to the same Christian school, and we had all known Lucy for years. Her and I had only really started bonding about a year ago, though. We had similar taste in television shows, so we talked about that a pretty good bit. Anyways, back to the party. While our other friends created their works of art, I tried to strike up a conversation with Lucy. But in catching up with her, I saw that Lucy had developed some strange, almost concerning entertainment choices. She was obsessed with, not merely interested in, but obsessed with. Television shows containing stuff like cannibalism, hardcore feminism, and even witchcraft. Coincidentally at the time,

I was exiting the popular platform Tumblr, as many of the stuff on it sharply disagreed with my Christian convictions. I couldn't bear any longer to look at posts about, quote, gender fluidity, scare quote, or using fictional characters as a means to escape regular everyday life. And then Tumblr also had this overwhelming fixation on the demonic. But I found out while I was weaning off of it, that Lucy was spending most of her time on there,

seeming to find a ton of solace in using it. Anyways, after the art parlor stuff was done, We all went back to Lucy's house to have a sleepover for the remainder of the party. When we opened the door to her home, the smell of cat urine and weird herbs immediately assaulted our senses. But we didn't want to make her feel bad, so we all shook it off and entered, even though I was trying to hold my breath, to be honest. On the walls in the home hung drug paraphernalia in statues of Hindu deities and even a Buddha statue too. I thought it was weird. Lucy told me her father traveled the world because he was in the world.

military, and so he would just bring back these kind of things from his travels. What surprised me most was this feeling of a dark heaviness weighing down on me. I know it sounds cliche, but that's the only way I can describe it. At times, it felt like someone was sitting on my chest, preventing me from totally breathing in all the way, even when I stood up straight. And then this other thing, even with all the lights on, the rooms in the house always felt dark, like almost a garishly yellow light. but it didn't quite light things up.

I just couldn't shake the thought that somehow, all of this was connected to the entertainment that she was consuming at the time. Growing up in a Christian household, my parents instructed me that whatever one watches influences their thoughts. Our conversations with friends later in the evening kind of validated my point,

as they all centered around the macabre and bizarre. Some of the friends seemed uncomfortable with what Lucy talked about regarding her gender and TV shows she liked and even supernatural stuff. She made claims about demons and she wondered openly about possession. It really disturbed some of us.

But eventually, it was time for bed. And so we chose where we were going to put our sleeping bags. Lucy and other friend and I were hanging out in Lucy's room upstairs. So figured we'd sleep there. And that room is where I felt the heaviness, the strongest. I could still breathe, but I felt an anxiety that I just couldn't explain and I couldn't focus. My head grew hotter and felt suffocated, but I'm around all of my friends.

So I just brushed it off. Maybe the Costco pizza I ate at dinner just wasn't agreeing with me so well. I didn't want to embarrass myself. We all three decided that it was time to go to sleep around midnight. As Lucy turned off her bedroom light, we all drifted into sleep. Lucy and our mutual friend slept in her bed together while I slept on the floor and a sleeping bag. A sudden jolt of fear woke me up after I had slept for some time. I had this crazy, strong sense of being watched.

There was a horrific, dark sense of dread emanating from Lucy's closet, and that one word rang in my head clanging like a gong. Dread. Dread. Dread. My mind was a hot oven of anxiety and fear, and I realized that the room seemed way darker than it had just a few moments before. Just then, I remembered my Cuban grandpa telling me horror stories about Santa Ria. Great timing.

about how people would have experiences just like this after a ritual. But I also remembered that as a kid, I would brush it off. I would just say, I'm a Christian. That can't get to me. I don't have to be afraid. At this thought, my mind beam with a glimmer of hope. In a small, trembling voice, I mustered or whisper. Get behind me, Satan.

I belong to the Lord Jesus. You have no power over me. My voice was so soft. I thought that I had dreamed it, not even said it. After whispering, I only got more dizzy and anxious. My heart pounded faster, so I whispered it again. This time, louder, as loud as I could. In the midst of the anxiety, I had one clear thought that screamed out at me

from what felt like the rolling billows of a storm at sea. Get out, it said. So I took my blanket with me and scrambled out of that room. As I ran downstairs, the house was eerily quiet, but the heaviness did leave when I left the room, which was good. One of my friends was still awake in her sleeping back downstairs. What's wrong? She asked, concerned.

You're breathing really heavy. Embarrassed, knowing no one would believe me. I told her nothing was wrong and that I just needed to sleep downstairs. She smiled, helped me make a bed on the floor, and then she dozed off. Eventually I also fell into a sleep, though it was fitful. My head was still hot and anxious. The next morning we woke up. Neither Lucy nor I ever mentioned the previous night.

Bleary-eyed and terrified, I didn't even say anything to Lucy that whole day. After eating some pancakes and bacon and talking through some stuff, we all just parted ways. But that evening ever since has still haunted me. Want more haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself.

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