u/INTZBK

I had an experience in a hospital once that left me pretty shaken up. About three years ago, I was in the hospital for a severe respiratory infection that wasn’t COVID or flu. I have COPD, and the infection caused me to go into respiratory failure. The doctor had placed me on a BIPAP machine to help me breathe, and treated me with steroids and antibiotics. Luckily, after a few days, my condition soon improved and they were able to take me off of the BIPAP, and put me on a Hi-Flow Canula, which allowed me to talk. So, it was early evening of the day I was started on the new device. My sister was visiting me, and a nurse and a respiratory therapist were in the room doing their jobs. The area on the bedside to my left was cluttered with monitors and the breathing machine. There had been a bedside three drawer nightstand there, but they had moved it and placed it by the door to make room for all the equipment they were using. The RT was adjusting the breathing machine, and the nurse was taking my vitals and preparing my medications. While all this was going on, the food service orderly brought in my dinner tray, and because the area near my bed was full of machines and people, they placed the tray on the nightstand next to the door and left. I had no appetite whatsoever, so we just left it on the nightstand for the orderly to pick up later. So, the nurse and the RT were doing their thing, and I was talking to my sister, when suddenly, the tray just flew off the nightstand, sailed across the room, and crashed into the bathroom door, sending food flying all over the floor and onto the bathroom door. At first, no one sad anything and everyone just kind of froze. Then my sister, ever the wiseass, said, “I guess someone really doesn’t like the food.” The nurse replied, “I guess not.” and then she called for someone from housekeeping to clean up. I was in that room for about ten more days. I temember feeling trapped there, stuck in the bed, hooked to a bunch of machines, and almost too weak to weak to walk. I laid there, expecting something else to happen, but nothing else ever did.

In February 1969 I was four. My father had returned from Vietnam the previous June and been assigned to a post in the South. My parents bought a brand-new house in a fairly isolated development near the post. It was a typical late-’60s middle-class home—three bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, dining room, living room, and den—for my mother, father, older sister, and me. My younger brother was born about a year later. Most families in the neighborhood had military backgrounds.
Not long after we moved in, I noticed a face in the heavy-grained pine paneling of the den. It looked like an old man with long hair and a beard. No matter where you stood, the face seemed to look at you. I pointed it out to my mother and sister. My sister, nine, was particularly alarmed. My mother dismissed it as just the way the paneling looked, but soon hung a large picture over it. Once covered, it stopped bothering us.
Things began sliding off shelves, tables, and windowsills even when placed well away from the edges. It usually happened while people were in the room but nowhere near the object. My mother said it was nothing to worry about.
Late at night I started hearing voices in the living room—a man and a woman talking, too low to make out the words. I thought it might be my parents, though everyone was usually asleep. When I asked, my mother said it was probably a dream. My sister said she had heard it too. My mother still insisted it was bad dreams.
We had a female German Shepherd who had always slept indoors. After the backyard was fenced she stayed outside during the day, but some nights she refused to come in. She would stand at the back door and whine. Forced inside, she paced and whined all night.
Then came the knocking—light taps at first, later harder knocks on the walls. My mother blamed plumbing, settling, or the heating ducts. One afternoon, while she, my sister, and I sat in the kitchen, loud continuous banging erupted from inside the cabinets. She finally stopped offering normal explanations and told us simply to ignore whatever happened and keep doing what we were doing.
The activity continued. Everyone, including my father, began seeing something in the hallway—always out of the corner of the eye, running up or down the hall or darting from one room to another.
A few incidents stand out. Once, while my mother yelled at my baby brother for dumping food from his highchair, the full dish-draining rack slid off the counter into the sink, sending dishes and silverware crashing. Another night she got up and found every exterior door—front, back, and carport—standing wide open. Not unlocked or ajar, but fully open. And once, while my sister brushed her teeth in the hall bathroom, something grabbed her hair from behind and yanked it straight back. She ran out screaming, wrapped in a towel. My mother calmed her and sat with her through her bath.
Growing up around occurrences like these is why I believe in the paranormal.

I have watched Unforgiven many times. I often wondered what Beauchamp wrote about after what he experienced in Big Whiskey. He arrived in town in the company of English Bob, a gunman of some repute, who, although apparently quite formidable, was easily taken down ànd beaten bloody by Little Bill ànd his deputies, with Little Bill claiming it is all to enforce the city’s firearm prohibition ànd to discourage anyone else who might come to town to collect the bounty the prostitutes had placed on the two cowboys who had disfigured one of them. Little Bill has a reputation as a hard lawman ànd also is known as à gunfighter. It becomes apparent the Bill is a sadist who enjoys inflicting punishment and humiliation on others. Also, Little Bill exposes English Bob as a liar, a charlatan, and an outright murderer, and somewhat of a coward. Afterwards, English Bob is banished from Big Whiskey, and Beauchamp latches on to Bill as the subject of a new dime novel, spending a lot of time listening to Bill’s pronouncements and watching and eventually even assisting Bill in his sadistic punishments. Little Bill and Beauchamp end up having two encounters with William Munny. In the first encounter, Munny has just arrived in town during a rainstorm, and is sick and is still abiding by his code of reform, refraining from drinking and trying to live his life peacefully, although his poverty has led him to agree to help the Kid kill the two cowboys to obtain prostitutes’ bounty. Little Bill disarms Munny and then gleefully attacks and beats Munny in the saloon and then runs him and his companions out of town. Munny basically sticks to his somewhat warped moral code through the killing of the two cowboys, but after he learns that Little Bill has tortured his best friend Ned to death, he gets drunk and goes into town. When he arrives at the saloon, Beauchamp sees the real William Munny. He is a killer wirh no regard for his reputation, no arrogance, and no fear of consequences or of being killed. He isn’t a legend, and doesn’t crave renown, he kills people because he is a killer, not a gunfighter, not a lawman, and although he is seeking vengeance for the killing of his friend, in reality no excuses or justifications are needed. People that anger or annoy him, or just are in the wrong place at the wrong time are marked for death. He shows nothing but contempt for Beauchamp, and leaves Big Whiskey after threatening to kill everyone residing there. Beauchamp witnesses an event that strips away any sense of adventure or romantic fantasy about the violence of the old west, and shows the destructive horror of it all instead. So, do you think Beauchamp went on to write a dime novel about the hard sheriff and the cold blooded killer, or do you think what happened at Greeley’s saloon in Big Whiskey changed his attitude towards the gunfights and killings he wrote about?