Some nightmares stay with you long after you've had them. Sometimes they scare you, sometimes they can inspire you, but what if your nightmares weren't just dreams. What if every nightmare you had was a real occurrence like memory of a sleep walk? I had one such nightmare, it was a while after I had met La Diablesse.
We had moved into our new home and had been living in it for some time. In this dream, a man I had seen twice in passing through our neighborhood had broken into my room through the window. Since I was six I have had a habit of sleeping with a knife beneath my pillow, naturally in my dream I reached for the knife.
I stabbed and slashed at him, but he just kept coming to attack me. I slammed him into hooks on the wall, smashed his head against the ground-things that should be fatal or near there-but he kept getting up and chased after me. In my folly thinking his skull cracked against the floor I stopped running away. His hand grabbed my ankle and he threw my to the ground. I thought he would kill me then, but just as he made a bite for my neck I swung my fists at him. His teeth grazed my arm leaving me with a sharp throbbing pain.
I don't remember how I got away, but I did and he continued to give chase. I ran to the high balcony and waited for him to charge me again then threw him over the edge unto the landscape rocks below. Still that was not enough to kill him, when he got up and continued to chase me, I realised it was a dream and woke up. I awoke covered in sweat and my arm was swollen where his teeth had grazed me.
At first I ignored the dream and the swelling, but after having similar dreams over and over for a week it started to worry me. What bothered me most was one evening I saw the man on my way home, he had a creepy look in his eyes as he stared at me mumbling to himself. Grand-mother said it was a Loogaroo, and made me put salt on my window sills. I stopped having the dreams or waking up with bruises after that.
Later I asked grand-mother about the Loogaroo, she said he was trying to get me to submit in my dream so he could drink my blood. Apparently, if he had caught me in my dream and I had not fought back he would have been able to freely drink my blood. After he drank my blood seven times I would have died in my sleep. It seems they drink more than just your blood, they also eat a bit of your soul. I haven't stopped putting salt on my windows since, I also still keep the knife under my pillow. I once tried to set traps to my windows, but the traps were tedious to set and annoying to dismantle whenever I wanted to open the windows, so I gave up on them.
A few years later while I was away at college, one of the guys in my group of friends started to complain about waking up with bruises. I didn't think anything about it at first, but a few months later he started to complain about feeling tired after sleeping, there was also a discoloured mark on his neck. Some of the others warned him it might be a Loogaroo and that he should put salt on his window. He laughed it off, and a few days after that he was dead, his family said he died in his sleep.
I'd never felt so disappointed, angry and sad with myself before, I knew I could have saved him. I could have spoken with him, changed his mind, but I didn't. About that time I was beginning to dismiss much of the myths as stories, even convincing my self that my encounter with La Diablesse was just a dream or something I had imagined.
I never wanted to feel so useless again, so I asked my parents and other adults to tell me stories about Loogaroo. From what I can tell, Loogaroo is Nosferatu, vampire. Some stories say people keep them off by hanging garlic over doors and windows, others by having a cross and holy water. But the most common way of staving them off seems to be with salt or sand in the doorway and windows.
This works, as it seems the loogaroo has to count all the grains before it can enter, so an OCD vampire... Because the salt and sand are small, counting takes them awhile, so they are stuck counting the grains until sunrise. I have no idea if the garlic works, but I find it annoying having to replace garlic regularly. Sand and Salt don't degrade so they are easier to keep, unless strong winds disperse them. In which case you can just add more.44Please respect copyright.PENANAyZae1vQrWe