by Jim Harold
-Ben, Australia
14. Little Boy Charlie
We moved into this house sometime between when I was 10 and 12 years old. We noticed quite a few strange things starting to happen. One of the first I remember is, for some reason, whatever was manifesting itself had a fascination with my hairbrushes. They would disappear for sometimes a week, sometimes a month. Some of them never did reappear. Then a hairbrush would wind up on the kitchen table, and my mother…well, you did not take a hairbrush into the kitchen. I got grounded twice for that when I swore I didn’t do it. We finally figured out what was going on, so then she looked on it a little differently. There were just a lot of varied experiences at this place.
We had kind of a small hobby farm. It wasn’t on a lot of land, but my dad had retired due to medical reasons and he just wanted something to putter around with. He was born and raised on a farm. My mom had always wanted to raise Red Star poodles, toy poodles. We had anywhere between 12 and 16 dogs. We had a doggy door and a huge yard, all fenced in. They were pets. It wasn’t any kind of kennel or anything. They slept with us and got up on the furniture and all that.
One of the other things we noticed is that the dogs would stand and look at something. They would all be looking up in the same location and crying and wagging their tails. They’d be like dancing, their little feet kind of dancing around, like they were real excited to see somebody. We really thought that was bizarre behavior. We kind of got used to it, but that was just really strange.
Then there was food. You could not leave any kind of food on the cupboard and turn your back on it. If you were fixing a bowl of cereal, you did not take out the box, pour it in the bowl, set it on the cupboard and turn around to do something else, because if you did, the box would be dumped out onto the floor. It would literally fall over and dump out onto the floor.
This one time my mom really got mad. She had fixed chicken fried steak and had taken it up on a plate and was making gravy. When she was ready for the milk, she turned to get it. When she turned back around, the plate of steak was on the floor and the dogs were having a great feast. We got to eat frozen pizza that night! Unfortunately, we had a carpeted kitchen, which I will never, ever have again. So we had to try to scrub up the grease stains.
While we’re on our hands and knees doing that, my mom is cussing the ghosts out. The only thing I said, because I didn’t want to get in trouble was, “It’s a good thing you’re already dead, because if you weren’t, you would be!”
I did see the ghost one night. You know when you have the feeling that somebody is staring at you? I woke up and I know I was awake. Of course, you always have the people who say, “Oh, you were asleep. You dreamed it.” I didn’t, I was wide awake. I opened my eyes and I looked to where I felt the feeling. There was a woman and a small boy standing at the side of my bed. They made eye contact with me; they knew I was there.
I will never forget how the little boy looked so scared. That’s what kind of surprised me. I always felt that it was his mom with him; I don’t know that for sure, but he was clutching her hand very tightly. She was girlish, mid-20s, and he was maybe 4 years old.
She had on a green velvet type dress that went clear to the floor, and a hat like you would wear maybe back in the 1800’s to go to church or something, a kind of bonnet type hat. She was wearing a muff, the ones they used to put their hands in to keep them warm. She had a muff that matched her dress, one hand in that and with the other hand she was holding the boy’s hand.
He was wearing a little brown outfit with the little knicker pants that come down about to a little past mid-calf, and little brown shoes that tied. He had on a cap. That was his little outfit. So they looked like they were going to church or some wedding or funeral or something.
Her face had no expression at all. That was also extremely strange to me. Nothing; she wasn’t happy, sad, confused, nothing. It was a completely blank slate. I’ve never seen a face like that before. Because when you look at somebody, you can always tell a little something.
He was clutching her hand so tight and he was so scared. He was staring at me like I was the ghost. I thought that was interesting. I stared at them for a minute, and I noticed I could see them very clearly. It was in the country, and I was in an upstairs bedroom, and I had the drapes open. I don’t think I ever shut them. The moonlight was coming in. I could see color and everything. I could also see the wall behind him. I could see through them, behind them. So they weren’t solid, but they were very, very clear.
I wasn’t frightened at all or anything. I just told them, “It’s the middle of the night, and I’m sleeping. Please leave.” I turned to look at the clock, and it was 2 am something. I don’t remember the exact time now. I turned back and they were still there. That’s when I said, “I’m sleeping, please leave,” and I turned my back on them and the feeling went away. Of course, I had to turn to look and they were gone.
When I got up that morning, I told my mom, “I know who’s been feeding the dogs and who the dogs get excited about.” It was that little boy. He played with them. Mom said that one day she saw a ball fly through the air out in the backyard. It was daylight and she was doing the dishes. She heard the dogs barking real excitedly. She looked up and said the ball was sailing right across the window, even with it. The dogs were chasing it. They were just having a ball, and she was like, “Well, okay.” I just kind of got so used to it, it wasn’t really anything weird. I don’t know how to describe it, but I was never afraid in that house. I loved it.
Whenever we saw the ghost, we’d get excited. We called the little boy Charlie for some reason. We’d say, “Hi, Charlie.” It was just kind of a name we made up.
-Brenda, Colorado
15. A Haunted, Haunted House
A friend of mine put on a haunted house that turned out to be, well, really haunted!
It was in a 100 year-old house. My friend did a really good job of it, but because of the nature of the house, we liked to stay inside it during the night for security reasons. A little history on the house that we discovered was that the previous owner had been an old lady, and she had actually died in the back room. It was a case of where one kid thought the other kid was taking care of her, so they didn’t check on her for weeks. She just kind of festered in the back room. Sad.
From the mail that kept coming to the house, we found out her name was Molly. Because we were putting on a haunted house, we would joke that it actually had a real ghost in it. A few things would happen that were kind of like, “Oh, that was strange,” but nothing really intense happened until this one night.
The layout of the house in the back part was that there were two back rooms with their closets right next to each other. We had cut a hole through one of the closet walls so that you could walk from one room to the other. Then, there was another room on the other side of the hallway.
The guy who was running the house slept in that room. Me and another person were sleeping in the hallway in sleeping bags. The house was really old; there was no air conditioning, no vents or anything like that. All the windows were bolted down. All the doors were padlocked from the inside. Another thing to mention was that between each room, we would hang large plastic sheets so that when you were in one room of the haunted house, you couldn’t see what was going on in the next.
So we’re sleeping in that house, and I woke up, because I’m a fairly light sleeper at times. I heard somebody in Molly’s room walking around. At the time, I thought, “What is that?” I heard the walking around, and then I heard the plastic between the closets move. I was scared.
I thought, “Is there someone in the house?” I looked over at the other person, his name was Charlie, and he was just dead asleep. Then I heard the curtains move back, and then she’s back – well, whatever – was back in Molly’s room again, walking around. Like I said, this was an old house. There was no air current in this house, so there was no reason the sheets would’ve been making noise. I was desperately trying to wake
up Charlie, I said, “Wake up! Wake up,” while still trying to be quiet. Finally, he woke up, and I said, “Listen!” He listened and he asked, “What is that?” I said, “I don’t know!” We listened for a little longer, and then we finally got over to the owner and I woke him up, and the noise stopped.
We looked in the rooms, nothing was there. We checked all the deadbolts, they were still locked on the inside. All the windows, everything was closed. There was nobody in the house, and there was nothing that could’ve caused that noise.
Really, that was kind of the end of it; we had no solid explanation. Probably the most plausible one is that it was an actual haunting.
In spite of this, I love the paranormal. I’ve been on ghost hunts. I love all this stuff, particularly true ghost stories, like mine!
-Sherry, Texas
16. The Haunted Home of Rest
This story happened back in 1994 through 1996. When I was a nursing student, I was working at this nursing home in New England. It was an assisted living home with a very small population. We had something like 12 residents. The home itself was a mansion. The guy who built the mansion, Columbus Smith was his name, was an attorney who made his living by pursuing properties in England after the Revolutionary War was completed. So he had people over here in the United States who were actually heirs to properties in England, and the Crown wouldn’t let them have the properties. So he would sue and he would get the money for these people.
During one particularly involved case, as the story goes, Smith had to go over to England to attend to it. In the course of 10 days of the trial, his hair went from black to white, ash-white. The money that he made from that trial financed the construction of the mansion.
Columbus Smith actually brought in an artist from Italy to paint all the frescoes on the walls and the ceilings. It really is a very ornate, very decorative mansion. It’s really something to see and tours are made available to the public.
He built the mansion and lived there with his wife and his two children. His son died in the mansion at the age of 12 from tuberculosis, and a horseback riding accident killed his daughter at the age of 21. That left him alone in this mansion with his wife, who eventually died as well. After that, he built an addition onto the back and turned the mansion into a home for destitute women.
All of the staff there have seen something at one point in time. Typically, what people will see is a woman in a red dress. They see this woman in one of the second story windows. I have never seen the woman in the red dress but one night at about 10:30 pm, when it was close to shift change, something interesting happened. I was walking out of the kitchen, down the hall to do some rounds, and to check in on everyone, make sure everybody’s doing okay.
As I was walking, out of the corner of my eye I see this person. He’s about five and a half feet tall with white hair, wearing a blue jacket, and he was walking into the sitting room. I turned and I couldn’t see him anymore. At first I thought it was my imagination, or maybe I’d caught my reflection in a window, because there is a nice window on the left-hand side when you walk out. I tried for probably a good five minutes walking back and forth in front of that window, trying to see if I could get my reflection. I just couldn’t do it. Not where I saw where this person was. I thought maybe it was just a resident. So I walked into the sitting room, then into the dining room, and just checked around, but I couldn’t find anybody. It was just a very odd experience.
A day or two later, I was talking about this with the director of the place, telling her my experience of it. She’s just said offhandedly, “Oh yeah. He shows up every once in a while. No big deal. He just checks in on the place.” He being Columbus Smith!
So now it’s a historic building, and it’s become a nursing home. Since it is assisted living, the residents don’t need a whole lot of physical care. They’re all ambulatory but there’s a lot of senile dementia and Alzheimer’s, they are the kind of cases that really make it interesting when you start getting into the actual haunting of the place. Every now and again, you would have a resident freaking out, for lack of a better word. They’re real anxious, sometimes they even start screaming. I remember one particular instance when a resident was quite upset. I came into her room and turned on the lights. She’s was just cowering in her bed. I asked, “Hey, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?” She started screaming, “Get that woman in the red dress out of my room!” I couldn’t see anything, but you would have occurrences like that.
Sometimes it would be difficult to tell if it was dementia or something more supernatural. I don’t even know if these folks knew about the history of the place or any of the stories there. The fact that multiple people specifically described and talked about the woman in the red dress was something that was just really interesting to me.
I think we know of one true poltergeist-like experience. I wasn’t there for it, but there were some long-time staff there who told the story. One time, when they were setting the dining room table, they got all the plate count and the silverware laid out. They came walking in and started bringing the other residents into the dining room. As the story was told to me, all of the plates, all of the silverware, everything, just flew off the table in different directions. That was the only thing I’d ever heard of any kind of violent-type energy happening there.
-Dave, Wisconsin
17. The Boo Tube
This was probably back in 1989. I was about 14 years old, and it was a Sunday morning. I was playing one of those old Nintendo game consoles in my room.
I had an ancient TV that I used to play video games on, so I wouldn’t bother my parents. It was one of those old time TV’s that had dials on it to tune the stations.
I had just finished playing and the TV was on channel 3 to get the feed from the game console. I clicked it to 4 and I wasn’t watching anything but just wanted to put it on something so I wouldn’t have to hear a bunch of static. I got up and I was messing around in my room. I was supposed to go to a movie that day with some friends of mine.
The phone rang and it was my friend. I picked it up and we started talking. I was standing in front of the dresser where the phone was and the television was to my left where I could catch it in my periphery. Then all of a sudden, the dial on the television, I hear it and see it in my periphery. The TV changed itself from channel 4 to channel 9! Keep in mind, this TV had a mechanical dial that required someone to physically turn the dial and it would go click, click, click when it was changed.
Now here’s how I know that something happened. First of all, it freaked me out so bad that I ran out of my room – and I didn’t just run; I was running so fast my feet barely touched the ground. I was high-stepping out of the room. I ran in where my mom was and I’m just like freaking out. She didn’t know what was going on. Here’s this 14-year-old kid, who she probably already thought was crazy, babbling about my TV. I said to her, “My television changed, my television changed.” Blah blah blah.
Then, I go back in the room, and here’s the other thing that tells me that something happened. I only got channels 4, 5, and 9 on that TV on VHF and the UHF channels, 25, 34, 43. Back then, in Oklahoma on Sundays, pretty much all that was on at that time of day were these live feeds of church programs. Pastors preaching, people singing and that kind of thing. Except on channel 4, which is the channel that I turned to, not to watch, just to put it there, so I wouldn’t hear static. On channel 4, they had this show on that was called “For the Record.” Very catchy. It was the local politics show. Obviously, it was very different than a church program. You wouldn’t mistake one for the other.
So, when I went back to the room, it wasn’t on channel 4, obviously, it was on channel 9. There was one of the local pastors in the area on there, preaching something. I didn’t pay attention to what he said, I was so freaked out. But that was how I knew that something very real had happened. I’d seen it out of my periphery; I’d heard it; I’d gotten scared; and when I’d gotten back, there was definitely no way to confuse
those programs. It had changed from this political program to this church service, itself!
The thing is, it wasn’t like today’s TVs with electronic tuners, it was that manual and very audible click, click, click. It was a very rapid movement. It wasn’t like a slow turn. It was like vroop! I remember my brother-in-law saying, “Oh, it was the garage door opener sending a signal or something like that.” I replied, “I could buy that, yes, if it was a remote-controlled television.” The TV did not have a remote. There’s no garage door opener in the world that could cause a mechanical dial to turn like that. It just couldn’t happen.
Looking back, it’s interesting, because since then I’ve read a little and learned a little. I was 14, it can be a very difficult time in your life. I’ve learned a little bit about poltergeists and different things that can cause stuff to happen. I think that becomes the most reasonable explanation. Maybe it was manifesting due to my adolescent energy. Granted, I, as a teenager, read way too much Dostoevsky and Stephen King. That’s quite a combo there. I had a really active imagination. There was always kind of something weird about that house anyway. Who knows?
Nothing else happened in that house that I couldn’t really probably put down to just overactive imagination, but that was definitely, definitely something. It was 21 years ago and I’m 35 now. It is something that stuck with me and I remember the details to this day.
-Clint, Oklahoma
18. Haunted Frat House
I went to an engineering school, a very science-based, engineering, no-nonsense school. That’s the kind of guy I was, and still am.