S1 Ep6: The Shadow Person and the Pendulum

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Astonishing Legends now. The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on the Astonishing Dead Letter office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, the Astonishing Legends Network, or any affiliated entities or guests. When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone. But trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends, and now it's time for our fellow legenders to hear them too. Join us weekly in the vault beneath Blanket Fortiana, which we call The Astonishing Dead Letter Office. Tonight's episode, The Shadow Person and the Pendulum. Hey, don't you have a framed picture of Kreskin from Kreskin's ESP board game, where it contains a pendulum for you to use? Yeah, I do, actually. I have a pendulum that's hanging down in front of a picture of Kreskin from the board game, from Kreskin's ESP, one of the original pendulums. And I work with this frame guy. He got it in there. It's got some depth to it. So it's hanging down inside the frame. It's very cool. It took us a minute to figure out how to do it. Okay, well, tonight's dead letter comes to us from Crystal, and it's about a pendulum she purchased that apparently opened a door that she had a hard time closing. And I also believe it's your turn to read. My story is about a pendulum that I bought in 2020 that seemed to have come with a shadow entity as a gift with purchase. I had purchased it to see if I could make contact with anyone. After a few weeks of owning the pendulum, I started seeing a tall shadow out of the corner of my eye from my photography studio room. I saw it mostly when I was working on creative projects. At first, I thought it was my husband, but he wasn't home at the time. The shadow would also show up when I was cooking in the kitchen, but mostly when I was really into the meal I was making. It seemed to be drawn to showing up when I was in a creative state and didn't just show up randomly. I asked a friend what she thought it was, and she said maybe a family member who had passed. I had used the pendulum a few other times after I purchased it and asked who came through. But after consulting another friend, she said that regardless of what it was, if it was not invited, it shouldn't be in my home. The shadow entity eventually made its way upstairs in my bathroom, across the hall from my bedroom. I saw it a few times when I was doing some tarot card readings. At that point, it started to be too close to where I sleep, and that was not okay. With the help of the second friend, I did a cleansing with prayers and sage in my home, opening all the doors I could and all the windows, asking for divine intervention and demanding the shadow entity leave. Mind you, it was a rainy day with some wind, but when I was downstairs on my first floor demanding it leave, one of my front doors that really needs to be pushed hard to close slammed shut. I put the pendulum outside to be planted with some flowers and have not seen the entity since. Well, there you go. It was Kreskin. No, the thing is, he's alive. He's still with us, if you can be. I know. Well, no, I'm saying he's mentally, with his mentalist powers, he's initiating some contact. Not that it's contact with an entity. It could be some rather mundane poltergeist experience, and I'm not being facetious on that. Sometimes I think that here you have two things going on. You have the visual sighting of a shadow being mixed with some poltergeist activity. Possibility is that they are from the same source, two separate things happening, a multitude of things. But what seems obvious is perhaps the pendulum usage and also maybe the tarot cards have kicked up some activity that when you call into the void, you sometimes get an answer. And so when you call for interaction, that could spark an appearance and some other things happening. But I like it because I'm kind of the same way too, is that, okay, not in the bedroom. You've gone too far. Yeah. I sleep here. You're getting a little too close. I have to get to sleep. Cooking and doing photography is one thing, but now this is, yeah, not the bathroom, not the bedroom. Well, and that can get worse and infinitely more invasive, not to get specific here, but you may have heard our Halloween shows from 2024. That's just not where you want a spirit. That's right. One of our great friends, Jill, has a story about, I think, a ghost hunting friend of hers, and they were at a very haunted location, and there were some festivities, I think, for the ghost hunt the night before. And so people were drinking freely. This person, let's say, at the end of the evening was rather sick from the drinking and was in the bathroom and hunched over the toilet when they noticed a black, misty shadow forming in the corner, and they were like, not now. I am really sick. Like, and just ignored it. It was like, oh, sorry. Oh, yes. Take a hike. I was going to do a haunting. I see you're busy. I hope you feel better tomorrow. I'm very sorry. I was like, believe me, I've been there, and it just faded out of existence. It's like, well, just the fact that there is a limit where you don't care. The other thing that jumped out at me about this one is like seeing something in the corner of our eyes, which, you know, always brings me back to my friend Mark's mother on the The Red Coat. On the Laughing Indian episode. Yeah, where she would see a red coat off in the woods when she was in her garden. They had this beautiful land in Woodstock, New York. But only when she wasn't looking directly at it was it there. Right, right. He was there pretty regularly and dressed like a British red coat. Like, it was a vivid thing that she saw. But only the corner of her eye. We have since heard of the theory, though, purported by some paranormal researchers, that it has to do with the cones and rods in your eye and that, and I can't remember exactly how the science works on that, but they are longer, I believe, the cones and rods, at the periphery of the eye. And you're seeing something that you would normally not see looking straight ahead. Oh, right. So you're picking, yeah, your eye is intaking more information than it normally would looking straight ahead. So that's why you're able to perceive these things that are kind of just on the edge of perception, let's say, from the corner of your eye. Yeah, and the other thing that's interesting about this is this thing mainly seems to show up when Crystal is involved in a creatively satisfying process. Yeah, right. Which some people might see that as supportive, but there's always that warning, like from our series on astonishing legends about the siren call, the hungry ghost. What if whatever is there is feeding off your energy somehow? It's an energy vampire, not to evoke Colin from what we do in the shadows, but those elementals, things that aren't human that seem to feed off our energy somehow. But I feel like usually what they want from that is usually fear, but I don't know. Right. Well, there's something to be said, I think, about people who are in the zone when they're doing a creative project. There is perhaps a spiritual connection or at least a connection to your subconscious and the creative side and the hemisphere of your brain that juices are flowing here. And as people say, you get in the zone. And how many times have you heard somebody, especially musicians, that say like, hey, this took me like 15, 20 minutes to write. It just came to me. Bob Dylan wrote Blowing in the Wind in 10 minutes. Right. 10 minutes. It's one of the greatest songs of all time, right? And I think Dolly Parton wrote Jolene in one day. Brian Wilson tells a story. Yeah, and I can't remember the name of the title, unfortunately, at the moment, but he says, yeah, this song came to him like 15, 20 minutes. It was just in his head. So there is possibly a divine, creative, spiritual connection that's made. And when you're in that zone, perhaps you are more apt to see something like that. Perhaps when you're in that zone, they're more likely to show up or because you're in that zone, you're more likely to see them. It could be six of one, half dozen of the other. But you know what I'm saying is that one is sparking a connection with the other in that you're in a creative state of mind, which I think Edgar Cayce called high play, that in the higher realms of consciousness and beings, that there is also creativity, that it is a highly spiritual, godly thing to be in that zone. And so you're speaking their language and they kind of show up. But I also like the idea of like, hey, that thing ain't invited. You need to get rid of it. Which, yeah, I can also see not wanting something just kind of lingering around all the time. Well, at least Crystal solved her problem by burying the pendulum. But I got to be honest, I've never in all our shows, 10 years, we're over 10 years old now. I have no idea how you neutralize a pendulum that's acting up. I got no thoughts on that. I would bet that there is a process explicitly for that. Somebody's going to write in and tell us what you do. Yeah, there's some steps. There's a ritual, I'm sure. Well, if it works, it works. I don't know if that causes more problems, burying things, burning things, putting things under water. There's ways to get rid of it and deal with this. In this case, I'd be contacting Milton Bradley, whoever made the Kreskin game. It's like with the Ouija board. Well, we certainly collected a bunch of stories, but does the manufacturer have a file for all these things like that? That's one more for the Kreskin game. Yeah. Let's make the pendulum out of something else. I think it's probably just plastic, but it doesn't matter. It is plastic. The Kreskin one is plastic. I have it. Hey, those Ouija board planchettes are plastic. Well, they weren't originally though, right? Remember our Ouija series? We did it. Yes, we did a series and they can be made on all different materials, which goes to show me that it's really about the intention to communicate. And the openness to the person and what's on the other side and opening up that channel for a little bit. Well, Crystal, thank you so much for sending your dead letter in. You seem to have taken the right steps here. We'd be curious to know if anything odd is growing in the spot where you buried the pendulum. The Astonishing Dead Letter Office is hosted by Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess and is executive produced by Tess Feifel. The show is edited and mixed by Sarah Voorhees-Wendel at VW Sound. The theme is based on the Astonishing Legends theme by Judson Crane at Founder Music, arranged by Alan Carissia, who composes all the other music in the show. Tommy Beaver Design created the logo. The announcer is John Bolan. That's me. Stories are lightly edited for length, content, and readability, but otherwise presented as they're sent to us. We're always looking for more Dead Letters, so if you have a story of your own you'd like to share, email it to deadletteroffice at astonishinglegends.com. Please include how you would like to be credited. First name only? First name last initial? 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