In the winter of 1987, we moved into a house in the suburb of Woodridge. I was 12 at the time, a tall boy; athletic, outgoing and very much in love with sport, in particular, soccer.
The new house was a dream for me; it had a fantastically large back yard for me to practice in and it was dotted with six or seven massive eucalyptus trees. The house was double-story; the lower half made from brick and cement, that formed a large basement area under the house. There was only one room in existence downstairs; a neat little box with a sliding door and a built-in bathroom and toilet.

My father immediately set about turning a major part of the basement into bedrooms for my two younger brothers, hastily constructing walls with the tacky wood-paneling you can get real cheap at the hardware.
There were five of us kids all up, two girls, three boys and it was the girls privilege to sleep in the already existing bedrooms upstairs, while us three boys inherited the dingy downstairs.
As the oldest child I enforced my right to the pre-existing downstairs bedroom with its built-in toilet and shower while my two younger brothers would have to put up with sleeping in their half built rooms (my dad never did actually finish putting front walls on them!) I was never a boy given to flights of fancy or overt displays of imagination, so it was with a strange sense of pragmatism that I approached the terrifying events that were about to ensue.

My first few nights in the room were without incident, allowing for the uneasy sleep of being in a new house. But after about the fourth or fifth night I was awoken by the harsh rasping of whispered ramblings from somewhere near me. I sat up, expecting to find one or both of my brothers in my bedroom, but no-one was there and I turned over and went back to sleep.
The next night the same thing happened, but as I awoke once again to the harsh whispers I made a conscious effort not to move for fear of disturbing the intruder -- it was right next to my ear, and not just one voice, but what sounded like hundreds of soulless utterances in some other dialect. It was then that I screamed, throwing my duvet off of me and flying to the sliding bedroom door, reefing it open with such force that it actually came off of its guide rail. I slammed on all the lights in the under house basement with hysterical screaming, and then bolted upstairs and did the same thing -- its funny how we think light bulbs can keep the supernatural away.

My parents came dashing out, their faces a mixture of sleep and panic. I told them what had happened and predictably, they didn't believe me, but insisted that I had some type of nightmare or night terror episode. After about half an hour of my father (a staunch Atheist) drilling me with all the logical explanations he could muster for what had happened, I willingly went back to bed, agreeing with the practicality of his arguments. To say that "I felt an evil presence in the room", or "felt uneasy" or "I could sense right away that something wasn't right with the place" would be a lie. I didn't. I didn't "feel" uneasy, I didn't feel afraid. As I said, I was an unimaginative and pragmatic boy, not given to flights of fancy, and so it was that I slept the rest of the night without incident.

The next night however was a different story. I purposed myself not to go to sleep at all, in the supposition that maybe I had been dreaming and wanted to validate the reality of my experience by remaining awake the whole time until something happened. As I lay there, small sounds and bumps niggled on the peripheral of my hearing, particularly from the bookcase to the right of my bed and the bathroom to the left. Moments later there was a sound like rustling paper and the whisperings ensued full force along with the violent shaking of my bookcase. Some books fell and others seemed to be shooting out with tremendous velocity onto the floor. Again, I ran screaming hysterically from the room, slamming on all the lights and waking my parents once again.

My parents made me take the next day off school. First they had me move out of the bedroom; swapping with my youngest brother. Next they took me to a doctor, convinced that I might be using narcotics, or worse, that I may be mentally ill and it had gone undiagnosed -- they eventually found that neither was true. Moving rooms however did not reduce the supernatural activity, and over the years the banging and voices became so loud that even my Atheist parents could not deny what was going on. For some reason unknown to this day, the activity seemed to be centered on me, ME, a soccer-playing normal kid with no history of bad behavior or unusual fits. But that all changed as the years passed.

Night after night I was swamped with lucid demonic dreams, only to wake up with my bed turned fully around in a different direction. On one occasion I woke to find myself dressed in more than seven layers of clothing, including several cardigans, jumpers and on top of that a ski jacket and gloves! The voices turned from whispers to audible deep drones and very often we would find toys and furniture scattered about the place even when we had cleaned up. The most startling of these episodes involved my father. He had built a storeroom under the house, next to the wood paneled bedroom, installing nice new steel shelving to hold all his heavy power tools and toolboxes. That same night there was a horrendous clamor coming from the storeroom that woke the whole house up, and my father came downstairs in a fit of rage to find out what had happened. When I told him that something had been in the storeroom he didn't believe a word and was quite ready to give me a flogging. But as he inspected it he noticed that the steel shelving (and let me tell you, these shelves were SOLID, designed to hold heavy equipment) had been bent and TORN right through!

Eventually I would sleep with the light on every night, a habit, I admit, that went on until I was about 25 years old. But this didn't have any apparent effect on the things that were living with us. Objects would often float or levitate through the air, some of them aimed at me. A broom that was sitting on the verandah flew off and barely missed me one night. All these goings on however, were to be only the warm-up act. As the years went on my behavior became more and more erratic. I couldn't concentrate on my school work because I was awake most of the night, too terrified to go to sleep and as a consequence failed my final exams. I did not finish high school. My dreams of demonic entities became increasingly grotesque and tangible. Dark Shadow beings (we used to call them the shadow-men) were often seen by all of us, usually in our bedrooms, and one night, my sister awoke upstairs to a preternatural light coming from the backyard. In this lambent nimbus was one of the shadow-men, calling her name and beckoning for her to come down -- as if you would!
I became an aggressive, haunted young man, unable to cope with school or life in general but the worst was yet to come.

The last night for me, the night that caused me to leave my family and home at the age of 15 and never come back was something so unbelievable that if my schoolmate hadn't been there, I would have thought myself insane.

It was a typical friday night, Mum and Dad had bought fish and chips as usual, which was our friday night treat (you've got to remember there are 7 mouths to feed here people! So fish and chips was a luxury to us kids!). Our house was situated on the other side of Woodridge Shopping Plaza, and my school mate, Scott, lived on the other side of Wembley Road.
So after school we'd gone back to his house, grabbed his sleep over gear and got back to ours in time for dinner. Scott and I took our paper-wrapped dinner and headed down the back yard, between the massive Eucalypts, talking horny teenage boy talk and telling lewd jokes. It was during one of these jokes that we heard a deep, morbid moaning, coming, it seemed, from the tree nearest us. Scott stopped mid sentence, quickly looking at me to see if I had heard it too -- I guess the look on my face was answer enough. Then, for some reason he started laughing, hitting me on the arm -- he thought I was playing a prank on him. It was then, while he was in mid-laugh, that the moaning became a grating wail, high-pitched and piercing and was then joined by hundreds of other shrieking voices. I was paralyzed with fear, and I mean paralyzed. I was shaking uncontrollably and released my bladder involuntarily, making a large wet patch on my shorts. Scott got up and began to sprint back to the house when he was forcefully thrown back to the ground with a sickening thud and then he too began to wail with hysteria. The natural ambience of the evening began to dim around us; the glow of street lights and the backyard porch light -- all this seemed to fade until there was only the two of us clinging to each other on the wet grass of the backyard. The shrieking took on a discernable lilt, becoming a stygian chant in ancient tongues. Strange glowing lines began to appear on the grass all around us. A black ellipse began to form in the air in front of us, carving itself from the ebony face of the night. It burnt at its edges with greenish mist and faces -- how can I possibly describe these faces! -- they were the faces of the dead; eyeless sockets that stared right at us. And they moaned. They moaned MY name. Even in my terrified state I realised that that black ellipse was a Gateway, or Portal of some sort, because moments later, some THING began to come through it. It was a dark loathsome shape, heaving and dragging itself with its forearms. It slithered towards us like this because it didn't have a bottom half. From the waist down there were only entrails and viscera and a horrid stench like burning flesh. As it came towards us it became apparent that its attention was focused on me and when it saw me it came at terrible speed, dragging itself on those forearms with hungry grunts. As it came toward me it spoke, in english; "You called us, you call to us!" At this point, I actually sh*t myself for the first and only time as a mature person. To say that the voice was unnatural would be a gross understatement; it terrified me to the core of my being and I actually wet myself again. The funny thing is that I remember thinking "how much more pee do I have in there?". I wasn't too embarrassed because I realised later that Scott had also released his bowels.

Now, this isn't one of those stories where all this racket is going on and nobody else hears it. EVERYONE for several houses down could hear it! My dad came running out into the backyard brandishing a machete he used for trimming the trees and I could just see him out of the corner of my eye through that strange, dim cloud that was all around us. At the same time that slithering thing reached me, its horrid stench almost overpowering me and it began to DRAG ME back towards the ebony Gateway. I knew it was going to take me back through and I wouldn't let go of Scott for any money. At the same time my dad broke through that inky dimness and he was screaming and crying and swinging that machete like a mad man. It was the only time I've ever seen my father cry. All I can remember him screaming was "Get away from my son you !@#$%&, @#$$@@#$$, you get away! you get away" over and over again. The mayhem stopped as suddenly as it had began. And remember, all this happened in a matter of minutes. My dad fell to his knees in a swoon, bawling like a child and my mother was further back near the house, also on her knees yelling out prayers to Jesus. Scott and I were huddled together, clutching each other in our soiled clothes, and they had to call an ambulance before we would separate from each other.
Two 15 year old boys hugging each other like babies. They took us to the hospital and we both spent several days there.

I never went back to the house after that. My parents put me in a youth shelter in Mt. Gravatt, a place called Nathaniel House and I stayed there for three months before going to live with some friends out in Dinmore, in Ipswich -- I never finished school because of the trauma, and for many years suffered from severe depression and weight gain. It has taken me a full ten years to get back to normality i.e normal emotions and normal weight again. I started working in an Industrial laundry when I turned 16 and life went on from there. Within three months my parents sold the house and moved to Mitchelton on the Northside. I eventually did my music degree and went on to study the supernatural and occult sciences and ceremonial magick, completing my thesis with a doctorate in ancient languages and mythology. I went on to do translations in greek and hebrew for a Bible company.

I tell you this because I now have a clear understanding of what happened. That there are entities; sub-astral beings of vast intelligence and malice that live just beyond the boundary of our world. And there are some places where this "membrane" has worn thin, and they can cross over, into our world. The creature said that I "called" it. I most certainly did NOT! But what it might mean is that the molecular make-up of certain individuals has a way of aiding their transfer from one plane of reality to another.

Make of this what you will. And thanks for listening (I have changed some names and time periods for the sake of those in this story who wish to remain anonymous).

Submitted From: Matthew, Queensland, Australia

Contact me here: geniusslessons@hotmail.com