[SPEAKER_00]: Paranormal experiences don't really work to a time scale, and therefore we invite you to listen to a dark miniser.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hello everyone and welcome back to another instalment of our Dark Minisode series.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now today's Dark Minisode comes to us from one of our newer Patrons.

[SPEAKER_01]: Not only a new Patreon but all round and you will listen up and we love getting experiences from our newest listeners.

[SPEAKER_01]: So if you are on you to the show and you have your own experience, go to our website the DarkParanormal.com and click on Submit my experience or click the link in the show notes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And also if you'd like to become one of our members over on Patreon, where you basically keep the show running, and also act like a kind of publisher for the show, suggesting changes, etc.

[SPEAKER_01]: head over to patreon.com forward slash the dark paranormal, or again click the link in the show notes.

[SPEAKER_01]: But for now, please take some time for yourself, make yourself a nice warm drink, get yourself relaxed, as we listen to our Patreon submission for this dark minisode.

[SPEAKER_01]: keys to the other side.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hi Keath, I'm relatively new to the show, but I'm loving it so far, and I've just signed up to become a Patreum.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a junior school teacher from Kent.

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to stay anonymous for obvious reasons.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm 34 now, and I teach year 3s, which I love, and I have done for the last few years.

[SPEAKER_01]: and after a bit of a binge, I've decided to tell you about what happened after my mum died.

[SPEAKER_01]: People I've told either don't believe me or they'd look at me like I've lost the plot.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I think, well, I hope, you and your listeners may understand.

[SPEAKER_01]: My mother passed away in March, 2024.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was cancer, it was quick, and it was brutal.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was six weeks from Diagnosis to Funeral.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm the middle of three sisters and we all had what I'd call a polar relationship with my mom.

[SPEAKER_01]: She loved us, we know that, but she was secretive, distant.

[SPEAKER_01]: Though a part of her life she just didn't share.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if you tried to push, she would shut down completely.

[SPEAKER_01]: When I was maybe 15, she used to say she was going to bingo in the local pub every Monday night, as regular as clockwork.

[SPEAKER_01]: So one Monday, I think I'd been asked out, I'm not too sure now.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I do know I needed to borrow money for something that I can't remember, and I walked down to the bingo to catch her, which was held at the local pub.

[SPEAKER_01]: However, she wasn't there.

[SPEAKER_01]: I asked the landlord's wife, who asked the other girls behind the bar, and they all said they hadn't seen her.

[SPEAKER_01]: That night when she came home, I asked where she be, and Bingo was her reply, not even blinking.

[SPEAKER_01]: I told her I'd gone to the Bingo looking for her.

[SPEAKER_01]: She just shrugged and said, oh you must have missed me, maybe I popped out for a cigarette.

[SPEAKER_01]: I could always tell.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we never spoke about that again.

[SPEAKER_01]: When she died, we had to do the thing of going through all of her belongings, separating what we do once we don't want to accept her.

[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't too interested.

[SPEAKER_01]: My eldest sister Karen took most of the furniture.

[SPEAKER_01]: My youngest still Louise wanted the jewelry, photos, bitten pieces, a TV for my niece's [SPEAKER_01]: But they asked what I wanted and in all honesty I didn't want to think.

[SPEAKER_01]: I would have been taking 4 taking sake.

[SPEAKER_01]: Also there were too many complex feelings involved.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then I remembered her keyring.

[SPEAKER_01]: Mum had this massive bunch of keys, old house keys, old padlock keys, keys to God knows [SPEAKER_01]: but it also had little sort of charms hanging from that ring.

[SPEAKER_01]: A golden toad, a silver mushroom.

[SPEAKER_01]: One was a purple crystal drop.

[SPEAKER_01]: Around the size of an old 50-pence piece, teardrop shipped.

[SPEAKER_01]: When I was little maybe five or six, she would jangle these keys before we'd go out, just me and her.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's just go for lunch.

[SPEAKER_01]: Me and you.

[SPEAKER_01]: What do you say?

[SPEAKER_01]: She'd say, and she'd shake those keys, and I'd hear that jangle and see that purple crystal swing, and as petty as it sounds, I'd feel special.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like for once I had all her attention to myself, so I said I'll take the keys.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just the keys.

[SPEAKER_01]: My sister's thought I was mad.

[SPEAKER_01]: What are you going to do with a bunch of random keys?

[SPEAKER_01]: but they didn't really argue it was more rhetorical.

[SPEAKER_01]: I took them home, put them on a hook by my door, and I felt like a piece of her that was actually good.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a happy memory was home with me.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it was about a week later, I started hearing footsteps at night.

[SPEAKER_01]: My house is a Victorian terrace, old floorboards, so you hear everything.

[SPEAKER_01]: Floorboard creaking as a noise is when I was used to, but these would deliberate.

[SPEAKER_01]: Slow.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like someone pacing back and forth in the hallway.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'd lay there listening, my heart pounding, telling myself it was next door or the house settling or even my imagination.

[SPEAKER_01]: but it happened three nights in a row, the same rhythm, the same root, from the stairs to the kitchen door and back again.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then things started getting knocked off shelves.

[SPEAKER_01]: The first time I came downstairs and a mug had fallen off the draining board and was shattered on the floor.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then I noticed a bottle of shampoo was laying on the bathroom floor.

[SPEAKER_01]: A book on my bedside table on the floor when I woke up.

[SPEAKER_01]: Little things but regular.

[SPEAKER_01]: Things I could also put down to me being clumsy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Every couple of days, however, something new would be moved or knocked over.

[SPEAKER_01]: The atmosphere in the house felt different too.

[SPEAKER_01]: Heavy.

[SPEAKER_01]: especially in the hallway and the living room.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like the, uh, was thicker, harder to breathe.

[SPEAKER_01]: And there was this overwhelming feeling of sadness, but not my sadness.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was grieving obviously, but this was something external.

[SPEAKER_01]: it felt mournful if that makes sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like someone was upset, not angry, just deeply quietly sad.

[SPEAKER_01]: I not think I knew what I was thinking, that's my mom.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's somehow my mom via the keys.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if she was here and sad, well, what was I meant to do?

[SPEAKER_01]: I kept [SPEAKER_01]: Grief does strange things to your head.

[SPEAKER_01]: We all know that.

[SPEAKER_01]: It makes you sometimes see patterns that aren't there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Probably here things too.

[SPEAKER_01]: I told myself I was projecting, imagining things because I did miss my mom.

[SPEAKER_01]: Even though our relationship was complicated, she was still my mom.

[SPEAKER_01]: This went on and off for about a month, the pacing.

[SPEAKER_01]: objects moving, that heavy sadness, but I got used to it weirdly.

[SPEAKER_01]: I started talking to it sometimes.

[SPEAKER_01]: All right, Mom.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm home.

[SPEAKER_01]: That sort of thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: It felt stupid, but comforting in a way.

[SPEAKER_01]: I woke up on night, must have been maybe two or three in the morning, and the atmosphere was completely different.

[SPEAKER_01]: Not sadness anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: This was dense, concentrated, as if the air itself had weight, and I had this overwhelming sensation of being watched, but not by one person by several.

[SPEAKER_01]: I just lay there in the dark, eyes wide open, absolutely frozen.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I swear to you, I could feel them.

[SPEAKER_01]: Three presences, at the foot of my bed, I could tell they were stood together close, like they were holding hands, all just watching me.

[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't like the pacing solitary presence.

[SPEAKER_01]: That one felt lost, wondering, this felt deliberate, focused, like a group with a purpose.

[SPEAKER_01]: After what felt like hours but was probably minutes, the feeling lifted, after I heard my bedroom door creaks slightly, and something leave, and the air went back to normal.

[SPEAKER_01]: The next morning I grabbed the key ring and I removed every key and believed me there were lots.

[SPEAKER_01]: I put my keys on the ring and placed those loose keys in a plant pot in the back garden.

[SPEAKER_01]: Those keys could have been for anywhere.

[SPEAKER_01]: The next two nights were actually really peaceful, really peaceful.

[SPEAKER_01]: So peaceful I was convinced I'd nail the culprit.

[SPEAKER_01]: But by night three, I was tossing and turning, and then the air changed.

[SPEAKER_01]: That dense feeling fell down on the room again, and as I start towards the bottom of my bed, very, very faintly, moving slowly in and out of the shadows as if rocking back and forth [SPEAKER_01]: Then, like before, my bedroom door creaked open and inch, and the feeling and the beings all disappeared.

[SPEAKER_01]: I barely slept for the rest of that night, and almost every other night they were there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Not every night, but regular enough.

[SPEAKER_01]: Soon I began feeling them in the kitchen while I was cooking.

[SPEAKER_01]: always that sense of three moving as one, watching.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'd still sense the sad one pace occasionally, and I started thinking of them as separate things, the pace are and the trio.

[SPEAKER_01]: But now the trio were more present, more persistent, more intense.

[SPEAKER_01]: Other than the outline of that trio I never saw anything, I never heard voices, sometimes I couldn't even see them at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: For example if it was a full moon and that part of my room was lighter than usual, I knew they were there, but I could see all of the things that the back of my room like I normally could.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was no way anyone could be that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Though I knew they were.

[SPEAKER_01]: the way you know someone stood behind you when you can't see them.

[SPEAKER_01]: That type of feeling.

[SPEAKER_01]: Though were a good few times I almost threw away the key ring.

[SPEAKER_01]: Took all of my keys from it, held it over the outside bin, ready to drop it in there.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I just couldn't do it.

[SPEAKER_01]: That ring in its little hangar arms, were all I had of my mom, that felt good.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now this brings us to March of this year, a year since my mum had died.

[SPEAKER_01]: My sisters and I decided we should do something to mark the anniversary.

[SPEAKER_01]: Louise suggested we go to Monday, Bingo, have a drink at Mum's local.

[SPEAKER_01]: Raised a glass to have.

[SPEAKER_01]: It felt appropriate, given how much she'd apparently loved it there.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, on the Monday closest to the anniversary, we had a quick pre-drink in my house [SPEAKER_01]: The bingo took place in a typical UK village pulp, probably 80 plus years old, nothing fancy.

[SPEAKER_01]: A working men's club sort of place, sticky carpets, fruit machines, that smell of beer and cleaning products.

[SPEAKER_01]: We got ourselves some drinks and we sat in the lounge area first, not in the main [SPEAKER_01]: carefully.

[SPEAKER_01]: The way you do when you're all thinking the same thing, but no one wants to say it aloud.

[SPEAKER_01]: That she was difficult.

[SPEAKER_01]: That we all struggled with her.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because we missed her anyway.

[SPEAKER_01]: I placed my keys on the table.

[SPEAKER_01]: Habit, I suppose.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I was fiddling with the purple crystal, while we all talked, running it between my fingers.

[SPEAKER_01]: An older woman approached our table.

[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe late 60s early 70s, smartly dressed with a kind face.

[SPEAKER_01]: She served her name was Laney.

[SPEAKER_01]: She was sorry to intrude, but she'd known her mother apparently.

[SPEAKER_01]: She recognized Louise's face from the funeral.

[SPEAKER_01]: We invited her to sit down, bought her a drink, and she told us a few nice stories.

[SPEAKER_01]: Things about mum we didn't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: How generous she'd been.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then she looked at the keys, in particular at the purple crystal, and her face changed.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, not to one of horror, but surprised.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, she said, leaning in.

[SPEAKER_01]: Did she pass the pendulum onto you then?

[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't understand.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, what?

[SPEAKER_01]: I thought she kept all that from you girls.

[SPEAKER_01]: We all looked at each other and said, kept what from us.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then the woman went pale.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, God, you don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's when she told us that that purple crystal wasn't just for decoration.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was a pendulum.

[SPEAKER_01]: And for over 20 years, our mother and her two friends, the names of whom we didn't recognize, and both of whom had died, worn apparently in 2019, and won in 2021, met in a small room upstairs in this very pub every Monday night, to give psychic readings.

[SPEAKER_01]: Tarot, pendulum, palm, mediumship, [SPEAKER_01]: But to a very select group, according to Laney, it was invitation only, nothing was advertised.

[SPEAKER_01]: On mother was the last surviving member of that trio, but she apparently still kept coming every Monday, right up until she got too ill.

[SPEAKER_01]: Still going up to that room on her own.

[SPEAKER_01]: We sat there, stung.

[SPEAKER_01]: It explained everything.

[SPEAKER_01]: The secrecy, the lies about Bingo, the part of a life she never shared.

[SPEAKER_01]: She'd never been playing Bingo.

[SPEAKER_01]: She'd been speaking to the dad.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what made me say it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Probably the look on the woman's face, maybe because I was finally starting to understand.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I told her about the hauntings, the pacing, the three crescences watching me, and the feeling that something had come home with these keys.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now came a face closer to horror.

[SPEAKER_01]: She placed her hand over mine.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're still with it.

[SPEAKER_01]: She said, nodding again at the queering.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're with the pendulum.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're still attached to their work.

[SPEAKER_01]: You need to get that connection broke.

[SPEAKER_01]: Louise, who we now laugh at, for having her mouth open the full-time lady was there, asked lady how we do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Lainey said we'd need to get a blessed.

[SPEAKER_01]: A priest, if we were religious or, if not, someone whom you were doing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing for her, for us, for me.

[SPEAKER_01]: Karen spoke to her priest, I'm not religious but Karen goes to church.

[SPEAKER_01]: She knew him well enough to talk to and so asked for his help.

[SPEAKER_01]: We went to see him a week later, I bought the keys, I explained the situation, he didn't ask a single question, he didn't judge anything.

[SPEAKER_01]: He listened, nodded, and then blessed the keys, the pendulum, specifically.

[SPEAKER_01]: He said a small prayer over them, cost-bying them in his hand.

[SPEAKER_01]: He then headed off and came back with a small bottle of holy water, and suggested I place the key ring in a small bowl, cover it with the holy water for seven days.

[SPEAKER_01]: He said his blessing could broken any connection, but this would be an extra layer of help.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I am not exaggerating when I say, the activity stopped immediately, completely.

[SPEAKER_01]: No footsteps, no objects moving, no sense of being watched.

[SPEAKER_01]: The house felt lighter, normal.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like it was spring and someone had opened all the windows and left the fresh breeze in.

[SPEAKER_01]: I still have the key ring.

[SPEAKER_01]: I keep it in a drawer now, I've moved my keys back to the old ring.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I think I can safely say, whatever was attached to that key ring worth of pendulum, moremen have friends, their work, their energy, whatever you'd like to call it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's gone.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're at peace now, I guess.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or at the very least, they've left me alone.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've not told many people a story, my sister's now obviously, and the priest.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Laney from the pub, most people would think I'd lost it if I told them the story.

[SPEAKER_01]: That grief made me imagine the whole thing, but I know what I felt and seen.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know what was in my house.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think about mum's secret life quite a lot now.

[SPEAKER_01]: what she did in that room above a pub, who she spoke to, who her clientele were.

[SPEAKER_01]: Whether she was any good at it, part of me wishes she told us she'd let us in.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I do understand why she didn't.

[SPEAKER_01]: She was protecting something that mattered to her.

[SPEAKER_01]: She was protecting ghosts.

[SPEAKER_01]: I like to think on some level she was trying to reach out.

[SPEAKER_01]: My theory now is she was there on her own, pacing, sad, maybe wanting to explain, to apologize for the secrets, and then she'd return in the night with the other two.

[SPEAKER_01]: Doing what they'd always done, maybe protecting their work, protecting her, protecting me, but staying together even in death.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you're wondering no, nothing psychic gift-wise has been passed on to any of us three girls.

[SPEAKER_01]: Although, in our sincerity, my niece, Louise's daughter, has just started senior school.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Louise has had a few spooky encounters via her daughter.

[SPEAKER_01]: They do say these things skip a generation, don't they?

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for reading, Kev.

[SPEAKER_01]: Anonymous.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, anonymous.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for providing me and us with this tremendous miniser.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad I'm recording this during the day because I can perfectly visualize three small, elderly women holding hands, rocking back and forth on their heels in the darkness of the foot of my bed, and if I was recording this at night, well, let's just say I'd be putting all the lights on for about an hour.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thankfully, I don't have to waste my electric bill because it is the middle of the day, but genuinely anonymous, thank you for such a marvelous experience.

[SPEAKER_01]: And to everyone, don't forget, if you have your own personal paranormal experience, please click the link in the show notes or go direct to the website, thedogparanormal.com and share your experience with me so I can share it with all this new ship.

[SPEAKER_01]: because all of these experiences are building to a wonderful collage of this overall puzzle we call the Paranormal.

[SPEAKER_01]: But until next time, stay safe, take care, and I'll speak to you soon.