Ghosts of Villa Nueva: Non-Ordinary Energy in the Rainforest

My strange day began one late afternoon in the small rainforest community of Villa Nueva, Costa Rica.

The rounded, two-story house I had been building for the past year was almost completed. It overlooked the Pacific Ocean high on a hill on a 36-acre rainforest property that was mostly isolated.

I was alone, standing in the house at one end of a long, narrow hallway that connected two guest bedrooms on the first floor. A diaphanous light was creeping through a window at the other end of the hallway. It was only about 4:30, but the light was weak. Unlike the United States, darkness comes quickly in Costa Rica, around 5:30 – every day of the year.

I don’t know how long I had been standing in the hallway looking at the dim light that was darkening with every passing minute.

But the longer I looked, the more uncomfortable I became. There was something there in the hallway, some kind of sentient presence that while I couldn’t see it with my eyes, I knew it was there and it knew I knew.

Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Something similar happened weeks earlier when I was walking in one particular area that was adjacent to my property along a bend in a badly worn dirt road that led to the even smaller community of Esquipulas.

This area was always dank and dark with an earthy-moldy smell from wet fallen leaves released by the rainforest’s giant trees. But nearby, on the other side of the bend, you could see a clearing where an abandoned, rotting home still stood.

I had never walked down this stretch without feeling I was being watched. And it wasn’t just me. Others had expressed similar feelings. It was – well, just creepy.

I should point out that living in a rainforest has its pluses and minuses. Besides the fresh air and tranquility, there’s an array of fascinating animal and plant life – everything from giant orchids and toucans to brightly colored tree frogs and turquoise butterflies the size of bats. I even had a troop of mono titis (monkeys) occasionally pass through when the water apple trees were loaded with fruit.

But there is also something unnerving about a rainforest. The isolation that brings peace and quiet can also bring trouble. There’s always concern about home invasions, which were on the rise in Costa Rica. In fact, for protection, I borrowed a shotgun from a local mechanic.

Also, a rainforest itself is prone to severe weather. Spectacular lightning storms with high winds and driving rain bring down tall trees and rip roofs from homes and power lines from posts.

Even when there isn’t a storm, it’s not unusual to be awakened at three in the morning by the sharp crack of a broken tree as you wait helplessly in bed not knowing where this tree will land. (In fact, a few weeks after I sold my property, a tall gallinazo tree fell on the covered back porch and wiped it out, much to the chagrin of the new owners.)

Other night sounds can also make you uneasy. For example, the eruption of dissonant squealing by a family of squabbling mapaches is not particularly pleasant. And one of the oddest sounds you will ever hear originates in a rainforest. It’s difficult to describe, but imagine the otherworldly background sounds of dread created by the theremin instrument for early science fiction movies like The Day The Earth Stood Still. Now imagine it if someone was trying to imitate the sound.

When I first heard this Oooh Oooh OOOH Oooh, I thought Ramon, my Nicaraguan caretaker who lived on the property, was doing it, trying to be funny. But then one early evening I was talking to Ramon when the sound started from somewhere up in the trees. I asked him who he thought was doing that. He said “perizosa.”

Sloth. The three-toed variety.

Then there’s the neblina (fog) after a storm that floats eerily with a slight effervescent glow above the rainforest canopy as it follows the path of rainforest rivers down to the ocean.

Still, the natural sounds and sights of the Costa Rican rainforest were one thing. But I certainly wasn’t expecting the kind of paranormal interactions that followed in the short time I lived there.

The general feeling of malaise inside and around the house was soon taken to another level. It started as I was waking one morning and head a woman’s voice very clearly say, “Hi, Mac.”

Mac was the name of my Airedale, who slept in the bedroom with me.

A few days later it happened again. Same early morning, amorphous voice, but this time, “Hi, Thomas.”

The voice was familiar. To this day I’m not sure who it belonged to, but I’ve always suspected it belonged to an old girlfriend from L.A. who was very open-minded and enjoyed discussing metaphysical matters with me, especially what likely happens when we die.

I tried to find out if she, in fact, had died, but was never able to confirm.

The other noteworthy detail of these incidents is that the voice sounded like it was right in front of my face while lying in bed, a phenomenon that has been widely reported by those who are not mentally ill and do not commonly hear voices.

Oddly, something like this had happened to me once before many years earlier when I was a journalist for the Arizona Republic newspaper doing a story on an allegedly old haunted hotel in the dusty, former mining town of Oatman, Arizona – a place best known at that time for its wandering wild burros.

I stayed the night in the hotel’s most haunted room, a place where a cowboy had lost his life when things turned ugly during a poker game. And sure enough, around 3 a.m., the temperature in the room suddenly became ice cold followed by the sound of poker chips being shuffled – a sound that appeared to originate only about 6 inches from my nose as I lay in bed, shivering.

With this incident there was a witness. A friend who had accompanied me on this trip, also shared the bed with me in the hotel. She also experienced the extreme temperature drop and heard the poker chips right before her face at the same moment I did.

Another time in the rainforest house, I woke up in the middle of the night to find my ex-brother-in-law standing in the doorway of my bedroom.

He was staring at me with a goofy smirk – a common look for him. I raised up and was about to ask him what the hell he was doing there, but he vanished.

A couple of days later, I was walking around in the streets of Quepos and saw a local Realtor who knew me and my ex-wife’s family, including the ex-brother-in-law with the goofy smirk.

Usually the Realtor didn’t pay much attention to me, giving me a quick wave and leaving it at that. But this day he charged across the street and walked right up to me with an expression bleeding of condolences.

“I’m really sorry to hear about your brother-in-law,” he said.

“What about him?”

“You don’t know?”

He went on to tell me that my brother-in-law had died a couple of days earlier, complications from diabetes.

After doing a little investigating, I discovered that my brother-in-law had died the same time I saw him standing in my bedroom doorway.

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The Devil Dream and VERY Large Snake

I also found myself dreaming a lot in the rainforest house. These were often very realistic, lucid dreams. Most of the dreams were pleasant enough. However, one was especially disturbing.

I was standing in the living room at the large picture window looking down the hill to the ocean in the distance. It was a dark sunset with roving clouds of fog between the ocean and the window. It was also very windy. I felt that familiar feeling of being watched, but this was different. There was the additional sense of bad intent.

At that moment my point-of-view shifted from my eyes to that of some entity I can only describe as pure evil. It watched me behind the picture window and began to feed on my mounting anxiety. Slowly it moved in toward me floating above the long outside stairs that connected the ground with the front door.

I’ve come to refer to this dream as my devil dream. And like many others who have reported similar dreams, I realized in the dream that I was dreaming, and tried desperately to wake up. Eventually I did, but not before the dark entity was only a frightening arm’s length away.

I woke up breathing heavily and sweating. My young Airedale, Mac, was at the side of the bed, head cocked to one side and staring at me sympathetically.

A little later, I was preparing to take Mac for his morning walk. Normally I walked him on a leash because he tended to run off down the hill, and, also there were plenty of poisonous frogs and snakes in the area. But this morning I was going to give Mac a treat and let him do his business sin-leash.

My hand was on the front door about to open it, when I suddenly had a change of mind. Feeling a sense of dread not all that different from the devil dream, I put the leash on Mac, opened the door and began walking across the patio to the stairs.

Soon I was very happy to have the leash on Mac, because slithering up the stairs was the biggest viper I had ever seen – including in zoos. This snake had the mottled coloration of a rattlesnake, but the width and length of a boa – or even an anaconda?

But the most shocking feature was the snake’s head, which was triangular-shaped and the size of a goat’s.

The gigantic goat-headed snake slithered up the stairs in a manner similar to the approach of the terrifying entity in the devil dream. As it got closer I noticed its eyes, which were a bright red. Just before accessing the patio, the snake hesitated and looked me over with those beady red eyes as if making a decision.

That’s when Mac lunged forward and bellowed a series of deep, menacing Airedale barks.

The behemoth snake turned and went back down the stairs. Mac and I watched as the serpeant’s thick tail disappeared into the rain forest foliage.

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Alien Abduction or More Ghost Stuff?

Yet, the oddest incident in the Villa Nueva rainforest house actually consisted of several incidents that stretched out for weeks.

I wrote about this in detail in my Strange Days blog An Alien Abduction in Costa Rica? Red Lights in the Rainforest.

As I’ve pointed out frequently, I can’t positively say I was abducted. But, as crazy as it sounds, I can’t think of any other possible explanation – and believe me, I’ve tried.

I was living alone in the big rainforest house with Mac and a black cat named Clarice, whom I had rescued in the Arizona desert some years earlier.

Like so many of my paranormal experiences, this one also began at 3 a.m. I was sound asleep in the upstairs master bedroom when I was abruptly awakened by Mac’s frenetic barking. At first I was annoyed that he was barking in the middle of the night, but as I sat up I soon discovered his motivation.

Mac was sitting in front of a bedroom wall barking at red lights that were moving across it.

My initial thought was “home invasion.” The lights looked a lot like the reflection of brake lights from a car – the kind of lights that might have been coming from a vehicle in front of the house.

I grabbed the shotgun and leashed Mac. My plan was to go out the back stairs then surprise whoever was out in front of the house.

But to my amazement (and relief) there was no one parked out in the clearing in front of the house. It was a perfectly still night up on the hill – a night of stars and crickets with a slight breeze blowing up the hill from the ocean.

I watched a shooting star, then Mac and I returned to bed.

A month later, to the day, it all started again: Mac barking at the red lights moving around on the wall, me checking in front of the house, and once again finding nothing.

The lights disappeared for a couple of months – then returned, same day of the month at exactly 3 a.m.

All told, the lights did their thing three more times on consecutive months. But the last time, there was something more.

I had slept poorly again because of the red lights. I woke up feeling a little light headed. It was the same feeling I had after donating blood once without having breakfast first.

I stretched and that’s when I noticed it – a quarter-sized bruise mark on the inside of my right arm under the elbow. There were similar bruises on my left arm as well as on the inside of both knees under the kneecaps.

These were the kinds of marks often experienced by blood donors. But when did it happen to me? I didn’t have the bruises before going to bed. I couldn’t think of any possible way I could have done this to myself during the night.

Then I discovered these were not ordinary, lingering bruises. By noon that day all the bruises disappeared as though they had never been there in the first place. My arms and legs looked normal, but I began to sense something extraordinary had happened to me – something not of this world.

The lights never returned.

There had been quite a few UFO sightings in Costa Rica at this time, many near Costa Rica’s most active volcanoes.

Yet, to this day, I don’t really know what the red lights and disappearing bruises were all about. While I initially suspected some kind of extraterrestrial connection, I now wonder if the source of this mystery originated inside the Villa Nueva house rather than outside it. Could these lights have been spirit energy-based?

Of course this ghost idea doesn’t explain the bruising, unless . . .

Something was just messing with me.

Around this time, especially before the first appearance of the red lights, I had been experiencing the 11:11 synchronicity, a phenomenon in 2011 where people around the globe were reporting the continual odds-defying presence of 11:11 and 1:11 on clocks and watches, etc.

After the lights disappeared, so did my run-ins with 11:11. Were these numbers originating from another realm as a way of announcing that the lights were coming? Some metaphysicsts have theorized that sub atomic beings such as angels try to communicate with carbon-based beings through 1, 11, 111 and 1111.

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Alone in a Ghost House

I was living alone during this period of my life as my estranged wife had decided to return to the U.S. shortly after the house in Villa Nueva was finished. So the only witness to most of these paranormal events was Mac – and he died in 2019. (Note, Mac returned a few hours after he was put to sleep. I never saw him, but I did briefly smell his ear infection, which he often suffered from during his life. I’m guessing he was saying goodby.)

That said, I did have visitors who said they felt very uneasy in the same long hallway where I sensed the presence of some entity. The half-bath off the hallway also tended to creep people out.

Still, at times I wondered how much of this was real. I had taken an early retirement from the newspaper and spent most of my time in the Villa Nueva house writing a novel, ala The Shinning’s Jack Nicholson. Like Nicholson, was I slowly growing crazy from the cloak of isolation provide by – not the snow – but the rainforest? Was something similar to a condition clinically called distressing claustrophobic irritability (aka cabin fever) disfiguring my perceptions?

I left the Villa Nueva house in 2013 and moved to another region of Costa Rica. The following year, realtors sold the house.

The new owners had my email address. It didn’t take long for them to contact me with a quircky question: They wanted to know if I had experienced anything “strange” inside the house.

I discovered the new owners (and their guests) also had paranormal experiences including hearing their names called by familiar, bodiless voices and the appearance of a little “ghost girl” in the bedrooms and hallway.

In one incident, the new owner said she was greeting a visitor to the Villa Nueva house. And as the visitor walked through the front door, the owner said she distinctly heard a young man’s voice tell her to deliver a message to the visitor. The voice said to tell her that “he is here, and although he isn’t happy about being here, it makes him happy to see her doing things that make her happy.”

The new owner said the voice in her head was truly disturbing and that it took almost a year for her to have the courage to finally deliver the message, which she did through a Facebook message.

That’s when the new owner learned that the visitor’s 27-year-old son had died from an overdose right before her visit to Villa Nueva.

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The Villa Nueva Mystery

According to the Pew Research Center, nearly one in five people say they’ve seen a ghost, and almost one in three people have said they’ve been in contact with the dead.

However, most non-ordinary encounters of the ghostly kind occur in older homes with lots of history. The Villa Nueva house had not even been completed before I began sensing an overlapping of realms.

There had been talk in the village of Villa Nueva about my property serving as a burial ground for aboriginal people who may have lived there before Columbus and the Spanish Conquistadors. But I could never verify this.

I also could not verify another popular rumor, this one involving an “Indian princess” who allegedly hid gold somewhere on my 36-acre Villa Nueva property. Apparently this story had much more credibility among Villa Nueva residents. I even heard reports of individuals approaching my property with picks and shovels in search of the treasure.

Personally, I think a more likely scenario is that the house on the hill overlooking the ocean sits on a vortex of rarified energy. This property not only faces the ocean but it’s surrounded by other bodies of water in the form of rivers and quebradas (creeks).

Water is an energy conduit in many beliefs. Feng shui, for example, is an ancient Chinese traditional practice which claims to use energy forces (especially water) to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment. Historically, as well as in many parts of the contemporary Chinese world, feng shui was used to orient buildings and spiritually significant structures such as tombs, as well as dwellings.

It would therefore follow that the positioning of water in respect to a new home might influence the structure in a multiple of synergetic ways depending on how the water elements aligned to the property.

Then there was lightning – a lot of it, especially during the long rainy season. Could ionization also manifest in ways science has yet to understand?

Besides the abundance of water elements and lightning, I also suspected the Villa Nueva house sat on a fault line because of the unusual number of small quakes I experienced – what Latin America calls temblores.

One temblor was not so small. This occurred in September 2012 and measured 7.6. I was sitting on the back porch, writing. About 15 minutes before the earthquake, my black cat Clarice began yowling, then darting around and finally hiding. I could hear the rumbling sound, first at a distance then gradually getting closer and louder. When the quake struck, it felt like a bomb hit, followed by a good 10 to 15 seconds of shaking and swaying.

Remarkably there was no damage to the house, although I learned that people had died in the 2012 quake.

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Villa Nueva House Today

In 2021 the Villa Nueva house was sold again, this time (it’s my understanding) to Canadians. I do not know if the most recent owners have encountered similar paranormal activity.

What I do know is that many people besides myself have experienced non-ordinary reality in this house. In my opinion, there’s no doubt the Villa Nueva house is haunted, or at the very least a conduit for non-ordinary energy.

It would be presumptuous of me to say I knew what was going on there. But this round house up on the hill overlooking the ocean might be worth a visit from a professional paranormal team.

Maybe they could get to the bottom of it all – or at least shed some light on the little ghost girl who walks along the hallway that connects the two guest rooms on the first floor. Or perhaps seasoned paranormal investigators could ask the amorphous voices why they greet people (and their pets) upon awakening.