I Heard From A Friend Who Had A Friend Whose Friend Had A Friend

When I arrived in Portland, Oregon in 1999, I had a friend who told me about a friend that knew Tanya Harding. Many people know of Harding, she was a champion figure skater whose competitor Nancy Kerrigan was attacked. Harding was accused of being involved in the attack on Kerrigan and the news went crazy. Harding became the Bad girl of skating. At the time her husband Jeff Gillooly, her bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt, hired Shane Stant to break Kerrigan’s right leg so that she would be unable to skate, they were found guilty in the assault and wound up in jail.

Even my fiancé said that she knew someone who was friends with someone who actually went out with Gillooly before he married Harding. Gillooly has since changed his name and Harding split with him in 1994.

In Oregon there are a lot of figure skating wannbes that practice at the Ice skating rink in the middle of Lloyd Center Mall. It is a fairly big shopping mall just east of the River In Portland. This friend who had a friend who knew Tanya Harding said that his Father knew another Ice skater from Portland named Annora Petrova who like Tanya Harding had a tragic story. The only difference was that Tonya bettered herself, she became a boxer, saved an old woman’s life, did some movies, a TV show, remarried and had a baby.

Petrova was a haunted woman, mainly haunted by the internet, especially her Wikipedia page.

Annora Petrova was an ordinary young girl with hopes of becoming a champion figure skater. One night while she was bored, she Googled her name and found a basic Wikipedia page for herself. Now Petrova was a little curious because she did not create the Wikipedia and didn’t think she was well known enough to have a paged at all. She was only training at the Lloyd Center skating rink so that she too could compete for the Olympics.

The biography seemed true enough. It said that she was born in Portland Oregon to Mikail Petrovic and Nancy (Snyder) Petrova. From there, the page became more of a crystal ball.

She kept checking the page, and soon realized that it was just a little bit ahead of her real life, giving her a glimpse into competition wins — and losses.

She couldn’t believe that every time she checked it there was something that predicted the future. When she tries to change the page herself to say that she’s won a competition, it turns on her. The page would update itself but whoever was behind the updating started adding insults and epithets that would cause Annora to cry. One day The Wiki page was updated to say that it was Petrova’s petulant attitude that killed her mother and Father and that she became a “pathetic little orphan.”

When Annora attempted to call her parents that she knew were alive the phone would answer and all she would hear was laughter. Later she did find out that her parents were killed in an accident.

The page even says that she eventually gets banned from skating because of some accident where she hurts another skater. The vandalizing of her Wikipedia page continued with ad hominem attacks. Frequently the page would refer to Petrova as a bitch and a pig saying “Annora Petrova is a selfish little bitch who is going to get what she deserves.”

Annora heads to Switzerland to try to restart her career, and while everything seems to have sorted itself out, she looks at her Wikipedia page again. This time, it tells her that she dies on the following day, “friendless and alone”. She then went to Prague to audition for an ice circus.

She was found dead in an old Hotel in the Czech Republic.

Now I don’t know how true the story is and when you look up Annora’s name on the Internet the story changes and there are other accounts of people that “knew” her.

The reason I am sharing this story with you is because of a phone call I received on air the other night where a woman said to me that nothing weird ever happens to her, but she knows a lot of friends or friends of friends that have paranormal experiences and she wonders if she will ever have a weird experience in her life.

Don’t we all have a friend or friend with an acquaintance that has had a weird experience?

We all have strange stories we share about our friends. These stories we sometimes share at parties or when we are around a campfire somewhere and the moon is full.

When the mood is just right we are more than willing tell outrageous stories that we have only heard from a friend who had a friend whose friend had a friend that had some strange thing happen in their life?

Another friend of mine who I worked with in Salt Lake City told me that she had an encounter with the known serial killer Ted Bundy. She was at a location in Murray Utah called Fashion place Mall doing some school clothes shopping where a man approached her wearing cast. He asked her if she knew where a certain store was at the mall. She told the man that there was no such store at the mall and he insisted that it had to be in the mall and he bet her he could find it if he she would follow him. She declined.

A few months later in November of 1974 Carol DeRonch, 18, was in the same Mall when she was approached by Bundy, who told her that someone had been trying to break into her automobile. She thought that he was a police officer and Bundy later showed her a badge. Bundy asked her to accompany him to the car to see if anything was missing. Upon reaching the car the girl looked in and determined nothing was missing. He eventually asked her if she could go to the station to make a complaint. Bundy drove her in his Volkswagon, and pulled over on the way and forcibly placed a pair of handcuffs on her wrist. She screamed and fought her way outside the vehicle and eventually got away.

My Friend told me that DeRonch could have been her.

There was another friend that told me the story of his friend’s sister that had a husband that every time he would go to bed he would audio hallucinate. She said that one morning he woke up and came down stairs wondering where breakfast was. The truth was she didn’t cook or even fix breakfast. The husband complained to her, that he was hearing what sounded like sizzling bacon or fired eggs. He did tell her that it was most odd that even though he heard the bacon and eggs sizzling he didn’t remember smelling anything. His wife suspected he was having vivid dreams.

After a week had past the husband came downstairs with an umbrella and a raincoat. His wife asked him why he was all ready for rainy weather when it was sunny and warm outside. He told her you can’t be too careful after all the rain was coming down hard and it woke him up in the middle of the night.

His wife said that there was no rain at all. After many instances where he would hear the sound of rain or frying bacon he realized that something terrible was wrong.

He had to be having aural hallucinations. He eventually went to the doctor and he was going to evaluated for a mild stroke or some other brain stem infection.

After a thorough examination the doctor told the man that he did not have a stroke or even encephalitis. He did however recommend that he see a psychiatric specialist.

That was enough for him and he decided that he would live with it if he had to because he knew he was not crazy. In an unbelievable turn of events the sizzle sound stopped. The man so happy that he somehow was cured of his aliment until he started to feel a crawling sensation in the back of his neck and a tickle sensation in his throat. There was what appeared to be scabbed goose flesh appearing on his neck. Then the sizzling sound came back.

He was rushed to the hospital and after an even more thorough evaluation it was found that a small spider had laid its eggs inside the man’s ear. The sound of sizzling was the sound of the many spiders that had hatched from their eggs and began their journey through the man’s ear cavity, back of the neck and into his throat.The man made a safe recovery and is doing fine now.

It seems the human race excels in getting alien objects stuck in our bodies. I heard from a cousin of mine that friend of his had a kid who managed to conceal a piece of Lego up his nose for three years.

And of course there are friends who work in Emergency rooms that tell us what can easily go up any orifice of the human body.

The human race also excels in telling bizarre stories and if they don’t happen to you there is always that friend that everyone knows who has some of the craziest things happen to them.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org