Black Cloud
By
David Hoover
In the spring of 1994, I was 23 years old, rooming by myself on the top floor of a college residence hall. I wasn’t doing well in my classes – indeed, half the time I did not even go to them. I was struggling with depression and a sense that I had lost the purpose in my life. My life, much like the room I was living in, was a complete mess. Unwilling to leave school and admit defeat because of my student loans, I was also unwilling to continue with a major that had turned out totally wrong for me. The whole reason behind my depression I still do not know. I didn’t feel suicidal, but I was experiencing severe health problems and at the time I did not know what was causing it. I only knew I was unable to keep food down, and unable to derive much nourishment for the little that I was able to digest. Drinking alcohol only intensified the problem. I saw the campus doctor, but he was no help and offered me no encouragement to seek treatment elsewhere.
A typical day for me at this point went something like this: At three am every morning, I would wake up with excruciating pain in my stomach and chest, especially if I had been drinking. I would watch TV for an hour or so, until I became violently ill, at which time the pain would pass and I would go back to sleep. I would wake up at about noon, but be unable to find a reason to get up until about one in the afternoon. Then I would maybe go to get something to eat, if I felt up to it. I would spend most of my time holed up in my room reading. This was almost never about school-related things, but almost exclusively pleasure reading. I might go and play a role-playing game with my friends every once in a while, but I didn’t associate much with anyone. I didn’t clean my room and I certainly did not have a girlfriend. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was living under a black cloud.
I had never experienced any paranormal activity in the building I was staying in. It was a college dorm, so I don’t know who lived there before I did, or what weirdness might have been concocted there. I didn’t know a lot about its history, but I had never heard any rumors concerning haunting activity. I performed some rituals of my own, mostly for protective purposes, and I used tarot cards and a talking board a lot. I don’t consider the talking board to be evil, merely a tool from which you get what you put in. I do not blame it or any of my other activities for the story I am about to relate. In fact, I am rather glad that I was somewhat prepared for this when it happened.
I do not remember the exact date when this happened. I do remember that I had actually left my room that day, a rare event for me in those days, to make a pilgrimage to the local bookstore. One of the few things in which I had been able to maintain any semblance of interest in was the occult and I had just gotten a new book about fairy beings. It was so interesting that I had stayed up well past midnight reading it. Sleep had finally caught up with me, though, and I collapsed into bed.
The next part I remember with absolute clarity. I woke up at about 3:15 in the morning. I felt the pain as I always did, but now there was a blistering heat in my room. The only light came from an amber-colored street light outside my window. I could hear the typical whoops, hollers and car-door-slams of a college town after the bars close down and the bar-goers stagger back to their dorms. My first thought was that I needed to turn down the heat, and I started to get up. As I rolled over and looked into the semi-darkness of my room, all thoughts of leaving my bed vanished when I saw what was waiting for me there.
Taking form near the foot of my bed was what I can only describe as a shapeless, roiling black cloud, about the height of a person but much wider, shot through with purple “lightning bolts”. The intense heat that I felt did not come from the heating system, but was pouring off of this… thing. I don’t remember it having a smell that I noticed, or making any kind of sound. Somehow I knew that it hated me and wanted to hurt me, but that either the wards I had previously set up or my faith in God or both kept it from doing so. This only seemed to make it angrier, but it didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Even so, its presence was painful. It felt like a baseball bat had hit me in the stomach, and my head felt like it was going to split open from the pressure of its spiteful presence.
I heard a voice in my ear say “It’s trying to take form. Don’t let it.” I did not know what else to do so I thought, or said, I am not sure which, to the thing “You cannot take form. Leave me alone.” I wasn’t about to go near it, and it couldn’t come near me, so we sat there watching each other for about two hours. Neither of us moved. After a while, it faded away and the heat that it brought with it went away as well. I never saw it again. I had a sense that it was lurking around, but it never tried anything directly again and after a while it went away completely. After it vanished, I went into the bathroom and threw up. It hurt worse than anything I can describe.
I won’t lie and say the experience changed my life. It went on pretty much as it had before. It took me years and the help of my wonderful wife, my parents, and God to break out of my depressed state, and I have had the health problems that troubled me corrected. Until today, this very day as I sat here writing this, I thought it was an isolated incident, but now as I try to put these events together, I realize that the thing had been around for a long time before I saw it. I had only been unlucky enough to catch it at its work, whatever that was that one time, but it had always been there. Only today did I realize that it might have been part of why I was having such difficulties to begin with. I carried it with me for years and did not know it.
In my collection of occult artifacts, wrapped in aluminum foil and heavily warded, is a crystal pendant with a most unpleasant spirit trapped in it. The wards keep it from doing much of anything, but it is still there and still angry. Even now I feel it beating at the barricades.
There was originally a good spirit in the crystal, a fairy spirit or dragon of some type. It was helpful and even protective. I had forged a very strong psychic connection with this crystal and I still have it, even though it is not something I want. Another spirit came from somewhere and overpowered that spirit. I don’t know where it came from or why. Perhaps it came from someone that I associated with at that time. I certainly never summoned it. Maybe it was a mean “joke” or somebody’s attempt to “teach me a lesson” for something I had done that they didn’t like. At first, it looked similar to the first one, but gradually gave up that ruse when it realized I wasn’t fooled. Eventually it became most unpleasant and became almost impossible to avoid.
Every time I wore the crystal I would feel intense heat and become confused and depressed. When I was in school, I wore the pendant a lot. Everyone I knew who was into the occult wanted nothing to do with it. My wife, who I met later, comes from a very spiritual family. She wrapped the crystal in foil and warded it when she realized what it was doing to me. Unfortunately, I have never been able to decide what to do with the spirit, and it has remained trapped for some six years. After many years of being mystified by the experience, today I figured out that the black cloud was the true form of this spirit, and that I had been under that black cloud a lot longer than I knew. I would exorcise the crystal but it seems to have gone missing…