Strange Portals Spontaneously Appearing in the Home

One outlandish feature of the world of the paranormal is the idea of portals popping up in various places. These portals are said to lead to other locations or nowhere at all, and sometimes are even said to act as doorways to other worlds that sometimes allow things from the other side to come in. Portals seem like something one would be more likely to find out in the wilderness or remote areas, but it seems that sometimes these phenomena can happen right in the safety of our own homes. 

One strange report comes from Reddit user “GilgameshvsHumbaba,” who says this happened as he was living in a small apartment several years before telling his story. One evening, he woke up to feel someone touching his head, even though no one else was there, and when he stepped whatever it was away and looked around, he saw a square or rectangular "hole" in the air. Out of this hole shone a light, and there was a man's arm and hand protruding from it and waving around in the air. The witness says of what happened next:

“The hole" started drifting to the right and revolving toward me and I saw two young men in some other room. One was sitting and working or typing or something, and the other guy was looking at what he was doing and looking at me and looking around at my bedroom. I sat up on one arm watching them, and then I noticed that the light from their room was lighting up my room. I could see the ironing board to the left, my bookcase to the right, the floor, ceiling, and my door, which was closed. That was when I knew was really awake, and I sat up more. I think they were talking to each other, but I don't remember hearing them. I thought about getting out of bed and grabbing my clothes and just stepping through the hole into their room, but I chickened out because I wasn't sure if I would be able to come back or not.

The "hole" started to revolve the other way until it was "sideways" to me again, and then all of a sudden it disappeared and the light was gone and it was dark again. Since I have "night blindness", it was pitch-dark to me. Finally I decided that it had just been a weird dream, so I picked up the covers and lay down and turned on my side to go back to sleep, and that's when I realized I had been sitting up the whole time, so it had to have been real.

Well. that's it. The "hole" had smooth sides and sharp corners, no glow or fog or anything. Looking back on it now, I think the two guys were panicking because they had been seen and were trying to "close the window", or however you want to say it. I've tried to tell people what happened and they just laugh at me. I know it happened!!!! Now I want to know if it happened to other people, and if anyone reported it. I'm sure the two I saw repeated their little "experiment", so there must be more witnesses somewhere.”

Pretty weird stuff, indeed. From Reddit user “FlashyConsequence111” we have a similarly odd tale that supposedly happened back in 2004. This supposedly happened as she and her husband were sitting out enjoying a quiet evening on their veranda, and the witness says;

“There was a fence about 5meters/15 feet away from us. All of a sudden the side of this big tree next to the fence started moving, there was no wind and the other trees were not moving, nor was the otherside of the tree. My husband and I thought an animal was going to come out of it. After about 1 minute a black hole appeared and a man, carrying some box or bag in both hands, came out of the hole, ran accross the fence for 3meters/9feet another hole appeared in front of him and he went through that hole and disappeared. The trees near the second hole were moving and shaking before it appeared and he ran into it and were shaking for about 30seconds after it closed. The man was white, dark short hair, wearing a black and red flannel shirt and black pants and looked like he was running from something, he was in a panic.

I was in shock and amazed. I turned to my husband, he was looking at the fence eyes wide open. I said 'Oh my God! Did you see that?!!' He turned to me and said 'What?' I said 'That man came out of a wormhole and ran along the fence and went into another wormhole!, that's why the tree was shaking!' He said 'when was the tree shaking?' 'Nothing happened, we have just been sitting here'. I was shocked! I was like 'what are you saying? You don't remember?' We had just been discussing how the tree was shaking and what animal we thought was going to come out. To clarify, we had never before or since had different recollections of what we had seen together. I have only told that story to my sister and children. This is the first time publicly, there are definitely technologies we do not know about, I believe in wormholes and portholes.”

What was going on here? Many stories of portals revolve around closets, which makes sense since there has long been the spooky lore gif things in the closet that have haunted children since time unremembered. One account comes from True Ghost Tales and concerns a witness who claims that when she was just a girl, she had been watching TV in the living room with her mother when they heard her father start frantically screaming for help from elsewhere in the house. They tracked the source of the mysterious screaming to the witnesses’ bedroom and found that the door was locked, which was odd considering it was just a plain old doorknob with no lock to begin with. They stood there struggling with the anomalously jammed doorknob while the father shrieked and shouted in terror from within. At the time, they thought he was having some sort of mental breakdown, as he was an alcoholic and had been drinking heavily earlier that night; however, when they finally forced the door open, they were to find it was something altogether more bizarre. The witness says of what they saw in that room:

“My mom struggled for a few minutes trying to open the door. Finally she managed to open the door and we saw my father up in the air like if he was hanging from something then a few seconds later fell feel down. He was so scared that he sounded sober, he told us to get away from there and he ran as far away from my room, when we saw my dad he seemed almost pale looking, he had scratches on his chest as if he got into a fight or something. My mom asked him “What happened to you”? Are you Ok? The only thing that came out of my father’s mouth was, “THE DEVIL, the devil was trying to take me away with him.” At first I thought my dad was only saying that to scare me but he was serious about it, he said that the devil wanted him and was trying to bite his neck. I thought to my self, it sounds more like a vampire than the devil to me, why would the devil want to bite his neck anyways?”

The scared family retreated to the living room, where they eventually fell asleep, and the next day the father explained that when he had been in the girl’s room he had seen the closet door open by itself and heard a man’s voice issue forth from the darkness beyond before the incident, after which something dark had emerged and he blacked out. He took them to the room so that they could take a look at the closet, and this is where things get even stranger still. The witness says:

“We all went to my room then my dad opened my closet door and we saw this figure of a man standing inside my closet as if it was asleep, its arms were on his chest and he was all black, with long finger nails and he had wings. The weird thing about all this is that a few day later I saw it in my room. I was watching TV in the living room. We had the hall light on so that way it could reflect light into my room, but that night the light only reflected half way. I saw a dark shadow standing in the middle of my room, then he took his hand out and started moving his index finger asking me to come to him with his reddish yellow eyes. I was so scared that I couldn’t move at all. I was screaming for my parents but they couldn’t hear me at all, how could this be they were ten feet away from me? Anyway when I turned my head back to see him he was already next to me. All he did to me was he had lifted me up and he kissed my forehead and my neck, then he left, just like that. We never say IT again, but sometimes when I’m in the dark I feel like someone is there with me.”

It is interesting that the whole family seems to have witnessed it, so it seems beyond just a hallucination or overactive imagination. On the site "Phantoms and Monsters," there is another account from 2009 of some sort of menacing beast in a closet. The witness claims that he woke up one night suddenly at around 3 AM, and found that he was covered in sweat and overcome with an inexplicable cold fear that was overwhelming in its intensity, although his brother was still sleeping soundly. There also seemed to be a heavy sense of someone there looming near the bedroom’s rather large walk-in closet, and the witness would say of what happened next:

“I looked around in my room hoping to see my mom watching over us from the door way of the closet (I don't know why I thought it would be her but I did). Since our nightlight was on I could see things pretty clearly. I looked to my left to see a tall figure in our closet, it had an oval like head with small eyes and appendages hanging from it's face almost like a scruffy beard but it made more sense that it would be some type of structure. It looked over the both of us up and down. At first I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, since I could be very imaginative but what snapped me out of this is when it pushed some of the clothes hangers out the way and the fact that the window was open. It's skin looked rough and pasty almost like it was in a sauna for two years. It caught a whiff of me being awake and almost immediately I lost consciousness and control over my body. All accounts that were had from that night had not been fully remembered the following morning. Besides the fact that my sheets were in my closet instead of on my bed.”

Again, we are left here with a case that seems to be so bonkers that it is beyond an easy explanation. Just what was this thing and why would it be in that closet? Was the closet acting as some sort of a doorway to another realm? Who knows? Outdoing even these outlandish encounters is another one reported on Phantoms and Monsters, this time by a witness who had just about the strangest thing you could imagine come out of his closet when he was a boy, in around the year 1980. The witness, who claims he is now a paranormal researcher, says that when he was very young, he had been trying to get to sleep in the room he shared with his brother, and again, this was a room with a big walk-in closet. As he was lying there, the closet door began to open by itself, and the witness claims:

“One night as I was trying to get to sleep (my brother was already asleep), the door opened and I know this sounds crazy, but out came Big Bird (of the children’s show Sesame Street). I remember being frightened at first, but others came out too and they were very friendly and led me into the closet with them. All I remember at this point is that Big Bird gave me a flavored chap stick (most likely to ease my fear because I loved chap stick), and they brought me back to my bed. I went to sleep very happy over the whole experience and was not afraid anymore. I put the chap stick under my pillow after taking a tiny nibble leaving my teeth marks just to see if it was still there in the morning. The next morning, I checked and low and behold the chap stick WAS there, JUST like I remembered, and at that moment I knew for a fact it was not a dream. If it were not for that chap stick the experience probably would not have stayed with me all these years. I tried to tell my brother, but he laughed it off, as anyone would, it sounds totally crazy. Now, after reading the other accounts of similar experiences, I am wondering if it was an abduction disguised as a friendly interaction.”

What in the world? How do we come to terms with the sheer surreality of this? The witness gives an interesting observation, in that he believes it might have been an alien abduction, with the entities taking a form that would seem nonthreatening to a child. This is a feature of some alien abduction cases, with the beings allegedly able to either shape shift or manipulate perceptions in order to take the form of whatever will best serve their purposes in the eyes of the abductee, for reasons beyond us. Is that what was going on here? How else could we explain an actual character from a children’s TV show emerging from the darkened gloom of a closet? It could have been just the imagination of a child, but the fact that the witness remembers it so vividly all of these years later is notable.

From Your Ghost Stories comes a report of just such an experience, from the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The witness claims that as soon as she moved out of her grandmother’s house, where she had lived for some time, she began having extremely vivid dreams of a “spirit or demon” in the closet of the room in which she had stayed. She says that she had never had these menacing dreams while she had lived there, and that they had only started after she left, as well as growing steadily in intensity. She claims that the house had always been haunted, and says of what happened next:

“We just recently moved back in October. Now, I've always known this house was haunted. Everyone has. I have had so many different experiences. (For another story I assure you.) Everything seemed fine and normal. The house is old, it creeks all night long. You hear someone calling your name. For me, it is "Belle..." Nothing unusual. I walked passed the room I used to sleep in, now my uncle's room, the other day, and I instantly felt watched. Chills ran down my spine. I felt in so much danger. I quickly scurried down the stairs and forgot about it not to long after.

 I would walk by all the time (it's en route to my room). Every time I walk by, the door creeks open. Even if it is shut the whole ways, it takes force to open that door. I was carrying my cat from my room to the living room with me one morning last week. As we walked passed my uncle's room, a deep, low, frightening growl came from my cat, then she hissed the meanest hiss, as she kept her eyes locked on the room (the door was wide open, nobody was inside). Recently, my mom has been feeling it too. The door opens slowly when she walks by, and she feels cold eyes watching her.”

Another report from the same site is similar in nature and just as eerie. This particular report comes from the state of Virginia, from a witness who believes an actual demon inhabited the closet of their master bedroom and would use the closet to pass back and forth between worlds. The witness claims that odd activity gravitating around the closet, including loud bangs and murmuring voices at night, was so intense that he put a crucifix up by the closet to try and keep whatever it was away. There was even an incident when he said the entity pushed over his young daughter, and it would later lash out at his wife. The witness says of his experiences with the terrifying demonic force in the closet:

“It did not take long to figure out that the presence was in a large closet area which adjoined the bathroom and faced directly towards the bed in the master bedroom. The closet area never got natural sunlight and was extremely dark at night. I could feel that something was watching. The crucifix seemed to keep it out of the room but it still stared from the closet. So I did the usual "get out, this is my house," "I command you to leave." I felt that this thing was not going anywhere, that it was not scared at all, it was not moving. Not long after that we found a picture of our children on the floor and it had been smashed in the middle of the frame like something was thrown at it. One night while watching TV my wife left for work and I saw a rather large shadow fly out of the bedroom and out towards the car as she was leaving, almost as if it was chasing her. Not long after that she suffered a stroke and a major car accident, both of which left no lasting injuries.”

Was this a demon or just a very powerful spirit? Was it, like other cases we have looked at here, using the closet as some sort of portal between dimensions? In another account from the site Queenies Paranormal Playhouse, there is a report from 2005 from a frightened single mother who had just moved into a duplex in the United States with her young son and niece. Almost immediately, on the very first night, they began experiencing paranormal phenomena, such as the bedroom door opening on its own and the children complaining that “something” had touched their legs as they slept. The witness explains:

“The second night of our stay, my son and I were lying down shootin' the breeze in my room. The bedroom door that was cracked half way open had closed, then re-opened. This happened a couple of times, until we finally worked up the nerve to get up and turn on the light. The next night, my son blacked out after having (what seemed to be) a nervous break down about the ghost living in his room and closet. Now, the thing about it, is my son is a big 15 year old, and he does not scare easily! After 20 minutes, he went back to his normal self and cannot remember the incident.That same night, he went to sleep with me, and I woke up to something pulling back and forth on the door knob of my closet.  I screamed, but my son never woke up!

 Relatives have said that this place gives them bad vibes, and that sometimes, they can hear people talking. Now it is day 28, and last night, my young nephew and I were sleeping, when suddenly, he woke up screaming. He had jumped off the bed, and the bedroom closet swung open in front of him! But this morning, he can only remember standing in front of the open closet... hearing the high pitched scream of a female. I talked to the people who lived in this duplex before me, and they also lived with this ghost. Even after saying prayers and using holy water, the ghost will not leave! I'm a single mother and it took my savings to move into this place. Unfortunately, it seems we're stuck here for a long time...but this ghost is going to drive us insane!”

The United States is not the only place where such encounters have allegedly occurred, and a scary report on Phantoms and Monsters comes to us from Newfoundland, where the witness claims he lived in the late 1960s at an apartment along a place called Blackmarsh Road. He says that he was 9 or 10 years old at the time, and that he had been living there with his mother, grandparents, and three sisters at the time, and that the road had been rather well known in the area as a place pervaded by ghostly phenomena. He says that although he never actually saw anything ghostly, he sure did hear it, and it seemed to originate from a coat closet in the living room. He says:

“Sometimes, due to limited space, I slept on the sofa in the living room. In the living room was a small stove and coat closet. I remember the chimney ran next to the closet. I remember so vividly being woken up between 3-4 a.m. every morning to the sounds of a group of people conversing in the closet. To the best of my knowledge, there were six or seven people. I could not pick out what they were saying, though at the moment I could hear them very clearly. This went on until we moved. I told my mother about this at the time it was happening but, of course, it was dismissed as a child's imagination until many years later.”

He says that after he had moved away and grown up, he heard that his grandmother had also had weird experiences with the voices from the closet, and that she had finally managed to banish them by reciting the Lord’s Prayer aloud. What are we to make of reports such as this? Are these just tall tales or something more? Are these just delusions or the effects of sleep paralysis? Are they aliens, ghosts, demons, or something else? Are these really portals allowing these things to pass through some thin spot between realities? If so, it seems that portals like this can pop up in the most unexpected of places, and it might be something to think about at night when your closet is open just a crack.