A hotel room in Minnesota

Who knows why some places make for ghost stories for some people, when other people will not have an experience in the same place. A few weeks back a few ladies from Iowa and Ohio joined me on a tour. One of them had visited a hotel in Minnesota in April. Around 11 o'clock at night she was in bed and woke up to someone softly stroking the top of her hand. She was too afraid to open her eyes because she was sure that someone was standing beside her bed. After a moment the person walked around the foot of the bed to the opposite side and lay down beside her. She was still too terrified to open her eyes. Then, just as strangely as it had begun, the person seemed to disappear and she was alone in bed.

Oklahoma

I'm not sure that I should call this a "ghost" story, but it is certainly one hell of a story. A group from Oklahoma, a man and two women, came on my tour this past month. The man said that years back he'd been hanging out with some friends, three teenage boys talking about going to Oklahoma City to party, they were going on an on till one said, "enough talking, let's go." As soon as they stood up the bedroom door slammed shut, the window closed, the ceiling fan turned on so fast that all the papers in the room were rising and falling, the volume on the old dial stereo was going up and down repeatedly, the AC unit in the ceiling fell out so hard that is bounced off the floor three times. The friend's father who the house belonged too was a paraplegic and he was trying to open the door from the outside while they were trying to push it from the inside, hopelessly. The bedroom had two twin beds and a Buddha statue behind the door. After a few moments of this a shadowy skeletal figure rose from the foot of the bed. Its head hit the eight foot ceiling. It walked across the room and into the closet. As soon as it was gone the door opened and everything else stopped.

I told my tour participant that it sounded like his friend needed a serious exorcism. He said the family had tried a few things but there wasn't much family left anymore. His friend had lost his paraplegic father and every other member of his family in the years since.

Phoenix to L.A.

Often people see orbs in photos, and every so often live and in person. A young man from LA shared just such a story with me. Roughly ten years ago, when he was around fifteen, he lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Once he and few guys were staying at a friend's house over night and around 2-3 o'clock in the morning he and one of the guys got up to play a prank on one of their sleeping friends. As they went through the living room he stopped. Orbs were floating in the hall. His friend disappeared, but he stood there frozen in place unable to look away. He watched as the orbs moved down the hall. The bathroom door was open and they floated into the room. Once they were inside, he could see the bathroom mirror-- an old man's face looked back at him.

When he asked his friend if he'd seen anything, his friend said no. But he had gotten a chill and felt, just, frightened and sprinted as far away as he could.

French Canada to the US

Most people I meet want some sort of proof that they are having a ghostly experience and not simply imagining things. This past summer a woman who was living in Houston presently, but had been in different cities in the US shared a ghost story from her French Canadian grandparents.

Her grandfather died when she was born and her mother kept a set of family photos on a table near her crib. The photos were arranged in a certain order and one day, after putting the baby to bed, the mother came back to check on the baby and found all the photos rearranged. Thinking that she must have been confused, she arranged them again, as she wanted them to be. The baby was still asleep so she left. When she came back again later the photos were again rearranged. She took this to be a sign from the deceased grandfather.

Years later after the woman had reached adulthood her grandmother got breast cancer. The grandmother had remarried and seen her grandchildren grow up and move away. When she got sick and it seemed she wouldn't make it, they all came to see her. A big family, everyone came to express their love and say their goodbyes. The grandmother made a point of telling them that if they couldn't make it to her funeral that was okay, she had seen them while she was still alive.

After the grandmother passed the woman had been in a partially asleep, partially awake state and saw her grandmother. They talked, her grandmother was there with her grandfather and told her that her step-grandfather would be joining them soon. But the woman wasn't convinced this wasn't just a dream, so she told her grandmother, "if this isn't a dream squeeze my hand." At that point a numb feeling started in her fingers and moved up her arm.

When she told her mother this, she found out that one of her sisters had a similar visit from the grandmother, and a numb arm. A cousin had also seen her, all of them around the same time, in completely different parts of the country.

A few months later their step-grandfather died.

Fisherman in Millbury, Mass

Most of the ghost stories I hear are attention getting, but not really scary. But some are in fact flat out scary. The other night a woman from Rode Island shared such a story with me.

Years back she lived in an apartment in Millbury Massachusetts. A florist was below her and an old lady lived across the hall. It was a cheap two bedroom, so she and her fiance were excited to have the space and the extra pocket change. It wasn't long before she noticed something was strange. One of the bedrooms was cold all the time and she just couldn't be in it. It felt like doom. Her fiance dismissed her reaction at first, but soon found he too couldn't stand to be in the room. At night she began to hear stamping footsteps in the hall outside her apartment. Like someone was stamping the mud off their boots, then banging at her front door. The old lad across the hall heard it too, and the florist downstairs. They had been hearing it since before the lady form Rode Island moved in. One night she, or fiance and some guests were up late playing cards and the banging started. She told the guests that it was just the ghost. Her guests didn't believe her and insisted on going to the door, thinking he could open it really quick and catch whoever was making the noise. He did act quickly, but just as she told him, there was no one in the hall.

The noise and the cold room were frightening. But they adjusted at first. Then she woke up in the middle of the night and saw a man in a rain coat and hat standing at the foot of her bed. The vision went away, but then she started having vivid dreams where she was being grabbed and held down. She would wake up with bruises. Her doctor recognized them as bruises from being grabbed and tried to get her to admit that she was being abused. The doctor had seen this before, it was classic and the more the woman denied it the more insistent the doctor became. The night terrors continued, until they finally had to give up their cheap apartment and move.

No more bruises.

During her time living in that place she had gone to a garage sale in her neighborhood. The woman having the sale asked where she lived. Apparently the locals were very familiar with the building-- years ago a frustrated fisherman had abused his wife there. As the fishing dried up he became more and more frustrated until finally he beat her to death. This was sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. Afterward he drank himself to death in the apartment.

The landlord couldn't keep a tenant, most especially not a female tenant. A few months after the woman and her fiance moved, she went back to check on her elderly neighbor. The woman was afraid to come to the door at first. She said that since they had left the banging had moved from the hallway outside her apartment, into her apartment. When she was in bed at night it was at her door and she was terrified to get out of bed. She was unable to move.

Shortly after the visit the old woman passed away.

Skeleton, Canyon

In Skeleton Canyon, California, there are (were) two oaks that grew on either side of a road and over time their branches touched and grew together into one, creating an arch over the road. One of our tour guests was there forty years ago with a couple of friends, three seventeen-year-old boys out one night, looking for ghosts. They were checking out the oak trees when one of them said, "Hey guys, um, I can't move." He was standing right between the oaks. They tried to move him, but no amount of force could do it. Then they saw head lights coming down the road toward them. Now they were desperate to get him out of there, but still they couldn't. The headlights came straight at them then the lights were on the other side, moving away. Once the lights had passed their friend could move again.

Lansing, Illinois

A house doesn't have to be old to be haunted. A young lady and her family came on my tour recently and they used to live in a house about fifty years old in Lansing, Illinois. A few times when the mother was in the kitchen she would hear, in the next room, "Mom! Mom!"  Assuming it was her son she would peek into the room and find it empty. Another time the daughter saw a little boy in her house wearing bib overalls and a Baker Boy cap; she was five or six at the time. She'd once lost a necklace in her room. Both mother and daughter searched and searched for the necklace, twice taking out a drawer and emptying the entire contents out. After pouring over the entire room a few times, they opened up the same drawer a third time, and the box with the necklace was sitting there on top of all the other contents.

Government Buildings

Unfortunately, we've had a lot of mass shootings recently. They used to be rare. The other night a couple from Maryland joined me. He worked in a government office building, the sight of a tragic shooting a long time ago. A man had been laid off just before his retirement and he took a shotgun into the building and killed a lot of people. The man said everyone who worked there had seen or experienced something. At one point his department was having a dispute with another department over copies. The people in his department were convinced people from other departments were using up their copies. One day he was walking down the hall and saw a man in grey pants and a white shirt go into the copy room. Cornered. He got up his courage and walked into the room--there was no one. Convinced one of his co-workers at a nearby desk must have seen something, he asked. Sure enough, the co-worker had seen the same figure. A few months before one of the co-workers had died; he always wore grey pants and a white shirt to work.

Delivering Babies

Common wisdom says that children and old people are the most sensitive to ghosts. A couple from Pensacola had a few stories for me the other day, but the stories weren't the most interesting part.

The husband didn't really much believe in all this stuff, although he did once see a human shadow in his house --when it was struck by lightening--he got out his gun. But his wife did believe. Once she saw a man she thought was her husband. They were sitting at the table and he was down the hall, so she opened her mouth to call to him when she realized her husband was sitting across from her. Apparently his uncle had died years before and the two looked exactly alike. The husband's mother saw him too. Shortly after the wife saw the man down the hall they got a phone call from the husband's mother; her long dead brother had just tucked her into bed.

The wife had many such experiences, but only in the last three years. She was an OB-GYN and I asked when she had started delivering babies. The question got an odd look-- three years ago, she said.

I don't remember where I heard it, but somewhere in South America, if you take a new born baby on a picnic to the seashore, the forest, the woods, before leaving you call to the child. You yell the name all around. The belief is that the spirit isn't fully attached to the body yet, and it likes to be free so you have to call it back to remind it that it belongs in the body.

Gulfport, Mississippi

When I first began talking to people about their experiences with ghosts, I was surprised by how many stories involve smells. A lot. This spring a woman from Gulfport came on an evening tour. She was very familiar with New Orleans, as her nephew used to live here and she would come all the time to stay with him and party in the French Quarter. He was very fond of Patchouli, and after he died she would sometimes go into a room in her house, where he always staid when he visited Gulfport, and she would smell patchouli in the room. She would walk out of the room, close the door and walk back in and the sent would be gone.

At another time she and her family were sitting at her dinning room table talking. Across the room was a sofa and behind it a table with lots of family pictures. The conversation moved along until it came to her nephew. They heard a slapping sound and looked across the room. His picture had fallen over on the table.

At another time she'd come home from work and found a picture of the two of them, having a good time together, on the floor. No one had been in her house that day, but that morning the photo had been sitting high on a shelf with a mug in front of it. The mug was in the exact same place.

Georgia

Hospitals are full of ghost stories. Two women from Georgia joined me in the Garden District on a rainy Sunday afternoon this spring. One of them was a nurse in Labor and Delivery and she said they had one room that things were always happening in. The phone rang routinely without anyone on the other line, until the staff got fed up and pulled out the cord--the phone still rang.

For some reason that room was used mostly for storage. But if all the other rooms were full, they would have to put a new mother in that room. When that happened, they would have to make a path through the boxes to get the bassinet into the room so that the mother could hold her baby. Once they had a woman there and her husband was with her, sleeping on a chair beside the bed. At two o'clock in the morning he called the nurses' desk and demanded, "where is my baby?" The nurses didn't know what he was talking about, the baby was asleep in the nursery. He was furious, he insisted that someone had just wheeled the baby into the room and must have taken the baby away. The nurses went to the room to show him that his baby was fine and asleep in the nursery. When they entered the room the path they'd made through the boxes was all filled in.

Kings Mountain

March 30th, 2013

There is nothing like an old picture of family member. A month or so ago two ladies came on my tour and one, the one who's sensitive to this stuff, had a great story from Kings Mountain. Her friends' grandmother was on her death bed and the family had all come to keep an eye on her. Well when it was this woman's turn, she sat in the room and saw a man at the foot of the grandmother's bed. Long old fashioned coat, little spectacles. She kept watch anyway.

When she was able to bring it up to her friend's mother, the woman ran and got an old photo of the grandmother's husband who'd died a few years before. The photo was not him as an old man but in his prime, looking like a fine country doctor.

The photo exactly matched the man she's seen at the foot of the bed.

Making Amends

March 30, 2013

Having issues with the dead is often considered explanation for a haunting. A month or so back, two men from Chattanooga, TN came on my tour and one shared a ghost story with me. Growing up in Delaware he had seen his grandfather four or more times in his room. This was over the course of several years. His grandfather would sit at the foot of his bed, or on top of his chest of drawers. As a child he remembered his grandfather's comb over, a telltale feature of the old man.

When the boy grew up he finally decided to make amends with his grandfather at his grave site. He hasn't seen him since that visit.

Pocatello, Idaho

Some people are constantly on the move. The other day a woman joined the tour. She was living in London at the time, but had once lived in Pocatello, Idaho. There was only one occasion in her life that she thought might relate to paranormal activity. While living in Pocatello, alone, no pets or roommates, the remote control to her television went missing. She searched her place, but for a year she couldn't find it. One day she came home from work to find it sitting in plane sight on her couch.

Madisonville, Kentucky

Madisonville Kentucky. I had a couple on my tour who were pharmacists and worked at home sending orders to hospitals. The last out of the house job he had was in a hospital and he sat at a desk in front of reflective glass. His office was next to the morgue. One week they brought a young woman into the morgue. He was sitting at his desk and saw a women pass by in the reflective glass. A moment later his assistant came in, white scrubs, and he asked if she had just been there. No, she said, she'd been in the cafeteria for the last hour.

About a week later the same thing happened. A moment later the assistant came in.

Peter Pan

A couple from Massachusetts shared a few of their ghost stories during a tour. They were driving home form a camp site when the woman saw the silhouette of a boy, like Peter Pan, leap three times past the car and disappear into a brick wall. She said nothing to her husband and he said nothing to her. About an hour later she mentioned it and he, matter of fact, confirmed that he’d seen the same thing.

Another time they were at an air museum in Massachusetts, taking pictures of an old WWII airplane on display, and there was a little boy in the cockpit. She insisted to her husband that a little boy had climbed into the plane, but he said no one could get into the plane at the height and angle it was set.

Gainesville, TX

When one person sees a ghost, they often blow off the sighting, crediting an overactive imagination. But when multiple people see the same thing, it is harder to dismiss.

Over the Halloween holiday two couples from Texas came on the tour and the men had seen a ghost together, many years before. Back in Gainesville, Texas they had been driving with their father at about 2 o'clock in the morning, all three in the cab of a pick-up truck, in a relatively unpopulated area, when a woman in a wedding dress ran into the road in front of them. They all looked at one another, stopped the truck, and got out to look for a body.

They hadn't heard a thud, but that didn't change what they had seen. But as much as they looked around it didn't matter, there was no one there.

A week or so later, they were watching the TV and a panel on a talk show were talking about the very same sighting. Apparently they were not the only ones to see her, and fear that they had killed a woman on the road.

Yucca Valley, CA

It isn't often these days that you hear of people dying at home, but it is good to know it still happens. A couple came on my tour from Yucca Valley, CA and they had taken care of his mother, in the house, until she passed. She was in her eighties.

She would always wear a throw over her shoulders; it was covered in roses. When she wasn't on the couch with the throw over her shoulders, she would have it fan folded, laid neatly on the arm of the couch.

A while after she had passed the wife came home from work one evening. She had laid the throw on the couch, using it to keep the dogs from getting hair all over the couch. After work she walked into the living room to find the rose throw fan folded on the arm of the couch.

She went to her husband, in a back room, and asked why he had moved the throw because she was trying to keep the dog hair off the couch. He didn't know what she was talking about. He hadn't folded the throw and certainly not in an ornate fan fold. Only his mother did that.