WIGHT HOLLOW

The House on Cottage Street

It was a weekend in late July 1989. I was sixteen, and it was a typical afternoon at 960 Cottage St NE, Salem, OR 97301. I still remember that old Bungalow style house. I think it was built in 1925 or something like that.

DISCLAIMER: Don't harass anyone living there now. I don't know them and haven't lived in Salem Oregon for over 16 years at the time of this post!

A few of my friends, guys like myself, usually hung around, but they weren’t over that day. I was mostly focused on the TV, watching MTV back when it actually played music videos instead of a bunch of crappy game shows and "reality TV." Prince’s "Batdance" had just come out—it was a weird track, and honestly, not one of his better ones in my opinion. I was more into things like Great White’s "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" or Tears for Fears' "Sowing the Seeds of Love."

The house was packed.

My parents had their friends over, and my younger sister had a bunch of her friends there—girls around thirteen to fourteen, like my sister, filled the room with high-energy chatter. Being sixteen, I was just trying to exist in the middle of all that noise.

My sister's friends were constantly flanking me and flirting, but I didn’t think much of it; I figured they were just joking around or being annoying. But I didn't hate it either because generally I was close to my sister, protective of her and her friends and got use to her friends over the years by that point.

I didn't find out until years later that one of them actually really liked me, like a whole lot, but back then, I was just a teenage boy trying to watch music videos, and was in really good shape playing football and lifting weights with a set I had at home in the basement I'd often go to when the chatter got to be too much for me, especially during this Summer Break.

Now that I think about it, I do miss those times and aside form the strange shit, not so great shit of high school drama, I do miss it, and if I could somehow time travel my mind now, fully intact to back then, I'd do it all over because it was awesome. I might have even tried harder in school, but whatever.

It should be noted that at that time in life, I considered myself to be an atheist. Not one of those militant, belligerent "boo hoo, my parents made me go to church" types. I was also a staunch skeptic chalking any odd experiences from the past as waking nightmares or something along those lines, and the rest mere hoaxes. More often than not that was the case.

I just kept my atheism to myself and didn't feel the need to justify it if someone asked me what I did or didn't believe, usually responding with it doesn't matter and wont change what someone else does or doesn't and doesn't really hold weight on how I get along with anyone unless they make it and issue and at which point considered it there loss of me as a friend than the other way around.

The Figure in the Glass

So everything was mellow for the most part. Any strange stuff was no where in my mind and one of my sister's friends had flopped herself across my lap playfully, and made everyone laugh, including my parents. The afternoon turned instantly. A violent, heavy slamming erupted at the front door. It wasn’t a polite knock; it was a heavy, rhythmic slamming—the sound of a fist hitting the wood and glass with enough force that the frames rattled. The music and the chatter in the room went dead silent.

We all looked at the door. Through the decorative frosted glass, I could see a solid, dark silhouette. So could everyone else. It was a tall, solid shadow, distinctly wearing a wide-brimmed hat resembling a fedora. The figure continued to pummel the door, the strikes so aggressive that everyone in the room genuinely thought the glass was going to shatter inward.

The Search

Three of the men in the room moved immediately. One of my parents' friends snuck up to the front door while two others, including my stepdad, bolted for the back to cut off any escape route by the fence line. The guy at the front door reached for the handle and wrenched it open, prepared for a physical confrontation.

The porch was empty.

He stood in the doorway, staring out at a quiet, sun-drenched street. At the same moment, the two men who had run around the back reached the yard. The perimeter was sealed. To exit the property quickly, a person would have had to scale a fence that was far too high to jump or climb in the seconds it took for them to move. We all looked around, but there was no sound of a car engine starting, no footsteps retreating, and no one hiding in the bushes. With a street as small as Cottage Street was, it wasn't physically possible for someone to vanish that fast.

The Escalation

That day scared everyone, but it was just the start. Things at the house started getting out of hand fast. Not long after that, my sister was pushed down the stairs by an unseen force.

Then it happened to me. I was in bed when the mattress started heaving and waving under me like it was a waterbed, even though it was just a standard mattress. I stayed pinned there, paralyzed, as low-toned whispers started swirling around the room. They merged into a hollow, miserable moan that crawled closer and closer until it peaked—exploding into a full-blown yell emanating directly from my pillow.

It wasn't a story or a fantasy. It was just what started happening in that house, and it was getting out of hand.

The Aftermath and a Shift in Reality

I don’t want to go through every single experience the others had—my sister, my mom, my stepdad, or the friends. My sister had some really good, loyal friends who often offered to let her spend the night at their places just to get away from the house. To this day, my sister has blocked out a lot of what happened there, and I don't bring it up to her.

A couple of her friends hung around me and became mutual friends for a while before life moved us all in different directions. Sometimes they’d hang out with me and we’d head to the mall or whatever; over time, I ended up with more lady friends than guy friends. Being a straight kid, that was perfectly cool with me. They’d notice when something in the house rattled me, but eventually, we moved on.

The Skeptic’s Wall

What I seldom inform anyone is that prior to these occurrences—especially after I turned twelve—I was more or less an agnostic and an atheist. I admitted I didn't know everything, but I acknowledged that nobody else did either. I didn’t believe in deities, ghosts, spirits, or space aliens poking people and mutilating cattle.

This was also the era of the "Satanic Panic." Most of it was just mainstream media and bullshit talk shows spreading hysteria. However, contrary to modern claims, not all the reports were false; there were some actual theistic Satanists into some really sick shit back then. Most people hadn't even heard of "Wicca" or related groups until the 1990s New Age movement erupted with people like Shirley MacLaine and psychic-themed media appearing everywhere.

The Breaking Point

I will say I had one particularly bad encounter that I survived. If I went into the full details, nobody would believe it—honestly, I wouldn’t believe it either if I heard it from someone else. But after that specific incident, things started calming down, even though there was always a thick, heavy feeling in the air at that place.

We finally moved. By the period of 1991 to 1994, many close friends had moved away too, and some unfortunately died in accidents. Whatever the cause was, everything started turning dark around 1996 and, from my experience, it never truly stopped; it only slightly leveled out in the early 2010s.

Legacy of the Shadow

That’s life. I’m 53 now and not in the best of health, but this is my story. It wasn’t the first or the last place where things occurred, but nothing else ever reached that level. It was a total culture shock that forced me to rethink everything and explore deeper. That house, and the shadow through the stained glass, provided the foundational experiences that eventually led to the creation of Druwayu. It was the most significant chapter of my life, the moment I had to acknowledge that there was much more to the world than I had ever been willing to believe.

The Final Word: A Skeptic’s Reality

I still keep my skeptic's filter firmly in place because of all the hoaxes, and hoaxes really piss me off. Not only do they detract from the few actual things that occur, but those of us who have actually experienced these things know right off when it’s bullshit inspired by Hollywood garbage. Now, we have the added problem of AI in addition to old means of digital photography and CGI used to fake occurrences.

The point is, some of this shit is actually real. I don't believe all "hauntings" are just the ghosts of someone's loved ones; I think it’s something else entirely. I still don't rule out some potential since we don't know what all that shit is, and I have a deep disgust with occultism and all the distortions it contributes to on top of everything else.

Scary as it was, that place on Cottage Street gave me a real culture shock. It forced me to rethink everything and explore more, and a lot of those experiences resulted in the basics of what became Druwayu. I'm 53 now, and while my health isn't the best, this remains the most significant experience of my life—the moment the world proved it was much darker and more complicated than I ever imagined.