This really happened and I've never found a logical explanation so this seems a good place for it.
One night about 9 years ago I was sitting in the gazebo of my church, St. Mary's, in Muncie, Indiana. It was getting on toward evening and I had been sketching the church when I saw the church door open. The mass had long been over, the last people having left about 20-30 minutes before; and I saw my boyfriend walking out with a priest.
I put my things into my bag and headed toward the building to speak with them. My boyfriend had planned to be out of town around noon that day to participate in a weekend lecture series in Colorado, so I was quite surprised to see him. The priest was an older man, one whom I'd never before met. They didn't seem to notice me as I came up to them, and they were speaking in such hushed tones that I couldn't hear them even when I was quite close.
The next thing I knew I felt something dark and cold surround me, like the deadly cold wind before a tornado...those from the midwest will likely know what I'm talking about here - it's an eerie, other-wordly kind of feeling that makes your skin crawl. I stepped around the two men and walked into the church, crossed myself and genuflected before sitting down briefly. The feeling that something was very wrong never left me.
I left after perhaps 5 minutes and both my boyfriend and the priest ignored me as they had before. I began to walk toward my house, which was about 6 blocks away, and when I glanced back over my shoulder as I was about half-way down the church's drive, my boyfriend was walking after me. I became very scared and I started running, afraid to go home but not knowing where else to turn. I'd always found the church a sanctuary and to have it become a frightening place itself was more than I could bear.
I ran toward the campus and kept looking back over my shoulder, each time seeing Don as far behind me as he had been at the church grounds... but he wasn't running to keep up. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, I came to the campus and sought refuge behind Benificence, the main statue at Ball State. As I crouched down behind her I looked for my boyfriend, who was nowhere in sight. I stayed there for the better part of an hour before running to the nearest phone booth and calling a friend of mine to see if I could stay the night rather than return home.
I know this sounds very silly, but when I woke up the next morning I was convinced the whole thing was a figment of my imagination. Mind you, the strongest drug I'd ever had was alcohol, and that a mere glass or two for the occasional special dinner. I was a studious girl, not given to hysterics, and I had no reason on earth to create that sort of scenario out of my imagination alone. My boyfriend and I were also quite close so the terror I felt - and his utter silence throughout the entire episode - was completely foreign to me.
Don must have decided against going, perhaps he had laryngitis and that was why he could neither lecture nor call out to me. He wasn't running after me because I was being silly...and there is nothing sinister about an elderly, visiting priest.
Monday morning I saw Don and he told me how much fun he'd had, how he'd seen a few old colleagues and former classmates, and how he'd been invited to speak at yet another lecture series because of his performance at this one. I never mentioned the incident to him...I also spoke with the church secretary who told me there had been no visiting priest that she knew of and Father Grady hadn't mentioned that any old seminary friends of his had come by...
Who was the old priest? Why did I see my boyfriend, who was 2,000 miles away at the time? Why did the church I'd always seen as a loving haven become an ominous place to me?
When I mentioned this incident to a fellow I knew, many years after the fact, he told me that Dragon Paths crossed over the church grounds and that a group of white witches had performed cleansing rituals on the yard and in the gazebo one midnight shortly after my incident.
It remains, in my experience, disturbing and unexplained....