Bubbles in Milwaukee

I have seen a lot of orbs in my time, most in photos, a few live and in person, but recently a woman shared something about orbs that was new to me. She was from outside Milwaukee and had a seven year old daughter. Her daughter would often talk about seeing "bubbles." Sometimes they showed up in her closet and she would talk to them; other times she would come into her parents’ bed, complaining she couldn't sleep because the bubbles were keeping her up. The mother never saw a thing. 

Until a recently, when she was in a room with her daughter and thought she saw a ball of light by a ceiling fan. She decided to go into her daughter's room to take a picture and see if anything showed up. The room was empty and there was nothing. Later she took a photo with her daughter in the room and the orb showed up.

The part of this story that I have never heard before is that her daughter plays with the "bubbles," moving them around in the air with her hands. Why not? I guess a childlike innocence goes a long way.

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.