BLACK EYE

The Prisoners

A corrections officer from a local jail had a paranormal experience he shared with me a few years back. The story will follow him unto the grave, but he wanted to give it to me. He was well aware of my interest in the subject and felt comfortable having a conversation about such things with me. Perhaps he needed to get it out so that he could begin to put it behind him and, maybe, forget altogether. This is his story.

We were transferring a group of ¨ladies¨ to a women's prison and didn't have enough room. Cut-backs had closed a floor and we had an influx of male prisoners to process. So we put them in an older section of the jail until we could process them. The facility was almost a hundred years old and ghost stories were plenty, but nobody really believed that shit. It would keep the female transfers in check and out of our hair for awhile I had thought.

Somehow these women got a hold of a piece of paper in there and a broken pencil. Sloppy, yes, of course. The Janitors rarely went in that section, because it was only used once or twice a year, and they were scared. Bad people go in and out of the jail for decades and, although most have just illustrated some piss-poor decision making skills, we get some evil bastards through.

I've caught prisoners clawing at walls speaking old Latin talking to shadows inside. They weren't in because they had robbed a bank or something, it's because they're evil. They're locked down because they've eaten relatives or engaged in some related demonic shit. The general population are thugs, thieves, druggies, or dealers. We get twisted evil inmates through waiting for a psych evaluation who give off their evil presence. Can you imagine how many have gone through there over the decades? Over these past years there have been more and more vile, satanic loving evil bastards...

Anyways, those dumb bitches got it in their head that they were going to make themselves a Ouija board and summon up some dark shit. I wouldn't have cared much, because it occupied their free time, but they actually pulled it off. They brought something over and, of course, it was more than they could handle.

When I had gotten to them, they were trying to push their way out of the bars and one of them was pretty close. They finally could do more than scream when I had to threaten that I'd leave them in their another night. The Ouija paper board they made did nothing at first. It was mostly gibberish at the start. They claimed it had gotten real cold, real fast like the old jail had become the new refrigerator.

The silhouette of a woman formed out of the shadows across from them in another holding cell. ¨She¨ circled them moving through barred cells with complete ease. Slowly the shadow that she was became more solid, but somehow much darker than the rest of the poorly lit area and blacker than the night itself. Soon after it began to walk on the walls on all fours. Crawling like an obsidian spider it had circled them, moving from shadow to shadow, and stalking them as if had been wondering who to have first.

Their screams were like banshees themselves when they got my attention. At first, I had thought that they were fighting, but I could hear fear in their cries. I signaled for the other two guards to stay with a transfer, who actually appeared scared himself. Inside, I had found humor in this, because the inmate was a notorious thug. When I entered I had seen the terror on these foolish women's faces and felt something negative that made my skin crawl. In the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something there, but it had just faded away in the darkness before I could fully focus on it. Something was invited in there and these ladies had opened a door that they could never close.

After they composed themselves and I switched on every damn light I could find, they told me it had charged at them. They believed it wanted inside one of them and was feeding off their fear in order to gain the strength to it. Then they handed me the paper with the Ouija design on it. Shaking my head, I had torn the damn thing up, and found a trash can for it.

¨Haven't you damn fools made it hard enough for yourselves in the real world?¨ I had asked of them. ¨Try praying good and hard like you never ever have before in your lives and I'll have you transferred within the hour.¨