A Woman's Intuition
An anecdote on trusting fear
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
It’s not always true is it. Don’t get me wrong. Pushing past fear, ignoring it even, is a valuable tool when it comes to personal growth. When stepping outside of your comfort zone. Making a career change or starting a new habit. Wrangling fear is one of the markers of many of the greats in any field. They don’t listen to the nagging voice that says, “What if.” They simply do it, despite themselves.
What I am going to write about today is the start of a short interlude exploring intuition, and specifically fear and the importance of paying attention to it. If you’ve been following along, I’ve just wrapped up my Wendigo series. I’m in the middle of research for my next one (the reveal for that will come next week), but I’ve got some shorter topics I’d like to write about. This is a personal story that I thought of while reading The Gift of Fear. This story takes a slightly more paranormal turn than the stories in that book do, but it resonates with the same message. Trust yourself.
You know those encounters that you just can’t quite fit into your boxy worldview? Maybe you’re an atheist who had a psychic encounter you can’t reconcile. Perhaps you’re a Christian who was visited by the ghost of a relative who recently passed. Maybe you’re agnostic, but the Virgin Mary appeared to you in a precognitive dream.
There are so many combinations of worldview and faith (or lack thereof) running headfirst into an offbeat encounter that can’t be explained by dearly held beliefs. This is one of those stories. It did not happen to me. It happened to my mother. I was a child when this occurred, maybe nine or ten years old, but I still remember it vividly. It scared me. It still does when I think about it.
My aunt was babysitting me for a few minutes. My cousin was over. It was a nice evening. My mom took my toddler brother and infant sister with her to go run some errands. It was dark out, but not late. We played while my aunt drank coffee at the kitchen table in our small townhome.
The place was not well lit. The only ceiling lights we had were in the kitchen and bathrooms, so my cousin and I played in dim orange lighting provided by a floor lamp my stepdad had picked up at a garage sale. I don’t know how long it had been. Not long, before my mom burst into the house.
She was afraid, holding my baby sister in her arms and urging my brother through the door. This isn’t entirely out of character. My mom is a bit tightly wound, excitable. But unlike her usual stories of meeting someone at the gas station or talking a stranger’s ear off for an hour in the grocery store, she was afraid. In my memory she was out of breath, panting.
“What happened?” my aunt asked.
She knew it was going to sound out there. But my aunt is a very devout believer in intuition and psychic abilities. She was the right person to tell.
“I got a really bad feeling.”
“What do you mean?”
My mom went on to explain that she was at the post office. She had pulled up to a drop box to mail a letter, some bill more than likely. When she got there, a feeling of dread overtook her. Her skin prickled. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. Fear rushed over her.
Behind her was a man in a truck. He was waiting to drop his mail off too. My mom sat in her car terrified. Frozen. She started to cry. She couldn’t bring herself to roll down the window or open the door, and after a few moments of waiting, the man behind her got out and walked his mail to the drop box, shoving it in before asking if she was okay. She told him she was and then left.
In the kitchen that night, she told my aunt that she felt complete evil around her. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. She was afraid that someone was going to kill her. Initially she thought the man behind her was the reason for that feeling. Obviously he was just a normal post office goer, running the same errands as she was that day.
But it was a couple of weeks later when my mom learned that a 19-year-old woman’s body had been found near the intersection just beyond the post office parking lot. She was nude, her throat slashed, left dead at a construction site. My mom told me that she thought that was what she felt that night.
To be honest, I tend to be a skeptic about things like this. There’s a lot of human psychology around what we feel and why. In fact, I had to look through archived newspaper articles and call my mom before I wrote this just to be sure I hadn’t misremembered the whole thing. It took some digging. I searched the wrong year and almost wrote the whole thing off as family urban legend. I even conjured up a few other stories my mother had told me and set off to find out if they were true. I did find it though, and it happened the way my mom remembered.1
In the book I’m reading right now about violence and intuition, the author makes the point that human beings have evolved to survive based on instinct. No different than an animal that gets spooked by a smell on the wind, or a sound in the dark.
I tend to think that’s the right explanation. At least most of the time. Fear plays that role in our lives. It keeps us safe, and when it comes to safety and well-being, I think it’s worth following those gut instincts every time. There doesn’t have to be logic to it. A reasonable explanation. If your body says to get the hell out of somewhere, or not take that turn, or check your back seat, you do it.
This anecdote is a little different. My mom wasn’t in immediate danger. Why would my mom feel something like this, out of the blue, within weeks of when a murder would take place? Maybe it already had. Maybe it was on that very night. What role does intuition play when we pick up on danger that’s already passed, or hasn’t yet happened?
My aunt told her it was probably because she has small children. She said pregnant women have heightened intuition, so it would make sense that a mother with young children would too. They’re opened up to their senses in a different way. Maybe there’s truth to that. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s unexplainable. Maybe it’s evolution. Maybe it’s a woman’s intuition.