Mysore Ghost Story • 31 October 2013

Butterfly, Succubus

There is a blog behind this blog. Here is a ghost story I posted there a few years ago.

What’s below is the original post with some edits, plus my comments on that post, minus the comments from other readers.

I took it seriously at the time, but now it’s just for laughs. Tis the season for summoning old spirits… and then hanging them out to dry.

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Ok, friends. Do not read this if you are going to be tempted to share stuff from here with anyone else. Honestly. This story is just for us.

So I’m seeing the dark side of Mysore. Or, more likely I’ve just accidentally become aware of the dark side of reality entire, and this stuff goes on everywhere without being noticed most of the time.

I wrote last week about some… peripheral weirdness. There’s been a bit of that around my new house here.

Then two nights ago, bad dreams about this place. I dreamed that I woke up and the wall to my room had been removed and a giant market was being set up in the empty space upstairs. I was mad about that.

Then last night, easily the most vivid and physically real experience of an entity outside myself. Woke in the oddest liminal state – I was in my dream body, but in my everyday, cognitive mind. Couldn’t move.

A small, female, faceless grey entity was on top of me, pinning down my shoulders and a leg. I could not move. The entity was trying to force me down and in to deeper sleep. I fought it, stayed awake, and eventually pushed it off.

Then I could move again. Went to the bathroom, felt no danger or fear. Went back to sleep.

Spent today totally gutted. Like I had taken some kind of hit. No appetite. I have a couple of really close friends here – just sort of relaxed in to their presence and mostly slept.

Please, don’t get all worried about me and tell me how messed up it is. From my perspective—I know this is odd—it’s not that big of a deal.

That said, if you’ve got a little luminescence for my light bubble, do send it in this direction. I’d appreciate it from those of you who have some psychic stuff going on more than you usually admit.

Later the same day

This doesn’t scare me, but it’s annoying to have so much weird stuff happening in my house, and to have to be on guard for it tonight.

I wonder if there’s a reason this beautiful house on the hill has sat empty in recent years. Something might have happened here. I’ll continue to feel it out and I will move if it doesn’t subside.

Day 2

It’s so weird to have this awareness. When my center of gravity shifted from gross body to subtle, that was fun! But there has been some other shift now: away from the subtle body to some less tangible sort of reality. Like what I notice most in the world is shifts in the light, flickers in my visual field, and the shivers they make on my skin. It seems the land of “stardust” is morally neutral… there is no sense that it’s all love and light in the fourth dimension.

I love how talking like this in public, or to my therapist, would get me labeled delusional. “Skitzophrenic,” the blanket term for sensitives.

Whatever. I’m more grounded in my cognitive mind and emotionally settled than ever. Perhaps more grounded than the last few weeks, even, since this helps me dial in the super-open emotional boundaries for now.

Day 3

I’m too intrigued by this experience to want it to end. I feel anger at the thing, but not fear.

Yesterday, I sent it a bunch of F-You energy. Talking to TW’s mom (an intuitive healer), I gather this was the exactly wrong strategy. Instead, she recommends enveloping myself in white light. How Star Wars.

Also, CC clarified about his experience a long time ago on this same road. He said he was set upon by what he calls a pooka – some sort of succubus – when he was sleeping on the floor of an empty room.

Ok. So maybe it’s time to step away from my curiosity about this whole thing.

Day 4

I wanted to say that this episode is making me even MORE agnostic about the nature of reality. The spiritist worldview doesn’t help here. By spiritist, I mean anything from superstitious Frank Peretti-style Christianity, to fairy/angel New Age stuff, to gnostic views of “the universe” as some sort of demiurge that makes things happen.

It’s entirely possible that the experience of the succubus was generated by me.

My inner awareness has definitely taken on more psychedelic qualities this year. Lucid dreaming started when I lived at SD’s house for a week a couple of years ago, sleeping in his yoga room while subbing at the shala. But now, the dreams have become beautifully vivid, I’m seeing hazy fields around people, the nimitta has stabilized, and just in general the experiences of non-solid stuff has felt more intense to all my senses.

The succubus lives in this realm of sensory intensity. On one hand, it may just be a subjective result of this new way of having strong sense experiences of the non-physical world, which includes past and future and ideas and imagination and metaphor and other peoples’ interiorities and whatever else. Or on the other hand, it may actually exists “out there.”

It’s trite to say there’s no difference.

But there’s no difference.

All that said, now I can tell you what happened this morning. You’re going to love this.

Last night, a big butterfly the likes of which I’ve never seen in Mysore flew in to the bathroom while I was taking oil bath. The butterfly was black and white, with gold at the edges of her wings and a single red dot.

I talked to her while sitting there covered in oil. Thanked her for coming (she was a helper, I felt) and told her she didn’t have to stay around in that form or anything.

She flitted around the bathroom, then I shut her in there so she would know her way out (the bedroom windows don’t open, so she needs to be in the bathroom to get out). I skyped with the Editor and told him about the butterfly.

After we got off the phone, somehow she got in to the bedroom. She landed on the edge of my desk and started walking toward me while I was massaging my feet with coconut oil.

That’s when I saw that she had a large, grey, dead mosquito wrapped in cobweb/spiderweb attached to her back leg. She kept walking toward me, like she was asking for help to get free of the succubus.

Randomly, I’d purchased toothpicks at Loyal World on the moon day. So I opened them up and used one to try to get the succubus off her leg. She sat there and took it, but each pull almost took her leg right off her body!

Can you imagine? Literally almost having her leg pulled out of its little butterfly-socket. And she just stood there, slowly pulsing her wings.

Finally we re-maneuvered. I actually picked her up and turned her around for a better angle, and was able to pry the thing off.

Then, she did this amazing thing. She opened her wings all the way and just waved them. I wasn’t dreaming this. It was on the manifest plane. Then she fluttered up around the room, landing on my mirror. I told her, again, that it was fine to leave. But I saw that she was really weak.

She stayed most of the night. When I got up at five, she was still there. I also had a candle burning all night.

I returned to bed and got up again just after sunrise. The butterfly was gone, and the candle was just burned out.

I called the Editor to tell him what happened. He asked me to burn the succubus, which I’d tossed in the garbage. It was still there on the top of the heap, so I lit one of my shrine candles and burned the grey, cobweby mosquito corpse.

It took a good 60 seconds, and the process produced no ash. Only smoke.

Last night at her house, Annie Pace did some spontaneous ritual stuff with incense when someone brought her a photo book of old times in Mysore. Just waved around the smoke and moved her body in a trance.

When people do that stuff here, a lot of times it’s just culture. But sometimes there’re interacting with non-obvious aspects of reality.

I think Annie was in that space last night. Though earlier in the night, I saw her enact her rituals for the comfort of them. For their familiarity and rhythm.

That’s real too.

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