ls Meramec State Park Haunted by Spirits Past?

By Pat Aman

Photo: Mermec State Park

Meramec State Park is a beautiful area in Franklin County Missouri. It's about 60 miles southwest of St. Louis off Highway 44 near Sullivan Missouri. The Meramec River flows beautifully through this magnificent, forested area and provides everything for people from fishing and floating to just being able to sit and enjoy the lovely views. The bluffs along some stretches of the river have a lot of limestone. I mention this because limestone seems to be connected to some of paranormal cases.

Photo: Mermec State Park

The Park has about 11 cabins that were built during the Great Depression in the 1930's. President Franklin Roosevelt established the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corp, to create jobs to help people get back to work.  During this time, a lot of young men were hired to build structures in state and national parks, and then they also lived in these cabins. Today, these dwellings can be rented by the public. There's no Wi-fi, TV, radio etc. These awesome cabins are fully furnished with not just furniture, but linens, appliances, etc.....just like home.   

It's known, by some of us, that this area has had and can still have unexplained things occur. While enjoying our "cabining" experiences (we don't go "camping", but we do go "cabining"), we've had paranormal experiences in a couple of the cabins. In 2014, my husband, my brother, his wife and I were staying in one of these homes away from home when this incident happened.  

 There are times when out of the blue something in my head says, "Take a picture of this."  When I listen to that inner voice, I usually end up with pictures that create questions, but have no answers.

Photo 1

The 'voice' I heard this one particular day, told me to take a picture of the cabin's kitchen door. That's a strange subject for a picture, but I did what my little voice told me to do.  When I looked at the picture on my camera, it had turned out very blurry (picture 1). To see if I had a problem with my camera, while standing in the same spot I turned to the right and took a picture of flowers that were on the kitchen table (picture 2). This picture, as you can see, came out perfectly clear.

Photo 2

Picture 3

I then turned back to the door, took another picture and THAT picture came out blurry like the first picture did (picture 3).

My sister-in-law was in the living room, and I called her over and showed her what was happening on the pictures. While we were standing there discussing this odd occurrence, at the same time we both sort of shivered, looked at each other and said "WHOA!"  We had been startled by a very cold breeze that had gone THROUGH both of us!  At the same time, we both blurted out "did you feel that?".  Laughing and sort of in shock, we couldn't believe what had just happened.

Picture 4

After that happened, I decided, for whatever reason, to take another picture of the door. That picture came out nice and clear as you can see in picture 4. 

Other experiences while staying in cabins:

• We've heard, faintly, a radio playing old songs from the 30's/40's. 

• Another time, three of us were in the living room having a conversation.  We were interrupted when we heard moans coming from an empty corner of the room.  
  
  
• We woke up one morning and walked into the living room area and saw small, bare footprints in a row on the cushion of the futon. It looked like maybe a child had walked on it. No children were with us. I don't understand or try to explain what happened at those times, but they were great paranormal experiences.

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Pat Aman is a retired church secretary, great grandmother, and has been happily married for 58 years. During her lifetime she has seen two UFO’s, lived in a house that had an unfriendly spirit, and became very interested in Cryptids.

Gargoyles in the bedroom

 By Robert S Urbanek

Mausoleum for Queen Louise-Marie;
 Sint-Petrus-en-Pauluskerk; Ostend, Belgium gargoyle
 Georges Jansoone 

I had been aggravated for several months by noise from a neighbor. On October 14, 2020, a boisterous backyard gathering dispersed shortly after 10 p.m. but my anxiety kept me awake until about 4 a.m.

At approximately 5:15 a.m. I was awakened by a light. To my left, what had been a shuttered window was now a blank wall softly lit with a slight yellowish tinge, as if illuminated by candlelight. Then, near the top of the wall, appeared the living head of a monster, like a cathedral gargoyle. The beastly head was replaced by another after a couple of seconds, then followed by another. This happened five or six times. One head had glowing eyes. Another appeared to be a cross between a man and a lion. Then the heads disappeared.

I turned to my right to turn on a light and make notes. When I looked back, the shuttered windows had returned.

While this vision might be related to my anxiety, this seemed to be a spectacular display for something as mundane as a noisy neighbor. Perhaps the event released demons from my subconscious. Did I purge beasts from my mind only to release them into the world? I looked up gargoyles on Wikipedia. One section noted “gargoyles are said to protect what they guard, such as a church, from any evil or harmful spirits” but another passage said, “The primary use of the gargoyle was to illustrate evil through the form of the gargoyle.”

One could argue that extreme stress had altered my brain chemistry so as to create an illusion, but since I had fallen asleep before the vision, I would think my brain would have returned to a more balanced state during the sleep period.

Two days after the vision, after another noisy and sleepless night, I went to the ER to request some sleep meds. I described my "hallucination." They took a blood panel (which came up fine), prescribed some sleep meds but did not take x-rays. The discharge nurse, after asking a few questions to determine my mental stability, suggested that I might be a shaman.

A few days later, I had a phone consultation with my internist, and he also did not suggest a brain scan. Fortunately, the next several days were peaceful and I slept much better, both with and without the pills.

After a few weeks, the neighbor moved away, and the new neighbor was much quieter.

This was not my first experience with a specter on the wall. On February 9, 2005. I was asleep in a different room in my house. I was awakened at about 2:15 a.m. by a bright light emanating from a clock on a dresser near the foot of my bed. To my right, next to the closet door, a portion of the wall glowed like a torch-lit cave. Stick figures on the wall bounced against each other, like men in hand-to-hand combat. 

To my left hung a Patrick Nagel serigraph depicting a larger-than-life head of a woman wearing sunglasses who had a stark white face and gray hair. I had purchased the print in 1985. But at this moment, the picture was solid black and bulging from the wall. To break this spell, I reached up and switched on the room light. The vision disappeared. I concluded that the dark power of the Nagel “goddess” was inciting the wall warriors to fight each other.

Robert S Urbanek

Vacaville, California
Website: www.robertsurbanek.com