by Kayla Weller

Created on: November 30, 2010

I've had a lifelong fascination with the paranormal. As a child, I read stacks of books on the subject.  Many of my afternoons and nights were spent watching television shows and movies on the paranormal. The paranormal is a broad term though and can include many different sub-topics. Everybody interested in the paranormal has their own favorites. Mine were ghosts and extra sensory perception. Other subjects just didn't interest me as much. Though I certainly believed UFOs and alien life forms were possible, I just wasn't intrigued. And, though the magic and rituals of the Wiccans and Pagans was an interesting subject, the agnostic in me balked with skepticism. Cryptozoology bored me. If Bigfoot or the Chupacabra existed, it was just a mutation that had yet to be discovered by modern science.

I never had my own experiences with the paranormal. I listened to the tales of my fellow students who had their own experiences with both a touch of fear and of jealousy. The pair of friends who walked past a cemetery and saw a group of nuns in a circle out of the corner of their eye. When they turned to face the circle full on, the nuns were gone. The translucent faces at the window that another friend would often see. The friend whose bedroom television that would inexplicably turn on during the night. But, me? The one who desperately wanted to see these things? I always saw the mundane details of daily life and nothing more.

Until I was 27. I had just moved to Las Vegas and was living in an apartment near The Strip. Late one night, I stopped at a strip mall near where I lived to pick up a few things. I didn't know it at the time but the battery in the minivan that I drove was starting to die. When I returned to the car, I turned it on. Or tried to. Nothing was happening. The car was completely unresponsive. Now, keep in mind, I know nothing about auto repair. I had a vague idea of how to change the oil and that was it. Even worse, I was on the verge of broke and all my family and friends were halfway across the country.

'How in the hell am I going to get the car back home?' I thought in a panic.

My mind went through all the options and I couldn't come up with a solution. In the end, I decided to go to sleep in the back of the car. When I woke up in the morning, I decided, I would figure it out. Which is probably a strange decision but, hey, I never claimed to be normal.

I awoke in the morning with the sun shining its rays down onto the parking lot. I sat up and stared at the steering wheel still unsure of how to get the car home. As I stared, the dashboard lit up, the car revved into life and...drove from the space it was parked in to another parking space two lanes down. The car stopped and turned off.

My jaw dropped and my mind was a blank as I stared in shock. What's odd is that I didn't experience any fear. All those horror movies I watched as a child should have conditioned me to fear a ghostly presence. But, no, I had this thought that whatever it was that had drove the car across the parking lot was helping me and that there wasn't anything to fear.

Out of pure instinct, I got out of the car and got into the driver's seat. When I turned the key, the car worked perfectly and I drove home.

The skeptic in me tries to convince me that it was just a dream. After all, I had just woken up, hadn't I? But I know that I was wide awake at the time and can't blame it on a half-asleep state. I guess I'll never really be able to explain that moment in time.

Learn more about this author, Kayla Weller.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.