True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold's Campfire 1

by Jim Harold

  I knew it wasn't a dream because after I started hearing it I would open my eyes and look at myself in the mirror across the room. That way I would know that I was awake. I know I was perfectly conscious of what was happening, because I was having perfectly conscious thoughts, like, Okay, is this...what am I hearing?

  I kept trying to ignore it, and every time I would think, Okay, this isn't real, this is a hallucination or something. I was just covering my ears and trying to ignore it. But it kept getting louder and louder and louder and louder, until I finally said, "Okay, just shut up. I'm trying to sleep." And then it exploded. It felt like an explosion to me. And this is where it starts getting really odd. It felt like I was in an explosion because I heard the ringing in my ears, I went completely blind, and it felt like I couldn't move and my entire body went numb; I wasn't sure if I was able to move. I was trying to roll around, to see if I could move, but I wasn't sure if I was moving. So finally it faded away after about a minute or so—it felt a lot longer than that, but it did finally fade away after a minute—and I realized I had been lying on my side while this was happening, but when I came out of this state, I was lying on my back, so I did actually move. That's kind of what makes me think it wasn't sleep paralysis, because, first of all, I wasn't asleep, and second of all, if it was paralysis, I wouldn't have been able to move to my back.

  Well, I went to check my phone. I couldn't grab my phone at first because my hand would go around it but I couldn't grab onto it. And so I finally grabbed my phone, and when I checked the time, the time was exactly 11:11.

  A couple people have told me that maybe it was a spirit trying to get a hold of me, or trying to get my attention through the whole 11:11 thing. Somebody also told me that it was probably a partial out-of-body experience, too, because I wasn't fully unconscious, so it could have been that. Some people might think I'm insane, but I feel what I heard and saw was real.

  -Tiffany, Ohio

  58. Oh, Rats!

  I grew up with a stepmom, and bizarre things always happened to her, particularly in one house we lived in with her. One of the first things I remember was when we were sitting down at dinner, and she suddenly grabbed her arm. She was in pain, she said. My dad asked, "What's the matter?" She said that something slapped her! She moved her hand, and you could actually see welts coming up on her arm. At first I thought that maybe she had done it herself, but the prints were opposite. You know when you grab your arm, your fingerprints are on the outside of your arm? Well these were on the inside of her arm.

  Yeah, it was a little strange for us. We just kind of sat there and looked at her and thought, Okay, then! The craziest thing was, not too long after that, whenever she would sit down to watch television or something, it just seemed like rats would fall on her out of the blue.

  It didn't matter where she sat, they always landed on her. And we were looking at the ceiling and everything, to make sure that they weren't crawling across the ceiling. We didn't know if they could do that or not, but.... Rats are pretty athletic, and can go almost anywhere. In this case, though, rats would appear from nowhere, and you'd never see a rat again. You wouldn't find an infestation or anything. They would just drop out of the sky and hit her! My dad set mouse traps out and everything, and got nothing. They would never get caught.

  I should say that there were rats and there were mice. It was just...it was random. I'd heard of it raining cats and dogs, but...not mice and rats!

  We had a "Cypress Knee" sitting on our TV. It's the stump of a tree that grows in the swamps in the southeast. They're not light, those things. They can be kind of heavy. My Dad had one that sat on top of the television. One time my stepmom was standing at the back door, talking to my dad, who was outside. I was standing in the doorway of my room, and I saw this Cypress Knee come floating from the living room into the kitchen. It was levitating, and it moved toward my stepmom. My dad was outside and through the window saw something behind her, and he said, "What's that?" She turned around, and as soon as she did, it dropped to the floor and rolled to her feet. Of course, I was standing in the doorway watching this as it happened. She looked at me, and I turned around and went back into my room. For a little while she was scared of me, because she thought I was the one making that stuff happen.

  These particular things were directed at my stepmom, but there were other, more general things happening. At night we could hear things walking around by the bed. Just a constant pacing, back and forth. Soon after we moved out of this house, it burned down. It seemed that there was something strange in every house that we lived in, so long as my dad was married to her. The only thing that I can think of is that she said she used to do witchcraft, before she met my dad. She used to play with Ouija boards. Maybe that was drawing in those spirits.

  We moved into this house, what they call a parsonage, which was a preacher's house, next to this church that was on the property. For some reason, the preacher just did not want to live in that house, so he lived somewhere else. Because it was available my dad decided that we'd move into it. Weird little things would happen there. You'd turn off the light in the bathroom (it had those old switches that you had to push down or up really hard to get the light to come on), and you'd take two steps out of the bathroom and it would turn back on. The switch would be up. It wasn't just an electrical problem; the actual physical switch would be in the opposite position from where you'd left it.

  Also, the water faucets would turn on and off by themselves. We'd hear water running and go check the bathroom, and there was the water running. Of course, my dad was getting after us saying that we needed to turn off the water after we used it. We'd say, "But it was a ghost!" and of course he was like, "Yeah, right."

  Stuff like that happened all the time in that house. But the big event that happened was around Christmastime. We had just come home from my grandmother's house and were standing on the porch, waiting to go into the house. My dad moved to put the key in the lock when the curtain that's on the front door pulled back. It pulled back but there was nobody standing there.

  My stepmom was very pregnant with my brother at the time. I've never seen the woman move so fast in my life. She had cleared the steps and was out in the yard. I was up on the porch, and I backed up—there was a rail, thankfully, or I would have fallen in the bushes. My dad finished opening the door and then he went in to go turn on the light. Not every room in the house had a light switch; some rooms you had to go in and actually pull the string down from the ceiling light to turn the light on, and in the living room that was the case. So he went in to turn the light on, and then he came running out. He said something had slapped his hand when he turned the light on. I was holding our cat, and he grabbed it—this was a nightly ritual and my cat was used to it—and he tossed the cat in the house. My cat was usually fine with it, but this particular night my cat was not fine with it. My dad threw the cat in there, and the cat let out a yowl and ran out, down the street, and up the tallest tree he could find. And that cat didn't come down for three days. He stayed up in that tree.

  My dad thought maybe there was somebody in the house, so he decided to go back in. He turned on the light, and as he did, he could hear running. The way the house was set up, you'd have to go through one bedroom to get to another bedroom, and then into the kitchen, and then on the other side you had the living room, then dining room, and that went into the kitchen as well. He thought that the running went to the bedrooms, so my dad went through the dining room into the kitchen. He reached the kitchen about the same time as the running noises, but there was nobody there. Our back door was locked—the screen door on it was locked, but the back door actually going out onto the porch was pushed the opposite way of how it was supposed to go. You pull it in to open it, but it was pushed out. So he managed to get through the door, and the screen door was still locked, and he could hear running across the grass, and he said that he was looking out the screen, and whatever was out there turned around, and it had glowing red eyes.

>   About a week later, after the porch incident, it was right after Christmas. My dad was sleeping and he said that he felt something shake him. So he woke up, and he said that there was something standing next to the bed, and all it did was point to the wall where—in his bedroom, the fireplace was up against the wall in the living room, and through his dresser he could see that there was a red glowing ball, and that's when he realized that the house was on fire, and he got everybody out of the house. He thinks that if whoever/whatever hadn't woken him up, we would have been in trouble.

  We had a lot of stuff happen to us, and I think it was centered around my stepmom. I do because when I left the home, I didn't have that kind of stuff happening anymore. When my dad finally divorced her some years later, things calmed down for him as well. From the time that he married her, there was stuff that was happening all over the place.

  -Jacqui, Nevada

  59. Mind Over Matter

  I was on YouTube looking up some video because I was bored, and I saw something they call a psi-wheel, that involved meditating a little bit. I decided to try it out. I've always believed mind over matter was possible; I'm a firm believer in that of that area of the paranormal. The psi-wheel wasn't too hard to make, really; I just took a needle and a bottle cap and a piece of paper and I set it up. I started looking at it to make it move, and it didn't really work out too well.

  So I just kind of relaxed my mind a little bit, and, lo and behold, it started spinning. I sat up straight and I kind of freaked out. I'd never done anything like that before. And, you know, it was my first time even trying it, and I wasn't expecting to get that far at all.

  I decided to take a little break after doing that, and I went out to the bathroom to get a drink of water and make sure I was fully awake. It was a little late: 9:30 or 10 o'clock. I went back to my room and stood about 10 feet away from the psi-wheel, and it started moving before I even got close to it. I even did it from a distance. It worked really well, and that surprised me. I did some research and saw that the wheel was susceptible to wind currents, so I turned off the fan on my computer and sealed off my windows and everything else, so there was nothing to stir the air. I was sure there was no wind blowing anywhere, and the wheel started spinning again when I tested it.

  I always believed that I could move objects, I just never really thought of trying the psi-wheel thing. I have always believed in the paranormal; I've felt cold spots and ghosts and things from time to time in the places I lived that are supposedly haunted.

  The strange thing about the psi-wheel experiments is that I take a little break when I do them because I get really, really hungry. It's the weirdest thing. I ate three meals that first night, and I don't usually eat more than two a day. I found myself craving vegetables more than anything else, and I wouldn't really believe what happened if it wasn't for the hungry part.

  Maybe it's the life-energy of the plants that my system was seeking. I was talking to someone online who said there's a theory that telekinetic energy takes up some body mass. That might be interesting for some of your readers to research.

  -Brian, Pennsylvania

  60. Would You Like a Sweet?

  This happened about 15 years ago. I was with my boyfriend at the time, and we both fell asleep. You know sometimes when you fall asleep, you wake up with a sudden jerk? Well, that's what happened, with an added twist.

  We both woke up at the same time, and it was weird because we both started to describe our dream. It wasn't like I described my dream and he said, "Yeah, that happened to me." We both started saying the exactly the same thing. Well, what happened to us both in the dream was that we were traveling in a car on the opposite side of the road, which meant that we weren't in England, where I'm originally from, but in a different country, and it was raining really, really hard. There was a child in the backseat. And when the child reached his hand out and offered a candy, that's when my boyfriend turned around and the car crashed. In the dream I knew my boyfriend and I were so romantic, we were living together in the future, and we were out in a foreign country, traveling.

  Well, about a year later, we took a holiday to Orlando, Florida, and me being a nice big sister, we took my little brother with us. He was about 11 years old at the time. So we were driving in Florida with my little brother, and it was raining really, really hard. Some cars were even pulling over to the side of the road because they didn't want to be driving in the horrible weather. My little brother had a packet of Skittles and he reached his hand out and offered my boyfriend a sweet, and when he turned to take it...that's when we both realized, no no no no! Right there, on the road, we both remembered the dream we'd had about a year before about the kid in the back, the bad weather, and all of those details. It was really freaky.

  When he put his hand through the opening between the seats with the packet of Skittles, and my boyfriend said, "Oh, have you got any purple ones?" then we were like, "Oh my God!" You know?

  I absolutely believe that dream stopped us from getting into a terrible accident. The boyfriend didn't last, so it wasn't that romantic ideal that I had about him in the dream and our future together, but the details were all there. I think that dream prevented a tragedy.

  -Michelle, Minnesota

  61. The Tree With a Face

  To set the stage, when this all happened I was in the U.S. Navy and I'd just changed religions from Christianity to Wicca. I was at a park nearby the port with another serviceman, and we were talking and hanging out when this strange incident occurred.

  We were shooting the breeze, relaxing, talking about gaming, sci-fi, occult matters, and all that. Suddenly, I got a vibe that there was something on a tree. This unknown sensation. I asked him to get a flashlight. He said, "Sure." I asked him to shine the flashlight at this part of the tree where I got this weird instinct that something was there, and as he did we could see an image on the tree. It kind of looked like a face on the tree, and it looked like we had scared the crud out of it!

  I think we actually scared the spirit because I don't think it expected us to know it was there. I think it was just sitting there, watching us.

  I'm more sensitive to things like this, and when you open up your mind you kind of become open to more occurrences. I don't believe in everything supernatural, but I've had some strange, unexplained coincidences happen in my life.

  We went back to that park later and shined the flashlight where I'd seen the face previously, and it just looked like the normal tree bark. We did not see that image ever again, not after that one night. When we saw it, the amazing thing was that the face looked like yours or mine—a human face on a tree!

  -Ryan, Florida

  62. Here Comes Peter Cottontail?

  I was around 8 or 9 years old, and it was my weekend to be at my father's house. It was the weekend of Easter, so, Saturday night I was very excited and wouldn't go to sleep. I couldn't get to sleep, trying to stay awake for the Easter Bunny. As soon as I was about to doze off, I heard these three loud bumps, almost like knocks, downstairs. I thought it was my father playing a joke on us, you know? I looked over and saw my sister lying next to me and my father on his bed. There wasn't anybody else; everybody was where they were supposed to be. You would think there might be people milling about, "helping the Easter Bunny," as it were, but everybody was where they were supposed to be, and there wasn't anyone else in the house. I tried to go back to sleep, and it happened again: three loud noises. I couldn't explain it—and I'm getting goosebumps right now, oh my goodness.

  This was back in the '80s, and I know the house was roughly 100 years old at the time, so I don't know if it was the pipes banging, or if it was my grandmother—I know she died in the house about 10 years before this. It's hard to explain exactly what it was.

  After this happened my father ended up selling the house, and misfortune fell to the lady that bought it. I ended up reading in the newspaper that it burned down, and she didn't know why. They couldn't figure out what caused it to burn down. Ma
ybe what I heard that night was more sinister than the Easter Bunny.

  -Karen, New York

  63. The Family Bible

  The house that I grew up in with my five siblings and my mom and dad was in a quiet cul-de-sac, in a small city (back then), in Mequon, in 1972. You know how they say that kids pick up on things? Well, I guess as a kid I did not pick up on things, but my siblings did: things like footsteps and objects misplaced and then turning up. But I did experience a few strange things in the house. The first one was after my mom passed away, when I was about 12. My stepmother was in the house at the time, so it was my dad, my stepmother, and myself, and we'd just gone up to bed when there was this really loud thump on the living-room floor. It was a hardwood floor. My stepmother and I went downstairs to check it out. It was the family Bible, which had been in a built-in bookshelf, on the bottom shelf, probably only two inches up from the ground. If it had fallen out from that distance, it would not have made that loud noise. It seemed as though someone or something took it off of the shelf and slammed it on the floor.

  This happened after my mom died, but I don't know that I necessarily tie the two together. It's just interesting because so many other weird things happened in the house.

  When I was a little bit older, in high school, my parents went out of town. It was just my older brother and I alone in the house, so he'd had some friends over that night, and I had a friend stay overnight. We didn't have any full-blown house parties or anything like that; there were just a couple of people over. So after the three of us—my brother, my friend, and I—had gone on to bed, in the middle of the night my girlfriend and I sat up in bed, at the same time, and we heard a woman crying and a man consoling her. Like, in the middle of our living room.