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.