Sixth Sense
Trust your gut
An unrelated plug.
I told you last week I would be writing about a few shorter topics while I gather research for my next series. I also promised I’d let you know what it would be about. Drum roll please….witch hunts. If you read my Wendigo series, you will probably be able to see what inspired the topic. I aim to expand beyond the Salem Witch Trials, though I can’t write about witch hunts without touching on the events that happened there.
Aren’t we all terrified by the persuasion of the crowd? Being accused of a crime we didn’t commit? Witch hunts represent a strange vigilante justice gone awry, the mob mentality that overtakes, the worst of superstition. Anthropologists often attribute windigo killings to the same mentality, which got me curious about what drives them. Throughout the month of October, I will cover witch hunts throughout the world, the circumstances that lead to them, and the women (it’s usually women) who have been prosecuted during them.
Afraid of the Dark?1
Jurassic Park had just come out. A mother and her daughter couldn’t wait to see it. They bought tickets for a show that started right around dusk. It was a tradition they had with a few of the girl’s friends and their moms. They would go just before dark, get snacks, and watch a movie before heading home.
That afternoon, the mother had parked a few blocks from the theater to do some shopping with her daughter. They dropped off their bags and walked to the movies together. They joined their all female group and waited in line to buy tickets. The girls talked excitedly about the movie.
Behind them stood a man. He wore a black shirt, the words, “Afraid of the Dark” in white lettering splashed across it, and loose gym shorts. When the mother turned and saw him, her stomach got a sick feeling. She felt fear, but for no discernible reason. He glanced around at the girls huddled with their chatting mothers.
“Girls night out?” he asked.
“Mm hmm,” she replied, then quickly turned her back to him to disengage.
When they came out of the theater a couple of hours later it was dark. A friend asked if she wanted a ride to her car.
“Mom, I have to go to the bathroom,” her daughter said.
She didn’t want to make the other woman wait, and told her that she was alright. They could walk the few blocks to their car. As soon as the words left her mouth, she felt that she’d made a mistake, but instead of acting on the feeling, she pushed it away and said goodnight.
When they stepped out into night air, she thought of the man in the black shirt again, and picked up her pace. She couldn’t see anyone. Didn’t hear footfalls behind her. Still, her dread grew, and she decided to run.
“Are we racing, mommy?”
“Yes we are.”
She turned back, eyes pulled by a nagging feeling that someone was behind her, and saw the man from earlier in the night following them. She didn’t know where he had come from, but she knew she had to make it to the car before he did. By the time she reached her car, he was running after them. She unlocked the back door for her daughter first, shoved her in, and locked the door before closing it and running to the driver’s side.
She fumbled for the right key. Her shaky hand missed the lock as she tried to get the door open. By then, he had reached her car and was trying to open her daughter’s door. They met eyes from across the hood, and she felt a message exchanged between them. His look said, “You are my victim,” and her eyes said back, “No I am not.”
Finally she got her door unlocked and sat down to try and get the keys in. He was on her immediately, pulling her legs, trying to get her out of the car. Her only thought: I Have To Get Away. Keys. Keys. Keys.
Her body took over at that point, and it wasn’t until she was reversed and driving away, her car door still open, that she realized she had stabbed the man in both eyes with her car key, plunged it into the ignition, and escaped.
This was a story told by Gavin de Becker, the author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence. It doesn’t appear in his book. I watched him give a talk outlining principles detailed in the writing. The main point? Trust your intuition.
The woman above had several instincts that night. They made no logical sense to her. The fear for the man behind them? What for? He was just waiting and making casual conversation. The refusal of the ride and her immediate sense that she should have taken it? Why be a bother? Many of us would do the same, and according to Gavin, we are overwriting nature’s alert system: our intuition.
I had heard about this book through various Reddit posts, many of them filled with anecdotes on trusting your gut instinct. As a fan of horror, I’m intrigued by our relationship with fear and its place in our lives, so I thought I’d give this book a try. I have to admit, it was much different from what I anticipated reading. That is due in large part to the stories I had read in the subreddits that recommended it. I expected it to be more spooky. Psychic. Mysterious.
Gavin de Becker does not take that route at all, and in reading his background, it makes sense. He is not a psychic phenomena researcher, as I mistakenly assumed. He is an expert on violence and a security specialist who has worked with the Supreme Court, Congress, CIA, FBI, corporations, celebrities, and was twice appointed to the President’s Advisory Board for the Department of Justice. He has seen and investigated cases of violence ranging from stalkers to assassins, but also covers the more common domestic violence committed in homes against spouses and children.
The book is a sort of guide for navigating violent people or those who have the potential for violence, but at its’ core, Gavin believes that the expert on any potentially dangerous situation you might encounter, will be you. Your fear response. That sense that you have when you first encounter someone and feel that something isn’t right.
It goes against rational thought. It especially goes against our enforced social politeness. We don’t want to assume the worst about someone, and if they aren’t acting in a way that we can consciously understand is inappropriate or dangerous, we will push those thoughts away in order to appear friendly. The book opens with the story of a woman named Kelly that demonstrates exactly that.
When I heard his voice, I knew something wasn’t right.
It had been a long day when Kelly arrived at her apartment building to find the door propped open. She sighed. Her neighbors had been known to do this from time to time, despite the fact that she had talked with them repeatedly about the need for a locked door. She didn’t feel safe knowing that just anyone could come into the building.
They just don’t get it.
She pushed the door open with her foot, balancing bags of groceries as she walked toward the stairwell. A can of cat food dropped out of one of the bags and rolled down the stairs. Exasperated, she started towards the lower landing, when a man spoke from below.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
Later, she would tell Gavin de Becker that the moment she heard his voice, fear shot through her body. She could tell that something wasn’t right. A man appeared, the can of food in hand, and walked up the stairs smiling at her. He looked at the bags of groceries.
“Let me give you a hand with that stuff.”
Kelly smiled and refused. He moved to take the bag from her insisting. She refused again, but let him take the bag.
“There is such a thing as being too proud, you know?”
Kelly pushed her feelings down and allowed him to carry the bag for her. Gavin points out that this, the subtle insult and the subsequent feeling that Kelly had to prove him wrong, is a common predatory tactic. He advises resisting the urge to show someone that you aren’t proud, or rude, or whatever label someone throws at you to insist that you do what they want you to do.
Unfortunately Kelly didn’t. As they walked up the stairs he asked her what floor she lived on.
“The fourth floor.”
“Oh, what a coincidence! I’m going to the fourth floor to visit someone. I’m actually late. But it’s not my fault. My watch is broken. Come on. Let’s hurry. We’ve got a hungry cat to feed.”
Gavin breaks this down too, labeling what he calls, “Too Many Details.” The man knows he is lying, so he tries to reinforce his story with more details than is necessary. Kelly didn’t know this man, yet here he was, giving out way more than was needed to justify his presence in the building. And that last sentence? The “we.” He puts them on the same team. We’ve got a hungry cat to feed.
When they reached her door, he offered to bring the bag of groceries in.
“No thanks. I’ve got it from here.”
“Come on. We can leave the door open. I’ll just put the bag down in the kitchen and then I’ll go. I promise.”
Kelly again went against her own feeling and let him in the house. Over the next three hours she endured a brutal rape. When he was done, he closed the window.
“Don’t you dare move,” he said to her.
“You know I won’t,” was her response. But at that point, she followed her gut instinct. With only a sheet wrapped around her, she walked just behind her rapist, following him into her living room where he turned some music up on her stereo. When he turned left to go into the kitchen, she turned right, ran to her neighbors, and opened their unlocked door.
The police did not catch the perpetrator until after he murdered another woman. When Gavin talked to her about it later, she told him that the decision to get up and leave was almost unconscious. She set her mind aside, and let her body lead her away from danger.
Run.2
She was 19 years old working at Payless. She didn’t know it, but there was a man who had been robbing Payless shoe stores throughout the summer. He was a former employee, and he was black, just like her. He came up behind her while she was straightening shoes and asked about them.
She turned, and as soon as she saw him, she wanted to run. But she didn’t. She wanted to be polite. The store she was working in was in a mostly white community, and she didn’t want to do something that would make her coworkers look down on a black man. She pushed the feeling away.
She was vacuuming the store at 8:45 pm when her coworker yelled for her to come to the cash register. When she heard her voice, she felt that same feeling again, the nagging voice in her head telling her to run. She ignored it, and walked to the register to see that the man who had been in the store earlier was a holding a gun.
He went on to rob the store. He took the girls into the back room, demanding more money. When they cough up any money, he raped the woman. That woman was actress Gabrielle Union. He did get caught, but not until he had hurt another girl. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison, and Gabrielle went on to live a successful life, but not without the scars that come from such a brutal attack.
She said she heard a voice telling her to run. Where did that come from? The man behind her didn’t do anything out of line. He didn’t say anything sinister. Yet her intuition, that sixth sense, picked up on the fact that he was dangerous.
While the book points to evolutionary biology as the reason for this intuition, and I don’t disagree here, I still can’t help but wonder how these women knew that something was wrong. They heard a voice, they saw a man, they felt an inner urge to run.
But why? Between animals, things are different. Clearer. There is predator and prey. The mountain lion eats the deer. The deer is afraid of the mountain lion. Between humans, predator and prey relationships are not defined until it is much too late. Many human predators are even charming. They go out of their way to make you comfortable, like the man did with Kelly.
Yet something inside of each of these women knew different. And Gavin de Becker, a man who has literally helped stop assassination attempts, believes that type of intuition is within all of us, and that it is the most advanced detector of danger in the world.
I have to admit, while I understand the evolutionary implications of this reasoning, that we avoid danger for survival, I don’t think it’s a satisfactory explanation for what these women were feeling. They picked up on something outside the realm of their own mind, the perpetrator’s intention, without any outside information.
Is it a sixth sense? Some type of psychic knowing? A message from God or a guardian angel? Or something innate in each of us, a mysterious evolutionary advantage passed on from thousands of years of survival?
Let me know what you think in the comments. And if you have any strange stories of your own regarding intuition, please share them!
Wow! This is very spooky and I found the retellings of the stories very gripping. Intuition is truly a powerful tool. I try to follow my gut whenever I can. Great post, Shaina!