Jonathon Needs Me

I am now 21 years old. The most frightening experience of my life took place when I was 17, so read on and I will tell you about my strange and scary happening with the paranormal.

Since I can remember I have always been fascinated by ghosts and things of an otherworldly nature. With that fascination also came a great fear which I believe stems from my religious upbringing. I had always thought that you would be safe from spirits unless you exposed yourself to them. This is the reason that I never once played with a Ouija board or stepped into a "haunted" house. As long as I was only a spectator reading about ghost stories in a book or watching them on TV I was in the clear.

I don't really believe that anymore, although if I did I would probably be able to sleep more at night. In high school, I found myself hanging out with the "weird" crowd because I was never interested in what are considered "normal" topics of conversation for a teenager. I couldn't really relate to my eccentric friends even though they intrigued me. Some of them fancied themselves to be witches or psychics and many of them also shared my paranormal fascination.

One night in late October a few of my best friends and myself went to a Fright Fest in celebration of Halloween. There was a woman there who claimed herself to be a clairvoyant professional who could communicate with the dead. For a price, she would lead a seance with me and my friends to contact spirits. I didn't like the look of this old, withered woman or the feeling I got when she looked at me, I wouldn't call it evil, but something that emanated from her made me want to stay away. My friends were all led to a small dark tent that I opted to wait outside of.

At first I faintly head giggling coming from the tent, then the old woman trying to coax the spirits to speak through her and then there was an astonishingly abrupt silence that had me worried. I had the urge to run away because I felt something so oppressive and evil was coming from inside the tent but I couldn't just leave my friends so I made my way through the thick fabric that covered the tent.

I didn't see any demons or hear any strange noises. All I saw were the horrified faces of my friends and even the clairvoyant. "What's wrong! What did you see?" I immediately demanded to know. One of the girls I had come with, pointed at me and said in tears "It said it wants YOU!" No reader, your ears are not deceiving you, although I wish they were. The clairvoyant asked to speak with me after my friends had left the tent. She had a very sad look in her eyes and told me that I was right not to participate in the seance because the paranormal was not something you wanted to get involved in. She told me that while the spirit had control over her body she was still conscience to a certain degree so that she could force out a spirit who might intend to harm someone. After sensing Jonathon's obsession with me, she had tried to force him out but he had been exceedingly reluctant to leave her body. She also told me that Jonathon's spirit was the sort that could not harm or control someone unless they had opened themselves up to him. She told me that I must never give this spirit invitation to contact me and ended the conversation by telling me that curiosity killed the cat.

As I sat in shock on the car ride home, my friends reluctantly told me that there was a man whom they were talking to (through the psychic of course) named Jonathon Crisa and he was very sad. My friends had felt sympathy for this spirit and wanted to help him. When they asked him what he wanted , he pointed outside the tent to where I had been standing and cried out "I need her!". The spirit then quickly vanished leaving only the disoriented psychic. Moments later I walked into the tent at the same location the spirit had pointed and everyone realized he was talking about me.

I don't know how I was able to leave the car that night and walk alone into my house where all my family was sound asleep but I did and somehow even managed to fall asleep. My slumber was short, however, because soon I was awakened by a tapping on my window right above my bed. I pulled my covers over my head and hoped with everything I had that the noise would go away. But the sound grew louder and louder until it turned into a knock that was more like banging. I ran from my room without looking near the window and crawled into bed with my sister. The noise did not follow me and I have never had any other encounter with the paranormal since.

Some people have suggested to me that perhaps a tree had been tapping my window in the wind to create the illusion of knocking but there is no tree or anything of the sort near my window. Some people say that my friends had probably set the whole thing up as some practical joke but I must tell you that after the "incident" my friends will not so much as talk about what happened that night or anything else that has to do with ghosts. About a month after the strange occurrence happened one of the girls who was there with me that night came to me in tears and apologized over and over again for trying to get me to come to the seance which might have put me in a lot of harm. She swore to me that she would never dabble in the occult again.

The questions that haunt me are "who was Jonathon?" and "why could he need me?". I have searched for a long time and only recently did I find what might be a possible explanation. My great grandmother, Dora, was supposed to have been a beautiful, compassionate and outgoing woman. My grandmother talks about her sometimes and one day told me about how there was a man who lived rather like a hermit that Dora had befriended. Apparently, the man fell desperately in love with my grandmother and asked her to marry him several times. Dora refused every time and when she finally did wed, her and her husband left California to go to Washington. The hermit man was so heartbroken and alone that he ended up taking his own life. My grandmother could only remember this man's first name: Jonathon.

Was this the spirit who claimed to have needed me all those years ago? Was he the one who knocked on my window thinking that I would somehow bring him closer to my dead grandmother? And more importantly, if he was, will my refusal to open my window and invite him in be the final rejection he has from my family or was that just the beginning?