by Jim Harold
One day, we came home from school and we found them standing in the front yard looking at the house. That was odd. They explained that they had been in the kitchen and they were washing the dishes or something and talking, when they heard the front door open. As I said, the stairs going up to our bedrooms are at the front door, and they heard footsteps go up the stairs, and then they heard running across the hallways upstairs. They heard all three of the doors slam (there's three kids' rooms). The sisters had then gone to the foot of the stairs and said, "Children, come down, give us some sugar; how was your day?"
Of course, we never came down, and they realized that it was about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, which was a couple of hours too early for us to be out of school. They went outside and they did not go back in the house and they would not work in the house anymore from that point on, unless the family was there. The only time they ever came to do any work was if my parents had a party or something and they would come over to help out.
One more thing about that house: I found out that the original contractor of that house—I don't know his name, and this could be hearsay; it's a small town—but the original contractor of that house, they say he hanged himself in the house while it was being built. I don't know whether that's true; I can't swear to it, but there you go.
The house changes hands about every five to seven years or so. I can't tell you for sure why it changes hands so many times, but I know for us, I think it was just time. When my husband and I married the house was for sale and we've been married now for a little over five years and it's up for sale again. It's just like clockwork, and at a price that's ridiculously low. It just makes you think.
-Beth, North Carolina
21. The Haunted Beauty Shop
I was on management at a beauty shop. I would open and close the store, and it would just be me and a receptionist—sometimes just me. We had a practice of locking the door when we counted money out and stuff like that. Anyhow, we would always hear the front door open by itself. When it was locked. After hours.
At first I thought, Oh, it's my imagination, and then we would hear the back door—with a push bar on it; a big, metal door—we would hear it slam shut by itself. Nobody really went out the back. (At the place I worked, we did haircuts, so we had a big vacuum and we only had to take the trash out once a month. So we never went out the back door; everybody took their breaks out front.) Whatever it was would slam the door.
I think the most interesting thing that happened to me there was when I went in one morning when it had snowed. In West Texas, when it snows, you don't go anywhere; everyone stays home, because we never have snow. So it snowed one night, and I told the receptionist to close early and I would take care of things the next morning. So I came in early the next morning and locked the door and all that stuff, and then went into the back office and got to work. I heard someone laughing, and I thought, Well, surely...maybe outside, somebody's throwing snow, so I kind of peeked around the corner and looked, and of course there was nobody there.
It was 8:30 in the morning, and there were no footprints out in the snow or anything like that. But I'd swear the laughter was inside the shop. I just had an uneasy feeling. I did not like to be there by myself, though I never saw anything. In fact, I was so scared to be there by myself that I even had my dad come up one day when I was up there by myself, because I just always had the worst feeling there.
There were two instances when I had this strange feeling—and I don't know what it was; I've tried to actually look it up, do some research on it, and I can't figure out what happened to me, or what was going on. One night, I woke up from a sleep (and I don't remember dreaming or anything like that, and I wasn't scared), and I had a sensation of electricity. Have you ever felt when the ground conducts electricity, or has that kind of electric feel, that kind of vibration? I don't know how to explain it... It was just flowing throughout my body, throughout my whole body. The first time I had this feeling I attributed it to, you know, a deeply religious thing. I had some medical problems and stuff, and that night I prayed for God to heal me. Three years later, I woke up with the same feeling, and I don't know what it was. I have no idea. I have no clue to this day why or what.
Actually, the medical symptoms subsided once I had this feeling. I didn't go back to the doctor right away; it wasn't anything I had to be real worried about at the time, but it could have developed into something, you know? Something they had to kind of watch. And now it's years later and I don't have the problem anymore.
-Candice, Texas
22. The Shadow Knows
My wife and I joined a paranormal research group here in our small town about two years back, but I'm a bit of a skeptic. I haven't had any paranormal experiences throughout my entire life, although my wife has had a few. She's more on the believer side. You could say we're two sides of a coin. And in this particular case, we were doing more of a casual paranormal hunt, where we go with several people to a larger building or structure that had reported paranormal activity. We go in there with members of the public and we kind of escort them around and attempt to have some type of paranormal experience in the structure. The structure was here in our town, which has an automotive history, and it was an old warehouse that was used in the past, where a couple of deaths were reported.
We'd been to the warehouse, which is kind of a large, creepy building itself, many times, and did not have too many experiences ourselves, but on this particular night we were investigating with a group of six or seven of us. I don't want to call them "civilians," but they weren't necessarily paranormal investigators; they were more members of the general public just curious about what was going on in this particular building. We were on a floor where there was no electricity. Three floors up, as a matter of fact. We'd heard about some activity occurring in a particular corner of this warehouse, which was quite large. We started heading into that corner with our group, and it was very dark with flashlights turned off.
The warehouse is sort of open to the elements in some areas, and, in this particular corner, a window was broken out and casting light across the corner there. As we were approaching the corner, my wife started shouting for everybody to stop moving. I stopped and I noticed that two or three other individuals in the group were still moving, so I repeated her instructions that everybody stop moving, because I figured that she was on to something. Everybody then complied, except I saw this one particular shadow that was still in motion. And I looked at the shadow, and it was a male figure with his arm upward, raised as though he were reading something. And I thought, Who is still moving? The warehouse could at times be a bit dangerous...there's piles of rubble...
I thought, Well, I've got to get this guy to stop because what my wife is saying may cause him some harm. So I looked around the group of individuals to try to compare where people were and what position they were taking. And nobody matched the shadow. So I looked back to the shadow again—it was still there—and I looked around again, and I did that two more times. The third time I looked I started to realize the shadow had no source. And as I started to think that, the shadow moved, and took maybe two to three additional steps out of the light from the window, and then was gone. I just froze, and I started to ask, "Who else saw that?" My wife, of course, chimed in that she did, and two or three other individuals had also seen the shadow.
For the next five minutes, I went into debunking mode, and attempted to explain away the shadow. I went over to the window, and I had to almost crouch down to my knees and walk across the window frame to it. I could almost do it, if you know what I mean, but the shadow we'd seen was darker than my shadow when I simulated it. The light source that was coming in from the window was a street light that was about...oh, maybe a block and a half away, 20 feet in the air. There was no fire escape, no ledge outside the window—it was a straight drop outside a third-story window. So, it's not like somebody could have walked by. They couldn't have walked by the light, and they couldn't have walked by th
e window. So that of course shook me up a little. Not "shook me up," I guess; more "excited me," if I can say that.
We started to do an EVP session kind of in the area where the shadow had moved off to. (EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena, for those fellow ghost-hunters out there.) And as we started to do the session, I was facing the corner where the shadow had been. I heard a voice, kind of a mumbling, grumbling voice, off to my left, and I looked and there was a guy standing there, a part of the circle. And I asked him, "Did you say something?" and he looked at me and said, "No, I didn't say anything." And his voice, the tone and the fluctuation of his cadence was different from what I had just heard. Thankfully, by that time, I had turned on my audio recorder to catch that EVP—which was direct voice phenomena, because I actually heard it, as opposed to the electronic kind.
I have actually asked myself how this has changed my skeptical nature, if it has. If anything, I'm still very skeptical. It hasn't really shaken me to my core. It hasn't changed my world view or anything like that; I'm still very skeptical. I was expecting something like this; that's why I started paranormal investigation and research—I wanted to know if there was anything out there. Everyone was coming to me with these claims, like "I saw this" or "I heard that," so this was my opportunity to get a little bit of a taste of it, and it did kind of pique my interest, but to a large degree, I would say that I'm almost more skeptical just because I know a little bit more about what I'm looking for. So, I'm still pretty skeptical, but I qualify myself now as being among the ranks of people who have actually had an experience, even if it was a little bit on the minor side.
-Jeff, Indiana
23. A Call From Grandpa
When I was about 4 1/2 years old, back in the early '70s, my father passed away. I was pretty close to his side of the family as a child. But in the '80s, as I was growing up, life happened, and I just kind of swayed away from that side of the family.
During the early part of 1990, my grandfather (my father's father) passed away. Unfortunately, I did not go to the funeral. In August of that same year, a couple days before my birthday, I was at home in my apartment, getting ready to go to work, when the phone rang. I picked up the phone, said "Hello," and I could just hear a muffled sound. I had to say hello several times. I could tell someone was there, but I just heard a muffled sound, like the person was really really far away.
The third time I said "Hello" I heard the voice call me by name—a nickname that only my father's side of the family called me. I knew right away it was my grandfather. I knew right away. He called me "Velmita," and I really got spooked. I hung up the phone, because, I mean, I didn't understand what was going on, you know? I didn't really expect this. I hung up, and I picked up the phone again thinking I was going to get a dial tone. And he was still on the line.
I just got totally spooked. I hung up and left my apartment, because I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to think. When I told people, I got made fun of a lot: "You got a long-distance call from heaven," blah, blah, blah. I insisted, "No. This really did happen." I know I wasn't going crazy. It really did happen.
I was 100 percent sure it was him. One-hundred percent sure. And for it to be around my birthday cinched it.
You know, I think about if I had done anything differently. It just really spooked me. I mean, going back...I don't know, I may have done the same thing. I hate to say I was frightened, but it's just something you don't expect, you know?
-Velma, Texas
24. Grandma's House
We'd just put Grandma in the nursing home, unfortunately, and we had to go clear everything out of her house, so I was going to go back and stay for a week. I took my cats with me; I was at Grandma's when no one else was there, and the cats and I would just hang out.
I think it was actually the first night that I was back there. I put away my things, went to bed—no big deal. I think at about 2 o'clock in the morning, I was sound asleep, and all of a sudden there was this huge bang. It was like someone had slammed a solid wooden door into a wooden cabinet or something. It woke me, and I was very startled.
I was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom with the door closed, and I swear that, right after that, I heard definite footsteps coming upstairs, and a tap at the door. So, I thought—and I'm trying to rationalize this somehow—I thought maybe for some reason something had happened and my mom had had to come over. So, I'm lying on the bed still, and I'm saying, "Hello?" There's no answer, and the room's still dark, and I'm like, "Okay..." I'm still trying to rationalize it...maybe I dreamed the whole thing. So I reach up and switch the light switch on, and I look down to the floor in the middle of the room, and both of my cats are staring at the door with huge eyes. So, that's when I'm like, Okay, I didn't dream it.
I had left my phone in another room, so I got up very carefully and opened the door, and no one was there. I got my phone and then checked the entire house, thinking maybe we'd moved something today and it fell over and I was just hearing things. Nothing. Everything was perfectly still, just where we'd left it; the doors were all locked, and there was nothing going on. Finally, when my heart rate came down to somewhere near normal, I went back upstairs, went to bed, and eventually fell asleep.
I had been lying there listening, wondering if anything else would happen. But then it sort of got odder, because nothing else happened. The next day, my mom came over to help clean things up, and when we were eating breakfast I said, "Mom, the weirdest thing happened last night." So I told her the story. She said, "You need to talk to your grandma when we get to the nursing home today." I asked, "Why?" She goes, "No, just tell your grandma the story. This will be interesting."
I'm thinking Grandma's going to laugh at me or something. We go to the nursing home, and my mom looks at her mom and says, "Mom! Robert kind of heard some stuff last night." Before I said anything, my grandma looked up and asked, "Did you hear that really loud bang, like wood slamming into wood?" And I said, "Yeah, what is that?" and she said, "I don't know, I looked, too...I've heard it a few times." And I told her everything else that happened, and she completely...she looked like, Oh, yeah, things like that happen in the house.
My grandma said she actually saw people in the kitchen, to the point that one day she thought that someone was in her kitchen and walked out there to see who it was, and there was no one there—no one in the bathroom right off the kitchen or anything. And she swears that somebody was walking through the kitchen.
My grandfather has passed, but that was way back in 1975, and this was just two years ago. If it were a ghost, I have no idea who this would be, actually. And, apparently—I don't like telling secondhand stories, really—but this is the house basically that my mom and her brothers grew up in. They moved there when she was in sixth grade or something, and she's the oldest. And Mom said that when they were kids, some nights they would see shadows in the bedroom. Not normal shadows. She said you'd close your eyes and hope it would go away, and open your eyes and it would still be standing there. I wasn't told any of these stories when I was a kid.
I was at this house all the time; I spent every Saturday night at Grandma's house, and nothing ever happened when I was growing up, spending Saturday nights there. That was kind of my safe haven.
What amazes me is that my grandma had heard exactly the same huge bang. It sounded like solid wood slamming into solid wood really hard.
-Robert, Minnesota
25. Man of Science Meets the Supernatural
This happened about 16 years ago while I was working in the pathology lab in one of the major hospitals in Sydney, Australia. Working at the hospital as a scientist, you had to do an afternoon shift, in all areas of biochemistry and blood bank and so on. When you finished your afternoon shift you were generally on call, and because I live up here in the Blue Mountains, about 60 miles away from Sydney, it was easier for me to stay down at the hospital site. So if any emergency came through, they'd page you and you'd come in and do your work.
I was wor
king an afternoon shift and I was on call, and after I finished my shift at about 11 at night I went down to the casualty section. That's called an ER in America. I went down to casualty and picked up my personal pager from the casualty switchboard and said, "I'm on call tonight." Of course, the protocol is that if something comes in, they page you. Where I was staying, well, it was a 10-story building built by someone who had absolutely no architectural merit to their name because it was this pretty blocky sort of building. I was staying on the fourth floor, and to get there...well, it was pretty involved. You had to go by service tunnel at the top, about 650 feet long, and the security people shut the whole hospital up about at 8 o'clock. So the only way to get into the building was the service tunnel. So, at the end of the shift, I went down, got my pager, logged on and said I was on call tonight, and went off to my room.
I took the stairs up to the fourth floor. But as you go up the stairs or via the lifts, you are always going to pass the security section there and they're always going to see who comes and goes. I popped my head in and said, "I'm on call tonight, I've got my pager, it's working, I'll see you later on." So I went up to my room, got changed, and went to bed. It was one of those hot and muggy nights. It was just steaming hot. I was finding it very difficult to get to sleep.