True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold's Campfire 1
Page 1
Contents
Lucifer In The Lamp - Campfire's Spookiest Story
Introduction
Title Page
PART ONE: GHOST STORIES
1. Would You Like a Spot of Tea
2. Wheezer
3. Guess Who Came to Dinner
4. It Was Just the Cat
5. Calling Out the Spirits
6. Minuteman on Guard
7. The Groaning Ghost
8. Goodnight, Grandpa
9. The Girl in the Attic
10. Civil War Phantoms
11. The Home of Gathered Spirits
12. The Late, Great Captain George
13. Bullmoose Is Back!
14. Our Family Dog
15. My Roommate, Lizzie Borden
16. A Night Visitor
17. Mom’s Here Again
18. The Elevator Man
19. Grandma’s Got More Company
20. One Messed-Up House
21. The Haunted Beauty Shop
22. The Shadow Knows
23. A Call From Grandpa
24. Grandma’s House
25. Man of Science Meets the Supernatural
26. Bed Shaker
27. Smoke
PART TWO: OF MONSTERS AND ALIENS
28. A Light That Wasn’t Quite Right
29. Spirited Away
30. A Walk in the Wilderness
31. Something’s Out There!
32. Ol' Red Eyes
33. The Thing in the Woods
34. Out-of-Body Visitors
35. The Night Visitor
PART THREE: TALES OF DREAMS AND DEATH
36. Love Is Like a Butterfly
37. A Vision of Uncle Charlie
38. Mom’s Deathbed
39. A Pat on the Shoulder
40. Dad’s Last Goodbye
41. Strange Dreams of Buildings and Planes
42. Granddad Watches Over Her
43. A Vision Before Living
44. The Dream of a Funeral
45. A Poem From Beyond
46. Goodbye Sunny
47. Nana at Night
48. Uncle Ted’s Bed
49. Breaking News, in My Dreams
50. Dream Invasion
PART FOUR: SOMETHING OUT OF THIS WORLD
51. The Case of the Bookcase
52. An Unexpected Visitor
53. Mr. Synchronicity
54. Staying for the Credits
55. A Commotion From Above
56. Things Happen Here
57. The Spirits Woke Me Up
58. Oh, Rats!
59. Mind Over Matter
60. Would You Like a Sweet?
61. The Tree With a Face
62. Here Comes Peter Cottontail?
63. The Family Bible
64. Easy Rider on the Other Side
65. What Are the Chances?
66. A Cold Blast on a Hot August Night
PART FIVE: EATING MY OWN DOGFOOD
67. It Lit Up the Whole Sky
68. There’s Someone in Here
69. AK-47s Can Make You a Believer
70. Why I Hate Logging Trucks
71. Turn Your Radio On
Bonus: “Herman,” by Campfire Contest Winner Janese
Closing Thoughts
Acknowledgements
About The Author
Lucifer In The Lamp - Campfire's Spookiest Story
I wanted to begin the book with a story that you'd soon not forget. There have been so many spooky stories on the Campfire that it is hard to pick one as the most spine tingling. This one gets my vote and, after all, it is my book so here it is!
I was about fifteen and my friend Bridget and I were looking for something to do after school one day, and she suggested a Ouija board that she had at home. So she pulled it out and we set it up on the floor. In order to make it a little more spooky, I guess, she turned off all the lights and just had a lava lamp for our light. It was set right next to the board.
She started asking questions like, "Is anyone there?" and it seemed to be responding and she asked for it to give us a sign. We waited. Nothing happened for awhile, so we moved on, and she kept asking other questions, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed the lava lamp. All of the wax was collecting in one solid ball, which I thought was weird. So I kept watching it, and slowly it was forming into the shape of something; so I pointed it out to my friend thinking that this was our sign. As we watched, it shaped into the form of the head of a devil and it was so detailed, and there's no way that a lava lamp could have made that much detail. It's mouth was open like it was growling, it had fangs, its eyes were very angry. It was facing us; it didn't move within the water of the lava lamp at all, it faced us the whole time, and then I said to my friend, "Oh my God, it's the devil" and we both took our hands off the board immediately and it just went back to the lava lamp bubbles.
After that, I didn't play with the board much. I tried it one other time with a different friend and I made sure every light in the house was on and the windows were open, thinking the dark maybe had something to do with it.
I don't know if it was evil necessarily, because it went away and it wasn't threatening. Maybe it was something playing a joke on us, a spirit...I don't know. I think it was something, and it definitely peaked my curiosity. I'm very fascinated with the paranormal, Ouija boards, Tarot cards, all those things. I think something had to have made that lava lamp do that.
-LeAnn, Utah
INTRODUCTION
Somehow people feel comfortable telling me their spooky stories—a demon who appears in a Lava Lamp during a Ouija board session, a haunted hospital where a long-dead nurse brings a patient a cup of tea, or a haunted bed that shakes at night for no reason! I often ask myself this question: As a professional family man, how did I end up getting involved in all of this strangeness with these people and their weird tales?
Well, I think it was fate that I would end up being involved in some way with the paranormal. As a child, I was always drawn to stories of the strange, the weird, and the inexplicable. Thankfully, I've never outgrown it.
Whether it was life after death, ghosts, Bigfoot, or UFOs, I've always been fascinated with the unknown. In 2005, I married my love of broadcasting with this obsession and started The Paranormal Podcast. For those not indoctrinated, podcast is a fancy term for an Internet radio show. You can find my programs at jimharold.com.
Quite unexpectedly, the show has become one of the most popular programs of its type in the world. I have interviewed best-selling authors, experts, and researchers on their theories on our mysterious world. I've learned a lot from them, and yet I have even more questions about the paranormal than I had before I started. Doing The Paranormal Podcast has always been fascinating to me, but I knew there was something missing in my programs—stories of the average person and their tales of high strangeness.
To fill the void, while continuing the main show, I added a companion production called Jim Harold's Campfire that focuses on just that—everyday people and their supernatural stories. I have spoken to listeners from every corner of the globe, including Ireland, Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It is incredible to me that there is such a universality to this subject; so many common themes and yet so many diverse experiences.
To me, it speaks to the reality of paranormal phenomena. The skeptic would say that, many times, stories of the paranormal are outright hoaxes, the mistaken perceptions of good people seeing what they want to see, or the ramblings of the mentally unstable. I will concede the point that many stories, in fact, do fall into these categories. However, even if a small per
centage of these stories are real, scientifically inexplicable phenomena, then we have something. In talking to my Campfire listeners, I have come to believe that the vast majority, if not all, are telling what they believe to be the truth. I would submit that some of them have experienced just what they have perceived—a real brush with the supernatural.
When I named the show, I just thought Campfire was a catchy moniker. I was wrong. My listeners have made it much more than that—an electronic version of the old family campfire where we sit around in a comfortable setting and tell spooky stories. It really has brought me and the audience closer together, and the program has had an impact on people that I never anticipated. Many listeners have told me that the program serves as kind of a paranormal support group. I give no psychological advice nor claim any expertise in that field whatsoever, but I do think that it is therapeutic for experiencers to know that others from around the globe have also seen things they cannot explain by mere logic. Via this shared electronic campfire, we realize that we are not alone and that most people have had strange experiences that they cannot begin to explain by rational means.
The chapters in this book are real stories from my listeners. I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I have. Thank you for joining my listeners and I around the Campfire (marshmallows not included). Enjoy!
Best regards,
Jim Harold
April 2011
TRUE GHOST STORIES: Jim Harold's Campfire
by Jim Harold
Copyright, Jim Harold Media LLC. 2014.
All Rights Reserved
eBook Edition
This is the first book in Jim Harold's Campfire series.
Previously released in 2011 as
"Jim Harold's Campfire: True Ghost Stories"
ISBN-10: 0-9898536-4-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-9898536-4-4
PART ONE: GHOST STORIES
The meat and potatoes of any good campfire tale-telling session are ghost stories. Whether it's a mysterious girl in the attic, Lizzie Borden haunting a bed and breakfast, or a long-dead nurse coming back to serve a patient, our Campfire is no different. Ghost stories are our main stock in trade.
Who knows what ghosts represent? Not I, but I do believe they are real. Are they the spirits of the dearly—or not so dearly—departed, a residual psychic "tape recording" of long-past emotions, or interdimensional travelers? Your guess is as good as mine. After doing these programs for six years, my best educated guess is that no one really knows what is behind the ghost phenomena. Yet that makes it no less real!
What struck me most about these stories as I heard them was the absolute sincerity, and sometimes fear, decades after the experience, that permeated the voices of these callers as they retold their supernatural stories. Read on and you'll see what I mean. These stories are told in the voice of the callers, which I think makes them all the more chilling. Stoke the fire; it's ghost story time!
1. Would You Like a Spot of Tea?
The thing is, this is kind of a secondhand story. My partner, Paula, her family...they describe themselves as "spooky." You sometimes meet people who have paranormal stories, and they've got, like, one paranormal story, and then you get a person to whom this happens on a monthly basis. Her whole family is like that. I'm convinced that whatever experience a person sees is as much about him or her as it is about the experience. Her family is willing to see whatever it is that exists as part of the "other world." And I'm sure that whatever it is must be hereditary as well, because I meet so many people whose whole family has had these experiences—and my partner's family, they're into paranormal experiences.
Paula's mum's experience is the most amazing I think I've ever heard. She often has small medical procedures, so she's not particularly well; she goes into the National Health Service (NHS) every now and again. She lives in a place called Low Hill next to Liverpool, and she was in this NHS ward after an operation with lots of other people there. They were all asleep, and she was up quite late, just not able to get to sleep. A nurse came around and talked to her for a few minutes and asked her if she was okay, and asked her if she wanted a cup of tea. And at this point she said yes, she wanted a cup of tea. There was something about this nurse that seemed quite odd, but she couldn't put her finger on it at the time. The nurse went away, and she didn't come back for ages; actually, I think it was about an hour before she came back with the cup of tea, and by then Paula's mum realized what was strange: She had a kind of old-fashioned uniform on.
Paula's mum asked her, "What's the deal with the old uniform?" The nurse apparently just smiled at her and walked away. The next morning, Paula's mum checked into the nurses that were on duty that night. There was only one nurse on duty that night, and it hadn't been the one in the old-fashioned uniform.
Paula's mum became more and more convinced that she'd actually seen a ghost. These things happened to her quite a lot—spooky things. She sees psychics quite a lot, and this one particular psychic sees her. (I don't really approve of psychics; in my experience they usually turn out to be charlatans.) She asked this guy about the experience. She described what happened and he did whatever psychics do, and he said that he was getting a name. It was Lily. So the next time Paula's mum went into this hospital for another small operation, she engaged one of the nurses in a conversation about, you know, goings-on in this hospital. She told the nurse that she felt that she'd had an experience in this hospital. And the nurse asked, "Oh, what was that?" Paula's mum described it and which ward it was. The nurse went, "Oh, that would have been Lily." It turns out she was the resident ghost.
I think they had a bit of a discussion—but again, I'm getting this secondhand. People who worked at the hospital apparently had done some research because lots of people had seen this nurse. She'd never frightened anybody; she'd gone around and sort of...just asked people if they needed any help, and if they wanted a cup of tea. Whether she'd made all these people cups of tea, I'm not quite sure. You know, we've all heard of a ghost talking to people, but never preparing food! I said to her, "You should have tried to push it as far as you could go; try to get a latte or something."
I'm 51 now, and, you know, nurses now wear these horrible blue sacks; they're terrible. But when I was a kid the uniforms were quite sexy, with big skirts and little hats. I guess they have to wear these things, but it's a loss!
-Dave, United Kingdom
2. Wheezer
When I was in college I was a member of a fraternity. Our frat house was this huge mansion at least 100 years old, with the classic legend of a ghost in the house. The story goes back to the 1920s when the owner and his wife lived in the old house: Apparently there was some intermingling between one of the servants and the lord of the mansion, and the female servant had gotten pregnant. And supposedly the owner, to suppress knowledge of it, murdered the servant.
Fast-forward to when I was there: The ghost in the house was known as Wheezer because people reported hearing this wheezing sound at night; it was really kind of a spooky thing. A lot of these stories were circulating around the house, and I personally had friends who told me that they had heard this wheezing sound. People had seen curtains moving when the windows were shut tight and things like that. This was a real scary thing and I was wondering what was going on.
I stayed on the third floor with the president of the fraternity for three or four nights, and he had this batting helmet from the New York Yankees hanging on a nail on the wall. At about 10 o'clock, three out of the four nights that week that we were there, that batting helmet flew off the wall and rolled across the floor. It did not fall straight down, Jim; it flew across the room and rolled. We would look at each other and say, "Oh my gosh, that's Wheezer!"
-Jeff, Pennsylvania
3. Guess Who Came to Dinner
From when we first moved into our house, my husband and I had the feeling that there was something going on in our home. The very first incident occurred when we were having dinner. We had a bag near our refrigerator
where we keep recyclables, and both of us witnessed this bag swinging on its own. There was no breeze. Nothing. But the bag started moving, and it startled us both. Things started occurring after that...things that I would almost describe as curious, as though something was just watching us because we were new in the home.
My husband and I had experiences when we felt like we were being touched. Again, one time at dinner my husband had just started eating, and he said, "Someone just touched me on the back." Another time, I was painting—I'm an artist—and I was doing some work at my art table. I had gotten really close to look at what I was doing and when I moved back to kind of observe it, I felt that I had pushed into somebody, like someone had been looking over my shoulder. I felt this distinct feeling that something was there. And we had other things—noises, the TV turning off; you know, things of that sort that happened.
There was one day, or one evening I should say, I was asleep with my husband, and we had a cat in the bed with us, and all of us were startled awake with what sounded like a clipboard slamming on the ground. I often put my paintings on clipboards, so we got up and checked out my studio area, and there was nothing out of place. But it was a loud enough crash to wake us all up.
Honestly, I never felt there was anything bad about it; there was nothing malevolent. The entity just seemed more curious about us than anything else. It wasn't bad.
The house does have something of a curious history. It was built in the 1950s, and actually started out as some kind of an outdoor shelter. The family that owned the property decided to make it into a cabin, so it was built by the father and his wife and sons, and the sons more or less grew up in the house. Curiously enough, we did some remodeling a few months ago that involved replacing the tile in the bathroom, and we found the initials of the kids who had helped build the house in the concrete. So our thought was, maybe the entity was the older gentleman that had helped build the house in the beginning.