Missouri Hills

I have had tours that were completely made up of visitors from Texas, but I rarely have a lot of people from Missouri. Tonight was an exception, as almost half the group was from Missouri. Most of them were from the same family and their grandmother had a prize family story about a house she and her family had lived in over forty years ago.

The house was out in the hills. When she moved in with her husband and kids the landlord asked if she was going to stay. She said she planned too. He couldn't get anyone to stay for more than a few months. The day they moved in they heard a radio playing really low. She figured it was some kids down the lane, the closest neighbor. But when she and her husband got into bed later that night, he said "If you're going to listen to the radio, turn it up." She told him they had not unpacked a radio. Later he investigated the attic, no radio anywhere.

Routinely she turned off all the lights when she left in the morning. At the end of the day she would drive up the hill and the lights on the second floor of the house would be on. In the back seat her kids would say, "Mom, hurry up. See, we have visitors upstairs in the window."

One night a friend stayed over. When he came to breakfast in the morning he was shaking. He told her he would never come there again. She asked him what was wrong. A woman had woken him in the night and asked if he wanted a drink. He gladly got up and went to the kitchen. There was no one.

They managed to stay in the house for a year, but they finally did find the activity too unsettling. After they moved the house burned down.

Hudson River Valley

Mansions or big houses, one of my tour guests grew up in one in the Hudson River Valley. She and her daughter took the tour recently and despite growing up with the ever present feeling that she would see something paranormal, she never saw a thing. But her daughter, years ago at six years old, did. The family was visiting her grandmother and she and her sister were sleeping in the sun room adjacent to her grandmother's bedroom. It was pasted their bedtime and her sister was asleep, but she was awake playing with toys on the floor when she looked up and saw a girl standing in the doorway, blond, about fifteen, in a white nightgown. The image was foggy, but the girl was clearly looking at her playing on the floor. At six she was petrified, but still managed to run through the door, through the foggy girl and into her grandmother's bed.

It was the only time she saw anything at the house. But years later her uncle mentioned seeing the same image in the same doorway.

Southern Missouri

A couple on my tour had an old family ghost story to tell. One of the old men in their family, an uncle or grandfather, in his eighties, had told the same story for decades. When he was a boy there was an old abandoned farm house that the children were always told never to go into. One day he and a friend managed to sneak up to the house and went inside. They were looking around the front room when they turned and saw a man hovering behind them. He had a beard, a white robe, and sandals; the bearded figure was staring at his friend. After what felt like a long time the figure turned to him and before their eyes met he and his friend rain out of the house, down the hill, and never returned to the farmhouse again.

The sister-in-law of the previous women from Southern Indiana had a separate paranormal experience. In the late 1990s her sister died in a car accident. They had always promised one another that if anything happened to one, she would send the other a sign. Well the women had a music box that she had kept for many years and was very attached to but never played; she didn't even think that it worked.


One day she was milling around the house and she heard the music box, softly playing on the shelf.

Southern Indiana

Countless people insist to me, that they will believe in ghosts when they see one. Fair enough, but a lot of experiences are far more subtle than that.

A while back a women came on the tour with her sister-in-law. She did not believe in this sort of thing until about three years ago. Her father had fallen ill and passed away. For weeks she had been in and out of his house, back and forth to the doctor and then the funeral home. There was a stack of papers and mail on the dinning room table that she passed repeatedly, looking at it over and over again.

A few days into funeral planning, the funeral director asked if her father had served in the military. If she could produce his discharge papers, he could have the proper rites for the funeral. She knew her father had served in Korea at a desk. Her father had no combat stories and his service had been over fifty years ago. She told the director not to include the rites, there was no way she would find the papers, if they even existed.

Once she got home she went directly to the computer to continue going through his e-mail. After staring at the screen for a while she turned around and looked at the dinning room table behind her. She noticed a yellowed dusty sheet of paper lying flat on top of the pile of mail and paperwork. This was the table that she looked at constantly throughout the day and this paper was not there before. She got up and walked over; it was her father's discharge paper.