True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold's Campfire 1

by Jim Harold

  I kept very still in the bed, thinking maybe I had turned in my sleep and that's why the bed was moving and there was tapping, but it continued. The tapping went on for about 30 seconds to about a minute, and I was just trying to muster up enough courage to say "STOP!" I said, "Please stop!" Then it did—instantly.

  -Meg, Arizona

  49. Breaking News, in My Dreams

  I guess you could call me somewhat of a skeptic; I'm kind of the "I have to see it to believe it" type. I'll listen to paranormal stories and I'll have my doubts. But premonitions in particular have come to me within dreams, and it's been interesting, to say the least. The first one was about an international news event. But I didn't know that until the next morning when I heard about it on CNN or Fox News, or whatever news station I was listening to that day.

  First of all, I should probably explain that I'm originally from Santiago, Chile. I was adopted by an American family, and my dream was about my home country. In it, I was standing on a hillside with...I guess I can identify them as native Chileans. We were staring at this volcano that was slowly erupting, and it covered the countryside. We were all running from it as it was erupting; it was spewing ash and creating a giant gray cloud. I found it weird that I kind of experienced it through a first-person point of view, not like an "I'm floating above my body" kind of dream. The next morning, I woke up to find out that indeed a volcano had erupted in Santiago overnight. So it was the night of the eruption that I had the dream, and I had no way of knowing this—I was in Florida. It was a little...exciting, and scary at the same time.

  I wish I could have done something. Would anyone have believed me? If only the dream had happened a couple of days earlier. I do share my dreams with my girlfriend and all of my family, just in case anything like that could happen again. I wish I could have told somebody beforehand, because it coming true was just wild.

  And that's not the only premonition I've had. The next one was in a dream as well, and it was also an international event. I don't know if you recall, but a while back there was an Airbus A330 plane that went down. It was an Air France airliner. Everyone had heard about that, but that's not what I experienced in my dream. About a month after the Air France incident, I dreamt that we had another Airbus go down, and that there was one survivor, a child. I viewed the plane kind of going erratically, flying erratically in circles around me, and I was next to the coast in the dream. I was watching a plane just fly erratically in circles, and then finally going down, crashing into the ocean.

  I didn't think much of it, because I try to connect dreams to what's going on in my life, so I kind of thought about it like, Maybe I don't have control over a situation for the time being, like at work or in my personal life. In the morning, I listened to the Today show on my iPhone and I heard breaking news about an Airbus going down in the Indian Ocean, with one survivor, and I was just in shock. I couldn't believe it, for a dream like that to come true a second time.

  -Daniel, Florida

  50. Dream Invasion

  It happened I guess about eight years ago, a few years before I married my wife. We were staying in this old house that always had some weird things associated with it—doors closing; just odd situations. We had roommates and we were all frightened of something in the house. We talked about it, but we were never sure what it was.

  One night we were all sleeping and I was having a dream that my wife and I were in bed when this figure, this dark shadowy figure started choking her, and I was staring at her, trying to get this figure off her but I was paralyzed. I couldn't move.

  We'd come to find out we were both having the dream simultaneously. I didn't know this at the time. I shot awake and started freaking out, and she shot awake at the exact same time freaking out as well. I asked her, "What is wrong with you?" and she told me the exact same story from my dream, except in hers she was being held down by something. She was looking at me while she was being held down and I had this terrified look on my face.

  In this dream, we were almost like two actors, and my point of view was from kind of the hero who was going to save her, and her point of view was the person being attacked. It was crazy. I never experienced anything like that since and I don't expect I ever will.

  -Chris, Arkansas

  PART FOUR: SOMETHING OUT OF THIS WORLD

  Some stories defy categorization, and these can be some of the most suspenseful and engaging tales on the Campfire program. Questions of synchronicity, of seeing something in the future and changing it, of telekinesis, or of experiencing poltergeist activity around a particular relative...are these phenomena supernatural in nature? Are they caused by our own emotions, or by fate? Who knows?

  One thing is for sure: These stories bring a chill that makes me long for another log to throw on the fire!

  51. The Case of the Bookcase

  I have very strong intuition, and as I get older, I think I have to listen to that more and more, because it's come through several times. I think the strongest, most significant incident in my lifetime, as far as intuition goes, is what happened when I was visiting Budapest many years ago. This was about '79 or '81, before my husband and I had our children.

  He and I went to Europe for a bit of a holiday, before we had our family, when we were footloose and fancy-free. I have relatives and family there, and I'd visited quite a lot when I was growing up. I wanted my husband to get to know Hungary too, so we were going to stay in Budapest. My father had come to Budapest a few weeks before we were due to arrive, and he rented a small apartment for us so that we would have a place to stay and not have to worry about that when we arrived. It was an apartment that would be shared with a man who lived there. He had a huge apartment, and had a room there that he rented out to people.

  So we arrived very late at night at the airport, and we were extremely tired, because it was a long journey. My cousin picked us up and drove us to this apartment. The fellow showed us the room, and it was this huge old-fashioned apartment, a great big room, and he said, "Okay, it's really late at night; don't worry about unpacking all your things. We'll leave and you can settle in." My cousin said, "Yeah, we're going to leave, too, and we'll come by and visit in the morning."

  I still don't really understand the feelings that I started getting at that point, but they were so strong, it was almost not in my control. What I had noticed was that the beds were separated (in Europe they often are in apartments—they would have one bed in one corner and another bed in another corner, or the two beds would be separated with a little night table). My husband and I had been married maybe one or two years; we weren't newlyweds, but I looked at the beds and I said to my husband, my cousin, her husband, and the fellow who was renting the apartment: "Those beds have to be moved." And they kind of looked at me incredulously. It was 2:30 or 3 o'clock in the morning, and their expressions were like, Wait a minute. We're not going to start moving furniture now. We're talking about heavy, European-style furniture and exhausted travelers. They looked at me and said, "Well, you can wait 'til morning. Why do you have to do this now?" And I stood so firmly on the ground there it was like I was nailed to the floor, and I wouldn't budge. And I said, "No, you have to move the beds." For the life on him, my husband couldn't understand why I was being so adamant.

  It was just like something outside myself was controlling me, and I just insisted and insisted. Finally, very reluctantly, the men picked up these beds and I directed them. I said, "They have to be on that other wall, way over on the other side." So they moved them, and we flopped into bed as soon as that was done. That was it.

  All of a sudden—I don't know what time it was, but it was still dark—there was this huge crash. It was totally dark; there was no light around at all, because this particular apartment faced into a hillside. My first thought was that a car had come over the hill and gone off the road and come in through the window, because there was the sound of splintering glass and just a tremendous crash. My husband said, "Don't get out of bed." He gingerly stepped
out, trying to avoid maybe stepping on some glass, and found a light switch way on the other side by the door. What had happened was that the huge, heavy bookcase with beveled glass doors and thick encyclopedias or other books in it that was attached to the wall had crashed down onto the floor. One of the beds had been underneath that bookcase before it was moved. Whoever had been sleeping in that bed when the bookcase had come down...well, they would have been...instantly gone. Dead, right there on the spot.

  The thing is, I didn't really perceive the bookcase to begin with, and when I noticed the bed, I wasn't noticing the bookcase there. I didn't think along those lines...I just knew that the beds had to be together; we had to sleep together, not separate, and that the beds had to be on the other wall. Not moving the other bed to where the bookcase was, but the other wall. And it was just beyond my control.

  The fellow that was in the apartment, his rooms were way down a hallway. In the morning, we approached and knocked on his door and said, "Look, come see what happened during the night." He was just astounded, because he grew up in that apartment; it was his childhood home. He said that that bookcase was his grandfather's bookcase, and it had been on the wall when he was a boy, and he slept under that bookcase, and he would have never imagined that it could have come off the wall. After all those years, just that very night. And he didn't hear anything. So, you know, after that experience, I always, always say to myself (although I don't always follow through with it), I tell myself to listen to what I'm feeling because it's very strong.

  -Judith, Canada

  52. An Unexpected Visitor

  I'm sure a lot of your listeners are horror movie fans—or at least some of them. So, the easiest way to explain the place where I grew up is...well, it's like the location of the house from Evil Dead. Picture a cabin in the woods, with a dirt road leading to it, lots of trees. Unlike in Evil Dead, though, it was a fairly nice house, although it was definitely out there in the middle of nowhere. It was a little spooky. No neighbors, no noise whatsoever at night. Maybe a howling wolf or something. It was in northern Georgia, the Appalachian foot hills. There is a bit of history with the area surrounding my house: I'd heard it was a historical battleground during the Civil War. As a child, I often roamed out in the woods, exploring, and I'd found several burial mounds, as well as remnants of older houses—things like that. Civil War bullets and things.

  When I was 18, I was home by myself one night when I heard a knocking coming from the walls. Now, this didn't scare me at the time, because my friends, who knew I could be frightened by living out there by myself, primarily, had shown up on several occasions and knocked on the walls before—a little prank. Good clean fun. They'd even sometimes wake me up on the weekends when I was sleeping, because it was something to do—and there is not a lot to do in North Georgia when you're 18.

  So, figuring it was them again, I went outside, and I said, "Oh, that's really funny you guys," and I walked around the perimeter of the house once, and there was nothing going on. No one there. So, I just guessed a bird flew into the wall or something. I didn't know. I went back inside and continued to watch Battlebots on TV.

  About three or four minutes later, I started hearing the same knocking coming from the roof. And I thought it was just wind...trees. So, I went outside again and looked. There was no wind whatsoever; it was completely still that night. I walked back inside, but was starting to get a little concerned.

  Just a few minutes later, the knocking started coming from the ground. Now, we don't have a basement or anything, so I couldn't check that. It didn't make sense, how the noise could even generate from the ground, and about this time I noticed that my cat was sitting right beside me. It was almost never that affectionate, and it was pushing itself up against me, staring at the source of this noise, and it freaked out.

  The funny thing was that I was grabbing the cat, screaming, "You protect me!"

  And that wasn't even the end yet. After that, I thought maybe someone or a group of people were playing a very big prank on me. So, I went and got a very large knife and sat in the middle of the room and waited for this to stop. The cat was sitting there with me, and suddenly the knocking started coming from the walls and the ceiling and the floor, and it just kept going while increasing in intensity.

  I sat there thinking, I don't have any other options. I'm at home; there's nowhere to run. I'm just going to sit here and wait this out. It just kept getting creepier. After 10 minutes, it still did not stop. Finally, I left and went to stay with a friend for the night.

  I thought maybe it was some kind of residual haunting from the war. I don't know if it was the house itself, because I only had one other experience there. I thought maybe it was something passing through.

  Six or seven years prior to the knocking story, when I was 11 or so, I was walking through the kitchen at nighttime when my parents were already asleep. I turned to look down a hallway and there was just a glowing ball of light, about the size of a Yorkshire terrier. Now, I say that because we had a Yorkshire terrier, and immediately I thought, Oh, it's Muffy. But it couldn't have been Muffy because it was white and glowing! And as soon as I looked at it, it took off down the hallway, and it slammed into a couple of walls, and it disappeared into one of them. It all happened so fast that I thought maybe I just imagined it or something, but it was a little too elaborate for a figment of my imagination.

  As I said, I don't know that if the house is haunted per se; the things I experienced might just have been something moving through. I don't know how the mechanics of that work. If I thought something was going to happen again, I'd definitely like to go back. That's an option; the house is still in the family. But I just don't think anything would happen again. In 18 years of living there, I had only two strange experiences. I've gone out on my own, trying to do some ghost hunting, because this is obviously an interest of mine, and I've never come across anything in all of my searching like this. It scared me at the time, but I'd be really interested to find out what it was.

  -Zach, Florida

  53. Mr. Synchronicity

  I've had moments, I think as most people have, when I've had feelings of premonition or something, when you can predict the next song that comes on the radio, or you get a flash of something about to happen, and then it does. Those kinds of things. Hard to define; hard to write down or document.

  A few unusual incidents occurred that lead up to my main story.

  Maybe 12 years ago I had a dream one night about a specific government agency. Not anything black-ops or anything like that, just a state agency, and I woke up the next day thinking, That was a strange dream. Why would I dream about that? That night, I got together with a friend of mine and a new girl he was dating, and I asked her, "What do you do?" She worked for that same state agency that I had dreamt about. Very strange.

  Moments like that have happened throughout my life. Last year, I found myself reconnecting with a lot of friends from the past, and there was one former coworker I particularly wanted to seek out. I made myself a note to see if I could find him online or contact some friends and see what was going on with this guy. I forgot to do it, but the next day I got a friend request from another coworker on Facebook, and the person I was looking to find was a friend with this other coworker. So, strange coincidence there. That got me thinking, What else? I wonder if I could affect this outcome somehow. So I asked myself to think of someone I hadn't connected with in a long time. I thought, My old college roommate! So, a few days later I spent probably 30 minutes to an hour online trying to find this old friend of mine, and had no luck at all. I couldn't find him; couldn't find a phone number; nothing whatsoever. So I gave up. The very next day, he signed up for Facebook and I was the first person he sought out. Fifteen years after I last spoke with him, he seeks me out the day after I was looking for him. Uncanny!

  Those stories lead up to the main story of synchronicity I wanted to tell you about. I know I'm a Cancer, but I'm fairly skeptical about astrology. It doesn'
t seem logical to me. I've read lots of things about it, and I understand it, but it still doesn't fit into my worldview.

  Still, I've found throughout the course of my life that I've had strong connections with other Cancers, by coincidence, and those born under Leo as well. My wife is a Leo, my oldest daughter is a Leo, and I have another daughter who is a Cancer, actually born on my birthday. So, that's a happy coincidence. (Author's Note: Jim Harold is also a Cancer.)

  About 11 years ago, I was on vacation with some friends, and we were out on the town. We started talking with another group of people, and something about one of the women in this group immediately seemed familiar to me. I felt that I knew her somehow. But I'd never met her before. So we started talking to this group of people and I started talking to this woman.

  It turns out we had a lot in common. We immediately had a connection, and she also had the same birthday as I do. Afterward, we kept in contact for about a year and a half, I guess. I never saw her again; we just kept in contact through mail and e-mail. But after about a year and a half, our acquaintance just tapered off.

  About eight and a half years later, a week after my wife and I separated, I was updating my day planner and I saw this woman's birthday. I always carry it over, even though it's the same as mine and I always remember it. That very day she reached out and found me again! I received a message from her, after it had been so long since I had last talked with her. She found me the very day that I was writing her birthday down in my day planner.