Wednesday Wildcard: I Don’t Need to Believe Because I Already Do

I opened this space up last week to anyone who wanted to submit to me their tales of brushes with the strange and unusual, but since no one took me up on that offer, I’ll just talk about myself for a couple of minutes.

I love anything to do with the strange and unusual. I really do. Ghost stores, UFO’s, folklore, urban legends. I eat it all up like candy. A lot of folks look at me like I’m weird sometimes when I make obscure references to places or things they’ve never heard of during everyday conversation, but I say that they are the one’s who are weird. How can you go through life never having heard of The Jersey Devil? Or something as basic as a banshee? I mean, what gives? Are people’s minds so closed off that when something like that does come up, they have no desire to further investigate the matter, and would rather just pass it off as pure quackery? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s something embedded in my DNA, because from an early age I was fascinated with horror stories that had to deal with ghosts coming out of the mirror to claw out your eyes, poltergeists haunting houses, and monsters gobbling up unsuspecting sea merchants. Is it possible that this is the case? I don’t remember my mother ever teaching me anything about the strange and unusual happenings that take place in our world. No dinnertime conversation about parallel universes or shadow people or Mothman. Quite the contrary. Even she passed off my fascination with such things as nothing more than a phase. Oh how she was wrong.

As I get older, I find that my interest in the subject deepens to the point of wanting to understand things on a more personal level. I want to experience them for myself, rather than just read or hear about them secondhand. I want to go on a ghost hunt, I want to fly into the Bermuda Triangle, and yes, I’d even like to buy the Amityville Horror house and live there with my family.

So is it just me, or do you guys love this stuff too, and if not, why?

And please, if you have kids, be sure to teach them well by educating yourself on more than just Survivor and American Idol, okay?