“That was not the right thing to do. That night it was like watching one of those propaganda films they show in movies. They were all of short scenes edited together with quick flashes. I saw my father getting married, a shot of some people gathering around a rosebush, me one Christmas morning jumping around with a Mickey Mouse guitar. I don’t even remember them all. But the worst was when I woke up.
“The lights were all on again and the camera was floating in the room. It was pointed towards me, like someone was handing it to me. I could smell him in the room again, and then the camera dropped to the floor. I got right up and went down to get the box. The shelves were locked again, and the box was opened and the films were all scattered on the shelf. I put them all in and carried it back to my room,” Eli said.
He knows he had watched all of the movies he saw in his dreams while his grandfather was alive because he remembered parts of them. For him, that does not explain how the camera moved or the fact he felt his grandfather so clearly in the room. The message was clear to him, though. He started a project transferring the film to VHS, and then more recently to DVD. That seemed to satisfy his grandfather’s spirit for awhile.
“After that night, the dreams stopped and they haven’t happened since. I have not made these pictures an obsession, but it has become a hobby for me to do this. I have even gotten a machine that allows me to take old slides and make digital pictures out of them. It hasn’t stopped the camera though. When I go a few weeks without working on it, I’ll come home and my camera will be on the bed. Now I just laugh and tell him I’ll get back to my work as soon as possible.”
What My Grandparents Left Behind: Tim’s Story
Perhaps if I’m going to share other people’s experiences with haunted objects, I should share my own as well.
They say every person has one geographic spot that they consider to be their true center, the place where they really feel “home.” Many of us spend our entire lives looking for that spot. I was lucky enough to have it from the moment I was born.
My mother’s parents lived in a side-by-side duplex house in Randolph, Massachusetts, throughout my life. They didn’t own it, but the people on the other side were their landlords and more like family than anything else. My mother and her three siblings had all grown up there and they swore it was haunted by a friendly spirit that lived in the third-floor attic, where the girls slept.
I had spent many nights there, especially when I was younger. My grandparents would take me every Friday so my parents could have a night out. I slept in a bed in my grandmother’s room. I remember suffering from old hag syndrome—the feeling that something is pushing down on a person’s chest (formerly believed to be the work of a witch, hence the name, but now believed to be the work of spirits or even demons) whenever I stayed there. I wouldn’t wake up to the feeling, as most people do, but would instead awake to see the shadow of ugly claws forming on the wall over my bed and reaching for me. I’d brace myself for the impending pressure that would soon hold my body down, yet I was unable to scream.
In later years, I’d often spend weeks at a time at my grandparents’ house during the summer. Growing up in a family of five children, it was nice to be the only kid sometimes. I’d spend my days helping my grandparents around the house and riding my bike all over town. At night, I’d sleep in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. I’d zip it up over my head because I knew I didn’t want to see what went on during the night. I could hear footsteps up and down the stairs, which were just beyond the far wall of the room, and banging in the pantry off the side of the dining room, right next to the living room. My siblings, my cousins and I used to close each other up in that pantry for a scare, even though my grandmother always warned us not to stay in there alone for too long. She never told us why, but we all knew. That’s where the ghosts hid.
My grandfather passed away when I was 19, and my grandmother followed a few years later. My Aunt Arlene lived with them and remained in the house after their deaths. I was planning a trip to see my aunt on one particular Saturday, and the night before I had an extremely vivid and lucid dream in which I was at the house, sitting at the dining room table and visiting with my grandmother just as I had when she was alive.
In the dream, we were discussing everything that was going on in my life at that time and she told me how proud she was of me. Neither one of us addressed the fact that she was supposed to be dead, but I remember feeling like it was the elephant in the room. Still, it was an extremely calming and serene incident, and it made me feel better about visiting the house for the first time since she passed.
Not long after that came the fire and with it the physical center of my universe was gone forever.
When the house burned down, the only person living on my grandparents’ side of the duplex was my cousin Amy, who was just out of high school. She had originally moved in with Aunt Arlene, but our aunt was getting married and had moved in with her fiancé. Amy was sleeping in the third-floor attic, and the fire started in the living room of the first floor. Many years before, an extension cord had apparently been run across the room, under the carpet. It must have been worn down over the years, surged, and then sparks from the exposed wiring ignited the rug. The house was old and the walls and ceilings were paper-thin. It was probably fully ablaze in a matter of moments.
Amy woke up not by the sound of a smoke alarm, but by the feeling that something was wrong. She opened the door to the attic stairs; the flames were already licking the walls of the hallway. She was trapped. She ran to the window across the attic, looking down on the concrete walkway and the dirt driveway three stories below. There was nothing to break her fall, and the fall would probably break her.
She crouched in the window, unsure of her next move, and felt two hands gently push her forward. Whatever spirit was there with her, it wanted her out before it was too late. Amy hit the ground, shattering both her wrists, but otherwise unhurt.
My cousin was upset, however, when she remembered that a beloved necklace that was given to her by grandmother was left hanging in her attic bedroom. Because she was so distraught, my Uncle Tom decided to go into the house to see if he could locate his daughter’s necklace. He thought it would be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, but when he climbed through the charred remains of the house to the third-floor attic—nearly falling through not one but two sets of stairs—there it was, hanging on its hook. Everything around it was charred and burned, but the necklace glistened as if somehow protected from damage by an unseen force.
At the time of the fire, I was in college and still living at home with my parents. I remember going with them to see the devastation the fire had caused, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. All that remained was a crumbling pile of still-smoldering wood and plaster. All the happy memories I had of that place were forever tarnished by the image before me.
The fire department had boarded up the doors because it was unsafe for anyone to go in there, yet Uncle Tom had found a way in through my grandfather’s basement workshop that had been dug out of the underside of the hill on which the house was built. In the back of the workshop was a staircase that led to the kitchen and the rest of the first floor of the house.
I remember my dad going up the staircase first and quickly coming back down again. He said the kitchen was too burnt, and he didn’t recommend crossing to the dining and living rooms, where the destruction was even worse. Yet I still had to see for myself, so I climbed the stairs and opened the door to the kitchen.
Once it swung open, I saw the kitchen exactly the way it had always been when my grandmother cooked wonderful meals. I could almost taste the fried chicken, the aroma filling the air, and could see every last detail the way I’d always remembered it—from the pan of bacon grease atop the stove to the permanent coffee ring on the counter in front of my grandfather’s coffee maker.
Then I shook my head and blinked my eyes, and saw the kitchen in its actual, truly horrific state.
>
Later on, while visiting Amy in the hospital, I shared that story with my parents. I often had discussions about ghosts with my mother’s side of the family, but I’d never talked about them with my dad. He’s a practical and rational guy, so I just assumed he’d brush it off and tell me there was no such thing. I was shocked when, in the parking garage of the hospital, he told my mother and me about what really happened when he went into the kitchen of the house. He heard a voice forcefully telling him to “get out,” and he immediately complied. Nothing more was ever said about it.
Before I left the duplex for the last time, I wanted to take something with me as a token of remembrance from the house in which I’d essentially grown up. Nothing in my grandfather’s workshop had been damaged by the fire, so it was a no-brainer for me to take his chair—a simple wooden chair that was probably part of some long-gone dining room set, or perhaps something he’d brought home from his job as a junk man.
He’d sit in that uncomfortable chair for hours at a time, stripping copper wire for cash and tending to his wood stove. I’d sit there by his side, watching him work, his hands hardened by nearly 80 years of life but still able to build nearly anything out of wood or spare parts. It was in that same workshop that he helped me launch my radio career at just 13 years old, wiring one of those old Radio Shack crystal kits.
As I was putting the chair in the back of my car, something else caught my eye. There, in a small flowerbed, was an ugly pink flamingo that had adorned the garden for as long as I could remember. Although everyone complained about this eyesore perched in the middle of all those beautiful flowers, my grandparents never got rid of it. The heat from the fire had melted half of the plastic, making it look like a big pile of pink goo on a metal rod. On a whim, I shoved it in the car, too.
When I got home, I took the chair and the flamingo into my basement bedroom. I had a little living area set up down there, too, with two couches, a coffee table, and an entertainment center. I put the chair in a corner near my air hockey table and weight bench and the flamingo up against the wall on the opposite side of the room. I then left, returning home around 1 a.m.
I crashed immediately after going into my room. Even though my bed was just a few feet away, I often slept on one of the couches because it was more comfortable. I dreamed of my grandparents’ house as it was before the fire, but as the dream went on, panic set in. Soon the dream version of the house was in flames, and I was startled awake.
As my eyes opened, I saw my grandfather sitting in his chair across the room. It wasn’t the first time a family member had seen his spirit—a few months after his death, during a family gathering on the front lawn, he appeared in the window of his second-floor bedroom. But this was the first time I saw his ghost, and I was a little frightened. He just looked at me; once our eyes met, he vanished.
The next night I was awakened in the middle of the night to see my grandfather sitting in his chair. Again, once he turned to look at me, he was gone. Finally, on the third straight night of his appearing in his chair, he didn’t disappear immediately and instead pointed to the melted pink flamingo against the concrete wall.
I knew right away what he was trying to say: “Get that thing out of here!”
I didn’t even wait until the next morning; I got right up and took it out into the back yard of the house. There were some woods behind the house, and I chucked the melted pink flamingo as far back there as I could. When I went back into my room, there was no sign of my grandfather in his chair, and he never returned to it again.
The remains of my grandparents’ house were plowed over and another house rebuilt over it. The new house is essentially a modernized version of what was there before, and to this day, it pains me to look at it. It’s just not right.
I’m not sure if the chair carried the spirit of my grandfather, or if it was attached to the flamingo. My gut tells me he’ll always be sitting in his chair and that he didn’t want any reminder of the fire, which is why he pointed to the flamingo. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t want a reminder, either. Of course, all of this could have been avoided had he just thrown that flamingo away when we asked him.
The Mummy That Suck the Unsinkable
Many feel the following story is nothing more than a myth, but if there’s even the slightest bit of chance that it’s actually true, it will go down as one of the most haunted—and deadly—objects in history.
According to legend, four wealthy Englishmen traveled to Egypt in the late 1890s or early 1900s to visit the site of a massive excavation. Hoping to collect some ancient Egyptian artifacts, which were all the rage among the English elite of the time, the four friends nearly fell over one another to purchase the prize of the excavation: the ornate sarcophagus containing the remains of the Princess of Amen-Ra, who had died nearly 2,500 years before.
The mummy at the center of curses and tragedy.
Little did they know that the princess had placed a curse upon her tomb. The Englishman who purchased the sarcophagus wandered off into the desert, never to return. Each of the other three men also suffered great misfortune: One was shot by his servant and lost an arm, one went bankrupt immediately after returning from Egypt, and the other became terribly sick and lost his job.
It didn’t stop with those four, either. The sarcophagus eventually made it to England and was purchased by another collector, who saw three family members injured in an accident and his house burn down before he finally realized what was causing all the bad luck. He donated the sarcophagus to the British Museum. While being unloaded, the truck it was on went into reverse, striking a bystander in the process. One of the men who carried it into the museum fell and broke his leg. The other died mysteriously two days later.
The sarcophagus was placed on display in the Egyptian Room, where more tragedy befell those who came near it. One night watchman died while on his rounds, and another quit because he couldn’t take the banging sounds and muffled sobs that came from within it late at night. One person’s child died of the measles, and other people who worked at the museum allegedly died after coming in contact with it. There are even stories that a photographer took a picture of the sarcophagus and the image that resulted scared him so greatly, he shot himself that night, unable to shake the horrific image from his mind’s eye.
The museum knew it had to get rid of the cursed sarcophagus and sold it to a prominent American archeologist. It was to be shipped to New York aboard the state-of-the-art RMS Titanic in April 1912. Of course, it never made it there—it allegedly sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic along with 1,517 people who suffered its final wrath.
Is that story really as unbelievable as it sounds? Many think it was the concoction of William Thomas Stead, a Titanic survivor who was also a journalist and ardent spiritualist. Stead allegedly made up the story in conjunction with another in which a medium warned him not to go on that fateful journey. There was never any record of such an item being loaded onto the ship, and surely something that valuable would have been logged and placed somewhere safe. And even the sarcophagus itself is something of a mystery; while many seek to explain away this curse by stating it still resides in the British Museum, the museum itself denies having ever had it in their possession.
Legend has it the mummy may have caused the Titanic to sink.
Of course, nobody would want to admit to having something that caused so much destruction, pain, and death. So perhaps in this case, the old joke about denial “not just being a river in Egypt” applies.
Uncle Webb’s Tools
Many people believe we need to find peace when we die before we can cross over to something eternal. After we pass, we want any problems we had to be solved, and for everyone to know how much we cared. Writing a will is a way to get that peace while we are still alive. Each person gets what he or she deserves, and the distribution of belongings is a way for us to assure our soul finds balance upon death. Johnny gets the coin collection he always wanted. Susie gets the wedding dress, so I can be with
her on her wedding day. Each grandchild gets money that will help him or her go to college. All the pieces fall into place.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, and the spirit can’t move on until everything is right with the living. An object becomes the focus of a haunting. In this case, the spirit will continue hanging around, trying to communicate so people can understand. When that item remains a symbol of a strained relationship, the haunting might be even more intense. The need to get the object into the right hands becomes an obsession, sometimes for the living and the dead.
While everything on the surface was fine between Jimmy and his father, Webb, there was always something underneath that was unsettling.
Webb was always being confused with other relatives, so early on people suggested he drop his real name, Charlie, and go with his middle one. That suited him fine. There was uniqueness about the name “Webb” that made him stand out, and though many people considered him average, the people who knew him best said there was always something special about him.
“Uncle Webb was always the center of attention,” said his nephew, Carl, who spent a lot of time with his uncle and cousins growing up. “If he was there, everyone else went to the background. Everyone wanted to hang with him. People just listened, like he was going to say something funny or deep. That guy made most things both at the same time.”
Webb was a contractor who took great pride in his work. Coming from a blue-collar background, he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and work with his hands and a good tool when he grew up. He told people about the business they would start together, working side by side, like he wished he could have done with his dad.
Jimmy wanted nothing to do with it. He went to college to become a teacher, and while his father eventually came to accept his career choice, he always took little jabs at his son.
Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf Page 4