✕
Spokane
07/2005
I have no way of accurately describing what happened. It was June of 2020 and we attended a small Catholic mass that had about 15 people in attendance. The church is bigger and can seat about 200 people easily. I stayed outside the doors of the chapel as they are glass and I had most of my children all seated together inside, but had my daughter who had just turned four playing in a play room that is situated off to the side.
While I was following mass, my ears started to ring and I thought, “must be too hot out,” as it was getting warm outside. At that moment, my daughter came out to me crying beyond hysterical and was almost to the point of hyperventilating. It was jarring because I had never seen her this upset in my entire life. I picked her up and placed my one year old down in a car seat as she had just dozed off in my arms and started to rock my other daughter in my arms. She kept crying and hyperventilating and I couldn’t calm her down.
As she was crying, a woman started to walk in a halting and strange fashion out of the church and she was pasty white and I thought, “Here we go!” because she looked like she was about to pass out. A moment later, another woman wobbled out of the chapel and collapsed onto a chair and immediately bent over and put her her between her legs. I noticed the first woman was gone and decided maybe sh had gone to the bathroom to run some cold water over her face. I wanted to check on her but decided I didn’t want to leave my one year old alone in the car seat so I set my now calmer four year old down and went into the chapel to get an older sibling to stay with her so I could take the baby with me down the hall. Went inside chapel, all of my kids were staring ahead intently and I thought, “this is so weird!” But my six year old son noticed me and I motioned for him to follow me, and his older girl seemed annoyed that she had to move so her brother could squeeze by her to get out of the pew. As any normal child his age he was eager to get out of church and followed behind me to join his sister. I asked her if she would be okay if her brother stayed with her while I ran to the bathroom and she reluctantly nodded her head.
I walked her by her hand and led her into the playroom with her brother walking in the doorway behind me. I turned my back to my kids who were now inside the room to shut the door so I could speak in a normal voice instead of hushed tones but the second I shut the door my daughter began to wail in a frightful manner and my son was.. just gone. For whatever reason I kept scanning the room which was a small, ordinary room with a few children’s toys, with a small closet for a vacuum and I looked in the closet for him and he wasn’t there. Grabbed daughters’ hand and went back to the cry area to see both women sitting there, the first was even more pale and the second was sweaty but sitting up and looked like she had just come to from fainting. Went back into chapel not caring that daughter was crying audibly, and she was hyperventilating again to find my kids shuffling in their seats and looking at me confused like I was crazy. My son was sitting in the pew, the same as before and I called him out to me. Again, he was very eager to leave the chapel and I brought him to the sitting area just outside the chapel and asked him why he went back to church. He had no idea what I was talking about. After mass, I asked my kids and they said I never came and retrieved him but we all noted that there had been a strange dull humming in the air that made us feel ill and worn out. My four year old refused to tell me why she was so upset and I asked her recently if she remembered and she vaguely said something bad was happening and she thought she would never see me again.
To this day, I don’t know what happened, but I didn’t lose time as I was trying to follow along Mass and it doesn’t have variations to a traditional low mass and it was the only thing that went smooth. I still feel unease thinking about it because it made no sense, I wasn’t on drugs, alcohol (never have done and never plan on using) and I absolutely know I got my son the first time because I will never forget almost feeling dread at the way my children looked like they were fixated on what was happening at the altar. They are good kids, but not overly pious, but it felt like they were actually trying to focus on mass to distract themselves from the other feeling that everything was just off. I later asked one of the women about what happened with her and she said there was a loud but low humming at church that made her head hurt and then made her feel like she was going to be sick and she left. She never even saw me and could not help me corroborate that I had, indeed, gone inside the chapel twice and taken my son out twice. Only my four year old and myself agreed it had happened.
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Anonymous