True Ghost Stories and Hauntings 1

by Simon Murik

  True Ghost Stories and Hauntings

  True Ghost Stories and Hauntings

  Chilling Stories of Poltergeists, Unexplained Phenomenon, and

  Haunted Houses

  Volume I

  Simon B Murik

  Published by:

  Paranormal Publishing

  www.ParanormalPublishing.net

  Copyright © 2016 by Simon Murik and Paranormal Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Acknowledgements

  A special thank you to all those who shared their experiences of the paranormal to make this collection of ghost stories and hauntings possible. Whether you believe in ghosts or are just curious about the other side, we sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

  Names and places within the stories have been changed to protect the privacy of those who contributed to this book.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Haunted Painting

  Welcome to Hollywood

  Another Saturday Night

  Burning the Midnight Oil

  Messages from the Dream State

  Dr. Danger’s Park of Amusements

  The Playground

  Missing My Wife

  Music, Lights, Poltergeists

  Ava’s Present

  Be Careful What You Ask!

  The Night Runner

  Laughter at Sunset

  Additional publications of interest

  This unusual collection of true ghost stories and hauntings has been put together by Simon B. Murik who is the son of a long line of mediums and sensitives originally from Eastern Europe. Many of the stories come from his own experiences while others have been contributed by family members and those who have shared their paranormal experiences with him.

  If you enjoy ghost stories and reading about paranormal experiences you will love this book. Get ready for a few chills and goosebumps as you read about haunted houses, poltergeists, and other unexplained phenomenon!

  Be sure to check out Volumes II and III of True Ghost Stories and Hauntings as well as other offerings from Paranormal Publishing at www.paranormalpublishing.com.

  Ilove superstitions. I make my living off of superstitions. America is teeming with haunted mansions that can be bought for a tenth of their actual value. Reselling them is tricky, but the valuable items within the mansions are sold off quite readily and tidy profits are made before I have to worry about what to do with the actual building. This mansion was to be the fifth time I’ve grossly profited off of someone’s ignorance.

  The mansion had the standard story behind it. A child died. The parents had a picture of the child made, and eventually they committed suicide after claiming for years that they could hear the child breathing. Or something like that—I wasn’t really listening. Less than $50,000 later and I owned a mansion worth ten times that before factoring in the sales of the valuables within.

  I arrived at the property the day after I bought it. Of course, I had sent an inspector before purchasing the mansion, but her job had mostly been to make sure the house hadn’t already been scavenged and burglarized. It had not been. I didn’t know much about the property itself; I had never needed to before. I had demolished the last mansion I’d purchased and given the property over to some people who wanted to plant some endangered species of bush or tree in the area.

  Seeing the mansion for the first time, I was nonplussed. It wasn’t nearly as massive as the last one (which was to be expected; this one cost half as much) and I was actually feeling a bit disappointed before I entered through the doors that had once been majestic. The whole of the interior was covered in dust and the lights were out—I’d have to hire a mechanic to fix the lighting if I wanted to find anything of value. I searched a few rooms with my flashlight and found some valuable silverware and china. There was some jewelry in one of the bedrooms along with some preposterously expensive children’s toys. There was one of those famous golden Game Boys, a teddy bear with blue stones (sapphires, probably) sitting on a crib that resembled Cinderella’s chariot, a doll house that probably cost more than my home, and in the kid’s bathroom, I found a gold pacifier studded with diamonds—how would that stop a baby from crying? Obviously the mansion was small because they spent all of their money on their kid—the toddler had her own personal swimming pool attached to her room!

  In the master bedroom I finally found the painting. She was a beautiful little girl, with baby clothes that would probably sell for more than the mansion. Her chestnut skin seemed almost silken and her dark, curly hair could have been sold as llama wool (I’d only felt it a few times in my life, but it is the softest of all wools). In all respects she was a perfect child, barely of toddling age. She was laughing in the painting, her underdeveloped teeth stretched wide in a smile. The framing of the painting looked gold, but there was probably a stronger metal underneath. Without the frame, the painting was almost worthless, but after being in the business of selling the valuables of ghosts for six years, I knew several people who would pay a hundred or so for it. This painting was a perfect picture of absolute tragedy, and there were circles where that was truly valuable. Perhaps one day the painting would be worth millions, another sob story that people add value to in order to seem compassionate. The important thing was that the frame would probably make up the cost of the mansion all on its own.

  Two months later and I was reasonably certain that there was nothing valuable left in the mansion. It had been cleaned, combed over, searched, been turned inside out, lit up, and had a metal detector run through it (all it had detected were water pipes). I’d sold off most of the objects. The painting was worth less than the cost of shipping it to the top buyer, so in the end I just gave it to my friend Georgie. The more expensive items still weren’t selling—the absurdly wealthy people who could afford them hardly ever bought used things—but eventually someone who liked to think of her or himself as “dark” and “deep” with tons of cash to blow would buy the old childhood toys of the ghost child who’d murdered her parents from beyond the grave.

  I’d made a lot from this deal—enough to buy two more mansions to try again—and was looking for more areas shrouded in dead rich people and superstition when I got a call from Georgie.

  “Hey, deadbeat. Need me to pay off your gambling debts again?”

  “Oh, that hurts. Truly, you have wounded me.”

  “Well?” I muttered with a slight smile.

  “Yes. But that’s not why I called.”

  I waited a moment. “So…”

  “Right.” Georgie reentered the conversation, and for the first time I noted a tremor in my friend’s voice. The calm Georgie who constantly laughed at himself sounded terrified.

  “It … it’s the crying. I can hear a baby crying. All the time. When I gamble, when I sleep; it’s throwing me off of my game and making me stay up all night. And sometimes when the crying and screeching is so terrible I don’t think it can get any worse, I start to choke. I feel like I’m drowning. I feel like … like I’m supposed to be drowning. Is something wrong with me?” I could hear Georgie—Georgie! Crying.

  “Georgie. Listen to me. I’m going to check on a few things, OK? Lie down, try to get some rest, drink a glass of water. I’ll call you back as soon as I can, OK?”

  Georgie must have nodded or something before I heard the buzz of the call ending. I felt a li
ttle relieved that the conversation was over, but knew that there was a worse one ahead. I dialed the realtor who had sold me the mansion.

  I introduced myself and reminded him of our prior relationship.

  “Oh, you’re the one who took the Williams Manor off of my hands! I can only thank you. Please, feel free to ask anything of me.”

  “How did the child and parents die?” I asked bluntly.

  “Ah. Well, for her first birthday, little Dinah got a swimming pool. But—”

  “She was one,” I finished curtly.

  “Yes. In the night she fell into the pool and drowned while her parents were sleeping. After that, they were guilt-stricken. They put a painting of her up, and then, well, to be perfectly frank, they went crazy. They heard crying, even screaming, in the night, and felt like there was no oxygen around them. They called everyone they knew and asked them for medical advice, sometimes yelling out that they were sorry, that they didn’t know she would die. Only a week later, they drowned themselves in the same pool where they had found her body.”

  Superstitious nonsense, I told myself insistently. Then, Could the painting be the problem?

  “Thank you,” I said shakily, and hung up. I took a quick breather and called Georgie.

  “Yes?” my friend answered almost immediately.

  “I think there might be hallucinogens in the painting I gave you. I’m going to pick it up and have it examined, but first I’m going to check you into a hospital so that they can get rid of anything in your system that might be causing this.”

  True to my word, I drove Georgie to a medical clinic and the painting straight home, setting an appointment to examine it. I should have kept it in an airtight box, but I couldn’t resist a peek. The painting was too big for me to unroll it fully in any of my rooms, so I just looked in the center at the smiling baby.

  Her smile was a little wider than the first time I saw the painting.

  Hallucinogens, I told myself. Then I called the realtor again and asked him to send me a picture of the painting from before the suicides. I gave him my email and in minutes had a message in my inbox. I opened the attachment and saw the painting as it was on the first week of its existence.

  The baby was frowning.

  I rushed into the kitchen and fumbled in the cupboards for a lighter. I knew then that the painting—that Dinah—had to die. I ran back into my bedroom, lighter in hand. I stared at the smiling baby and clicked the lighter. Flames flickered along the tip of my tool and then my hand went slack, dropping the lighter uselessly on the carpet, the flame spluttering out.

  Dinah was frowning.

  Suddenly I was, too, as I heard crying, screaming, filling my ears, my mind, my soul. I cried along with Dinah and collapsed on the ground, shrieking in a toddler’s tantrum. I stared at the baby with tear-soaked eyes as she began to smile again. The crying stopped, and pushing the oxygen from my lungs, I realized that I could not inhale any to replace it as any attempt to take in air felt like trying to breathe water. I found myself face down on the baby’s belly, crying, and as if I was drowning on dry land.

  Dinah was smiling.

  Idropped my suitcase on the scratched wooden floor and looked over the empty living room of the one-bedroom apartment. A closet, no windows, and a dead plant. The photos on the website had shown furniture but I should have known better. Either way, it was a long way from the fluffy white carpet and pink walls of the Alpha Delta sorority house.

  But at $900 a month it was all I could afford—and I was lucky to even get it at that rate. The lease of the former tenant—who the landlord slipped out over the phone had been an actress too—had been broken and he was desperate to rent it out. But that was the price of living in North Hollywood. And it was worth it.

  Or at least it would be worth it.

  Dropping out of Iowa State after my sophomore year to become an actress was easily the craziest thing I’d done, and when I’d told my parents what I was doing their heads had just about spun off.

  But whatever.

  I was taking my shot at this now and thanks to some killer photos I’d sent in and a video of me playing Sandy in Grease in my high school play, I’d already lined up two auditions for tomorrow and a third one next week.

  I walked to the bedroom and the floor creaked like it was waking up from a long nap. Stopping in the archway, I rubbed the back of my neck; a dresser backed up against one wall and a full-size bed with a nightstand next to it lined against the opposite one. Thank God there was a window in the center wall, though. I managed a small smile as I looked out at the sunny blue sky shining over the sidewalks and shops—you didn’t get much of this in Iowa in November. The apartment might have been a three, but the view was an eight.

  I went over to the dresser and started putting my clothes away. My eyelids got a little heavy as I stuffed the last of my sweaters in the bottom drawer and I figured I’d better catch a quick nap before going out again. I walked over to the bed, crawled onto the hard mattress, and lay down on my back. I stared at the dented white ceiling.

  Nine thousand in the bank and no immediate income. What the hell was I doing?

  I woke up to feel the bed rattling. An earthquake! My heart pounded as I hopped out of bed.

  The rattling stopped instantly.

  “Much better,” I said and went into the bathroom. I took a quick shower, threw on my yellow ISU Gymnastics t-shirt and one of my seven pairs of faded Levis, and hustled out of the apartment. The iron stairs echoed as I jogged down them; when I got to the bottom I pushed the door open and walked out onto the sunny white sidewalk.

  I wandered the street for a while, grabbed dinner from a little Thai place, and headed back to the apartment. The day was catching up with me again and my first audition was atnine in the morning so I figured I’d better crash early. I watched some TV on my tablet for a while and fell asleep in the middle of Gilmore Girls.

  I woke up to a scraping sound.

  It was coming from the living room closet.

  Pulling my sheets tight, I held my breath and listened as the noise got louder like it was trying to either get out or get in. A few seconds later it stopped and I drifted back to sleep.

  When the alarm went off at 7:30 a.m. I checked my phone. The studio had left a voice mail. I hit play.

  “Hi, Ashley. This is Lauren Roberts from Triumph studio. I would like to reschedule your audition for some time next week. Please call me back when you get a chance so we can arrange a day and time. Thank you.”

  Great.

  The second audition wasn’t until five and I fell back to sleep. I didn’t wake up until almost noon, when I slid out of bed and hit the shower. I twisted the hot nozzle farther than the cold but even after a couple of minutes the water was still icy. I turned the heat up but the water just got colder.

  Enough of this.

  I shut the water off and shivered as I stepped out of the shower. The tile floor felt like a slab of dry ice and the whole bathroom was freezing.

  This place really sucked.

  I pulled on my skirt and v-neck sweater and then went out to grab some lunch and check out the area some more. When I got back to the building it was a little after 3:00 p.m. and I called a cab on my iPhone to pick me up in an hour. I didn’t want to sit around the apartment, so I waited outside. The cab showed up at 4:00 p.m. on the dot; I got in and told the bald cabbie to take me to Sun Star Studio.

  The guy chuckled. “No problem.”

  Twenty minutes later I was walking up to the receptionist’s desk at Sun Star. She looked up from whatever she was reading and smiled. “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah, hi. My name’s Ashley Sloan. I have an audition with Rachel Michaels.”

  The woman typed into the computer. “All right, yes, you do. Five o’clock appointment with Rachel. If you want you can take a seat and I’ll let her know you’re here.”

  I walked over to one of the chairs and sat down. Twenty minutes later the door opened and a stocky woman with
thick, black-rimmed glasses stepped out. “Ashley?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said as I got up and held out my hand. The woman shook it.

  “Nice to meet you, Ashley. I’m Rachel Michaels. Come on in.”

  I followed her into a gray-carpeted office with two silver-framed chairs with black leather cushions sitting in front of a burgundy marble desk.

  “Have a seat, Ashley,” she said. I did; Rachel sat down in the other chair.

  I took out my script.

  “OK, start as soon as you’re ready,” Rachel said.

  I took a deep breath, exhaled, and began.

  We did the reading and Rachel put her script down and looked at me for a second. “Can you hold on?” she asked, “I want to see if the film’s producer, Nathan Waters, is in his office. I would like for him to see you perform.”

  “Sure,” I said, fighting to keep my mouth from turning into a huge grin.

  Rachel picked up the phone and hit a button. A few seconds went by and Rachel gave me a little nod. “Hi, Nathan, it’s Rachel. I have someone in my office I’d like for you to take a look at. Great, see you in a few minutes.” Rachel hung up. “All right, Nathan’s on his way down. I’m just going to go check something with Katie real quick.” She walked out of the office and I sat there looking at the black-framed pictures of mountains and ocean landscapes behind her desk.

  A few minutes later Rachel came back with a guy wearing faded jeans and a black, short-sleeved polo shirt who looked like he should be playing pro beach volleyball. He smiled and I noticed a thin white scar on his cheek. “Nathan Waters,” he said holding out his hand. I shook it and introduced myself. Nathan then stepped back and folded his arms. “OK, whenever you two are ready.”

  I read through the scene again with Rachel and when we were done Nathan clapped—my skin tingled.

  “Very nice, Ashley. Very nice.”

  “Thank you,” I said, running my hand through my hair.