; Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Saturday, May 03, 2025

WERE THESE 'TRICKSTER' ENCOUNTERS?

"Now I am just really curious after thirty years to know what this was about and why these things happened, though I believe I might not ever know the answer."

I received the following account:

"Hello, Lon. I've been reading your website and all the stories you've posted every week for over a year now. Your website, along with Beyond Creepy, has really filled me in with the oddities of this strange world we find ourselves in. When I was 18 years of age, I started to have encounters with greys in my life. I only remember snippets, and though I did try a hypnotic memory recovery around 8 years ago, nothing came of it at all. My interest in aliens came and went over the years until I found your website. Then I found out that there are a lot more things happening than just alien encounters. Right now I am 43 years old, and I have two young boys of my own - 4 and 8.

I almost put it out of my mind, but when I was younger, I had two strange encounters, with beings that I had never seen. Now I am just really curious after thirty years to know what this was about and why these things happened, though I believe I might not ever know the answer. I believe that you mentioned something like a trickster in one of your comments on a person's story last year. This is possibly the closest thing I could compare it to, though I admit I know nothing about this entity other than its name.

These two events took place in the first half of my life. When I was twelve, and the second when I was twenty-two years old.

The first event occurred when I was over at my best friend's house around the summer of 1988. My family and I moved about a year previously to this, and we had lived two doors over from my friend's home in a small cul-de-sac. I've never forgotten the address of our old house in Surrey, BC, Canada. I had known my friend since I was five, and he was almost a year older than me. I looked up to him like he was my older brother. So he and his older brother used to look out for me while I grew up. One day when nobody else but my friend and I were in his home, it must have been around the middle of the day to the afternoon, because I do remember the sun being out and it being bright, that all of a sudden my friend basically yelled my name, and practically yanked me out of his house through his garage which was the closest exit, and out onto his front yard. He was in a panic and I didn't understand why. It all happened so fast, but I knew by his behavior that something was seriously wrong.

We went across the cul-de-sac towards my old next-door neighbor, who was a firefighter, and both our families knew him and were friends with his kids. My friend told me on the way that there was this man in the bathroom, (which was right next to the garage door) that he saw through the open door in the mirror. I asked him what he looked like, and my memory of his description was that this man was menacing, and it terrified him. Whether he was big or small, or any other details I don't recall my friend saying, but I had never seen him so terrified before, or since. We rang the doorbell to the house with the firefighter, and he answered the door. My friend explained to him what he saw in his house, and the man agreed to go over and check it out. This to me seems strange today since if you think someone is in your house, you call the police, and I don't know why my friend or the firefighter didn't do that at the time. Regardless, he checked out the house, and I remember that he wasn't in there too long, maybe less than five minutes. He came back out and said that there was no one there. I just remember feeling a little foolish and a little let down at the time after he came back with a weird look on his face like we had made it up. But I trust my friend, and to this day I believe he saw something, though what it was, I have no idea.

Fast forward ten years to when I was twenty-two years old. My family moved again when I was sixteen, but this time to a city that was about a four-hour drive away. It was Kelowna, BC. I might not have put much thought into what happened at my friend's house if this second event didn't happen. Again, I didn't see anyone, but I believe whatever it was, greatly affected my night at work.

It was 1998, and I was working at a grocery store in a nearby town in Kelowna where I was living with my girlfriend. Now I had been working at this store for over a year and a half, and was working the night shift. We started at 12AM, about three hours after the store closed, and probably over two hours since the last of the staff had left. This store was called Extra Foods, however, this store location was closed down around the year 2010 and I am not aware of what they have put in its place since. It wasn't a small store, it was actually pretty large. I was somewhat excited, since it was basically my night to prove myself to my supervisor and the store management since I was in charge for the first time that night. I got to the store, turned off the alarm, used the key I was given, and let in the other two grocery stockers - who were somewhat new since they started maybe about three to four months previous to this night. These two guys were actually friends together and had known each other for quite a few years before they started working there. I got along with them without any issues, and we were all around the same age. The problem began though, when for some reason the store alarm, though silent, went off, and alerted the assistant store manager who thankfully for both our sakes wasn't working there in the morning. He called the store, I answered, he told me the alarm was going and I went and turned it off.

My memory of the alarm situation was that I was to turn it off to enter, and then I was to arm it again once everyone was in the store. This is what I did, and I still don't understand why it went off. Which might be something that you would probably forget about if it happened once, but it happened again. This time the assistant store manager showed up after phoning and I left it off until he got there. This store manager, I liked, and he liked me, and I always liked working around him, so he didn't give me a hard time, but he was also someone I felt that I really didn't want to get on the bad side of. He explained to me after I gave him my apologies that this was my first time, and it was somewhat expected. We went over the alarm again, and it seemed really simple and that was why I couldn't figure out why I was having so much of a difficult time with it.

It makes no sense to me why the alarm would go off twice, not at all. My parents had an alarm on their house since we moved away from the cul-de-sac by my best friend, and I was comfortable with being around a house alarm. So why would this store alarm be any different? The other two guys I was working with clearly knew that the store doors couldn't be opened because the alarm was set, and they would have known not to try opening the doors. Besides, we were all sort of working in the same general area, and I knew that they were nearby. The front doors of the store were a fair ways off, and I would know if either of them went outside. Anyhow, thinking the alarm situation was taken care of, my manager drove home, and now we worked on what little stock there was until the truck arrived with the real work for the night. So yeah, I had to turn off the alarm again to open up the doors to the loading bay. I might have forgotten about this night other than my seeming ineptitude at being able to prevent the store alarm from going off, but this is where it got really strange.

I had never seen this truck driver before, which was common since the stockers on the floor didn't typically interact with the drivers, and may have only seen them for a minute while they used a pallet-jack to move the pallets full of plastic-wrapped boxes out to the floor to unload, or when the drivers might have made a dash across the store to use the washroom. I worked there at night for around six months and had rarely seen the same guy more than a few times. So the guys on the floor stocking didn't really know these drivers, which is an important point for my story, because the stupid store alarm went off again when I thought I had it turned off to open the bay door to start unloading the truck. While this occurred, and I had answered the phone again to the assistant manager, the two stockers and the truck driver were standing outside of the public washroom, which was about thirty feet from the customer service desk where the phone was. I spoke to the assistant manager, who had kept his cool still throughout all of this, even though it was probably around 1AM at this point. I turned off the alarm again and then went over to the three guys standing outside of the men's washroom.

These truck drivers as far as I know, always drove alone from the Calgary supply to this store in Kelowna. In fact, working at another grocery store a few years after this one, I had never before seen more than just one person get out of a truck. There was no husband and wife team in my experience, though I have seen that on TV or movies before. This guy was no different, so nothing could explain why all three of the guys present there other than me swore that there was another person there in the store, who entered the men's public washroom. I asked the truck driver if he was joking with me, and I looked at the faces of the two stockers, and they all had serious, if not alarmed looks on their faces. All four of us knew that no one else was supposed to be there, yet there was apparently someone else there in the washroom a few feet from me.

The odd thing was, that even before entering the washroom, I knew somehow that no one would be there, and not because I believed I was being tricked by the three guys outside, but I just knew that I would find no one there. And that is exactly what happened when I went in and searched. There were only three or four bathroom stalls, and I checked each one, and the place was empty. I walked out and told them no one was there, and these guys stood there for a moment looking confused, but we all wanted to get to work because this store, Extra Foods really pushed their workers to the limit when it came to boxes stocked per hour, which was about twice the minimum number normally accepted by grocery stores. I had to put this weird, unexplained event out of my mind at the time, start unloading the truck, and get to work on stocking the shelves. However, looking back upon that night, I cannot dismiss that who or whatever that unexplained person was, was the cause of the alarms going off, and I wasn't the only one who thought that way. I believe the other guys, including the truck driver also made the connection. However, I never told the assistant manager, or anyone else other than my girlfriend and close family about it since, because I felt at the time that if I did tell anyone else at the store about it they might have thought I had lost my mind.

So now I am curious, am I the only one who has experienced something like this? Is there no one else out there who has had experiences with some entity that they have not seen themselves in which others have seen, yet had been affected by them?

If you had asked me what I thought had caused this to me back when I was twenty-two, I probably would have given my honest answer that it was probably aliens messing around with me, since while some may view these two events as highly strange, they were for me at the time, just two small strange encounters among a whole sea of unexplained events going on in my lifetime, and I wasn't a believer in demons, or anything other than ghosts and aliens, and maybe Bigfoot. I wasn't aware at the time that there was an entire plethora of others that fit none of those categories." R

NOTE: In my book 'Alien Disclosure: Experiencers Expose Reality,' there are some references to 'trickster' activity. It is especially prevalent in David Eckhart's experiences; intriguing bizarre antics displayed for no apparent reason or effect. Lon

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Have you had a sighting or encounter?
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Noted UFOlogist Dr. Raymond Keller believes the idea of extraterrestrials and even ultra-dimensional beings from many different planets and alternate realms living and working among us clandestinely is more than just another conspiracy theory.
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