“He wanted Jimmy to be a contractor, but to be honest, Jimmy was all thumbs. He couldn’t even hang a picture,” Carl said. Carl watched the relationship from the sidelines, listening to Jimmy when he talked about his father’s disappointment in him. “I know it gnawed at Jim, but he got over it. It was like he was a teenager stomping his foot. He would pay people to do the easiest repair job, and find a way to slip it into conversation when we were all together. You could practically hear Uncle Webb biting his tongue.”
In 2005, Uncle Webb died from cancer. He was still a young man with no thoughts of death and no will. He was not a rich man, so there wasn’t a lot of money to distribute among the kids. Everyone assumed Jimmy would get his father’s tools, as it is the kind of thing you pass down to your son, but Jimmy wanted nothing to do with them. Instead, they went to Carl, who had probably spent more time using them while Webb was alive than anyone else. He became a computer programmer, but understood the need to be useful around the house.
Carl’s house, located a few miles from the mansions of Lakewood, Washington, has been a haven for ghosts since the day he and his family moved in. For more than 10 years he and his wife and two children have shared the space with several different ghosts, although the house is much quieter now. For the most part, they have become used to the haunting and pass it off as part of their lives. They have never called in paranormal investigators or felt threatened.
“I did research, but nothing. No tragedy or little secrets,” Carl said. “Just a house and a family that for some reason is a magnet for dead people.”
The ghosts come and go, but the family can tell the difference between them by the activity in the house. Some move things around. Some run up and down the stairs. Little children are heard giggling at times. The most active spirit is that of a little girl they call Kay, who has a crush on Carl. While Carl dated the woman who is now his wife, Kay would lock the doors and pull the sheets off the couple. For years she would play with an old music box in the dining room, winding it up and moving it around the house. They even heard a humming along with the song. When their first child was born, they could not keep the baby out of the crib.
“I thought she might be jealous of the kids, but she protects them. I think it’s kind of sweet. She’s gotten used to my wife and just wants to play. I have no trouble with her now,” Carl said.
The little girl’s spirit has become a part of the family, but it’s the spirit of a different family member that has caused the most disruption. Uncle Webb, who probably would have fallen in love with the house when he was alive, had issues with the family. He and Carl might have been close, but to the dead man, his unspoken intentions had not been followed.
“It started two weeks after the funeral,” Carl said. “I had set up a little work area in the basement and put all the tools down there. One night I was in bed, tired after a long day in front of a [computer] monitor, and I heard a crash downstairs. I went into the basement, and all the tools were scattered around. I know I hung all those tools up and organized everything down there.”
He did not get around to putting the tools away until that weekend. When he observed the mess that Saturday morning, he noticed none of the hooks that held the tools were bent, and the tools were thrown about the basement in places they could not have naturally gotten to. “A hammer was under an old desk I have down there. For it to have gotten there, someone would have had to throw it. It’s a good 10 feet away.”
A few days later, Carl’s wife noticed a picture had fallen off the wall. “It was on the kitchen table. I didn’t put it there and my wife had nothing to do with it,” Carl said. The glass over the picture, which is of his wife during a trip to Europe, was shattered. “There was a screwdriver right through the glass. It was like someone had tried to stab her in the picture.”
His wife was frightened by the incident, even though the family had experience with the paranormal. “I know there are people in my house. This felt differently and we were trying to figure out who it might be,” Carl said.
They got their answer in the next few days.
“Uncle Webb had always liked the Beatles,” Carl said. “Radios in our house started to turn on and play Beatles songs. We have a radio in just about every room in the house. They would turn on by themselves and a Beatles song would play. They’d be on stations neither of us even listens to. Three of them have to be hand-tuned, so it’s not like someone hit the scan button or something. I began to wonder if it was Uncle Webb and what he wanted.”
The couple decided Uncle Webb was trying to tell them that he had moved on. Tools continued to be moved and radios continued to play. After three weeks, they began to get tired of turning off radios.
“I asked him to tell me what was wrong. If he had something to say, I asked him to say it. I didn’t really think I would get a response,” Carl said.
That night, all of the radios in the house turned on, all playing the same song. Carl turned them all off one by one and moved to the basement to shut the last one off.
“There it was. All of the tools were in a perfect circle on the floor of the basement. In the middle was a picture of my cousin, Jimmy, and me. That picture had been in the attic in a box of pictures. There is no way it could have gotten into the basement.
“I figured he wanted Jimmy to have the tools. I packed them up the next day and drove to Seattle where he lives,” Carl said. “I didn’t tell him what happened. I just gave him the box and told him they belong to him. He was actually kind of happy about it. You have to put some things aside. Uncle Webb is dead, and I think Jimmy might think it’s been too long. I’m not sure if he ever uses them, but they’re his now.”
Carl reports the music has stopped playing and the pictures now remain where they are hung in his house.
The Ghosts of Two Christmases Past
Every year, part of the Christmas tradition in the Balzano household is to decorate with some old family ornaments for sentimental reasons.
There is one my wife made in grade school and one my son made just a few years ago. One my father gave me goes near the top of the tree. We hang pictures of wreaths and candy canes our children made in grade school. Each has its own story that rings out across the years.
But what if an ornament could somehow store recollections of past Christmases? More importantly, what if those memories are not all that happy?
In the 1960s, Janet’s mother purchased an ornament of a young girl wearing a Santa hat and sitting on a sleigh. It was not handmade or antique, just a simple clay statue.
Janet does not remember anything unusual about the ornament while she was growing up. When her mother passed away a few years ago, she inherited the ornament among other things. Eventually it made its way onto her tree and almost at once, there was something different about the holiday season. The rest of the house had a cozy Christmas feel, but the room where the tree was displayed had a heavy atmosphere and it felt like someone had died in it.
Janet began to hear banging, scraping, and the sound of ornaments being thrown to the floor at night. When she investigated, she found nothing.
Then came something else. When she was in the room where the ornament was, she heard a little girl crying. Living alone with no children, Janet knew the cries weren’t coming from inside the room. The temperature also often dropped—something paranormal investigators hear from people who experience ghosts.
Then the ornament began to move. At first it only moved to different places within the room, but then it began to move to different places within the house.
Janet eventually put the ornament in a box and moved it into the attic. She heard the cries several more times, but the activity stopped. She never displayed the ornament again, although she says that in the 30 Christmases that have passed since she packed it away, it’s mysteriously reappeared on the shelf several times.
Another friend of mine had a similar experience with a set of Christmas angels. She placed the two white angels on a she
lf, well out of reach of her three-year-old daughter, who had begun to talk about a little girl named Elizabeth who came to visit her.
Nothing unusual happened that first week the angels were displayed, but one day my friend saw that they had turned around and were facing the wall. She turned them back around and thought it was a joke played by her husband, who said the figures looked like they were staring at him.
The next day the angels were again facing the wall. She turned them around and when her husband came home, she confronted him about it. He laughed it off, but her daughter overheard them and immediately offered a reason.
“Mommy, Elizabeth said the angels were naughty. They had to go into ‘time out,’ ” she said. My friend told her daughter not to touch the angels again, although she noticed none of the chairs had been moved and her stool would have been too short to reach the shelf.
“I didn’t do it. Elizabeth did,” her daughter claimed.
The angels were facing the wall again later that night. My friend was certain her husband and daughter were not the culprits. She turned the angels back around and whispered, “Don’t you move again,” but later she saw they were facing each other.
Then other unusual things started to happen. The Ouija board they kept in the closet was found with its lid off. The lights flickered. Her daughter began spending more time alone in her room playing with her imaginary friend, and they were heard singing Christmas carols.
Before going to bed a few nights before Christmas Eve, she saw the angels were again facing the wall. She picked them up, but then stopped.
“No,” she said to herself. “I am ignoring you this time.”
She went to bed but had trouble sleeping. When she went to check on the angels later, they were facing into the room. A red stain, like blood, was dripping down the wall right below them. She ran her finger over the stain and discovered that it was actually red candle wax. She searched her house the rest of the season for a red candle that could have made that mark, but was unable to ever find one. Nothing else happened that year, but she has not displayed those angels since then.
Three Ways to Get From Here to There
There is a saying that the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. This does not always hold true for haunted items. It doesn’t always take the whole to make the ghosts come out, and sometimes the displacement of parts can be what causes the imbalance.
There are stories of people removing an object from a sacred place, like a headstone from a cemetery or a rock from a Native American ritual site, and the spirits follow the fragment home. It’s as if you have broken off a piece of the whole and things aren’t set right until it is returned.
Another type involves places like the Assonet Ledge in Freetown, Massachusetts. Known as a “body dump” for murderers and famous for its numerous suicides, it was a quarry until a lethal accident forced the business to close. In addition to the countless paranormal experiences people have had there, many buildings made from the stone are reported to be haunted as well.
Some cars can carry a curse.
In some cases, the whole is destroyed, but some of the parts continue to disturb people. People have blamed curses, bad luck, and spirits; others simply shake their heads and know it is only an urban legend. You’re forced to ask questions whenever you hear a story like this, but the answers are never easy.
The Urban Legend
There may be nothing more American than our cars. From an early age, children, especially boys, are given toy cars to play with. Getting a driver’s license becomes a rite of adulthood. Before we make an automotive purchase, we spend time choosing which car best reflects who we are—or who we want the world to think we are. Whether they are lemons or classics, we are connected to them. It’s no wonder that so many ghostly experiences and spooky legends involve cars.
Perhaps the most bizarre of these is the cursed car, doomed to doom its owners through accidents and unusual experiences. There are two versions that have made the rounds most often, identical in theme, but different in the details. Here’s a riddle: What does a Hollywood icon and a prince who threw the world into war have in common? Both took a wrong turn.
In his day, no person played the part of the rebel better than James Dean. In fact, he still exists in our modern times as the man who lived the life people secretly want and fear at the same time. No one was cooler. For five years, he was the most wanted man in Hollywood. He embodied the idea of living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse—until the day he did die and left behind nothing but a corpse and two legends. One legend involves the man himself and the stamp he put on our ideas of the young, troubled rogue; the other has to do with the way he died and the car that might have survived after he died.
You never know if someone with haunted wheels will be on the road.
It all supposedly started with a life lesson all people need to heed: Listen to Obi-Wan Kenobi.
As part of his fast-paced and dangerous reputation, Dean spent much of his time acquiring and racing fast cars. His favorite became a rare Porsche 550 Spyder he had customized and detailed to his specifications. In what would become a series of fateful moments, the car he originally wanted was delayed, and the Porsche was only supposed to be driven in the interim. It was nicknamed Little Bastard and according to sources, Alec Guinness (best known as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy) warned Dean a week before his death to get rid of the car or risk dying in it.
Seven days later, Dean was dead. On the afternoon of Sept. 30, 1955, shortly after being ticketed for speeding, James Dean collided head-on with a car going the other way on Route 446 in San Luis Obispo County, California. All others involved in the crash survived, but the legendary rebel expired before he reached the hospital. Since then, his image has appeared time and time again as an example of wasted youth and suave uncaring. Stories of that crash have grown as well.
The original rumors began with a common motif in urban legends: James Dean still alive but so disfigured by the accident he dare not show his face and limit the potential earning power of his image. Similar things have been said about Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur, and Heath Ledger, who, along with Dean, is on the short list of actors to receive an Academy Award nomination after his death.
The story that has persisted is more about the car, the murderous “Christine” of its time (some say the Little Bastard inspired Stephen King’s tale of a killer car). It was salvaged by a used car dealer and used as a moneymaker and cautionary tale. According to Snopes.com and several other online sources, the vehicle was then bought by car customizer George Barris, whose mechanic suffered a severe injury as it was unloaded from the truck.
Barris allegedly stripped the car and sold off the parts. Troy McHenry and William Eschrid, two doctors living in the Beverley Hills area, got into an accident with each other immediately after using some of those parts to repair their own cars. McHenry died, as did another man who bought the tires from the doomed Spyder—they exploded the first time he took the car out.
Where are the car and its parts now? No one seems to know. One legend tells of it being transported by 18-wheeler to serve another stint as an example of how not to drive. On the way to its destination, the truck got into an accident, killing the driver, and the car was stolen. Another tells of it being transported but never arriving at its destination, even though the truck arrived late but in one piece.
Of course, none of this can be faithfully tracked to any reputable source. Barris spoke publicly about it, but was never able to have his version verified. Troy McHenry did die in a car accident, but in an actual car race, not racing a fellow doctor who also had parts from Dean’s car. Instead, the circumstances of the crash and the legends of the cursed car feed one another, and while there may be no proof that either is true, they stand as an example that Hollywood stories are always made from a little bit of truth and a little bit of imagination.
The Confirmed Curse
Decades before Dea
n’s crash, the hunt was already in full swing to reclaim another cursed car. This one was never as glamorous as Dean’s car, but it saw more history than the Porsche. When some people look at its most infamous moment, they think the car might have had something to do with the death of more than nine million people. All this from a second-hand limousine, a questionable driver, and a curse no one can quite explain. Just like World War I was not “the war to end all wars,” the car that sparked it continued to live past its prime.
The car was a 1911 open-topped Gräf & Stift Bois de Boulogne tourer owned by Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Although he was the heir to the throne of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, he had gained his titles and prestige more by accident and through family mishaps than through leadership and proving his worth. He married outside of his station (and was shunned by some of his own family for it), and seems to have played things close to the vest. This might have been one of the reasons he died on that fateful day in June 1914.
Ferdinand’s country had annexed Bosnia, and while visiting there, several attempts were made on his life. Then on June 28, 1914, his new limo took center stage. A grenade was thrown at the car, but the device was poorly timed and ended up exploding behind the car. The Archduke and his wife drove on, eventually making a wrong turn. They were ambushed as they tried to back up and straighten out. A shot in the neck killed Ferdinand and forced Austria-Hungary to declare war. A short time later, ties and pacts threw most of the Western world into battle.
The tourer was too nice to get rid of, so it continued to be driven during the war. General Oskar Potiorek, who was also in the limo the day Ferdinand was shot, inherited the car—but maybe he should have just bought a new one. He was beaten back in several battles by inferior troops, something outside of the highly decorated officer’s usual modus operandi. He returned to Austria shamed and was stripped of his command. There are several stories of what happened to him upon his return, but according to Snopes.com, the most prevalent is that he lost his honor, money, and maybe even his sanity. He also lost the car, which went to his captain, who died a short time later: He killed two bystanders on a country road before hitting a tree and killing himself.
Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf Page 5