Clive’s Childhood Fright

This story was sumitted by Clive Worth of Pontyates.

When I was about five or six years old, I had a strange experience. It was not a dream or a hallucination, and even now, fifty years on, I can still see it so clearly. When I think about it, I cannot help but notice that people who claim to have seen ghosts, UFOs or moving objects etc are often disbelieved by most people, who even claim that they are crackpots.

Yet what they claim to have seen is a lot more down-to-earth than what I saw that time.

This is why I have had to keep it to myself over the years and only told a few trusted friends because of the fact I was only about five or six then and more than anything what I saw has, to me, never ever made any sense.

For me at the time it was a very frightening experience, so much so that it has haunted me over the years and I would love to know what it was and if possible, why I saw it. I can only find this out by letting everyone know what I saw, in the hope that they will believe me and that they might know more about it.

It started one night when I was asleep in bed. It was very dark and I was woken up by a bright orange glow next to my bed. (Now I found out later on that it was not an orange colour but gold that I saw at the time, but because I was in a state of shock to me, at the time, this glow was orange.)

Something stood by my bed with the body of a man but the head of a fox, with long straight pointed ears sticking up and its arms straight, as if it was standing to attention. I can even now remember those piercing blue eyes looking straight down at me and it frightened the life out of me.

This was about 1956 or ’57. We had a black and white TV, no colour magazines or papers then, and no colour books at home – so there was no way I could have seen this image anywhere. Later, when I was about fourteen, I discovered what the figure was when I started to go with older boys to the cinema and watch films about Romans and Egyptian gods – it was like a jackal statue from inside a tomb.

I have, over the years, told a few close friends and none of my close friends ever made a comment or given an explanation because they probably did not believe me. It is, after all, such an amazing story, so hard to believe. It beggars belief and the only proof I have is me and me only, and only I know that I saw what I saw.

After seeing this, it seemed to give me a kind of inner strength to carry on in life because I realised then, at such a very young age, that there was more to life and that there was some other kind of life other than ours.