Often we want hauntings to be clear to us, but more often they are hard to define. Recently a dad from the Gulf Coast took his daughter on my tour. For him it was a great opportunity to share a city that he had enjoyed long before she was born, but as it turned out it was also a chance to dazzle her with his own life experience.
One evening close to twenty years ago he and some friends took our ghost tour and hung out with a few tour guides afterward. On a lark one of the guides asked them to check out a walkway between a few buildings. He and his friends asked if they would see ghosts there. Should they take pictures? What should they touch? The guide didn't want to influence them, so he insisted on keeping silent until they returned. Well, these guys went into the walkway and felt around the brick, tried to pay attention for cold spots. They eventually gave up and returned insisting that nothing had really happened, but while in the walkway one of them began to feel pressure on his temples and soon it felt like his head was being crushed in a vise. Not being the type to make a fuss, and not really believing in anything paranormal, he said nothing. The guide said they were still investigating the haunting, but they thought that some people had died in a fire there. Suddenly the young man who felt the pressure in his head burst into tears.
Afterward the group returned to the west bank and everyone went to bed, except the young man with the headache. He stayed up and watched television, sitting on the couch in front of a window. As everyone else in the house began to drop off to sleep, he heard a scratching sound behind him. He figured it must be a tree branch outside hitting the window, forgetting that there were no trees in the yard. As the scratching continued the mail slot in the front of the house began to flap. Drawn to the flapping sound in the front of the house, he began to walk toward it and thought he heard his name whispered. Then he heard his name again. Hoping that his host was joking around with him, the young man barged into his room. When he saw his friend just waking up, bewildered, the young man, barely himself, once again began to bawl telling his friend what had happened.
The next morning he went home to Lafayette. As far as I know that was the end of his haunting, but the man who shared this story with me said that long after that night he experienced sleep paralysis in the house, seeing a dark figure standing by the bed beside him.
