True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold's Campfire 1

by Jim Harold

  Anyway, I was nodding off to sleep for this short time and I was probably having a nightmare. And it woke me up; I was sort of woken up with a bit of a start and I turned over in the bed and looked at my watch—it was just past 1 o'clock in the morning. So I reached across to my pager to make sure it was still working and I sort of lay back in bed thinking, I've got to be back at work by 7 tomorrow; I need to get some sleep.

  So I lay there, and the next thing I knew, I could hear footsteps coming up the stairwell. Now I just thought it very well may be someone else coming off shift and they're going off to bed as well. So I lay there and I can hear them coming up the stairwell. They get to the fourth-floor foyer and they walk down the corridor, and they walk past my door. They walk about two doors down and then I hear this sudden, loud knocking on the door two doors down, and this person calls my name out. But the interesting thing was, Jim, that they actually called, instead of them calling just "Mark," they actually called me "Mister." Which is really unheard-of because you are just known by your first name there.

  The person who was in the room two doors down was a friend of mine named Alvin, who was also a med tech working the lab with me. And he's a very, very light sleeper. But this person knocked on the door and called my name out and I thought, Well, he just got the wrong door and he should have actually paged me, so I'll just lie here until he realizes he's knocking on the wrong door and he'll come back and look for me. So I lay there for about five minutes or so, and nothing happened. This is a bit odd. Ten minutes went past and I thought, This is really getting strange. So I got up and I walked down to the foyer and picked up the phone and I rang down to casualty and I said, "It's Mark here; did you send someone up for a call?" And the girl at casualty said, "No, it's been quiet since you left; nothing's come in." I said, "That's really odd, because someone's just been up here a few minutes ago looking for me. They called out and they knocked on Alvin's door but called me out and I wanna know what's going on." She said, "Well, everything's been quiet and nothing's come in. If we had something come in, we'd page you." I said, "That's right." So she said, "Why don't you try security and see what they've got going?"

  So I rang security and told them the same story: "Someone's come up here the last few minutes; what's going on?" The security guy said, "We've seen no one come up past us in the last few minutes. We would've seen them or heard them. And if we needed you to be called, we'd page you." I said, "Well, I don't know what's going on here, so I'm just going to go back to bed and forget about the whole business." So that's what I did; I went back to bed and forgot about it.

  The next morning, I was working in biochemistry and Alvin was working there as well. We were just chatting away and I asked, "Alvin, were you awake last night?" and he said, "Well, yeah, sort of." I said, "Just after 1 o'clock a person came up looking for me and knocked on your door and called my name out, and, in fact, they called me 'Mister.'" Alvin said, "Look, Mark, I was awake at that time and I was actually studying for my exams." He said, "I was wondering what was going on. I heard you go out and make your phone calls to casualty and to security." And he said, "I was wondering what was going on. I was going to come out and see what the matter was, but you seemed to have handled it fairly well and went back to bed." So he sort of laughed it off, saying it must've been some kind of spook or whatever, and I said "Yes, okay, fair enough."

  A few days later, I was on the ward taking blood and one of the nurses came up to me and said, "Mark, we've heard about what happened to you." I said, "News travels quickly around the hospital!" She said, "Look...well, you're not the only one this has happened to." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Over the years, we've had medical staff who have been called out when they're on call or something in the middle of the night having someone knocking on their door and calling their name out to come to an emergency that doesn't exist." And she said, "You've got to realize, the hospital is haunted." I said, "Obviously the quarters are haunted as well." She said, "No, you're not the only one. It's happened time and time again."

  Another thing too, Jim, it wouldn't have been a prank because no one would call medical staff out in the middle of the night for a joke. The first thing that would happen is they would be given their ticket and they'd be sacked. It's just amazing that when the word gets around that this happened again, the nursing staff comes back with the fact that it happened to other people, and I should just accept it.

  Here is another one. I'll put you in the picture: I've been up here in the Blue Mountains for more than 25 years, and before my son was born, we had a local tragedy; we had a young child drown in one of the local dams up here, just around the corner basically. It was a tragedy; the kid had gone down to the dam on the farm and thought the water was okay and went in and drowned. A real bit of a loss there. But, just after my son was born in '87, we noticed he was getting a bit agitated and tired all the time. We couldn't work it out. But when he started talking and that, after a few years we thought, Something is going on here. So I asked him one morning, "Look mate, you're looking really tired; what's going on?" And he said, "Aww, there's a child that comes into my bedroom every night and all the kid wants to do is play with my toys. And the kid wants me to play with him and won't go away." And I went, "Oh, okay. Have you told the child to go away?" He said, "Yeah, I told the kid to go away because it makes me tired." I said, "Well, just put your foot down and just ignore it." But I thought, We got a kid here who's got an overactive imagination.

  So we let it go for a while, and one night I got home from my shift at the hospital at about midnight, and the wife had dinner ready and was sitting down. We were just having our usual talk to see what was going on. We were sitting at the kitchen table and suddenly our attention was brought to the front door, and what came through the front door just flabbergasted us!

  It was a bright ball of light, about the size of a squash ball, and it had the intensity of an arc welding light, but it didn't hurt your eyes. It came straight through the solid door and it stopped in the hallway and it remained there for about a second or two, not even that, and then proceeded down the hallway, and did a left-hand turn straight into my son's room. And the wife and I just went, Okay, what is this? Now, I've seen a ball of lightning in action, when I took physics and stuff like that, and I know what it looks like and what it can do, and this was not a ball of lightning; it was just something completely different. Now, we weren't the only ones who actually saw it—we had an old tomcat with us at the time, and he saw it as well. And he took off after it, straight into my son's room. And the next minute, you could hear this almighty catfight going on. And the next thing we saw was the poor cat come screaming out of my son's room completely fluffed up like he had been through a tumble dry, and he just shot out through the back door, and we didn't see him for at least three days—he must have gotten hungry out in the bush! The wife and I got straight up from the table and we went straight into the room and there was nothing there. Our son was completely asleep; nothing had been stirred at all.

  Over the years, while we were in that house, we kept thinking we had a fourth child in the house. I've got three kids, and every time we got them into the car, we'd always think we had a fourth kid in the back there; not three but four. The wife used to remark all the time, "There's a fourth kid." Quite often my children would say that they'd hear a pair of footsteps going up and down the hallway or someone knocking on the front door to be let in.

  The interesting thing was, after we moved out of our old house to a new one around the corner here, something happened just a few years later. The wife and I were going down to do some shopping in a township about 25 miles away. She said, "Look, I'll meet you in the car; the kids are going with us." I said, "Okay, so I'll lock up the house." As I was locking up the house, I could see my wife sitting in the car, and I could see my youngest son sitting in there, iPod in his ears, listening to music and blocking out the kid sitting next to him. I locked the house up and I walked towards the car and I could still see
three people sitting in the car.

  So, off we drive, and as we were driving the wife was going on about how my daughter's room was so messy and how she wished she could clean it up and all that sort of stuff that teenagers generally do. And I'm sitting there going, Okay, the wife is now chewing out my daughter who's sitting in the back being very, very quiet. Being very patient and obviously going to lose her temper here any minute. I said to my wife, "I think you better tone things down; you're going to upset Emma. You're upsetting Emma in the back." The wife turned around and said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "You're upsetting Emma with what you're saying here and she got really quiet."

  She said, "Emma's not in the back." I turned around, and sure enough, there was just Tom sitting with his headphones, his iPod, listening to his music, and that was it. I went, "I saw two people in the back of that car."

  I don't know...I've always been a skeptic in many regards. Things happen for a cause or a reason or there is a reasonable explanation. But there have been times, Jim, in my life, when things have happened that completely defy any explanation. I don't know if I'm actually attracted to that or vice versa, but I think in some ways you get times in your life when those things do happen, and quite often you just completely gloss over it and don't worry about it. I think in many regards these things do happen to people, but it depends on what the circumstances are that could bring your attention to them directly and you see them as they are.

  -Mark, Australia

  26. Bed Shaker

  I guess I was around the age of 14 when this happened. I'd been kind of admiring a set of knives that I'd acquired over the years. It had gotten late, and everybody had gone to bed. Getting ready to go to sleep, I hear something in the kitchen, so I'm thinking, Okay, I'll be the man of the house and go check everything out. The doors are locked and everything seems to be okay so I lie back down on the bed. The lights are out. Within a few minutes for some reason or another, I look up towards the door into my bedroom and see what looks like a figure, a silhouette of a man almost as if he's peeking into the room. I can see his head and his shoulders. And me, being young, I'm thinking, Yeah, you come in here! And as soon as I say it, this thing moves from the doorway to the end of my bed, the foot of the bed. And it's not as if you see him taking steps; it's almost as if it floats to the end of the bed. Being 14 or 15 years, old the first thing I do is bury my head in the covers and yell, "Arrgh!"

  So after I get my head up from under the covers, I wonder what's going to happen. Then it feels like this thing, whatever it is, shakes the end of my bed. Next thing I do is, I start a-hollerin' for my mom. She's in the next room and has her door shut. She says, "It'll be just a minute." Well, I can't wait a minute. I jump up, and I run in there to tell her everything. She says, "It's just a spring in the bed," trying to ease my worries. So, I go back to the bedroom and I sit down on the bed—with the lights on, of course, thinking about what just happened, and the same thing happens again! I never heard anything like you would with a bad spring; the bed actually shakes.

  I don't know if it was the same one, but I've seen this figure in the house before, and it would always be in the middle of the night. You'd see this figure; it would come into the room. It had never shaken the bed or had any kind of contact with me that I can remember.

  -Nick, Georgia

  27. Smoke

  We live in a family home that's been in my husband's family since 1920. It was built by his immigrant grandparents and he's lived in it his whole life. I wouldn't necessarily say it's haunted, but I think that if you're a believer...maybe, some of the experiences I've had, I'd say it was more spirits or family spirits visiting, but maybe a skeptic would just write it off as something else. I would never consider it a haunting. To me, that's totally different.

  The most recent "visit" has been in the last two and a half years. My husband's mother passed away, but at the time she died she wasn't living in the home and she hadn't lived in the home for four years. Nobody smokes in the house and hasn't since she lived here. Well, probably a couple of weeks after she passed away, I was outside watering the lawn and our window was open. All of a sudden I got this smell of cigarette smoke, just like how it would smell when she lived in the house. I thought, Okay, that's truly weird. I went in and the whole kitchen and breakfast nook area smelled as if somebody was in there and had just smoked. It wasn't smoky or anything; it just had that reminiscent kind of smell and I thought it was odd.

  I went back outside and told my husband, "It smells like cigarette smoke in there and it's kind of weird." He's a skeptic and he's basically was like, "Whatever." When I went back in there 10 minutes later, it didn't have that smell at all.

  For the next year or two, that kind of stuff would happen occasionally. I do think I'm more sensitive to smell—that's been my experience, and not just in this house, but other places. I assume the smell might be her, and so it got to the point where I finally said, "Hi! I know you're here, and thanks for visiting. We're doing great, but as long as you just don't show yourself that would be great." I felt kind of silly saying it, but I do not want to see a ghost. I don't mind maybe hearing something, or maybe catching a whiff of a scent, but other than that...so I've heard footsteps, stuff like that, but nothing that I would be really spooked about.

  My husband, at first, his attitude was, "You're crazy; you always believe in this kind of stuff." Yet, he actually smelled it one time and he finally acknowledged that he knows what I am talking about. He thinks maybe it's something with the weather and it's coming out of the walls, so he is still a little bit skeptical, but he did smell it. His father actually passed away in the house in the late '90s, and at one point I told him I had heard him coughing down in the bedroom when I would be upstairs.

  His parents' bedroom was at the foot of the stairs and he kind of blew me off about that. Not long after, he told me that he had heard it too but just didn't want to say anything. So I didn't feel that crazy after he admitted it. But it's just been very light stuff; nothing real heavy, but it's here.

  -Melissa, California

  PART TWO: OF MONSTERS AND ALIENS

  Ghosts, although frightening in many cases, are sort of like comfort food on our supernatural menu around the Campfire. Most of us assume, whether it is the case or not, that they represent those who have "crossed over." So, most people are a little more comfortable with them than, say, monsters or aliens.

  In this part of the book, we will hear from people who experienced something quite different...and inexplicable. Buckle up—we now welcome monsters and aliens to take their seats around the Campfire.

  28. A Light That Wasn't Quite Right

  When I was about 5 years old, I lived in a flat with my sister, who was about 8, and my mother. On the evening of this story, it was late at night already, about 11:30, and our mom sent us off to bed. My sister and I slept in the same room. We didn't want to go to sleep, so we sat on the bed and just talked together, while our mother was in the kitchen reading a magazine. We were looking outside the window as we talked, from our flat that was on the fourth floor. That is important for the story—it was a rather higher one, not on the bottom floor.

  Suddenly we saw a bright light moving in the sky, and, in the beginning, we thought it might be a star or something like that, but it started moving in a very erratic fashion, at 90-degree turns, and it sped up and slowed down. We got really excited about it, because we didn't know what it was. After a while, it moved pretty fast, and pretty close to the window, and then it was just out of sight. Then it went out of our field of vision.

  We wanted to tell our mother and ask her if she saw it as well. When we got up to go to the kitchen, a very white light came out of the kitchen, and it was like those lights you get on a soccer or football field—very, very intense; so much so that you couldn't actually look into it. It only lasted a few seconds, and then it was gone. We went into the kitchen, and our mother wasn't there, so we thought she might have gone into another room, maybe
into the living room or something like that. We went there and into the other rooms, and we couldn't find her anywhere. She was just gone!

  The flat didn't have anything like a trellis or anything where you could just go outside; the only way out was the main door. But it was still locked from the inside with the key in the lock, so there's no way she could have gone outside.

  I didn't realize the implications, but my sister did. I was 5 years old and I didn't really start to think about the key in the lock and those kinds of things. I just thought, Oh, Mom probably went out.

  My sister checked the door and said, "Oh, no, the key is still in the lock. It's impossible, she couldn't have gone out." We didn't really know what to do. For about an hour, we walked around in the flat, looking, searching and getting anxious—even desperate. After that, we decided to go back to bed, because at that age, more or less, that's where we felt we were safest, I suppose.

  We went to bed, and that's where we must have fallen asleep, because there's nothing else I remember. We were sitting in bed and talking about where our mom could be, and the next thing I remember is waking up in bed again, still at night. I woke up more or less the same time as my sister.

  The first thing we did was get up and search the flat once again. So, we went to the kitchen and our mother was there. She was sitting there again, just like we saw her before, with a magazine; reading the magazine. We were very excited, and we went towards her and asked her where she had been, and she said, "Well, I was here all the time. I only sat down a few minutes ago."