True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold's Campfire 2

by Jim Harold

  I closed my eyes again. I was terrified. I wasn’t making any sound. There was the sound of this heater going, and I’m lying there and I’m thinking, “In a way, I’m super relaxed and in a way I’m terrified.” I thought that I’d relaxed so much that it had opened me somehow psychically.

  I’m going to say categorically that this was not something in the tea. I’ve never been a drug taker, and I certainly think I would know if I was under the influence of anything.

  There’s a lot more to it. I lay there for awhile – I don’t know how long. It could’ve been 30 seconds, it could’ve been minutes. But I just kind of sat there thinking, “What am I going to do?” I wanted to say something to her, but I didn’t know who I was talking to. I wasn’t going to say something and hear something coming back that I didn’t know what it was.

  Anyway, eventually I did open my eyes again, and this time, instead of seeing the mask, I saw a broad face, a male face. It had dark hair, it was parted in the middle. It was a classic Native American. Broad head, large head; the hair came down to a ponytail. He looked quite happy and friendly, actually. Within just a moment, as I was looking at him, his face changed into another.

  One of those two next faces was a woman from India but then it just started to flash face to face to face. It was like watching that old Godley & Creme video, the song “Cry,” where the faces are changing all the time, but it was so fast. It was just so fast, you barely had time to recognize them. They were just a blur, really. Somebody in there looked like a French girl. Now, why I would think she was French just looking at her, I don’t know, but that was one of the impressions I got.

  So I went through all these faces, and I closed my eyes again. Then some more time went past, and eventually I got the courage to say her name. She just answered me back very matter-of-factly. I said, “Are you feeling okay?” She said, “Yeah, I’m fine.” Somewhere in there, I opened my eyes again, and it was her again.

  While we were still sitting there, I remember I said to her, “I feel as though I’ve seen your face change.” Which was an understatement! That’s all I said. She just casually said to me, “I think I saw your face change too.” That’s all I can remember. I left, I went back downstairs, and we didn’t talk about it anymore. For a long time, I couldn’t tell anyone, and then I started to tell people. I’ve told several people over the 22 years since then. Describing the experience, even now, gives me the creeps.

  There is a postscript to it, because there’s a show here in Australia some people may remember. It was called “The Unexplained.” It was on TV here in the early 1990s. One night I was watching that, and I can remember thinking that I’d never heard anyone tell a story about somebody’s face changing like that. It was bizarre.

  You know what happened? There’s a guy who was a famous Australian shock jock at the time. They used to have several segments about weird things that happened, and then at the end they’d get a celebrity and ask them, “What’s strange that’s happened to you?”

  So he came on there and he starts relating this story about when he was broadcasting from a haunted house one time, they got a medium in, and before the medium did what they asked her to do, she took him down into the broadcast studio and said, “I want to show you something.” She went into this trance, and her face changed. He saw her face change.

  He was telling the whole of Australia about this experience, and it was the identical experience I had. He said he saw the medium’s face change into a golden mask and then others. I thought, “Well, there you go. It’s not just me.” Seeing this verified to me that I wasn’t imagining things. The woman didn’t slip anything into the tea. I was vindicated completely by a person who I have never known, right there on TV saying the same thing happened to him!

  -Steve, Australia

  32. Would You Like Fries with Your Time Travel?

  This happened on a very bright, sunny Saturday afternoon, in Bowden, which is a town where I grew up, near Manchester in Northwest England. On this particular day, I’d gone up into the town to do some shopping with my mother, which I did every week. We were waiting for the bus to take us home, and it was bustling with people, absolutely hundreds of people everywhere. As we were waiting at the bus stop, I asked, “Can I go across the road to McDonald’s?” It had only just opened in Bowden and it was quite a big deal for us, the kids at school were really excited about it. I said to her, “Please, can I just go over there and get a strawberry milkshake?” I had this fascination with them and thought they were the best thing ever.

  After a little bit of persuasion, my mum said, “All right then, go ahead. Cross the road.” It was just across the road, and she could see it from the bus stop. She said, “Hurry up, because you’re going to miss the bus and I don’t want to wait another half an hour.” So, off I went to the McDonald’s. I got my milkshake and came out of the McDonald’s. I stepped into the road. I was messing around with the lid on the cup and trying to get the straw through the little hole in the top. Out of nowhere, in the middle of the road, I bumped into a man. Now, at first I thought, well, I’ve not watched what I was doing, you know, I wasn’t paying attention. I stood back and looked up, but this man that I bumped into wasn’t there before. He just appeared out of nowhere right in front of me and I hit him head on. So much so, that I actually hurt my nose. It was like walking into cold steel, that’s all I can describe it as. I stood back and I looked up at him. I just went cold as he appeared incredibly out of place. He was an elderly gentleman maybe in his late 60’s, early 70’s. He was very slim and very tall. I mean, I was only eleven, but he was a lot taller than my dad was. He was about six foot something, I would have said. He was dressed just like a Victorian undertaker, completely in black from head to foot. He had a black frock coat, black trousers, and he had black gloves. I couldn’t see what he was wearing underneath the jacket, but it looked as though it was either a black scarf or some kind of silk cravat or something like that. It was buttoned up to the neck. It was a really hot summer’s day, in the middle of Bowden Town Centre, and he would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

  I stood back and I apologized to him and said, “I’m really sorry.” He didn’t say anything, he just glared at me. His face was very pale, his hair was swept back off his face, and sort of Brylcreemed down, and he looked at me. He gave me a stare, as if to say, “What are you doing, stupid girl, getting in my way?” That was the sort of a look that he had on his face. His eyes are what I can still see to this day, as they were jet-black. There was no color in his eyes whatsoever.

  The pupil and iris were totally jet black. His stare just went straight through me. I felt absolutely just terrified, cold to the bone, really. I apologized again, and I carried on across the road back to my mother. I turned around and looked over my shoulder to see, because I was sure that other people would have seen him, and there was no one there. I got back over to the other side of the road, and the first thing I said to my mum was, “Did you see that weird man that I just bumped into?” She said, “What man? You stumbled in the middle of the road, but I didn’t see any man.”

  The really strange thing, and I found out a few years later, is that on that street, the high street in Bowden, the main street, is that there’s a big church, Bowden Parish Church. I wondered afterward whether that would have been the main road to the undertaker, going to and from the church. I later found out after that, not only was that church there, but the area where this happened used to be a graveyard that belonged to another church that had been demolished, and all the graves had been relocated while they built the Town Centre. This happened when my mum was a child. She remembers all the children sort of being excited because they were digging up the graves and moving the bodies off. I sat and worked it out, and it would have been in the area of where the graves were that I saw this man.

  I am intrigued about the idea of parallel universes because when I’ve heard people talking of them, it reminded me of meeting this gentleman. I’ve wondered whether ti
me was acting as a loop and these two different times being on the opposite side of the loop touching together, and you get this blending of the two times at once. I wonder if that’s what happened, because that’s what it felt like to me. I felt like he was as shocked to see me as I was to see him. That’s the impression that I got. It was very strange.

  -Andrea, United Kingdom

  33. A Nightmare Before Elm Street

  When I was five years old, I lived in a small town named El Paso, Illinois. It was 1961, my dad was in the service and my mom was Japanese. While he was stationed elsewhere, we were staying behind in my dad’s hometown. We lived in this little house. It was probably built at the turn of the 20th century and I was never comfortable in the home. Probably part of it was because my dad was gone, and my mom had only been in the country about five years. I was born in Okinawa, Japan.

  This house frightened me. I had a lot of nightmares, but this one nightmare that I had in this house has stayed with me to this day, and I still remember it. I had gone to sleep, and in the dream I was in my backyard. There was a hill in the backyard, a door opened out of the hill, and this figure came out of the hill and was chasing me. The person had a long black coat on, and had long fingers with knives on them. I was running from him and I fell. In my dream, I was trying to drag myself away, and just before he got to me, I woke up. At the time, I shared a room with my sister, who was four years old. I woke up. I told her to get my mom because I couldn’t move my legs.

  My sister went and got my mother, and she came to the room. I do remember a doctor was called. This being a small town, doctors made house calls. It was several days before I could actually walk again. I remember my grandmother, who was a big German lady, coming over and exercising my legs so I’d be able to use them again.

  Needless to say this dream had an extreme effect on me.

  I had been a normal little boy with no health issues, but after the dream, my legs were paralyzed. I was unable to use them. It was almost two weeks before I could walk again.

  I’d have the beginnings of the nightmare recur throughout my childhood, but I would always wake up before I’d get to the entire nightmare. When I would, I’d usually get a high fever. It’d be a symptom of being sick and I’d just relate it to being ill.

  My mother related to me as an adult that the doctor had asked her and my grandmother who had scared me so badly. He thought someone had terrified me, that it was a psychosomatic reaction to some terror. Someone had frightened me to cause the paralysis because there was no other reason for it.

  Here is where it really gets weird. The end of the story actually came in 1988, after my mother had passed the previous year. At the time, I used to go walking with a friend early in the morning, and she gave me a VHS tape of a movie called…Nightmare on Elm Street.

  I’d never seen it before, so I went home and I popped it into my VHS. When I turned it on I thought I was going to have a heart attack, because when I first saw the Freddy Krueger character, I realized that was the person who was in my nightmare in 1961. Freddy killed kids in their dreams.

  I always told my mother, I thought if he had caught me that he would’ve killed me. I would’ve died in my sleep. I lived that movie over 20 years before it was made.

  -Frank, Colorado

  34. Walking into Another Time

  One day I decided I’d go visit one of my friends. He lived about a mile away from my house, so I decided I’d walk there, because I was in my 20s, a mile didn’t seem all that far. It kind of does now. But anyway, it was one of those classic mid-November days where the skies are gray with a little bit of drizzle here and there. The sun was just setting behind me. It was probably about 4 pm or so. It was the latter part of November and there were no leaves left on the trees as we were headed into winter.

  I was walking through this suburban neighborhood to get to my friend’s house, and I have a tendency to watch the ground very carefully when I walk, because if there’s a possible way to twist my ankle, I will. Just as I am about to make a turn on the road that kind of takes a dogleg of about 45 degrees, turns off to the left and straightens out, all of a sudden I felt my body being heated by the sun. I felt the sun wash over my body. I looked down at the ground still, and my feet were bare and I was on a dirt road.

  In every way, I felt like was in a different place and in a different climate. Even the time of year was different, and it was more like late spring, so the leaves were fresh and green. They were full open, but fresh and green. I could see bugs flitting around. I was kind of in this wooded area, standing at a clearing. I was off of the road a bit. All the houses were gone, and I was looking up at the sun and the sky was crystal clear blue. It was early morning, and the air was pristine and beautiful. I remember I looked back down at my feet, because I could feel the dirt underneath them, and I noticed I had a dark brown dress on that was almost down to my ankles but not quite. I realized that my chest was flat.

  So I looked at my hands and I realized I was probably about 11 or 12 years old. The only thing that was similar in my physical body was that my hair was the same color, but it was tied up in pigtails. So I thought, “Okay, what is going on, where am I, when am I, and who am I?” I was standing there contemplating it, and for the briefest flash of a second, I heard my name in my mind, but I couldn’t hold onto it. It just flashed out of my memory. I thought, “Well, maybe if I just relax a little bit, my name will come back to me.” I was really curious about, “Who am I right now?”

  As I enjoyed the scene, because it was quite beautiful, I could hear a horse coming down where the road straightened out. The road, oddly enough, followed the same curvature as the asphalt road I had been on, which is kind of strange. I couldn’t see the horse yet, because that part of the road was densely wooded. So I thought, “Okay, this is good, somebody’s coming down the road, and maybe they’ll know my name and where I live and so on and so forth.” I was kind of excited, and I started to see the horse emerge from the trees. There was a guy on a wagon, and I thought, “Ooh, maybe I’ll check out his clothes and I’ll look at the hardware on the wagon, and maybe I can try to figure out what timeframe I’m in.” I really couldn’t tell anything from what he was wearing at all.

  I waited for him to get closer to me, because this took quite awhile; the horse was just clopping along very slowly. I just instinctively at one point raised my hand up and said, “Hi, Mister” – and I knew his name. Then I said, “Wow, where did that come from?” Of course, over the years, I’ve forgotten what his name was. So I was all excited, I was standing there and I was waiting for him to answer me back. I was still waiting to hear my name. He just looked over at me like I was really bothering him and just went “Howdy.” I was like, “Damn!” So I thought to myself that maybe I’d go over to him and ask him who I was. Then, I thought it might appear crazy. I thought better of that. You know, they weren’t really nice to crazy people back in the olden days.

  Maybe if he had been a friendlier guy, I might’ve gone over and talked to him, but he seemed kind of mean. So, I decided not to pursue that any further. I was just standing there and I wondered, “What do I do? Where do I go?” My brain started kicking into survival mode, because I figured I may not go back to the 20th century. At this point, I’d been there 10 or 15 minutes, and I thought, “Okay, now what do I do?”

  I figured, I was a little girl so I’d have to get somewhere where I could be safe. I thought if I could head towards town, God knows where that is, but if I could head towards a town, maybe somebody would recognize me. I could maybe find a newspaper and find out the dates and the town I was in, because I want this data so if I did go back to modern times, I wanted to research this. Of course, I didn’t know which way town was. I could’ve been on my own property, and my house could’ve been 300 feet away from me. I just didn’t know much of anything.

  Since I was facing the direction where the man had come down the road I thought that maybe I was headed towards town. I decided, “Well, I might ha
ve to walk 5 or 15 or 20 miles, but I’ve got to start and at least I have the whole day in front of me and most likely I’ll find a farmhouse somewhere.”

  So I started to proceed, to find out the road to who I was, and as quick as a flash – a moment – my feet were on the asphalt again, my body was cold, it was drizzling a little bit, and I just stopped where I was, and I was back! I wondered, “What the heck just happened to me?” I whirled around, because I half expected the guy with the horse and the wagon to be behind me. I turned around to look, and there were just these suburban manicured yards. I was back to the present day. The sun hadn’t really shifted in the sky at all. I looked down to the ground, and I thought, “Was I walking as I was doing this?” Because I was on a road. But it appeared like whatever happened, it happened in mid-step, because I was in exactly the same place where I was when I was transported to wherever.

  It was odd to me, because to this day, I don’t know whether it was an Einsteinian fold in space and I walked into some poor girl’s body, or was it a past lifetime that I was re-experiencing? I don’t know the difference because my personality was so big in that body that I couldn’t even remember who I was. It wasn’t like I felt connected to this little girl at all. I was just kind of disappointed that I couldn’t find more information so I could research it. I think that I’ve gone forward in time, and seen little snippets of my future, but never back, back how far this was. That was odd. It probably had to have been the 1800’s because of the length of my dress.

  -Sandy, California

  35. Angel in the Desert