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Alien Abduction: The Betty and Barney Hill Story

3/5/2022

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     On September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were heading home from their honeymoon when they encountered a UFO in the skies over New Hampshire. The craft eventually forced their car to stop. There, hovering over the road was a huge, disk shaped craft. It had windows along one side, and looking out of them were more than a dozen beings.
     The Hills drove off in a panic, but a series of strange, rhythmic beeping sounds put them into an altered mental state and they lost consciousness. Two hours later they found themselves driving on a different road with no memory of what had just happened to them. 
     When the couple arrived home, they were totally baffled by the UFO encounter, and they had no memory of the missing time. Betty and Barney went into separate rooms and drew pictures of what they remembered the craft looking like. The drawings were remarkably similar. 
     The following day, Betty discovered that the dress she had been wearing was torn in several places, and it was covered with a strange pink powder. It was also discolored, and the fabric was deteriorated. Most of the powder blew away when she hung the dress on the clothes line, but enough remained to be analyzed years later. 
     When Barney unpacked the car, he found that the strap to the binoculars the couple used to view the UFO was snapped in half. He also discovered that the tops of his shoes were scratched and scuffed up as if they had been dragged along the ground. 
     Betty took the advice of a friend of her sister who was a physicist and used a compass to test the car for any anomalies. When she got to the back of the car, she noticed about a dozen highly polished circular spots on the trunk's surface that hadn't been there before their trip. When she put the compass on the spots, its needle spun around wildly.
     The Hills contacted Pease Air Force Base and submitted a UFO report. They were taken very seriously by the officer who took their information, and their report ended up in Project Bluebook--the US army's investigation into unidentified flying objects. The Hills later learned that another UFO sighting of an identical craft was seen by military personnel that same night, and that jets were scrambled to follow it. 
     In 1964, the Hills sought the help of a psychiatrist named Dr. Simon who was also a trained hypnotherapist. Over a period of six months the couple were hypnotized separately, and they gradually began to recall what happened to them during the missing time.
     Under hypnosis, Betty remembered their car stalling on the highway, and that it was surrounded by a dozen strange looking men. They were about four and a half feet tall, had grayish colored skin, and large eyes that wrapped around the sides of their heads. Instead of ears, they just had holes in the sides of their heads. Their mouths were tiny, straight slits.
     The couple was escorted along a path in the woods to a strange metallic craft. Betty walked unassisted, but Barney was in a trance-like state and was dragged along by two creatures. When they got to the ship, Barney recalled his shoes bumping against the doorway of the ship. This explained the scuff marks on his shoes.
     The couple were led into separate rooms and subjected to physical examinations. Skin samples were taken from both of them. Barney said that he thought that a sperm sample had been taken from him. Betty said that the creatures thrust a long needle into her navel as a pregnancy test. 
     Before leaving the ship, one of the creatures who Betty called "the leader" showed her a star map of where he and his crew came from. After the hypnosis session, Betty drew a picture of this star map.
     When the hypnosis sessions were completed, the Hills described the aliens' appearance to an artist who made several drawings. Another artist made a bust of what the creatures looked like. 
     Although the Hills never wanted publicity, their story was leaked to a reporter after they spoke about their UFO encounter at their local church. A newspaper posted a story about their ordeal without their permission. This forced them to go public with their story. They would eventually co-write a book with their hypnotist called 'The Interrupted Journey'. The book would go on to top the New York Times best seller list. It sold over 300,000 copies worldwide. 
     After Barney's death in 1969, Betty continued searching for answers. In the early 1970s, a woman named Marjorie Fish created a three-dimensional model of Betty's map and discovered that the stars matched the Zeta Reticuli star system. While many astronomers were excited by her findings, others were skeptical. The debate about the star map continues to this day. 
     Betty died in 2004, but interest in the couple's case continued. In 2020, the dress Betty had been wearing was found to contain traces of Tellurium and Rhodium. Both are extremely rare on earth, but more common in outer space. Rhodium is one of the most expensive metals on earth. There is no explanation of how these particles ended up on Betty's dress. 
      Many believe the Hills had a genuine alien abduction, but others were skeptical. Critics point out that the aliens the Hills described resembles an alien creature from an episode of the Outer Limits TV show. They also say that Betty's description of the 'pregnancy test' resembled a scene from the movie "Invaders from Mars". The couple denied ever having seen either show.
​     Information recalled under hypnosis is not necessarily accurate. When a traumatic event happens, our minds often fill in the missing information with images and false memories in order to make sense of it. Dr. Simon believed that the couple saw something very frightening in the sky that night which caused them to have amnesia for two hours. While he didn't believe that they were abducted by aliens, he had no explanation for the missing time. 
     Fascination with the Hill's abduction case continues to this day.  The documentary Alien Abduction: The Odyssey of Betty and Barney Hill was released in 2013, and a TV series based on the 2007 book Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill Experience is in the works. 

Resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_and_Betty_Hill
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2306tufos.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93elxGqDZKg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl1pVatXwbU&t=103s (Betty Hill Interview) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IToX0l-vYCg (Some interview with Barney and Betty)
https://books.google.com/books?id=-d5EDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhZ24yUpXSM&t=9s (Barney on To Tell the Truth - December 12, 1966)
https://innovation.unh.edu/license-technology/unh-innovation-spotlight-betty-and-barney-hill-collection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STnargCIhxU (The UFO Incident)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/08/010828075745.htm (Hypnosis study)
https://innovation.unh.edu/license-technology/unh-innovation-spotlight-betty-and-barney-hill-collection
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541211/ (Shared Psychotic Disorder)
https://kickasshistory.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-dumb-question-pt-vii-conspiracy-theories-what-about-them/
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February 06th, 2022

2/6/2022

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Picture
     It was late afternoon on December 26, 1900. Water lapped softly against the sides of the boat as lighthouse keeper Joseph Moore headed toward Eilean Mòr, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. With him was a small crew of men from the Hesberus. As the boat approached the landing platform, the lighthouse perched on the island’s highest point looked much taller than its seventy-five feet. Built a year earlier in December 1899, the tower was a welcome beacon to sailors as they navigated the treacherous waters around the Flannan Islands. 
     The lighthouse was a circular, three-tiered structure with an attached L-shaped keeper’s house. It was topped by the glass-domed room that housed the lamp which had to be tended to each night by one of the three lighthouse keepers stationed on the island. 
     The keepers of the Eilean Mòr worked in shifts. Three men were stationed at the lighthouse at all times, while a fourth took a two week leave. The island was totally uninhabited, so having three men stationed there was as much to stave off loneliness as it was to make sure the lighthouse beacon was always tended to. If one man took ill or had an accident, two could easily do the job until the man who was on leave returned. The isle had no boat of its own, but the lighthouse was visible from a neighboring island. If there was a problem, flares could be set off and a boat would be sent over to assist.
     The three lighthouse keepers stationed on the island were James Ducat, 43; Thomas Marshall, 28; and Donald McArthur, 40. Ducat was the Principal Keeper; Marshall, the Second Assistant; and McArthur was given the title of Occasional Keeper, as he was taking over for the regular First Assistant who was on extended sick leave.    
     As Moore approached the landing dock, he was already aware that things weren’t as they should be on the island. On December 15, the captain of a steamer who was passing through the area noticed that the lighthouse’s lamp was dark. He sent a wireless to the Cosmopolitan Line Steamers headquarters and reported the outage, but they failed to send a ship to see if the keepers needed any assistance. To further add to the confusion, the man responsible for checking on Eilean Mòr’s light from the Isle of Lewis, an island about thirty-five miles away, failed to notice that the light was out. 
The light was fueled by paraffin, and it wasn’t unheard of to receive a bad batch that wouldn’t light. If that was the case, the Hesperus had extra lamp fuel onboard that should hold them over until a full shipment could be delivered. 
     The captain of the Hesperus had blown the ship’s horn to alert the keepers of their arrival. When the men didn’t appear on the landing, flares were sent up to alert them, but there was still no response. Moore was sent over to see if the lighthouse keepers needed assistance, and to send back the man he would be relieving. 
     As Moore tied the boat up to the dock, he became more and more apprehensive. It was customary for the three men stationed there to greet the returning keeper, but the dock’s flagstaff was bare and the landing was deserted. Also absent were the supply containers that were always left on the dock to be replenished when the relief keeper arrived. 
     The island was eerily quiet as Moore climbed the 150-foot stairway that hugged the edge of the cliff. A strong wind rustled the short brown grasses that covered the southeastern slope, and seagulls cried mournfully overhead. Later, Moore would tell the captain that an overwhelming sense of foreboding came over him on his long walk to the top of the cliff. 
     Although the day was sunny, and the temperatures rather warm for that time of year, Moore felt a chill go through him as the tower grew nearer. He stopped and looked up at the lantern room perched at the top of the tower. No one stirred behind its tall glass walls. 
     As he approached the keeper’s house, he called out. But apart from the sound of the wind buffeting the lighthouse, and the cries of the gulls overhead, all was silent. He made his way to the entrance gate, and found that it was closed. Passing through the gate, Moore tried the entrance door that led to the kitchen. It too was closed, but unlocked. He put his hand on the doorknob, turned it, and went in.
     Moore walked through the entrance hall and immediately noticed that two of the three oil skinned coats were missing. The remaining coat belonged to Donald McArthur. This waterproof garment was the last layer of clothing the men would put on before heading out of doors. Perhaps no one answered the ship’s horn because two of the men were tending to something on the other side of the island, and the third was inside and hadn’t heard the call. Moore opened the door that led to the kitchen, then closed it behind him. Ahead of him was the kitchen door, which was open. The room beyond was deserted.
     On a cold, isolated island, warmth is both a necessity and a creature comfort, so the frigid interior of the keeper house was the first indication that something was terribly wrong. In the short time that Moore had been working on the island, he had never known a winter day when there wasn’t a fire burning brightly in the kitchen fireplace. But there was no fire today, and the ashes were cold to the touch which meant that the fireplace hadn’t been lit for some days. Moore pulled his coat closer around him and looked around the room. 
     The kitchen was unnaturally quiet, and it took him a few seconds to realize why. The pendulum clock that hung on the far wall that normally marked the time with a sensible, steady click was now still. The clock needed winding daily, so it must have run down. 
“Hello,” he called out. “Jim, Tommy, Don?” But there was no reply.
     Wind whistled softly through the chinks in the windows, and the boards on the exterior of the keeper house crackled and creaked. The kitchen was neat and clean. The pots and pans had been cleaned and the kitchen tidied up, which showed that the man who had been acting as cook had completed his work. But where was everyone?
     Moore walked through the kitchen and checked the other rooms in succession. They were deserted as well. All of the beds were empty, and they looked the way the men would have left them in the Mòrning. Passing through these rooms, Moore entered the lighthouse and starred up the spiral staircase that wound its way along the interior wall of the tower. Far above, he could see sun streaming through the tall glass walls of the lantern room; but like the keeper's house, the lighthouse was as quiet as a tomb.
    Moore didn’t take time to search the tower because he knew that something serious had occurred. He darted out of the house, then ran down to the landing where he informed Mr. McCormack that the place was deserted. McCormack, Moore, and a group of men went up to the keeper’s house to search a second time, but they found no further clues as to the lighthouse keepers’ whereabouts.
    The only place that hadn’t been searched was the lantern room, and one can only imagine that they were prepared for the worst. Wind echoed softly in the tower’s cold stone interior as McCormack and Moore ascended the iron steps that wound about the tower walls. When the two men reached the top, they breathed a sigh of relief. The room was deserted. The lamp had been cleaned, and the fountain was full of paraffin oil. The blinds were on the windows and in their proper places, and nothing was disturbed or missing from the room.
    Head keeper Ducat’s logbook was found in the sleeping quarters. The last written entry was on December 13. Details about December 14 and 15 were found written on a slate. These included the time that the light was extinguished on December 15, as well as barometric, temperature, and wind readings as they were recorded at 9 AM that day. This means that the three men vanished sometime between 9 AM and midnight on the 15th.  
     When the Hesperus’ crew searched the island, they discovered that the east landing was untouched, but the west landing had suffered severe storm damage. A box located at 110 ft above the shoreline was broken and its contents lay scattered on the cliff below. The winds must have been nearly tornado-force, as the iron railings were bent over, and sections of the iron railway used to carry large kegs of paraffin and other supplies from the dock to the top of the cliff had been wrenched out of the concrete. In addition, a rock weighing more than a ton was found dislodged from its original position and lying on the railway tracks. On top of the cliff, the grass had been ripped away as far as 33 feet from the cliff’s edge. 
     As night was swiftly approaching, Moore and another man were left on the island to tend to the lighthouse and keep the light burning. The Hesperus would return to the mainland while three replacement keepers could be found. This would mean leaving just two men to tend to the lighthouse; Moore, and one of the crewmen from the Hesperus, A. Lamont. 
     Superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board, Robert Muirhead, was clearly worried about Moore’s mental state. In his report, he wrote, “I may state that, as Moore was naturally very much upset by the unfortunate occurrence, and appeared very nervous, I left seaman A. Lamont on the Island to go to the lightroom and keep him company when on watch for a week or two. If this nervousness does not leave Moore, he will require to be transferred, but I am reluctant to recommend this, as I would desire to have at least one man who knows the work of the Station.”
    Moore was definitely shaken by the events. Remember, the three missing men were his friends. He had spent months on the island with them as his only companions, so it’s no wonder the mysterious tragedy affected him so strongly. In addition, he must have considered that the only thing that saved him from a similar fate was his two week shore leave. 
     The following morning, Moore told Lamont that he thought he heard men’s voices calling in the night. Although it was probably just his troubled imagination, one can’t wonder if the voices he heard were the ghostly cries of his missing comrades. The voices stayed silent after that night, and Moore and his companion had no trouble for the rest of their stay on the island. 
Superintendent Muirhead closed the case with his final report saying: 
     “When the accident occurred, Ducat was wearing sea boots and a waterproof, and Marshall sea boots and oilskins; and as Moore assures me that the men only wore those articles when going down to the landings, they must have intended, when they left the station, either to go down to the landing or the proximity of it.
     After a careful examination of the place, the railings, ropes etc and weighing all the evidence which I could secure, I am of opinion that the most likely explanation of the disappearance of the men is that they had all gone down on the afternoon of Saturday, 15 December to the proximity of the West landing, to secure the box with the mooring ropes, etc and that an unexpectedly large roller had come up on the Island, and a large body of water going up higher than where they were and coming down upon them had swept them away with resistless force.”
     This seems like a logical conclusion. There was a violent storm, and Ducat and Marshall grabbed their oil skinned coats and raced down to the landing to secure the box to prevent it from being washed away. Because one man was supposed to be left at the lighthouse at all times, McArthur was left behind. As a newcomer to the island, he would be less familiar with the way the box was secured, so leaving him behind made the most sense.
McArthur must have heard the men calling for help, and in a panic rushed out without his coat to help them. By the time he reached the area where the box was kept, the men were gone, having been taken out to sea by a tremendous wave. A second wave then hit and carried McArthur away.
    But not everyone at the Northern Lighthouse Board agreed. Why had none of the bodies washed ashore? Why had one of the men left without his coat in the middle of the frigid Outer Hebrides winter? And how could three experienced seamen all be taken unawares by an approaching wave?
    At first glance, Muirhead’s conclusion does make sense; but there are problems with his theory, the biggest being weather. There were no reports of storms or giant waves on December 15 anywhere near the Eilean Mòr.
There was some speculation that the men might have been swept away on December 20, the day that a terrific gale caused a considerable amount of damage all over Scotland, and even wrecked part of the Shetland fishing fleet. But from all accounts, the lighthouse went dark on December 15 when the weather was calm, and it remained that way until the Hesperus dropped Moore and his crew off on December 26. 
     This timeline is extremely important, because if the storm hit the island five days after the lighthouse went dark, then it had nothing at all to do with the men’s disappearance. If the Hesperus had arrived prior to the storm, Moore would have found a perfectly intact island. There would have been no bent railings, and no turf torn away from the top of the cliff. Nor would there have been a one-ton boulder lying on the railway path, and no damaged box of rope. The landscape would have looked as it always had–windswept, beautiful, and serene–and the investigation of the missing three men would certainly have been looked at in an entirely different light. 
     Although Muirhead ultimately blamed a huge wave for the lighthouse keepers’ deaths, the majority of his report talks about damage done to the west landing by a violent storm; one strong enough to bend steel railings and dislodge a one ton stone. So which was it? A wave that inexplicably rose up in good weather and washed the men away? Or a wave caused by a huge storm that caused a considerable amount of damage to the west landing?
Just for the sake of argument, let’s say a freak storm that only affected the Flannan Islands was to blame for the men’s disappearance. All three lighthouse keepers were experienced seamen. If a storm did suddenly hit the island, they certainly wouldn’t have risked their lives by rushing out into it just to protect a box of mooring rope. They knew that the supply ship was due in five days, so there would have been no reason for them to do this.  
     Since there was no storm on December 15, we’re left with an odd scenario. Ducat and Marshall go down to the west landing to secure a box of rope in calm weather. They are suddenly taken unawares by a huge wave and washed out to sea. For some reason, McArthur runs out without his coat in a panic in an attempt to rescue them. It’s a complete mystery how he could have known that the men needed help since they were working below the level of the cliff, which meant that they couldn’t be seen from the lighthouse. Nor could McArthur have heard their cries for help since they were too far away. Nonetheless, in this scenario McArthur rushes down the railway tracks, when suddenly another tremendous wave rises up and sweeps him away. 
     This simply doesn’t add up. These were experienced seamen, and they had been on the island for nearly a year. They were well aware of wave activity both on the ocean and around the island. A wave big enough to rise up well over 110 feet from sea level would have been clearly visible to them from where they were working long before it reached them. What’s more, waves that size would have also been detected on the mainland, but none were reported on December 15, or any other day. 
     What about the bodies that were never recovered? Studies have shown that a dead body can remain intact in ocean water for up to three weeks. Though bodies rise and fall to the surface due to decomposition gasses, they generally remain on the surface for several days. It is very uncommon for a person to drown close to the shoreline, and their body never to be washed ashore. And it goes without saying that it’s almost impossible to have three bodies drown together, and not one is ever washed ashore. 
     Some think that the men somehow drowned, and that their bodies were blown out to sea by strong winds. But Muirhead’s report stated that on the 15th, the wind was blowing toward the shore rather than out to sea. Since the wind was blowing toward the shore, the men’s bodies would have been washed ashore rather than taken out to sea. The strong storm on December 20 might have dislodged the bodies from the shore or from the cliff. But even then, at least one body should have washed back onto the shore at some point. 
     Since 1900, many theories have come and gone, most fueled by false information that over the years has become accepted as fact. For example, you will usually read that Moore entered the lighthouse and found an overturned chair, and uneaten food on the table, as if the three men leapt up suddenly in the middle of a meal and rushed out of the lighthouse. But Moore stated in his report that he found the kitchen to be neat and clean. 
So where did this other version of the event come from? From a poem called Flannan Isle about the lighthouse keeper’s disappearance that was published in 1912. The poem was written by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, and one stanza reads:  

Yet, as we crowded through the door
We only saw a table, spread
For dinner, meat and cheese and bread; 
But, all untouched; and no one there:
As though, when they sat down to eat,
Ere they could even taste, 
Alarm had come; and they in haste
Had risen and left the bread and meat:
For at the table-head a chair 
Lay tumbled on the floor.

    Another piece of totally false information that continues to be circulated is that there were mysterious entries in the light house logbook. The entries written in Thomas Marshall’s handwriting supposedly read: 

December 12 -  Gale north by northwest. Sea lashed to fury. Never seen such a storm. Waves very high. Tearing at lighthouse. Everything shipshape. James Ducat irritable (Later that same day) Storm still raging, wind steady. Stormbound. Cannot go out. Ship passing sounding foghorn. Could see lights of cabins. Ducat quiet. Donald McArthur crying.
December 13 - Storm continued through night. Wind shifted west by north. Ducat quiet. McArthur praying. (Later that same day) Noon, grey daylight. Me, Ducat and McArthur prayed.
December 14 -  No entry
December 15 - 1pm. Storm ended, sea calm. God is over all

    The truth is, these log entries are totally fictional. They first showed up in print in 1965 in a book by Vincent Gaddis called Invisible Horizons. In it, he said that he got the log text from a 1929 piece by Ernest Fallon in True Strange Stories. But that piece also proved to be a work of fiction. For the record, the real logbook went missing during the 1901 inquiry into the mens’ disappearance. 
     When we put this false information aside, and if we consider Muirhead’s theory about the missing men being washed away by huge waves as being improbable, we’re left with the very real possibility that foul play may have played a hand in the mystery of the missing lighthouse keepers. 
There’s an often overlooked section of Muirhead’s report that seems to suggest that one or more of the men were planning something. In his report Muirhead wrote:
     “I may explain that signals are shown from Flannan Islands by displaying balls or discs on each side of the Tower on poles projecting out from the Lighthouse balcony; the signals being differentiated by one or more discs being shown on the different sides of the Tower. 
     When at Flannan Islands so lately as 7th December last, I had a conversation with the late Mr Ducat regarding the signals, and he stated that he wished it would be necessary to hoist one of the signals, just to ascertain how soon it would be seen ashore and how soon it would be acted upon.” 
     Muirhead considered Ducat’s suggestion, but after discussing it with other officials he considered it to be impractical, as the view of the island from the mainland was sometimes obscured by fog. He also didn’t want the keepers’ families worried by a distress signal that might not be seen until long after it was posted.  
      So, just eight days before the men’s disappearance, Ducat asked for permission to test how long it would take someone to reach the island if a distress signal was hoisted up onto the tower. This seems extremely odd, and more than a little suspicious given the eventual turn of events. 
Could Ducat have been planning on killing the other two lighthouse keepers, then sending up a distress signal to make it look as if the men had died in an accident? When Muirhead shot down the idea of using signals on the tower, did he kill the men and bury them somewhere on the island? This would explain why the bodies never washed up on the shore.
     One problem with any theory involving murder is that there wasn’t a boat on the island that anyone could escape in. At least, none that anyone knew of. But it’s possible that one could have been bought from a passing ship and secured somewhere out of sight.
    There are those that believe that all three men staged their own disappearance, and that they had an accomplice who picked them up in a boat. Ducat and McArthur both had families, but we don't know what their home lives were like or if they had financial troubles. Could the three of them simply have left the island and made their way for the mainland, then started a new life somewhere else? It’s certainly possible. We hear modern day stories of this very thing happening all the time. 
     Some believe that insanity may have played a part in the men’s disappearance. In the nineteenth century, lighthouse keepers suffered a unusually high frequency of madness and suicide compared to other professions. It was long assumed that they went mad from solitude, but new research suggests that they were literally being poisoned by the lighthouse itself. 
     In order for the powerful light to show on all sides of the tower, it was necessary for it to rotate smoothly and at a consistent speed. This was accomplished by floating the light on a circular track filled with liquid mercury. When dust and dirt built up in the mercury, the lighthouse keepers would strain it through a fine cloth. So like hatters of the day, lighthouse keepers were probably being driven mad by constant exposure to mercury fumes. 
     Everyone assumes that McArthur was the last one out of the lighthouse because his coat was left behind. But what if he went mad and ran out without his coat, and the other two men grabbed theirs and ran after him? Maybe they knew of his mental state, and they were trying to prevent him from killing himself. Perhaps, in their effort to save him from jumping off one of the cliffs all three men went over. Or, maybe McArthur killed both of them, then leapt to his death. 
     The truth is, we simply don’t know what happened to the lighthouse keepers that day, and we probably never will. But whether it was a gigantic wave that swallowed the three men into the sea, a murderous plot, or an act of madness, one thing is for certain; the disappearance of the Eilean Mor lighthouse keepers remains one of the most baffling unsolved mysteries of the Twentieth Century. 
     Because so much lore and superstition surrounds the lighthouse keepers’ disappearance, writers and filmmakers have adapted the story in many different ways. The 2018 movie “The Vanishing” used it as a setting for murder and greed, and various writers have put their own spin on the mystery.
     Whenever anyone vanishes without a trace our imaginations begin to run wild. It’s human nature to want to solve a mystery, if for no other reason than to make sure that such a thing doesn’t happen again. But for a writer, a mystery presents a challenge; to come up with a unique solution to the problem. So to end this journey I’ll leave you with my own twisted tale about the disappearance of the Eilean Mor Lighthouse keepers. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Before This Dreamless Sleep  by Barry Pirro

     “Do you think he knows?” Marshall whispered, “Could he have overheard us?” 
     “You know as well as I do,” Ducat said, “the man’s a lummox. He don’t know a thing. And we never talk about it when he’s nearby. He’s as dumb as a blind babe he is.”
     “But he’s not,” Marshall said. “He’s not stupid. You know what he is! You know what he did. And to get away with it for this long; starting a new life with a wife and kids. I’m telling you, he’s shrewd. He’ll be on to us, I know he will.”
     Ducat gazed into the fire. “Keep your voice down. I know what the man did,” Ducat said softly, “and I know what he is. He’s a monster, he is. We both read the journal, and I remember it in the papers like it was yesterday. No one’s safe with the likes of him around. No man, and certainly no woman. Which is why we have to do it today.” 
     “Why don’t we report him to the authorities?” Marshal said. “Let them take care of him.”
     “I’m the authority on this island,” Ducat said, slamming his fist on the table. “I’m the authority. Get that through your skull. There’ll be no trial where he might get off. No chance he might escape. This ends now.”
     “All the same,” Marshall said, “I think we should wait. Moore will be here in five days. That’s just not enough time.“
     “Enough time?” Ducat said with a dark laugh. “Enough time for what? It don’t take more than ‘Donnie, come and have a little look-see over here’ to get the job done. It’s not like the man can fly, you know. The five days before Moore gets back is more than enough time to let nature take care of what’ll be left of the sod. Between the gulls, the fish, the crabs, and the tides, you won’t be able to tell Donnie from a dead seal.”
     “But that’s the problem,” Marshall said, “How do we explain it if we don’t haul him up afterward?”
     “If Muirhead had let me put signals on the lighthouse to let the folks on the mainland think there was a problem, we’d do that,” Ducat said. “But without that as our cover we have to do it different, that’s all. Its’ better this way anyway. The less left of the bastard the better. When Moore gets here we just say Donnie went missing, and that we searched and searched for him. By the time they find him, it’ll look like he fell off the cliff by accident. That’ll be that and the world will be a safer place, believe you me.”
     They heard the outer door of the keeper’s house open then shut, and Marshall went over to the fireplace and pretended to tend the fire. McArthur came in, his hair tousled and wet with mist, and his eyes red and watering from the wind.
    “Damn it’s cold,” he said, coming into the kitchen still wearing his oilskin. “Hey Tommy, put some more coal on the fire. The wind’s whippin up a fury out there and I’m chilled to the bone.”
     “Did you get that box tied up?” Ducat asked. “I don’t want it bustin’ up against the rocks.”
     “I tried, but the wind’s too strong for me to do it alone,” McArther said. “I’m gonna need one of you to help me with it. We should get it done right away. You said yourself a gale is on its way. There’s no knowing how bad it’ll be.”
     Marshall turned slightly and eyed Ducat as McArther made his way to the fireplace. Ducat rose from his chair. “I guess it’ll have to be me helpin’ you out, Donnie-boy. Tom’s got to get the light ready. Dark’s comin’ on fast.”
     McArthur turned around slowly. “The name is Donald, Mr. Ducat. Donald. Not ‘Donnie-boy’.”
     “Oh, excuse me. Well, Donald it is then,” said Ducat with a slight smile. “Tommy, you stay here while I go and help Mr. Donald McArthur tend to that box. Or, would you rather I call you Mr. Marshall?” he added with a laugh. “Be back in two shakes.”
    The two men left the kitchen and closed the door behind them. Before heading outside Ducat grabbed his oilskin from the hook near the front door, then he and McArthur headed out into the fading afternoon toward the west landing. As the two made their way across the field, a storm far out to sea sent tendrils of lightning dancing on the ocean’s horizon, as if bright spidery hands were caressing the edges of the earth. 
     Back at the lighthouse, Marshall paced the kitchen nervously. Wind battered against the keeper's house. The boards on the siding creaked, and the wind moaned overhead in the lamp room. The clock on the far wall ticked steadily, and seemed to grow louder as the minutes passed.
     After ten minutes Marshall finally heard the back door open, then shut with a bang. There was the sound of a coat being removed and hung up on the peg near the door, then the kitchen door opened. 
     Marshall looked up and started to say, “Is it done?” but stopped in mid sentence as McArthur walked into the room, brushing his fingers through his damp hair.
     “God it’s cold out there,” he said. “Better get your gear on. Ducat wants you to help him down by the landing. We tried to get the box off the crane, but it’s stuck and he thinks you’d do a better job at it. Or in his own words, ‘McArthur, you’re about as useful as a tits on a bull. Send Marshall out here.’”
     McArthur laughed and moved over to the stove and put the kettle on. “You’d better get moving. He’s in a foul mood. I’ll make a pot of tea for the three of us. It’ll be ready when you get back. You shouldn’t be long.” 
     Marshall headed toward the hallway door. ‘Ducat must have lost his nerve,’ he thought. ‘Or maybe he has a new plan. I just wish this was over.’ He headed down the hallway and grabbed his oilskin off the hook. 
     “Go and get the light ready,” Marshall said. “If we’re not back soon, start it up. The last thing we need is for the light to go out with a gale heading our way.” He opened the door, headed out into the darkening afternoon, then pulled the door shut behind him.
     McArthur counted to ten, then headed for the back door. He put his oilskin on. He’d be needing it with the wind starting to blow as it was. He opened the door, grabbed the length of pipe used to prop it open in the summer months, then headed out into the fading light, all the while whistling the tune of an old sea shanty.
     When he got back fifteen minutes later, he was soaked to the skin. Both men now lay at the bottom of the cliff. Ducat had put up a fight, but in the end he lost his footing and went over so fast he didn’t have time to scream. Marshall was no problem at all. The wind was blowing so strong that he never heard McArthur coming up behind him. He later reflected on how satisfying the sound of the pipe hitting Tommy’s skull was. ‘Just like a ripe melon hitting a stone floor,’ he thought. 
     McArthur climbed to the top of the tower and started the light, then set it in motion for all the world to see. He tidied up the kitchen, then went into the sleeping quarters and made up Ducat and Marshall’s beds. The wind was loud. A superstitious man might have been frightened alone on the island on a night like this, but not McArthur. He calmly sat on the edge of his bed, took out his journal, and began a new entry. 
     December 14, 1900 -  I wondered how Ducat and Marshall would react when they read about my adventures. I left this book out for them to see, as if I had forgotten to tuck it under my pillow. There was always a chance they wouldn’t read it, but we all know human nature, and how curiosity killed the cat. I hope they also enjoyed the newspaper clippings. Every time I read them, it brings back fond memories. 
     This island is a long way from London, and twelve years is a very long time. Though these two weren’t pretty like my five young Whitechaple lassies, playing cat and mouse with the boys was such fun! Listening in at windows and seeing their glances at one another day after day; it was all I could do to keep a straight face. 
     Now Jack’s a happy boy again! My knife's so nice and sharp, I want to get to work first thing in the morning. But first I’ll have a shave and a change of clothes – the priestly disguise I’d stashed away for when I reach the mainland. I’ll put fuel in the light, and hang my oilskin coat on its peg to keep everyone guessing, then I’ll take my two keepers for a little ride in the rowboat I’d hidden on the far side of the island. The old fishermen that passed by on the trawler helped with that. Money talks, you know. And the same gentleman who sold me the boat will pick me up this afternoon. Poor man. It’s a pity he won’t live long enough to see me off. It’s a good thing I know how to pilot a trawler. 
     Tomorrow, Ducat and Marshall will sit quiet as two dead church mice, and I’ll row and row until the lighthouse is just a speck in the distance, then I’ll spend a pleasant morning feeding the fishies with their stinking innards. I know the papers will never give me credit for these two, but I don’t mind. After all, a Ripper by any other name is still The Ripper.
     McArthur put down his pen and stored his journal in his bag. He climbed into bed, pulled the covers over him, then turned out the light. He had a smile on his face, and not a care in the world. The last thought he had before his dreamless sleep began was, ‘My god, It’s good to be back!’

Resources
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/The-Eilean-Mòr-Lighthouse-Mystery/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannan_Isles_Lighthouse
https://acclaimhealth.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Reading-Flannan-Isles-Lighthouse.pdf
https://www.strangeoutdoors.com/historical-strangeness/tag/Joseph+Moore+eilean+Mòr
https://historyandimagination.com/tag/joseph-moore/
https://theghostinmymachine.com/2019/06/17/unresolved-what-happened-to-the-lighthouse-keepers-of-eilean-Mòr-flannan-isles-scotland-disappearance/
https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/curious-disappearance-eilean-Mòr-lighthouse-keepers-scottish-mystery-004820
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/70180/115-year-old-mystery-flannan-lighthouses-missing-keepers
https://www.nlb.org.uk/history/flannan-isles/ 
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/unraveling-the-mystery-of-eilean-Mòr-lighthouse/90050/
http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2014/03/mad-as-a-lighthouse-keeper-not-the-solitude-but-the-mercury/ 

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The Sodder Children Disappearance

1/9/2022

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     The story you are about to hear is true, and although it has nothing to do with ghosts or the supernatural, it is nonetheless terrifying. The Sodder children's disappearance is one of the most talked about unsolved mysteries of the 20th century; and because it all started on Christmas Eve and involved children, it is all the more heartbreaking. The case gives new meaning to the phrase ‘disappeared without a trace’, so if you are up to the task, maybe you will be the first to put this 75-year-old cold case to rest once and for all. 
     Christmas Eve of 1945 was a special one for the nation. World War II was finally over, and families would at long last get to celebrate the holidays with loved ones who were coming home from overseas. 
     The Sodder family wished that their 21-year-old son Joe would have been able to make it home in time for Christmas, but once he was given leave, it was just a matter of time before he would be reunited with his parents and his nine brothers and sisters. 
     There would be no Christmas tree that year for the Sodder family because they were sad that Joe wouldn’t be with them for the holidays. But they had plans to keep the family traditions of exchanging gifts, attending church, and a special Christmas dinner was in the works.      
     Christmas was always a special time for George and Jennie Sodder. Celebrating the holidays with family made them grateful for how far they had come in their lives. George Sodder had worked hard all his life to make a name for himself. Now the 50-year-old Italian immigrant was a well respected, successful businessman and owner of his own trucking company. 
     Giorgio Soddu--George’s given name--immigrated to the United States from Tula, Sardinia, Italy in 1908 when he was just 13-years-old. But in spite of his youth and the prejudices many people felt toward Italian Americans, he worked hard to make a name for himself in his new country.
     George lived with relatives in Pennsylvania, attended school, and eventually found work in the railroads carrying water and other supplies to the workers. A few years later he took a job as a truck driver in Smithers, West Virginia, and eventually started his own trucking company. Soon after, he met his wife-to-be, Jennie Cipriani, a storekeeper’s daughter, and the couple moved to Fayetteville, West Virginia where they raised their family of ten beautiful children.
     With nine children at home, Christmas Eve of 1945 was a busy time for the Sodder family. That night, 17-year-old Marian, came home from her dime store job with surprise gifts for her three younger sisters, and they wasted no time in opening their early Christmas presents. 
     By 10 PM, George Sodder had retired to his bedroom on the first floor. His two oldest sons, John, 23, and George Jr., 16, were already asleep in the second floor bedroom that they shared with their two younger brothers who were still playing in the living room.     
     It was after 10 PM, and Jennie tried to usher the children up to bed, but they asked if they could stay up a little later to continue playing with the toys. Jennie reluctantly agreed, but she reminded Maurice, 14, and Louis, 9, that they still needed to feed the chickens and bring the cows into the barn. They promised their mother that they would, and that they would also put their sisters Martha, 12, Jennie, 8, and Betty, 5, to bed after they finished playing. They also promised to turn out the lights, shut the curtains, and lock the front door. 
     Jennie headed to bed with three-year-old Sylvia in her arms, leaving the kids playing in the living room next to their older sister Marion who had fallen asleep on the couch. The children played quietly, so as not to waken their sister, and one can imagine that they were talking about the Christmas presents that they would be opening the next morning. 
     They looked at the mantle clock. ‘It’s getting late’, they probably thought, ‘but we’ll head up to bed in a little while. Just a little more time playing with the toys won’t hurt. After all, it’s Christmas Eve.’    
     At 12:30 AM, the phone rang and Jennie rushed from the couple’s first floor bedroom to the hallway to answer it. ‘Who would be calling this time of night?’ she thought. She picked up the phone and heard laughter and the clinking of glasses in the background as if a party was going on. A woman asked for a name that Jennie was not familiar with, so she told the woman that she had the wrong number. Jennie later recalled that the woman laughed in a strange way when she told her this, and that she then hung up. 
     Jennie hung up the phone. She thought that the call was rather odd, but chalked it up to someone at a Christmas Eve party who misdialed the phone. She glanced down the hall and was surprised to see that the lights were still on in the living room, and that the shades had not been drawn. The boys were usually very responsible about locking the house up at night, but Jennie guessed that with all of the excitement about Christmas they had forgotten. With the exception of Marion, all of the kids slept upstairs, so she assumed that they had all gone up to bed. 
     Careful not to wake Marion who was still asleep on the couch, Jennie closed the curtains, turned off the lights, and checked the front door. It was unlocked. They had also forgotten to lock the door. Those kids. They must be so excited about Christmas. She clicked the lock shut, took one last look around the room, then went back to bed being careful not to wake up her husband, or baby Sylvia who slept in a cradle next to their bed. 
     At 1 AM, Jennie was awoken by the sound of something hitting the roof of the house with a loud bang followed by a rolling noise. Having already been woken a half-hour earlier by the mysterious phone call, Jennie was tired. She listened for a short time, but didn’t hear any other sounds, and she quickly fell back to sleep. A half-hour later she was awoken by the smell of smoke and got out of bed to investigate. She rushed down the hall and was shocked to find George’s home office engulfed in flames. 
     Jennie ran back to the bedroom and woke George up, then the couple shouted up the stairs for everyone to get out of the house quickly. Thick, black smoke filled the halls, and flames covered the stairway that led to the children’s bedrooms. John and George Jr. fled the upstairs bedroom they shared with their brothers, singeing their hair on the way out. 
     During the mayhem, one of the family members tried to call the fire department, but the phone wasn’t working. The line was dead.  
     The family fled the house and stood on the front lawn in their pajamas, shivering in the freezing cold, watching their house burn down. But something was wrong. The five children who had stayed up late to play with their toys were not with the rest of the family. 
    “Didn’t you wake your brothers up when you left your bedroom?” George asked John. “I did,” he said, running his hands nervously through his singed hair. “At least, I called out to them and the girls to get up, then Georgie and I ran out of the room. I thought they heard me and that they were right behind us when we ran out. Isn’t that right Georgie?” 
     George Jr. tried to think back, but the past few minutes were a nightmare. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. Everything happened so fast, and there was so much smoke. We were both coughing and yelling for everyone to get up. The smoke was so thick I couldn’t see a thing. If the light wasn’t on downstairs we never would have been able to see where to go.”
     The family ran around the yard frantically calling for the kids, but they were nowhere to be found. Then they looked back at the house. The entire bottom floor was now engulfed in flames and an icy cold wind fanned the flames. The kids must be trapped in the upstairs bedrooms. 
     George and the boys raced back to the house. They tried to go in through the front door, but the flames had spread so quickly that they blocked the way. All George could think of were his five children trapped in the house with no way out.      
     George and his sons searched for a way back into the house, but it seemed hopeless. At one point, George climbed a wall and broke a side window with his fist, badly cutting his arm. But it was no use. The fire was raging inside the house, and the flames leapt out at him. The only way left to save the children was to attempt to rescue them through an upper window. 
     George raced around to the side of the house where the ladder always stood, but when he turned the corner he was shocked to find that it was gone. He was beginning to panic, but he had to find a way to save his children. He hit upon the idea to move one of his trucks up to the side of the house, and to climb on top of it to reach the second floor window. Luckily, he always kept the keys in the trucks, so he still had a chance to rescue the kids. 
     Ignoring the freezing cold, George and his sons ran barefoot across the frozen yard to the trucks. George got behind the wheel of one of them and turned the key in the ignition, but nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. The engine was dead. ‘How could this be?’ he thought. ‘It started just fine yesterday.’ Leaping from the truck, he ran over to the second truck where John was behind the wheel frantically trying to start it, but that truck was also dead. 
     George and the boys tore back to the house and looked up at the upper floor. Smoke was beginning to seep out around the corners of the upper windows. They ran to a rain barrel that was next to the house hoping to douse the flames with water, but it was frozen solid. Back on the front lawn, the family stood huddled together in the icy wind, calling out the children’s names, hoping against hope that the kids would hear them and be able to jump out of one of the upstairs windows. 
     While George and the boys were busy trying to start the trucks, daughter Marion sprinted to a neighbor’s house. She told them about the fire, and asked that they call the Fayetteville Fire Department. The neighbor picked up the phone, but she was unable to reach an operator. 
     A driver on a nearby road saw the flames and tried calling the fire department from a nearby tavern, but he too was unable to reach an operator. It was Christmas eve, and the local switchboard must have been understaffed. 
     Exasperated, the neighbor drove into town and finally located fire chief F.J. Morris. In those days, Fayetteville didn’t have a siren to call firefighters to action. Instead, they used a “phone tree” system whereby one firefighter phoned another, who in turn phoned another. But even though the fire chief knew that five children were trapped in the house, he didn’t jump in his car and head over to the Sodder’s to see how he could help or call anyone to make sure the family was safe. He just started the phone chain and waited for the men to arrive. 
     Back at the Sodder home the family stood huddled together on the lawn on that frigid Christmas morning wearing just their pajamas. They watched helplessly as their home burned to the ground with the five little children trapped inside. Less than an hour after the fire started, the roof collapsed, the house was reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes and burnt timbers, and the five youngest children were surely dead.
     Even though the fire department was only two and a half miles away, the fire crew didn’t arrive at the Sodder home until 8 AM, over six hours after the fire started. Later, fire chief Morris would tell the state police that he didn’t know how to drive the fire truck, so he had to wait at the firehouse until the firemen arrived. In addition, since it was Christmas eve, many of the firefighters were away so they were sorely understaffed that night. By the time the fire crew arrived, the only thing they could do was hose down the remains of the house to cool down the ashes. There was basically nothing left of the house itself. 
     A short time later, local and state police showed up on the scene. They interviewed the family members, sifted through the ashes, and conducted a cursory investigation. By now the house was just a pile of wet cinders, and nothing remained but some burnt timbers, the remains of some home appliances, bits of the tin roof, and the smoldering basement.     
     By 10 AM fire chief Morris had some news for the family, but it wasn’t what they expected to hear. The firemen had sifted through the ashes, but they hadn’t found any bones, as might have been expected if the children had died in the fire. “But the children had undoubtedly perished in the blaze,” Morris said. “The fire had burned so hot that it must have completely cremated their remains.” 
     George and Jennie looked at the fire chief dumbfounded. “No trace of the children?” they asked. “The fire burned for less than an hour, and there were five kids. Surely there must be at least some bones left after the fire.” But Morris wouldn’t discuss it further. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ve seen cases like this before. I know it’s hard, but you’re just going to have to accept that the fire cremated their remains.” 
     Morticians arrived on the scene and the Sodders were told that because no traces of the children’s bodies had been found, the easiest and most respectful way to hold the funerals would be for the parents to pick up a handful of ashes for each of the five children, place the ashes in a box, and bury the ashes in place of the bodies. But George refused this suggestion. He was simply too grief stricken to make such a decision so soon after the tragedy.  
     Morris told George Sodder to leave the site undisturbed so that the state fire marshal’s office could conduct a more thorough investigation at a later date; but after four days, George and Jennie decided that they could not bear the sight of the charred ground that was once their home. George bulldozed five feet of dirt over the site, filling in what remained of the basement with the intention of turning the space into a memorial garden for his dead children.
     The day after the fire, the local Justice of the Peace, who also served as acting coroner, and six local citizens met in the Fayetteville town town hall to hold an inquest into the fire. They came to the quick conclusion that the fire was caused by faulty wiring, and that there was no sign of arson. They ignored Jennie Sodder’s report of hearing something hitting the roof a half hour before the fire started.
     The five children had undoubtedly perished in the fire, they said. The house was in complete ruins, and their bedrooms on the second floor had collapsed into the basement along with the rest of the house. There was no way that anyone could have survived such a devastating fire.  
     Death certificates for the five children were issued on December 30, 1945, and a funeral was held three days later. George and Jennie were so grief stricken that they couldn't bring themselves to attend the funeral, but the surviving children did.
     After the funeral, the Sodders began to have doubts about the official findings for the house fire and the fate of their children. They wanted an in-depth investigation to thoroughly explain how, among other things, faulty wiring could have caused the fire when the lights they turned on as they were trying to leave the house were working perfectly during the fire. Also, why wasn’t the phone working when it worked just a half hour before the fire started? Jennie was still convinced that the sound she heard on the roof that night had something to do with the fire. 
     When we think of arson, we have to think of a motive. It turned out that over the previous few years, George had been threatened on more than one occasion. The Sodders now began to wonder if their children had been kidnapped, and if the fire was a cover-up. After all, no one actually saw the children while the house was burning. When the two older boys ran out of their dark, smoke-filled bedroom, they called out to their younger brothers to get out of the room, but they never actually saw them. The three girls were supposedly asleep in the room together at the top of the stairs. There wasn’t a door at the top of the staircase, so they should have had no problem hearing the family shouting for everyone to get out of the house. And thinking back, there were no screams coming from the house as it burned, nor was there the smell of burning flesh.
     Evidence began to surface that supported the couple’s suspicions. The ladder that George always kept against the house that had gone missing the night of the fire was found at the bottom of an embankment 75 feet away from the house. Who had thrown it there, and why?
     The Sodders thought back to the night of the fire, and how the telephone hadn’t worked when they tried calling the fire department. It had worked perfectly just an hour before the fire when Jennie received the wrong number call. The fire chief had told them that the phone didn’t work because the wires probably burned.
     At the Sodder’s request, a telephone repairman went to the scene of the fire. He told the Sodders that the house’s telephone line hadn’t been burnt in the fire, it had been cut. Even though the house was now gone, the 14-foot telephone pole that was some distance from the house hadn’t been touched by the fire. In order to cut the phone wires, someone had to have climbed the 14-foot tall pole, reached out two feet away, and cut the wires. This discovery was strange to say the least, but things were about to get much, much stranger. 
     The night of the fire, as the family were watching their house burn to the ground, one of the neighbors reported seeing a man stealing a block and tackle from the Sodder’s property. The man was identified, arrested, and fined. He also admitted not only to the theft--he also confessed that he had been the one who cut the phone line, thinking it was a power line. Despite these confessions, he adamantly denied having any connection to the fire. Why were the local police so quick to believe him, and why wasn’t he investigated further?
     Why this man would have wanted to cut the power lines to the Sodder house just to  steal a block and tackle has never been explained. It’s doubtful that anyone would risk electrocution by climbing a 14 foot pole to cut the power to the house just to steal a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment. But perhaps there was a more sinister explanation for why he cut the power to the house. Jennie said that if the power line had been cut that night, they wouldn’t have been able to turn on the lights to find their way out, and the entire family would have been killed in the fire.
     Could this same man have tampered with the Sodder’s trucks the night of the fire? They had both started perfectly the day before. George believed that the trucks had been tampered with, but it’s also possible that George and John had simply flooded the engine in their haste to start the trucks.
     What about the mysterious phone call that Jennie received that night? The police were actually able to locate and interview the woman who made the phone call. It turned out that she was a local woman at a party, and that the call was simply a misdialed number. At least, that’s what the police said. 
     The thing that the Sodders had the most trouble believing was that all traces of their children’s bodies would have completely burned in the fire. The day after the fire, the couple went back to the ruins of the house and found many household appliances in the rubble, as well as fragments of the tin roof. How could these items have survived, but not the children’s bones.
     Household appliances are not human bodies. Is it possible that the fire really was hot enough to incinerate the children’s bodies, but not hot enough to destroy the appliances? Jennie did some research and found a newspaper account of a similar house fire that had killed a family of seven. In that case, the house had burned for a similar amount of time as the Sodder house, but skeletal remains of all seven of the victims were found at the scene. If this is so, then why were there absolutely no remains of the Sodder children?
     Jennie began conducting experiments on burning small piles of various animal bones in a wood stove. Even after burning the bones for well over 45 minutes, they were never completely cremated. There were always large bone fragments. In some cases, full bones were found after the fire cooled.
     Knowing that her experiments weren’t very scientific, Jennie consulted an employee at a local crematorium. He told her that during a cremation, pieces of human bones and teeth typically remain even after burning at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours. This is far longer and far hotter than the Sodder house fire could possibly have burned, so where were the children’s bones? 
     How many bones are we talking about? The human body is made up of 206 bones. The total number of bones for the five children would be 1,030. It would be virtually impossible for not one bone, or even one tooth to be found in the rubble. 
     What about the fire itself? Had it been set deliberately, and if so, why? After the fire, George recalled two incidents that made him believe that arson was to blame.
     In October 1945, a visiting life insurance salesman became incensed after George declined his services. He was also insulted by remarks George had made against Mussolini. Like George, the man was an Italian immigrant, and he supported Mussolini. As he stormed away, he warned George, “You’ll see. Your house will go up in smoke, and your children will be destroyed.” 
     At first glance, this story might be dismissed as just an odd coincidence. But months after the fire, the Sodders hired a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley who discovered that this same insurance salesman was one of the jurors for the coroner’s inquest that ruled the fire an accident. What are the odds that of all the town residents that could have been considered to be on the panel, the man who threatened George and his family was chosen. And remember, the panel came to the quick conclusion that arson was not the cause of the house fire. It’s possible that this man was able to sway the jury into dismissing the fire as arson. 
     Earlier that same year, a man approached George looking for odd jobs around the family farm. At one point during the interview, he walked around to the back of the house and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes located there would “cause a fire someday.” George was puzzled by these remarks. The house had recently been re-wired, and the local electric company inspected the job and pronounced it safe. Unfortunately, George was unable to recall this man’s name.
     The older Sodder boys recalled seeing something strange in the weeks before Christmas that year. They said that they noticed a strange car parked along the main highway, and that its occupants were watching the younger Sodder children very carefully as they walked home from school. The boys said that they never got out of the car, but they seemed overly interested in the children as they watched them walking down the road.
In the 1940s, the coal industry was under constant pressure from the mafia. George had a successful coal-trucking company in Fayetteville, and there were rumors that the mafia had tried to recruit George, but he declined. Some believed that members of the Sicilian mafia had kidnapped the five children, then started the fire in an attempt to extort money from George. 
     Jennie had always insisted that she was awoken by the sound of something hitting the roof just a half-hour before the fire broke out. Could the sound she heard have been some kind of incendiary device thrown at the house? In their search for answers, the Sodders located a local bus driver who had passed through Fayetteville late on the night of the fire. He said that he had seen people throwing “balls of fire” at the house.
A few months later, when the snow had melted, a small, dark green, rubber ball-like object was found in the brush near the site of the house. Upon examining it, George concluded that it was a napalm “pineapple bomb”. Someone could have coated or injected rubber balls with a flammable substance and thrown the burning balls at the house. Perhaps that is what the bus driver saw that night? And maybe that’s the sound that Jennie heard on the roof. 
     There are a few things to consider about Jennie’s story. First, she was awoken by the sound of something hitting the roof, then rolling off. Jennie and George slept on the first floor. Why didn’t any of the children report hearing the sound? They were on the second floor. They could have been asleep, but somehow the sound was loud enough to wake Jennie. Could the sound instead have come from John or George Jr. dropping something in their bedroom?
     The bigger question, though, is that if people were indeed throwing balls of fire at the house, then why was the fire discovered in George’s first floor home office? If the fire didn’t start on the roof, then the only logical explanation is that when throwing the flaming objects at the roof didn’t work, someone came up the house, broke a window, and tossed one into George’s office. 
     The private investigator, C.C. Tinsley, turned up an unusual piece of evidence that seems to point to some sort of a cover-up. After 60 years, several versions of the story are floating around, but one is that fire chief Morris did find remains at the site of the fire--a human heart--but he didn’t tell the Sodders.
     Tinsley and George confronted Morris about it and he admitted that he had found remains after the fire. But here’s where things get a little fuzzy. According to reports, After finding the remains, Morris took the heart, hid it in a metal dynamite box, and buried it at the scene. 
     When confronted, he apparently led George and the investigator to where it was buried. They dug up the box and brought the heart to a funeral director. He examined the “heart” and concluded that it was actually beef liver, and that it was untouched by the fire.
     Later, the Sodders heard rumors that the fire chief had told others that he had buried the beef liver in the rubble in the hope that finding the remains would placate the family and stop the investigation.
     It’s hard to know what to make of this story. The Sodders didn’t call for a more thorough investigation until long after George covered the site with soil. So, if Morris wanted to stop the Sodder’s investigation, he wouldn’t have been able to put the “heart” in the ashes. 
     But even if Morris had put the liver at the site earlier, why did he immediately take it away and bury it in a box where no one would find it? If he changed his mind about the cover-up, why didn’t he just throw the liver into the woods, or take it with him and dispose of it somewhere else? If he admitted to George and the investigator that he buried the liver at the site, and that he did it to stop an investigation of the fire, then why didn’t the state or local police investigate the incident? Once again we are left with many questions and few answers.
     In August 1949, George persuaded Oscar Hunter, a pathologist from Washington D.C., to supervise a new search at the site of the Sodder house. A team of investigators excavated through the five feet dirt that George had put on the site, and they sifted through the dirt and ashes. The search was very thorough, and several artifacts were uncovered. These included a dictionary that had belonged to the children, some coins, and several small bone fragments. It was determined that the bones were human vertebrae. Could this be the evidence that everyone had been waiting for?
     The bone fragments were sent to the Smithsonian Institute where they were examined by a specialist named Marshall T. Newman. He confirmed that the bones were from a human lumbar vertebrae. He further concluded that all of the bones were from the same individual. In his report, Newman wrote “Since the transverse recesses are fused, the age of this individual at death should have been 16 or 17 years. The top limit of age would be about 22, since the centra, which normally fuse at 23, were found to be unfused.”
     Newman said that given the fact that the oldest of the missing children was only 14-years-old at the time, the bones couldn’t be from any of the five missing children. He also added that the bones showed no sign of exposure to flame. He went on to say that he agreed that it was “very strange” that those should be the only bones found at the site. In his opinion, a wood fire that had burned for such a short time should have left full skeletons behind, if not flesh.
     The report concluded that the vertebrae had probably been in the soil that George Sodder had used to cover the site. How the bones ended up in the soil is another mystery. The bone fragments were returned to the Sodders in September 1949. 

Sightings of the Missing Children
     But what about the missing children? After the fire, witnesses began to come forward. One woman who had been watching the fire from the road said that she had seen a few of the kids looking out of a car that drove by while the house was still burning. Not knowing who this witness is, we have no way of knowing if she actually knew the children, and if she would have recognized their faces. In addition, anyone would slow down to look at a house on fire, and if there were children in the car, they too would have peered out the window to see what was going on. Still, one has to ask, what family would be driving around at 2 or 3 AM with children in the car?
     A woman who worked at a rest stop between Fayetteville and Charleston also contacted the Sodders. She said that she’d served the children breakfast the next morning, and that she noticed a car with Florida license plates in the parking lot while they were there. 
     If the rest stop was about half-way between Fayetteville and Charleston, the drive would have taken roughly a half hour. If the children left the house before Jennie answered the phone, it would have been sometime between 11 PM and midnight. If someone kidnapped the kids and ushered them out of the house, it’s possible that they had first taken them to a local house. Perhaps they had a change of clothes for the kids, all of whom would have left the house in their pajamas. After ordering them to change, they could have put them in the car and made their way towards Charleston, stopping along the way at the rest stop.
     But I find this scenario highly unlikely. Kidnappers would never have taken the five children out in public. If anything, they would have kept them completely hidden. Remember, the two oldest missing children were 14 and 12. Children that age might attempt to get someone’s attention. Bringing five children into a busy rest stop to have what must have been a long breakfast would be the last thing a kidnapper would do.
     In 1952, the Sodders put up a billboard at the site of the house, and another along US Route 60 near Ansted, West Virginia. The billboard showed pictures of the missing children along with the caption: “What was their fate? Kidnapped--Murdered--Or are they still alive? $5000 Reward”. The reward was later raised to $10,000.
     After the billboard went up, tips began to trickle in. A St. Louis woman contacted the family saying that Martha, the oldest missing girl, was in a convent there. A patron in a bar in Texas gave the tip that she had overheard an incriminating conversation about a Christmas Eve fire in West Virginia. Someone in Florida claimed the children were staying with a distant relative of Jennie’s. In that case, the relatives were investigated and had to prove that the children were actually their own. George traveled the country to investigate every lead, but he always came home empty handed.
     A woman named Ida Crutchfield who ran a hotel in Charleston saw the billboard and contacted the Sodders. She claimed that she had seen the children about a week after the fire. She said that they came into the hotel sometime after midnight accompanied by two men and two women. She described the adults as appearing to be “of Italian extraction.” When she attempted to speak with the children, one of the men gave her a hostile look and began talking rapidly in Italian, silencing the whole group. She also said that they left early the next morning.
     What’s interesting about this story is the woman specified that the individuals seemed to be Italian. She had no way of knowing the Sodder’s Italian heritage, or the incident where the Italian salesman threatened George for insulting Mussalini. But as with every other tip, this one was a dead end. 
     The most credible and mysterious information the Sodders ever received came years later. In 1967, a letter came in the mail addressed to Jennie. It was postmarked from Central City, Kentucky. It had no return address. Inside the envelope was a photo of a young man, around 30-years-old. His features strongly resembled those of Louis Sodder, who would have been around that age at the time. On the back was the following text:

Louis Sodder
I love brother Frankie
IilI boys
A90132 or 3

     The meaning of the writing on the back of the mysterious photo has never been deciphered. Recently, the granddaughter of one of the surviving Sodder children said that her mother always told her that the writing said “Aged 32 or 3” not “A90132 or 3”. She said that the writing was in script, and that the 9 was actually a letter ‘g’ and the ‘0’ was the ‘e’, and the ‘1’ was the ‘d’. The message “I love brother Frankie” remains a mystery.  
Picture
     A side-by-side comparison of the man in the photo, and of nine-year-old Louis does show an eerie resemblance. Louis and the young man in the photo even have the same raised left eyebrow. The man in the photo also bears a striking resemblance to the oldest boy who went missing, 14-year-old Maurice. Siblings often resemble each other when they get older, so it’s very possible that Louis would have grown up to resemble his older brother. 
     The Sodders hired a private detective to investigate the strange photo, but he never reported back to them and they were unable to locate him afterwards. In reading the account of this lead, and of the missing private detective, I wonder why they didn’t pursue the lead further with another detective. The family were so convinced that the photo was genuine that they added it to the billboard, and they displayed a copy of the photo in their home. 
     The Sodder’s never stopped searching for their lost children. Geroge even went so far as to contact the FBI for help in investigating what he considered to be a kidnapping. Then director J. Edgar Hoover personally responded to George’s letters. He wrote, "Although I would like to be of service, the matter related appears to be of local character and does not come within the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau." He added that if the local authorities requested the bureau's assistance, he would of course direct agents to assist, but the Fayetteville police and fire departments declined to do so. Was there a reason why they refused to cooperate with the FBI? We’ll never know.
     George died in 1969, but Jennie, George Jr., Joe, Marion, and Sylvia continued the search for the missing kids. John never talked about the fire, and thought that his family should just move on with their lives.
     Jennie continued to live in the family home, wearing black in mourning and tending the memorial garden at the site of the fire until her death in1989. After Jennie’s death, the family finally took down the weathered billboards that had stood for 37 years.
     As the years went on, the surviving children passed away. Today 77-year-old Syliva Sodder is the only one left. To this day she remains convinced that her siblings did not die in the fire.
     With no trace of human remains found at the scene, as painful as it would be for the family to accept, is it possible that the five Sodder children actually did die in the fire?
     After the fire, the family members were interviewed by the State Police. John first told them that when the family was fleeing the house, he went in and shook his brothers and sisters to wake them up before running out of the room. He later changed his story and said that he just called out to them, then left the room thinking they heard him. 
     The family said that John told them that he told the police that he tried to shake them because he felt that’s what he should have done. They said that he felt guilty about NOT shaking them awake, and that he just called to them. This could be true, but it could also be true that he did exactly what he first said he did.
     If John did shake them awake, there are a few extremely important things to consider. First, it means that he was the last to see the children alive. Second, it means that the five children actually did die in the fire. And third, it means that for over 50 years, John had been lying--not only to his family, but to the world.
     But would he really continue to lie all of those years just to cover up his guilt at not having tried harder to wake his siblings up? He never wanted to talk about the fire, but would he actually watch his family search for his missing brothers and sisters for over fifty years when he knew that they were dead? We’ll never know. If there was a confession to make, John took it to his grave.  
     Modern day fire professionals believe that the five children probably died of smoke inhalation, and that they were either dead or unconscious when the rest of the family were roused. It’s not uncommon for some people to die of smoke inhalation who are right next to other people who survive. This could explain why John and George Jr. survived the fire, but their younger brothers and sisters might not have. 
     What about the fact that no one reported the smell of burning flesh during the fire? From all reports, it was a very windy night. As a result, no one would have been able to stand downwind from the fire. Smoke and sparks would have been flying in the direction of the wind, so it’s not surprising that no one smelled anything unusual. 
     What about the lack of human remains in the ashes? The cremation specialist told the Sodders that bones remain even after burning for two hours in 2000 temperatures. The Sodder house was only on fire for 45 minutes. Why weren’t there any remains if the fire burned for such a short time? In reality, the home was probably burning for much longer than 45 minutes. Although there were active flames for 45 minutes, the fire would have continued to burn underneath the debris and ashes. The fire department showed up 5 ½ hours after the fire started. They put water on the site to cool it down so they could sift through the ashes, but the fire itself was smoldering up until that point. 
     With the bodies burning in fire for that long, very little would have remained. And it’s important to remember that the fire department sifted through the ashes for a very short time. It may not be that there weren’t any remains, they just might have missed them. 
     What about the investigation that was done in 1949? Those were professional investigators, and they didn’t find any of the children’s bones either. Keep in mind that four years prior to the investigation, George had piled up to 5 feet of soil onto the site against the wishes of the fire chief. Although the investigation was considered to have been very thorough by 1949 standards, by today’s standards it was far from it. Today, an excavation and investigation by a large team of researchers would take months to complete, not just a few days. 
     In spite of evidence to support the theory that the children died in the fire, there is equal evidence supporting the theory that they were kidnapped, possibly by the Sicilian mafia. And some modern day fire experts and cremation workers insist that not only should there have been some bones after the fire, there should have been a lot of bones and teeth left over, even if the fire had burned all night as some have suggested. As a result, the Sodder Children disappearance continues to be one of the most baffling and talked about unsolved mysteries of all time. 
     George Sodder died in 1969. If anyone thinks that he didn’t actually believe that his children were still alive, they need to take a look at his tombstone. On it is carved, “In Memory of George Sodder who believed in justice for everyone, but was denied justice by the law when his five children were kidnapped Christmas Eve 1945 at Fayetteville, W. VA.”

Resources
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-children-who-went-up-in-smoke-172429802/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodder_children_disappearance
https://thetruecrimefiles.com/sodder-children-disappearance/
https://mywvhome.com/forties/sodder.html
https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/object/animal-liver/
https://sorcerer.blog/2017/05/22/the-age-of-black-magic-step-ten/
https://medium.com/the-true-crime-times/the-sodder-family-a-christmas-inferno-f39f60843412
http://sites.rootsweb.com/~wvrcbiog/WhatReallyHappenedToChildrena.html
https://defrostingcoldcases.com/case-month-sodder-children/
reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/cpvxde/the_sodder_children_new_leads/
http://truecrimediscussions.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-missing-sodder-children.html
https://sites.psu.edu/resorensenpassion/
https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/the-sodder-family-this-is-important-medical-condition-causes-spine-fusing-early.326967/
https://www.timeswv.com/news/their-fate-kidnapped-murdered-or-are-they-still-alive/article_be5920fe-a3f1-11e6-a3fc-43908d62effb.html
https://scarestreet.com/sodder-children/
https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/wv-sodder-family-5-children-christmas-eve-1945-2.35000/page-3
https://stacyhorn.com/2005/12/28/long-long-long-sodder-post/
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Ghost Stories Told at Christmas

12/23/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture
   In the classic Christmas song It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, there’s a verse that most people sing along with but don’t pay much attention to--probably because it doesn’t make any sense. The line is, “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” Andy Williams, what in God’s name are you talking about?
   The telling of ghost stories at Christmas time was a wildly popular Victorian tradition. Back then, the custom of getting together on Christmas Eve to tell ghost stories was as much a part of Christmas as Santa Claus is for us today. 
   In his 1891 book, Told After Supper, British humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote, “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters.”
   Of course, the most famous example of a ghost story told on Christmas is A Christmas Carol. Originally titled A Ghost Story of Christmas, the supernatural holiday tale was written by Dickens to be told as a holiday ghost story.
   In keeping with this now mostly forgotten tradition, I’m pleased to present some chilling, true ghost stories for your holiday listening pleasure. Like the spooky tales told around fireplaces in Victorian times, the stories I’ll be sharing with you are first hand encounters with ghosts and other supernatural beings. 
   Where do these stories come from, you ask? Each year, I give lectures to large audiences about my work as a paranormal investigator. Afterward, I invite audience members to share their true ghost stories. The stories you are about to hear are my re told by audience members at those lectures. Some are short stories, others are a bit longer, but all are exactly as they were told to me in front of a live audience.
   So in the classic Victorian Christmas tradition, pull up a chair, snuggle up a little closer to my virtual fireplace, and give a listen to some truly spooky ghost stories. 

   Many people live by the adage, “Seeing is believing”. In this first story, we’ll meet a woman whose visual encounter with an unexpected guest made her a firm believer in ghosts of Christmas past. 

   About nine years ago I rented an apartment in Millford, Connecticut. Before moving in I was told that two people had died in the apartment. Now, this really didn’t bother me or I wouldn’t have taken the apartment. I didn’t ask the landlord anything about it like what room they died in, who they were. I just didn’t want to know because I wasn’t really interested. 
   One night at Christmas time when I was putting my tree up in the living room, I bent down to get a string of lights. When I stood up, there right in front of me was a full body apparition of a young man. I was kind of startled, but for some reason I wasn’t afraid when I saw him. 
   I looked him right in the face and thought, ‘Where did you come from?’ He was so close that I could have reached out and touched him. He wasn’t floating or transparent or anything like that. He was as solid as you or me, and I could see his full body all the way to the floor. 
He looked to be somewhere in his early twenties, was about my height, and had on a green army coat, like a US reserve jacket. I noticed that under the coat he had on a flannel shirt. He looked like he was dressed for outside for that time of the year. His face was a little dirty, and I remember thinking, ‘What, did you crawl out of a hole or something?’ I also noticed that his hair was kind of wild and messy. 
Then all of a sudden, in a split second, he was gone. That part was really freaky because he looked as real as anything. He really did. He looked so real, it was like if I touched him I would have felt someone solid. 
A few days later I ran into the downstairs neighbors and I told them what I had seen. I described the Army coat the apparition was wearing, his wild hair style, his height. They said, “That was the fella who died in your apartment. The kid always had messy, punked hair that he sometimes dyed different colors, and he always wore that Army coat.” 
Now, like I said, I didn’t know anything about either of the people who died in my apartment. I didn’t even know that one of them was a young person, but that’s exactly what I saw. I don’t know why he appeared to me that day, but I never saw him again after that. 
I’m amazed that I was able to let it roll off of my shoulders as easily as I did, but I just didn’t let it bother me. In fact, seeing him was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. I moved out eventually, but not because I was afraid or anything. I just needed to find a bigger apartment.  
__________

J.M. Barrie, the author of the book ‘Peter Pan’ once wrote, “Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away, and going away means forgetting.” In this next story, a woman learns that there are some goodbyes that you never forget. 

When I was four years old, the house we lived in was a two story Cape Cod style house. On one side of the upper floor was a playroom that had all of my toys in it, and on the other side was my sister’s bedroom.
One day I was upstairs playing in the playroom waiting for my best friend AnneMarie to come play with me. We had a play-date that day, and her parents were going to drive her over to our house. 
While I was waiting and playing with my toys, I noticed a light coming through the window which caught my attention. I looked over, and there was my friend AnneMarie standing outside the playroom window. Brilliant white light was all around her, and she was illuminated. It was this bright light that had caught my attention, and she was just standing there in the window with all this white light around her.
As she stood outside the window looking in, she said, “I can’t play with you anymore. I have to go.” I got really mad at her and I was saying, “Why? Why?” And then she disappeared.
I ran downstairs to tell my parents what had just happened, that I just saw my friend in the window. I said, “AnneMarie just came and told me that she can’t play with me anymore!” My parents were in the kitchen, and my mom was on the telephone. When I said this, she dropped the phone and my father just stood there staring at me. I didn’t know what was going on. My mom was visibly shaken, and very upset. So, that was my memory.
Years later, when I was a teenager, I asked my parents about it. I said, “I have this weird memory. I’m not sure if it’s a memory or a dream, but this is what I remember,” and I told them the story. My mother said that what had happened was that there had been a tragic accident that day. 
AnneMarie’s parents were about to come over to our house to bring her for the playdate. As her father was backing the car out of the garage, he accidentally hit his daughter and killed her. My parents were just getting that news on the phone when I came running down the stairs saying that I saw her in the window with the light all around her, and that she said that she couldn’t play with me anymore.
It was such a powerful memory that I never forgot it, but I never really thought about it or talked about it until I was a teenager and I asked my parents if it really happened, and my mom sat down and told me the actual story of the events.
It’s funny, because my first reaction was like just a little kid. I was angry with my friend that she wasn’t going to play with me anymore. I didn’t understand at the time how powerful that message was; of her actually coming to visit me in that state before she left the earth.
__________

It’s been said that the only real things in life are the ones that are unexpected. Ghost sightings are usually out-of-the blue and sudden, and there is usually no rhyme or reason why they appear. In this next true spooky tale, an unexpected ghost is spotted lurking in a very unlikely place. 

I’m really enjoying your lecture, and all of the ghost stories people are sharing. I wanted to ask you, are any of the pictures that you show in your presentation actual photos that you took during your paranormal investigations? Or ones that you knew were associated with a particular place? I’m asking because you just showed a picture of a young boy with blonde hair, and you said that the case was from Ridgefield. This might sound strange, but I saw a boy who looked just like that one day when I was in Ridgefield. 
This past summer I was at an estate sale with my daughter, and as we were leaving, we drove past a wooded area; a rather long stretch of road that wasn’t near any houses. As I was driving I happened to look over and standing in the woods about 10 feet back from the road was a little blonde haired boy. He was wearing really old fashioned clothing. He had on a white button-down shirt, and either knickers or riding pants. I didn’t notice what he had on his feet, but he was just standing there in the woods facing out into the road. He didn’t have any particular expression on his face. He was just staring straight ahead as we drove past him. 
Now, there was nothing around that part of the road. There were no houses or anyplace that he could have come from. And there was no reason why a kid would be dressed like that, in such old fashioned clothes.
As soon as we passed him I said to my daughter, “Did you just see someone standing in the woods?” 
“Yeah,” she said. “There was a little boy standing there.” I turned the car around and drove back. It was no more than two minutes later, but when we passed the spot where we had seen him, he was gone.
Like I said, I wasn’t the only one who saw this little boy. My daughter saw him too, and when I asked her to describe what he looked like she said that he was wearing old fashioned clothing. 
He looked just like the picture of the boy you showed when you were talking about the haunted house in Ridgefield, which was where the estate sale was. It freaked me out when I saw your photo, because as soon as I saw it I thought, “I’ve seen that boy!”
__________
There’s an old saying that goes, “Uninvited guests are often most welcome when they leave”. But as we’ll see in this next story, some guests linger on and on and on. 

Several years ago I moved to Windham, Vermont to an old farmhouse that was built in 1805. It was so old that the basement had dirt floors and there were rough hewn wood beams on the ceilings. In addition to the house, there was a three story barn and a carriage house out back. I didn’t know much about the history of the house, but I was told that it was once owned by the Chapman family.
About four years ago my neighbor from across the street came over to say hi. I opened the door and said, “Mary! How nice to see you!” 
I noticed that when she greeted me she looked into the house behind me, then she took a few steps back. I said, “Oh, come on in. Come in! I was just making some coffee.” And she goes, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s okay, that’s okay. I know you’re busy, I’ll come back another time,” and she turned around and left. I was thinking, ‘That’s really weird!’ 
A few weeks later I ran into her at the grocery store and I said, “Mary, you should have come in the other day. You didn’t have to worry about me being busy, you could have come in.” 
“No, I didn't want to bother you,” she said. “You had company.” 
“Company?” I said. “I didn’t have company. I was alone that day.” 
“Yes you did,” she laughed. “There was a man standing behind you on top of the staircase. I saw him as soon as you opened the door.”
“I swear, I was alone all day,” I said. “You saw someone standing behind me? What did he look like?”
“He was standing near the top of the stairs behind you,” she said. “It looked like he was on his way down the stairs, and that he stopped when you answered the door. He had on farmer jeans and a beard, like an old farmer. I just figured you had company and I didn’t want to interrupt.” 
I was totally alone in the house that day, and I don’t know anyone who looks the way she described this strange man. All I can think is that it must have been the ghost of one of the men from the Chapman family. 
My friend was shocked, but I just made light of it and said, “Well, even if he is a ghost, if he’s single and around my age, he can stay!”
__________

Things happen when you least expect them to; things that often leave you with a whole new perspective on life. In this next story, a woman has an unexpected encounter from beyond the grave which changes her entire concept of what awaits us after death. 

My friend lived in an old house that was built back in the late 1700s. I was staying over at her house one night when I woke up in the middle of the night because I felt something tapping me on my back. Now, when I went to bed, the room was totally dark. But when I felt this tapping, I reached for my glasses and I noticed that there was a dim light in the center of the room.
I put my glasses on and saw that the door on the far side of the room that I had closed before going to bed was now wide open. Then I looked over and couldn’t believe my eyes. Standing in the center of the room was a little girl, somewhere between 8 and 11 years old. She had hair that hung down to her shoulders, and her arms were down at her sides. She was wearing some sort of a long gown, maybe a night gown, and her back was to me.  
I know that some people who have seen ghosts say that they look like real people, but this was different. Even though she looked solid enough, her color was all wrong. She was an off-grey-ish white color. It was almost like I was seeing a black and white version of a person who I should have been seeing in color, if you can imagine such a thing. 
For some reason, I wasn’t afraid when I saw her. I just said, “Can I help you?” and as I said this, the girl started gliding very slowly toward the open door on the far side of the room. As she did, the door started closing by itself. By the time that she got to the door frame, the girl had vanished and the door was totally closed. 
This wasn’t a dream. I was absolutely wide awake when I saw her, and I’m not ashamed to tell you that I was awake for the rest of the night. It wasn’t that it was a frightening experience. It wasn’t scary at all, it was just amazing, and it totally changed the way I think about life after death. I just couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had just seen. 
__________

In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen tells Alice that she is over one hundred years old. Alice doesn’t believe her and tells the Queen that “one can’t believe impossible things.” In this next story, a woman is forced to change her way of thinking about the impossible after seeing something totally unexplainable. 

A few years ago, I was working as a nurse's aide at the old Somers Manor nursing home. This was before they built the beautiful new facility. At around 9 PM the nurse who was on duty with me went to dinner and I was there by myself. 
After she left, I was doing some work at the main desk when I heard the patients getting restless, which was very unusual. All of the patients were very senile and had dementia. They weren’t really conscious, so it was rare to hear anyone making a sound. 
The hallway lights were turned down low because everyone was sleeping, but as I looked down the hall I saw something really strange. It was a very white orb about the size of a large beach ball. It was made entirely out of light, and it was just hovering in the middle of the hallway. At first I was just puzzled because I couldn’t figure out where the light could have been coming from. 
As I sat there staring at it, it began to move, and I watched this thing float slowly down the hall to where the patient’s rooms were. I totally got the chills seeing this happening. This wasn’t something that happened quickly. I watched it moving down the hall for about 45 seconds to a minute, and then I saw it go into one of the rooms that housed six patients. 
I had to see what this thing was, so I walked down the hallway to the room where it had gone into. As soon as I got to the doorway, I walked in and there it was, just a few feet in front of me. But as soon as I stepped into the room, it disappeared. 
I have no idea what I saw that night, but I’ll tell you one thing, I couldn’t wait for that nurse to come back from dinner!
__________

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away....

In this next chilling tale, a girl and her friend have two encounters with a ghostly inhabitant in an old farmhouse. And in both cases, oh how they wished he’d go away!

My husband’s family’s home was an old farmhouse in Pine Plains, New York. His sister and I were best friends in high school, and around that time a lot of strange things happened to us in that house. But two things that happened when I stayed over at her house really put us on edge. 
One day during the summer we were there by ourselves, sitting in the front part of the house watching TV. At the time, the kitchen floor had just been ripped up because they were redoing it. So, there wasn’t a floor there at all, just two-by-fours. The back door of the house goes into this kitchen, and another door leads from the kitchen into the dining room. This door was shut because, like I said, they had ripped up the kitchen floor.
Now, this house was in the middle of nowhere, so nobody locked their doors around there. So, even though we always felt safe in the house, anyone could have walked in. 
So there we were watching television when all of a sudden we heard the dining room door open, then close. We looked at each other and were like, ‘Who could that be? How could anyone come in through the kitchen? There isn’t even a floor!’ 
We got up off of the couch and walked into the dining room. The room had hardwood floors, and coming from the door that led to the kitchen were wet footprints going across the floor. 
We were like, holy crap! They were full sized, men’s footprints, and they weren't even the marks of shoes. They were a man’s wet bare footprints coming out of the kitchen. It was just as if someone had walked barefoot in a puddle of water, then walked into the dining room. Each step was a little less wet than the previous one, and the last was just damp.
The wet footprints dried up after a while, but you could still see their impression on the hardwood floor. When my friend’s mom came home later we showed them to her, but she didn’t couldn’t come up with an explanation for them either. 
That same summer, another thing happened that really freaked us out. This time it was at night. Once again we were alone in the house, but this time we had two of the family dogs with us. We were watching TV in the living room when all of a sudden we heard loud music playing from upstairs. It sounded like it was coming from my friend’s brother’s room on the second floor. All of his stuff was in there, but he wasn’t living there at the time, so the door was always left closed because nobody used the room. 
The music was really LOUD. It was current music, like rock music, and it sounded like a radio playing full blast. Of course we were afraid because we thought that somebody was in the house.
We went upstairs to see what was going on, and we took the dogs with us. The minute we started going up the stairs the dogs started growling. We got to the top of the stairs and walked over to the door, and we could still hear this loud music playing in the room. By now the dogs were really growling. I put my hand on the doorknob, turned it and opened the door. As soon as the door opened, the music stopped. 
We put on the lights and there was one there. We walked in, and the dogs were still growling, and the hair on their backs was standing up. They walked over to a corner of the room, and they just kept staring at this one corner and growling.
We looked around the room to see what could have made that sound, but there wasn’t even a radio. No clock radio, no stereo, not even a television. It was so frightening that we slept with the lights on that night, and we kept the dogs on the couch with us. 
A lot of really strange things happened in that house. You’d make a pot of coffee, leave the room for a few seconds, go back, and half the pot would be gone. It made absolutely no sense. Five cups of coffee would just vanish. Also, cigarettes would disappear. Whole packs just gone without a trace. So, I guess whoever the ghost was, he was a barefoot, coffee drinking, cigarette smoking ghost!
__________

In her book, ‘Angels in My Hair’, Lorna Byrne wrote, “Your guardian angel loves you. You are precious to it. You are the most important person in the world to this angel.” 
You may be asking, ‘Are there really such things as guardian angels?’ Listen to this next story, and decide for yourself.

About 30 years ago my wife and I went camping in New Hampshire with my son Jeffrey and his wife, Kathy. The next day we decided to go canoeing on the Saco River. We didn’t know it at the time, but the river has a reputation for being rough and dangerous, and many people have drowned there. 
We were all in our own canoes. Kathy and I were riding next to one another, and my wife and son were riding together a little way behind us. 
When we first set out the water was calm, but it started to get pretty swift. As we were coming to a corner we saw a tree laying half on the ground and half in the water.
Now, if you damaged the canoe you had to pay for it when you got back, so I said to Kathy, "Put your foot out and try to push the boat away because you’re going to hit that tree." Sure enough she hit it and her boat turned over and filled up with water. She was caught underneath the boat between the boat and tree, and I wasn’t strong enough to push the canoe back so she could get out from under the water. So my son jumped out of his canoe and came over to try and help. 
In the meantime there was this thin, grey haired guy in his 60’s sitting on a sandy part of the shore. There was nothing else around because it was a very thick part of the woods. I'm pushing the canoe for all I'm worth, and Jeffrey is calling out to Kathy when all of a sudden I see this hand on the top corner point of the canoe. 
It was the guy who had been sitting on the shore. He said, "Relax". That's all he said. Then with one hand, he pulled the canoe up and Kathy came up out of the water. I immediately turned around to thank him, and this guy was gone. I mean, in a split second he was just gone. There was nowhere that he could have gone that fast. The place where he had been sitting, and the woods were at least twenty feet away. So from that day on, I believe in angels.
__________
“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” 
That quote by Shel Silverstein perfectly illustrates this next story where a boy and his brother were forced to believe that truly anything can be. 

This story happened to my father when he was growing up in Southbury in an area known as the Berkshire Estates. My dad was about fourteen at the time, and his brother was sixteen.
There’s a community there where they had a lot of summer homes that were modified and turned into larger homes, but at that time there were still a lot of abandoned one room summer shacks in the backwoods area. My dad and his friends used to hang out in these abandoned cabins a lot when they were teenagers. They’d go in there and roughhouse and put their comic books in there, that kind of stuff.    
​ One day, my father, his brother, and their friend Charlie met at one of these abandoned one-room cabins. They were playing for a good hour and a half in this room talking, doing their same-old-same-old before they finally went to leave. My uncle was in the front, my father was in the middle, and Charlie was in the back talking to my father. At one point as they were walking, my father turned around to answer a question that Charlie asked, but Charlie wasn't behind him. Seconds later, up ahead at the top of the hill they see Charlie coming down the hill. Who had my father and my uncle been talking to for the past hour and a half? Charlie wasn’t even there. 
When Charlie walked up to them, they made him take them to his house where his parents were to prove that he was home the whole time. It turned out that his parents had just let him go from whatever chores he was doing that morning. That’s when he became a believer in demons and things like that. Because he was like, “What was my brother and I talking to for an hour and a half?”
__________

Take a vacant house, a real estate agent, and the remnants of a blizzard, and you have the makings of one very spooky ghost story. In this next ghostly tale, a real estate agent has a run in with the former resident of a vacant house in Connecticut. 

I’m a real estate appraiser, and a few years ago I appraised a house in Weston. The house was vacant, and the driveway and sidewalk hadn’t been shoveled so there definitely wasn’t anyone in the house.
As soon as I walked in the front door of this house I felt like somebody was watching me. But this didn’t make any sense because I knew that the place was vacant, and I’m not particularly sensitive. I kept calling out, “Is anyone there?” but nobody answered. As I walked around the house taking pictures, I definitely felt like I was being followed around.
After I finished the upper part of the house, I went down to the basement to take pictures of the oil tank. Appraisers take a lot of pictures that don’t go into the report. They’re just for our files in case we get audited by the state. One of the pictures I needed to take was of the oil tank to show that it wasn’t leaking. 
In this house there was a shelf above the oil tank, and right in the middle of the shelf was a resin statue of two angels. The angels were hugging, but one was missing its head. So, I’m framing the picture to make sure that I can show that there’s no leaking in the oil tank. I’ve got everything in the frame, and I’m looking at it really carefully because I’m trying to make sure that I’m documenting this. 
I took a picture and then I looked back at my camera. I looked up again, and the statue is now at the end of the shelf about to fall over. It moved from the middle of the shelf all the way to the side of the shelf, and was so close to the edge it was about to fall off. This happened in the time it took me to look at my camera, then look back at the shelf. Just a few seconds. 
Of course, it creeped me out; especially because I had been feeling someone watching me the whole time I was there. So, I was more than glad when I finished and I was able to lock up and get out of there. 
I get back to my office, and I’m pulling comps to find similar houses to this one to find out what the value is. But the house seemed to be priced way too low. I kept coming up about $30,000 short of all the other comps that were in similar condition, in a similar location, and based on recent sales. I couldn’t figure out why. I didn’t think I missed anything. 
I’m thinking, ‘Why is this thing selling so cheap? It makes no sense to me.’ Weston is not a cheap area to buy in, so somebody was about to get a great deal and I wanted to know why. 
I decided to give the listing agent a call. I said, “I was just running the comps on the house in Weston, but I keep coming up short on the price. What’s going on? Is there some reason this wasn’t an arms-length transaction?” 
“Well, no,” she said. “But, I mean…well, you do know that the last owner killed himself in the basement, right?” 
True story! Every appraiser I know has ghost stories, and that is a true Connecticut ghost story.
__________
My favorite kind of ghost stories are those that occur in the workplace. In this last spooky tale, a man and his apprentice both catch a glimpse of a mysterious spectre while on-the-job in Waterbury, Connecticut. 

I’m a plumber, and a few years ago I was working at the Harold Leever Regional Cancer Center. We weren’t allowed to work there during the day. My crew had to go in after everybody had their chemo, so we had to work at night after all of the patients were gone. 
So, one night my apprentice and I went up to the nurses station to see if it was OK to get to work. The nurse said, “Everybody’s done. Go ahead, you can start.” So we go up to the next floor and we’re starting to get our cart and our tools ready, and we look down the hall and we both see a man go into one of the patient rooms. I would say the guy was about fifty-feet away from us, but we both saw him clear as day.
I said to my apprentice, “Hey, I thought everybody was out of here. You saw that guy go in there, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess one of the doctors is up here. Maybe he forgot something.” 
We walked down the hall and went into that room. It was freezing cold in there, and I could feel every hair on the back of my neck and my arms stand up. We turned on the lights, and there was nobody there. There was only one door to the room, so it wasn’t like he could have left by another exit. We both cleared out of there as fast as we could. 
My apprentice and I both saw the same guy. Tall, bald, glasses, suit-and-tie. So the next time we went to work we told the nurses about it. 
One of the nurses went into the office, then came back and handed me a photo. “Take a look at this picture,” she said. “Did the man you saw look like this guy?” 
“Yeah, that’s the guy!” I said, pointing to the picture. “I’m sure that’s him.” 
I handed the photo to my apprentice. “Yup, that’s the guy! Who is he?” he asked. 
“I knew right away who it was from the way you described him. He was a doctor who used to work here,” she said. “The thing is, he passed away a few years ago.” 
That was the freakiest thing that ever happened to me. I knew that I had seen something creepy that night, but seeing the photo of the guy really made me a total believer. 
__________

While each of these tales are unique unto themselves, they all have one thing in common; each person changed for the better because of their ghostly experience. Like Scrooge in ‘A Christmas Carol’ (someone who also rubbed elbows with a spirit or two–or three!), their encounter with the great beyond led them to realize that life holds a far larger truth than that which we can see with our own eyes. 
And so, in the spirit of the most famous of all Christmas ghost stories, I leave you with these five, wonderful words – “God bless us, every one.”
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Three Urban Legends

6/14/2021

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     Who doesn’t love a good creepy story? I know I sure do. Some of the best campfire stories fall under the category of urban legends; terror-based folklore tales considered to be based on fact. Although these legends are entertaining, they almost always contain elements of danger, violence, disturbing events, and death. 
     Urban myths were once circulated orally, but today they are spread by all types of media including newspapers, television news, email, and social media. In August of 2016, strange complaints began coming into the Green Bay, Wisconsin police department--complaints about clowns. People dressed as clowns were spotted waving from the edge of forests, standing on street corners, leering at onlookers from rooftops, and lurking near schools and playgrounds. Thus began the Clown Panic of 2016.
     Photos of a sinister looking clown roaming a vacant parking lot at night started going viral. A few days later a Facebook page was created claiming the clown was named Gags. In the days and weeks that followed, the creepy clown photos were discussed on all of the nationally syndicated news stations.
     Even though the truth about the clowns being a publicity stunt for the movie “Gags the Clown” was heavily covered in TV news reports, the creepy clown phenomenon continued to spread. By mid-October clown sightings and attacks were being reported in nearly every state in the U.S., across Canada, and all over Europe. But what started out as a hoax soon turned violent. 
     In Denmark a man was driving home from a football match when he spotted an axe-wielding clown standing in the middle of the road. The man nearly hit the clown, who was later revealed to be a 13-year-old boy. 
In Finland, ten people dressed as clowns jumped out of a van outside of an elementary school playground. They chased three children who escaped to an underpass, where another clown was waiting with a chainsaw.
     In Germany, two men reported a man in a clown mask carrying a knife and gun walking the streets at 2 AM. In Berlin, a 16-year-old wearing a clown mask had to undergo surgery after being stabbed with a knife by a 14-year-old who thought he was being attacked.
     In Ireland, a clown with an axe broke into a home and terrified a young girl, and four people dressed as ax-wielding clowns stood outside of a teenager's home and threatened to kill her.
     In West Virginia, a man was arrested and charged with assault after donning a clown mask and chasing four children between the ages of 6 and 11 with a baseball bat. In Rhode Island, there were three separate reports of a machete wielding clown chasing people out of a park. 
     Luckily, the creepy clown sightings died down and eventually disappeared leaving people wondering how things had gotten so out of hand. Some news outlets dismissed the sightings as mass hysteria, while others felt that the media was responsible for spreading the panic by running so many news stories about the subject. But the news website Vox summed it up perfectly when they pointed out that “the Great Clown Panic of 2016 was perpetuated by pretty much everyone except actual clowns.” 
     While not every urban myth spreads like a worldwide plague, legends with similar storylines seem to pop up randomly across a wide swatch of the country. Case in point is the legend of Crybaby Bridge. Dozens of towns in a variety of US states claim to be the home of the original haunted bridge, but no one knows for sure where the story originated. States where the Crybaby Bridge myth is popular include Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Texas, to name a few.
     There are many versions of the Crybaby tale, but as you can guess, all have something to do with a tragedy surrounding the death of an infant. In Maryland, the story goes that a deeply depressed teenage mother threw her newborn baby over the side of the Governor’s Bridge, then leapt to her death after her. Legend has it that if you visit the bridge at night, you can hear the cries of a baby coming from underneath the span. If you're foolish enough to look over the edge of the bridge and down into the murky water below, you just might see the bloated, mud-covered body of an infant staring up at you from the water's depths.
     An alternate version of the Maryland legend is attached to another bridge about ten miles from Governor’s Bridge called the Lottsville Vista Road Bridge. In this variant, a young woman has a heated argument with her husband over the nonstop crying of their baby. She pulls the car to a stop on the rickety wooden bridge and frantically hurls the newborn over the railing and into the muddy waters below. Realizing that she had just murdered her own child, the woman and her husband quickly drive off, leaving their dead child in its watery grave. Supposedly, on starless nights, when the bridge is bathed in moonlight, an icy gust of wind will swirl up from the murky waters, and a crying baby may be seen floating over the bridge, or lying face up in the waters below, and her shrieks and cries can be heard echoing throughout the surrounding dark forest. 
     As if that version wasn’t creepy enough, a variation of the story from the 1980s tells of a young couple driving with their baby across the Lottsville Vista Road Bridge when the car runs out of gas in the middle of the span. The couple gets out of the car and argues, leaving the baby in her carseat. When the husband leaves to find a gas station, the woman walks around to the front of the car and finds her baby's head impaled on the hood. The woman screams and runs down the road to find her husband. When they return, the baby is gone, and not a drop of blood can be found on the hood of the car. It’s said that when you drive over the bridge on a cloudy night, the crying of a baby can be heard coming from the waters below. 
     The interesting thing about urban legends is they often seem to be based on an actual incident or tragedy. In the case of the Lottsville Vista Road Bridge, the real story is more frightening than the legend itself. 
     In the late 1940s and into the early 1950s, the bodies of murdered women began turning up on Lottsville Road, which at the time was a rural dirt road. The women were all prostitutes from the Washington, D.C. area. After that, other bodies were dumped along the same stretch of desolate road. A police officer who patrolled the area in the 1950s, Everett G. Husk, said that he remembers when a cab driver’s body was pulled from the creek that runs along the road. Over the years, more than twenty murder victims were dumped on the side of Lottsville Road. There were so many bodies found along Lottsville Vista Road that the police started calling it “the dumping ground”. 
     During an interview about the Crybaby Bridge legend, a local resident said that he clearly remembered the newspaper stories about the bodies that kept turning up on Lottsville Road. “They did find dead bodies back there pretty frequently,” he said. “The first one was in the thirties when a local man killed another man and put him back up in those woods. I know that was the first one because it was big news with the few local residents for years and years. As far as the story and the name of the bridge goes, that's something that was made up right after the road was paved. No baby drowned there. In fact, a whole lot more babies were made back there than the other way around!" 
     Not all urban legends are attached to places. Some involve the use of rituals to conjure spirits. One of the most well known ritual urban legends is that of Bloody Mary, a terrifying phantom whose blood soaked image is said to appear in a mirror after her name is chanted thirteen times. When performing the ritual, the room must be dimly-lit, and the apparition appears as a blood covered corpse, hag, or specter. 
     Some versions of the legend say that Mary is the spirit of a witch who was executed hundreds of years ago for being involved in the black arts. Others say she is the ghost of a modern day woman who died in a local car accident, and that her hideously mutilated face shows up in the mirror when you invoke her name.
     There are many other variations of the Bloody Mary legend, and the avenging spirit goes by many names such as Bloody Bones, Hell Mary, Mary Worth, Mary Whales, Mary Johnson, Sally, Kathy, and Black Agnes among others. 
     If you're brave or foolish enough to give one of the rituals a try, it’s important that you recite the chant correctly. According to one version, the correct phrase is “I believe in Mary Worth”. Others require chanting or shouting into the mirror “Kathy, come out!” or “Bloody Mary”. The phrase is sometimes elaborated upon to taunt the ghost into showing herself, such as repeating “Bloody Mary! I killed your baby!” or “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, show your ugly face!”
     But be careful what you ask for, because you never know what Mary will do once she arrives in the mirror. She may kill you, drive you mad, disfigure your face with deep scratches, or she may simply peer malevolently at you from deep within the mirror. If the ritual is done by a group of people, she may drag one of them back through the mirror to live with her in the underworld.
     Where did the Bloody Mary legend originate? One source may be a ritual that was performed by young women in Victorian times. In it, a girl would enter a darkened house, then walk backwards up a flight of stairs while holding a candle and a hand-mirror. If she was lucky, she would catch a view of her future husband's face in the mirror. But if she saw a skull or the face of the Grim Reaper, it was a sign that she would die before getting the chance to marry.
     A variation of the Bloody Mary myth is that of Hanako-san--a Japanese urban legend about the spirit of a young girl who haunts school girl’s bathrooms. One version of the story says that she is the ghost of a World War II-era girl who was killed while playing hide-and-seek during an air raid. Other iterations say that Hanako-san was murdered in a school bathroom either by one of her parents, or by a stranger. Yet another version of the tale says that she committed suicide in a school lavatory. 
     The details of what Hanako-san looks like varies, but she is usually described as wearing a red skirt or dress, having a bobbed haircut, and she has a burn scar on her face. 
     To summon her, students must go into the girl's bathroom on the third floor of their school, knock three times on the third stall, then ask if Hanako-san is present. If she is, a quiet little girl’s voice will be heard saying "Yes, I am" from behind the stall door. After this, the individual may then witness the appearance of a bloody hand reaching out from under the stall. Hanako-san may pull the student into the toilet, or they may be eaten by a three-headed lizard.
     In some schools, students claimed to have witnessed other paranormal activities when in the presence of Hanako-san, such as the flickering of lights, the opening and closing of bathroom stalls, and seeing blood flowing from the bathroom faucets.
     These three creepy tales are just the tip of the iceberg as far as urban legends go. In the months to come, I’ll introduce you to more chilling urban myths from around the world, including Slenderman, the Japanese myth of the Slit-faced Woman, and the Nigerian boarding school ghost Madam Koi-Koi.
     Until then, beware of bridges on cold, moonless nights. Stay clear of that clown who is staring at you from the edge of a dark wood. Avoid mirrors in dimly lit rooms; and by all means, don’t go near the third stall in the girl’s school bathroom. Each has their own brand of horror waiting for you, and each is hoping to catch you off-guard so they can suck you into their hellish worlds. 

Resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Mary_(folklore)
https://historycollection.com/ghost-mirror-legend-bloody-mary-revealed/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/myth-bloody-mary-180974221/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bloody-mary-story/
http://matthewmeyer.net/blog/2010/10/27/a-yokai-a-day-hanako-san-or-hanako-of-the-toilet/
https://www.jappleng.com/culture/articles/jp-paranormal/320/japanese-legend-hanako-san-toire

https://www.wusa9.com/article/life/holidays/halloween/goatman-crybaby-bridge-urban-legends-in-the-dc-area/65-482587549
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_legends
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_legend
https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/10/12/13122196/clown-panic-hoax-history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_clown_sightings
http://www.strangemag.com/strangemag/strange21/crybabybridge21.html
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150126-how-to-create-an-urban-legend
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00789/japanese-urban-legends-from-the-slit-mouthed-woman-to-kisaragi-station.html
 
 
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Military Hauntings

4/22/2021

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     Ghosts don’t just happen. In a sense, they are born. Some spirits become stuck on earth after death because they are afraid to move on, while others aren’t even aware that they have passed away. Those who die sudden, emotional deaths sometimes remain behind to haunt the areas where they died, so it’s no wonder that military bases, boats and battlefields are hotspots for ghostly activity.
     Military hauntings are a fascinating subset of paranormal research that often goes unnoticed. Some stories are kept out of the public eye because the army would rather not admit that soldiers have actually witnessed sightings of ghosts and other paranormal activity. Other military haunting stories are dismissed as simply being urban legends that evolved over time with no real evidence to back them up. But the sheer number of stories, and the credibility of the eyewitnesses make it clear that military ghost stories are definitely worth exploring. 
     Soldiers stationed on military bases are well aware of the tales of ghosts haunting barracks, hangars, airfields, airplanes and tanks. There are stories of soldiers hearing strange voices coming from abandoned aircraft hangars, or of seeing misty figures gliding across airstrips. The same goes for tourists who visit famous battlefields where thousands of men lost their lives in bloody battles. 
     Although ghost stories about soldiers killed in battle are found all over the world, the following military ghost tales come from battlefields and military bases in the United States. But this first military ghost story isn’t about a place, it’s about a person--George S. Patton.
     Patton was a general in the United States Army who commanded the Seventh United States Army in the Mediterranean theater of World War II, and the United States Army Central in France and Germany after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. (1)
      Although he considered himself a Christian, Patton was a firm believer in reincarnation, and he said that he had lived many past lives as a soldier. He also believed that he would be reincarnated after his death. 
As a child, Patton believed he fought Turkish armies, and that he had fought beside John the Blind of Bohemia in the 1300s. When he was a young man, he was kicked by a horse and nearly died from his wounds. As he lay in bed he had a vision of his death as a Viking in a previous life.
     As an adult, Patton claimed that he had been a soldier in ancient Greece, as well as a first century Roman soldier who had died after being shot with a number of arrows through his neck. He said that he remembered being stationed in France as a Roman legionnaire in Caesar’s army, and that he fought in England with King Henry V. He also claimed that he fought alongside Alexander the Great and Napoleon, and that he crossed the Alps on an elephant during his incarnation as the Carthaginian conqueror, Hannibal.
     Patton’s belief in reincarnation and life after death was strengthened by two incidents during World War I. During a particularly vicious battle, he found himself lying on the ground, too terrified to stand and fight. Suddenly he saw the faces of his dead grandfather and several uncles before him. They demanded that he stop being a coward, after which he got up and started fighting. 
     The other instance took place in Langres, France. Though he had never visited the city before, Patton was easily able to navigate his way without assistance from locals. At one point he even gave a Frenchman a tour of the Roman ruins. He knew the exact location of the amphitheater, the parade ground, and a number of temples dedicated to various Roman gods. He also drove straight to the spot where he claimed Caesar had once pitched his tent.
    Of course, this wouldn’t be a military haunting story without a ghost. In this case, the ghost was that of Patton himself. When Patton died in 1945 after a freak car accident, both of his daughters were visited by their father’s ghost. 
Thirty-year-old Ruth Ellen was not with her father when he died, but at the moment of his death she woke up and saw him standing at the foot of her bed dressed in full military uniform. “I sat up in bed,” she recounted, “and I could see him plainly. When he saw I was looking at him, he gave me the sweetest smile I've ever seen.”
    Patton’s other daughter, thirty-four-year-old Beatrice had her own visitation from her father the night of his death. Beatrice said that she had been fast asleep when the phone by her bed rang. When she picked it up there was a lot of static on the line, but she clearly heard her father's voice say, "Little Bee, are you alright?" The line went dead, so Beatrice called the overseas operator who said that no calls had been made to her number that night. 

Pearl Harbor - Oahu, Hawaii
     If sudden untimely death is a formula for hauntings, then Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu should be crawling with ghosts. The battle that brought the US into World War II lasted just one hour and fifteen minutes, but in that short time thousands lost their lives.
    On November 26, 1941, the Japanese Navy ordered a fleet of warships to attack the United States Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor. The armada consisted of six aircraft carriers that carried 414 planes. In order to catch the Americans by surprise, the ships maintained strict radio silence throughout their 3,500 mile trip.
    On Sunday, December 7, the first wave of Japanese planes lifted off from the carriers. At 7:53 AM the head pilot broke radio silence by shouting the coded message “Tora! Tora! Tora!” to alert the Japanese fleet that they had taken the Americans by surprise.
     When the Japanese made landfall a barrage of bombs and bullets rained down on American ships and servicemen. Twenty American naval vessels were destroyed or severely damaged, including eight battleships, and over three hundred airplanes. The attack killed 2,403 US personnel, including 68 civilians, and 1,178 were wounded. The day after the assault, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.
     With so many soldiers killed suddenly and under such tragic circumstances, it’s no surprise that Pearl Harbor is considered one of the most haunted battlegrounds in the United States. Paranormal activity related to the 1941 attack has been reported all over the island, but the majority of reports come from the military areas that were hit that day. 
     Ford Island was at the center of the attack, and residents have reported hearing strange sounds, and seeing mysterious figures inside and outside of their homes. On the island’s army base there have been numerous reports about sightings of ghostly soldiers, the sound of eerie voices and phantom footsteps, and of other paranormal activity. The base’s airstrip has a reputation of being particularly haunted, as it is here that visitors often report seeing strange glowing shapes hovering over its surface, and misty figures walking across the tarmac. Security guards who patrol the base admit that they don’t like walking the grounds at night because of all the strange activity.
    One of the most well-known ghosts on the island is known as Charley. He is often blamed for water faucets turning themselves on and off, for heavy doors swinging back and forth, and for other playful activity. At the site of former military bases, radios reportedly turn on and off by themselves. The activity is sometimes accompanied by the sound of jangling of keys and loud footsteps coming from empty hallways.
    Residents of Ford Island have reported hearing phantom voices and footsteps in their homes. In addition, objects move, lights and electronics turn on and off by themselves, dark shadows have been seen walking aimlessly both indoors and out. When approached, these army clad specters vanish into thin air. 
    At the Pacific Aviation Museum in Honolulu, visitors and staff have reported seeing and even interacting with the ghosts of the servicemen who died that day. During an investigation for the Travel Channel's Ghost Hunters TV show, a tour guide said that one day she was closing up for the day when she saw someone walking around in the museum’s map area. She went up to the man and said, “The museum is closed. We really need to shut the doors, so you need to leave the building.” She followed him out the front door and locked the doors behind him.
     The following day, someone noticed something strange on the security camera footage. Throughout the entire time that the woman was talking to this person and leading them out of the building, she was the only one in the video. She could clearly be seen talking animatedly, then walking to the front door and continuing to talk, but the entire time she was totally alone.  
    In the Hangar 37 area of the museum is a mannequin dressed in an army uniform that the staff calls Kramer. When the museum opens in the morning, the position of Kramer’s arms and hands are often found to have moved overnight. The mannequin has also been found holding pieces of paper, and even a large propeller that is usually stored in another area of the museum. The staff thinks that the spirit of a playful soldier is responsible for the mannequin's strange behavior. 
    There are a number of wooden benches scattered around Hangar 37 where visitors can take a rest, or sit and study the exhibits. After the museum has closed for the day and the room is dark, the staff has reported seeing men sitting on these benches. They are so solid looking that they are often mistaken for real people, but when approached these enigmatic figures vanish into thin air. 
    In the theater area of the museum, the projector operator has seen the apparition of a man sitting in the front row as if he’s waiting for the movie to start. This mysterious figure is always in the front row, and sits either in the aisle seat, or the second seat into the row. The theater had originally been an area where soldiers worked on repairing aircraft. It is also a place where many men lost their lives during the battle of Pearl Harbor. 
     The ghosts of Hangar 37 are not only seen, they are also heard. Anne Muratta, director of marketing for the museum, had an eerie experience while working alone in her office one night. She was sitting quietly at her desk when she suddenly heard music and the sound of men’s voices coming from an area where vintage airplanes are displayed. When she went to investigate, the music and voices suddenly stopped. The lights were on in the museum at the time, so she could see that the place was totally empty. She returned to her office and the music and voices started up again. 
     Hangar 79 is a huge facility that houses a number of vintage aircraft which are under restoration. This part of the museum is particularly eerie because the hangar’s windows still have bullet holes in them from the December 7, 1941 attack. Mechanics and volunteers who work in the hangar report hearing footsteps, strange noises, and the sound of men’s voices talking. They also hear people walking on the upper deck of the hangar when the building is empty. 
    In one area of the hangar is a Sikorski helicopter from the 1950s. Ms. Muratta said that a paranormal group once visited the hangar and that one of the investigators happened to look under the aircraft and actually saw feet walking around the back of the helicopter. When he went to investigate, there was no one there. 
    Outside of Hangar 79 is the ‘Artifacts Trailer’. One of the museum’s registrars had been taking photographs inside the trailer. When she put the camera down it turned on by itself several times. The woman said out loud, “If somebody is here, can you turn the camera on and off three times?” After a few minutes, the camera turned on and off three times, then remained off. This same woman said that on several occasions she has heard the sound of someone in heavy boots walking throughout the trailer, even though she was the only one present.

Gettysburg - Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
     The fields and forests around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where it is estimated over 50,000 soldiers died during the bloody 1863 battle, are considered to be the most haunted battlefields in the United States. There are so many stories of ghostly activity in and around the city that volumes have been written about the subject. 
     The Jennie Wade House, the site of the only civilian death during the Battle of Gettysburg, is often referred to as America’s scariest house. Visitors report hearing loud banging sounds, and the voice of a young child talking and singing. Others say they’ve felt the arms of little children holding onto their legs as they tour the house. It’s also common to feel sudden rushes of cold air while walking on the second floor. 
     The Sachs Covered Bridge is one of only four remaining covered bridges in Gettysburg. It is also considered to be extremely haunted. Near the end of the Civil War three army deserters were executed on the bridge, and the retreating Confederate Army used it when they were retreating from the Union Army. Those who visit the bridge have reported smelling cigar smoke, hearing the sound of men’s voices talking, the feeling of being touched while walking through the bridge’s dark interior, and the sight of the apparitions of soldiers approaching the bridge and walking through it.  
     Gettysburg College is another well known haunted location. During the two days of bloody fighting, the college was used as a hospital to treat dying and wounded soldiers. From all accounts, the ghosts of the men who died there, as well as those of the doctors and nurses who treated them still roam the buildings.
    One of the strangest stories was told by two campus administrators. Sometime in the 1980s, the two women were on the elevator in Pennsylvania Hall when it malfunctioned and took them to the basement instead of the floor they wanted to go to. When the elevator doors opened, they witnessed a horrifying glimpse into the past. There before them was a bloody Civil War operating room. They could see doctors working feverishly to save the injured and dying soldiers who lay bleeding on tables and on mats on the floor. As the two women stared at amazement at the scene, one of the doctors started walking toward the elevator. Suddenly, the doors closed and the elevator moved to another floor. The two women quickly called a security guard who accompanied them back to the basement. Even though only a few minutes had passed, when they arrived at the basement, it was completely empty.
    Year in and year out, students who attend the college claim to have experienced eerie, ghostly encounters all over campus. Gabby Gill, a Gettysburg senior, had a spooky experience during her freshman year in Huber Hall. She said, “I woke up one night to a pressure on my chest and I heard someone dragging across the floor. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, every single item on my desk, and on my roommate’s desk had been thrown onto the floor.” (2)
    Another student described an experience he had while rooming at 520 Carlisle Street, an off-campus house overlooking the battlefield. He said, “In the middle of the night, I felt something brushing against my feet incessantly,” he said. “When I opened my eyes, I saw three black silhouettes shining lights on us. When I opened my eyes one of them was shining a light on me and when I sat up, all three left the room. In the morning my friends said they felt arms around them, but they didn’t open their eyes.” (3)
     You can read a lot of Gettysburg ghost stories in books and online, but I wanted to share a few stories that were told to me by two people who attended my lectures. The first story was told by a man who heard it from a very reliable witness. He said: 
     “I’m a board member at a library in Connecticut. I was talking to one of our older librarians, and of course I asked her if the library was haunted, and if she had seen anything. She said, 'No, I’ve never seen anything in the library, but I did see a ghost down in Pennsylvania.'
     She said that about ten years ago, she and two other adults were escorting a group of high school students on a trip to Gettysburg. They had rented a van and that afternoon they were driving around the battlefield. It was getting toward the end of the afternoon, so it was near dusk, but it wasn’t dark. They decided to drive on a dirt road out to Devil’s den which is one of the areas out on the battlefield. People had pretty much left for the day, so the battlefield was pretty much empty. There were not many people around at all. 
     As they were driving down this dirt road, they came into a field and they saw a man walking up ahead of them on the right side of the road. He was heading in the same direction as they were driving, so they saw the gentleman’s back. He was a fellow that looked like a Civil war Confederate general with a hat on, a sash, and they could see his insignia on his shoulder. He was clearly a Confederate general. He was walking along in front of them, and then they passed him and drove on for about twenty feet or so. 
     They thought that he was a Civil war reenactor, so they figured that they would stop and ask him about the events that were going on in Gettysburg. They stopped the car and rolled down the windows and opened the doors. Of course, you know the end of the story--there was nobody there. This took place in a big, open field. There was no forest nearby, no rocks to hide behind, no structures, no nothing, and all of a sudden the person is just gone. Everyone in the van had seen this gentleman as they drove by him. They thought it was a real person. It wasn’t a wispy looking figure or anything like that.
     Again, this story comes from a very, very believable older librarian. When she told me the story, there was no snickering or anything like that, and there was no reason for her to make this story up.”
     The second Gettysburg story was told by a gentleman who stayed in the Farnsworth House Inn. During the battle, the inn housed Confederate snipers. It is the site from which the shot that killed Jennie Wade was fired. Visitors who stay at the bed and breakfast tell stories of strange sounds coming from the attic, and of singing voices coming from the basement. During one of my lectures, the man told the following story: 
     “I spent a night at the Farnsworth Hotel. It’s right in the middle of the battle of Gettysburg, and it’s probably one of the most haunted hotels in America. The room that I stayed in, The Sweeney Room, is probably one of the most active rooms in that hotel. Guests have reported hearing the sound of something heavy being dragged back-and-forth in the attic, and I heard it the night I stayed there. I was in the room underneath the attic. When the sharpshooters were killed in the battle, they would drag their bodies to the other side of the attic and they would lay there for three or four days. I heard the dragging back-and-forth. 
     The hotel is decorated in the style of the period, and the crystals on one of the lamps kept swinging during the night. The toilet would flush by itself, and the electricity on my phone charger kept getting unplugged throughout the night.”
     This same gentleman had a strange encounter on one of the battlefields. He said, “When I was visiting one of the battlefields, I experienced an overwhelming smell of death. It was pretty amazing. What happened is, I saw a person who was farther down who was looking at one of the exhibits. After he left my friend and I went over to where this guy had been standing and I said, ‘Wow, I can still smell this guy,’ because I thought the putrid odor I was smelling came from him. My friend said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘I can smell the guy who was just over here. Can’t you smell it? I smelled him when we were all the way over at the other exhibit, and I can still smell it. I can’t believe you can’t smell it!’
We walked down toward the battlefield and the smell got worse and worse and worse. It was a very putrid smell. I asked my friend and another person, ‘Do you smell anything out of the ordinary?”’ and they said, ‘No, not at all.’ It was just an overwhelming smell.
     This happened on one of the main battlefields. Little Bighorn was the hill, and there was a tremendous battle there. It was a very moving experience. I could feel the energy. The energy of that place was like no other.”

Camp Devens - Devens, Massachusetts
     In 1917, Camp Devens in Devens, Massachusetts was established as a temporary military quarters for training soldiers during World War I. It was a reception center for war selectees and became a demobilization center after the war. Approximately 850 soldiers, mostly privates, died at the camp during 1918 from the Spanish flu, In the 1930s, Fort Devens Army Airfield was established. The facility included more than 1200 wooden buildings and an airfield. Devens also housed a prisoner of war camp for German and Italian prisoners from 1944 to 1946. It was designated as early as 1942 for detaining "enemy aliens" of Italian, German and Japanese birth. The U.S. Army post which resided at Fort Devens was officially closed in 1996 after 79 years of service.
     I recently interviewed a soldier about an amazing experience he had while stationed at Fort Devens. He said: 
     In the early 1980s, I was stationed in the Army at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. At that time, a series of barracks built during World War II were still in use. Several of these buildings were on a street together. There was a barbed wire fence around it, and there was a guard building that you had to pass through before you could go in. 
     My unit’s mission was to occupy these barracks for a few weeks, and to pour over maps and other information in order to plan for what the unit would do in the case of World War III. Some of the information was classified, which is the reason why we had to stay in a secure compound with restricted access. 
     Now, if there’s a ghost on an army base everybody knows about it. It’s part of the base’s mythology and lore. At Fort Devens, one of these World War II era buildings was known to be haunted, so we arranged for our team to stay in that building for the couple of weeks that we were going to be studying for our mission. 
     We had heard a few anecdotal stories about the place. One guy in our unit stayed in the building when his team was studying for its mission. He said that he was upstairs one day when he heard the screen door in the barracks open, then slam closed. He thought it was one of his team mates, so he called out, “Hey, which one of you guys just came in?” There was no answer, so he went downstairs but there was nobody there. There was classified information in the building, and he thought that somebody came in, so he quickly notified the military police. 
     The MPs came to the building and after listening to his story they said, “Oh yeah. I guess nobody told you, you’re in the haunted building. What you heard was probably just the ghost. We get called to come here all the time. Somebody will see movement in the upstairs window when this building isn’t even occupied, so we have to investigate it.” So even the MPs at Fort Devens knew that this building was haunted. 
     Rumor was that this series of buildings was once part of the German prisoner of war camp at Fort Devens during World War II. This isn’t as far fetched as it might sound. Many US army bases housed German prisoners captured off U-boats or captured overseas and transported here. According to the Fort Devens Post Cemetery website, “22 German and Italian prisoners of war who were captured in North Africa and held at Fort Devens between 1943 and 1946 are buried here. This group of graves includes that of a German U-boat Commander, Captain Friederic Steinhoff, who surrendered at the New Hampshire Navy Yard. Steinhoff, his brother, and Werner von Braun developed the underwater missile system used during World War II.”
     I had seen these German soldiers’ graves myself one day, so as a young guy in my 20’s I was thinking, “Hey, there was a POW camp here, and there are dead Germans buried in the cemetery. Maybe the ghosts of some of the guys buried here are haunting the building.” 
     To fully understand my story, it’s important to know the layout of the two story barracks. Downstairs were the living quarters which consisted of bunk beds and a shower at the end. Upstairs was the work space--desks, a chalkboard, typewriters, stuff like that, and at the far end of the building was a footlocker filled with maps and books and classified information about Eastern Europe. 
     My team moved in downstairs in the afternoon, and the classified material was brought upstairs. That first night I told my team mates, “Hey guys, I’m going to try to get the ghosts to show us that they’re here. I’m going to try to get them to manifest and to demonstrate their presence.” My buddies were like, “OK, whatever man”. 
     That night as we lay down to go to sleep, I wanted to welcome whatever spirits were in this building. So, just before going to sleep I asked any spirits who were present to demonstrate their presence and to show themselves. I said something like, “Go ahead and pass through me. Use me as a portal. If you need to pass through me from the other side to manifest yourself here, go ahead.” I also repeated this same thing in German, to the best of my ability, in case the ghosts of the Germans could only understand German.
     I know now that this was a stupid thing to do. You never make an offer like that to spirits. You don’t know who will take you up on it, or if they will ever leave once they catch hold of you. You also don’t know if doing so might affect you in a negative way for the rest of your life. But I was young and foolish and totally inexperienced in these matters, so I made the offer then went back to sleep.  
     I woke up at 2 AM. I was on the top bunk and everyone was snoring quietly, so I made the offer again. I said, “Hey, go ahead and pass through me. Show us a sign that you’re here. Please enter this area.” Then I said it in German. 
     As soon as I finished saying this, three things happened all at the same time. First, I immediately perceived an increase in what felt like the gravitational pull on my body. I felt my body literally like being pressed down on, but there were no pressure points. Something like a gravitational pull was pulling me into the mattress. It was as if my body was so much heavier, and that I was literally sinking into the mattress. 
     Secondly, I could feel a mild electric charge throughout my whole body. It was not an unpleasant sensation, but I could feel this electric vibration from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head.
The third thing that I experienced was what would best be described as tachycardia. My heart rate was faster than it had ever been from exercise. I didn’t feel like I was having an adrenaline dump, and it wasn’t like a heart that races from fright. It was just a doubling or tripling of the highest heart rate I had ever had. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was noticeable. So these three physical manifestations all occurred simultaneously.
     I also experienced an emotion during this time, and that was euphoria. I was so excited that all of these three things were happening because I felt like the offer that I had made was actually transpiring, and my physical body was experiencing the use as a portal. So, these three things happened all at once, and the duration was about ten or fifteen seconds. Then suddenly, it just stopped. Everything stopped at once. 
     I sat up in bed and leaned over to my bunkmate and said, “Hey, did you just hear anything or feel anything?” He woke up and said, “No, nothing”. I lay back down and quickly fell back asleep. As I look back now, I really shouldn’t have been able to fall asleep so fast after something so exciting that just happened. But I did. I fell asleep in minutes after that experience. 
     About an hour later, I woke up. There was enough ambient light coming through the windows, and I could see about half the guys on my team, about six guys, are leaning up in their bunks on their elbows, and they’re looking up at the ceiling. One of the guys said to me, “Hey, whatever you invited here tonight, go upstairs and tell it to leave.” I heard what they were hearing too--a room full of guys in heavy boots walking around upstairs. 
     Imagine the sound of a bunch of men in military boots walking on a wooden floor covered with linoleum coming into a classroom. We heard the sound of walking feet, we heard chairs being pulled around, we heard seats being taken, and then we heard writing on a chalkboard--that loud tapping sound you hear when somebody has real chalk on a real chalkboard and they start writing, “My name is …” or “Welcome to …” We heard all of these things, but I don’t recall hearing any voices.
     Then over a period of about 30 seconds, the sound of the walking, the creaking seats, and the rapping of chalk on the chalkboard, all of that sound dialed down like a volume dial on a sound system. It didn’t stop, it faded. It decreased little by little until it was totally gone. After the guys told me to go upstairs and tell it to stop I said something like, “I don’t hear anything now. I’ll check in the morning!”
     That day we went upstairs and there was no sign of anything. The room looked just the way it had looked the day before. Nothing was moved, and there was no writing on the chalkboard. There was some talk about the incident that morning, but we had work to do so we got busy with our work. The rest of our time our unit was there, there were no other paranormal incidents.
     After all these years, I still think back on that experience and try to make sense of it. Initially, I had thought that it was the spirits of German soldiers who had manifested that night. But a lot of other soldiers had occupied the building since World War II, so it really could have been anyone. While I was working there, I noticed that there was graffiti scratched into several desks.    The graffiti said stuff like “Last day in the states. Shipping out to the Nam tomorrow. Hope I make it back”. 
     I learned later that the building had also been used as a soldier processing center prior to their shipment overseas to Vietnam. I can’t help but wonder about the anxiety of young soldiers sitting there. I’ve sat through big administrative meetings like that where you had to write your will and fill out your GI life insurance papers. For all I know, the sounds we heard that night might have been from a class from the distant past on how to fill out your death benefit insurance for your family. I wonder if all of that emotional anxiety could have been imprinted on that space. 
     By offering myself as a portal to the ghosts of Fort Devens, I may have allowed a scene from the past to replay in the upstairs meeting room. Or, I may have granted permission to the ghosts of soldiers who once passed through these buildings to manifest. I’ll never know for sure, but the experience is one that had a profound influence on the way that I look at this life, and the afterlife. 

     During the Civil War, Major Sullivan Ballou wrote his wife one last letter before heading off to the battle at First Bull Run; the battle where he would lose his life just two weeks later. The words he wrote are both noble and haunting.

Headquarters, Camp Clark
Washington, D.C., July 14, 1861

My Very Dear Wife:

Indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps to-morrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last, perhaps, before that of death, and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country and thee.
Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless, how foolish I have oftentimes been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears, every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm. But I cannot, I must watch you from the spirit land and hover near you, while you buffet the storms with your precious little freight, and wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more.

But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth, and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you in the garish day, and the darkest night amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours always, always, and, if the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air cools your throbbing temples, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Sarah, do not mourn me dear; think I am gone, and wait for me, for we shall meet again. (4)

Resources
https://taskandpurpose.com/history/military-ghost-stories-will-hiding-woobie/
https://www.dreadcentral.com/cold-spots/16592/cold-spots-pearl-harbor/
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6g2q5k
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/pennsylvania/haunted-gettysburg-pa/
http://ghosthuntersofasheville.blogspot.com/search/label/General%20George%20Patton
https://www.militarytimes.com/2013/10/27/military-spots-where-spirits-are-said-to-roam/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton
https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-religious-life-of-george-s-patton#:~:text=He%20was%20a%20communicant%20of,marriage%20to%20a%20Roman%20Catholic.
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/pearl-harbor-fact-sheet-1.pdf
https://gettysburgian.com/2014/11/haunted-g-burg-the-paranormal-pervades-campus/
https://www.historynet.com/o-sarah-sullivan-ballou-letter.htm
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Zoom Lecture Ghost Stories 2020/21

3/27/2021

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     Everyone has a creepy story to tell. Yes, even you. It may be your own story, or a story that has been handed down in your family, or one that a friend or colleague told you. But the fact remains--everyone has a creepy story.
     Not every story is your typical run-of-the-mill footsteps heard in the dead of night ghost story. There are stories about everything from shadow people, doppelgängers, Bigfoot or other cryptid sightings, banshees, ghostly animals, to Ouija board sessions gone terribly wrong and phone calls from the dead. 
     The following mysterious tales were told by audience members at my virtual lectures. They are transcribed exactly as they were told to me apart from some minor grammatical corrections. I give lectures year-round, so this is an ongoing, ever evolving project with new stories added monthly.
     I'm sure you will enjoy this collection of true, creepy, otherworldly short tales told by regular, everyday people like yourselves. If you have a story of your own that you'd like to tell, stop by one of my free virtual lectures. The schedule is on my homepage, and on the Events Calendar. 
     So turn off your lights, sit back, and prepare to be scared. 
__________
"Little Dude" - An Ouija Board Story
     When I was in middle school in the early 80's, someone gave me an Ouija board as a birthday gift. I guess it was considered to be a game at the time, so that was one of my birthday presents. As soon as I got it, my friend Kim tried using it a bunch of times, but absolutely nothing happened. The planchette was moving, but it was clearly one of us moving it around to the answers that we wanted to get out of it. 
     Now fast-forward several years. I was away at college, and my brother was in high school. One night he and three of his friends decided to use the Ouija board. When they were using it, something happened that scared them so much that to this day he refuses to tell me about it. The only thing he will tell me is that they contacted the spirit of a little kid who they referred to as "little Dude".
     Whatever it told them freaked them out so much that they ended up throwing the Ouija board in the garbage. After they threw it out, they swear that it came back to the house a few days later. It just showed up in the house one day. After that they drove far away from the house and left it somewhere, but it came back again. They did this several times, but it kept coming back. Finally, they set it on fire. That must have worked, because it never showed up in the house again. 

Possible Bigfoot Vocalization - Shaftsbury, Vermont
    This wasn’t a Bigfoot sighting, but I might have been lucky enough to hear a Bigfoot just a few months ago in October of 2020. I was “primitive camping” on a farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont which is just outside of Bennington in the foothills of the Green Mountains. I was there for that reason. I wanted to start doing some field research. I’ve been interested in this subject for decades now, but I hadn’t started to do actual research. 
     I thought primitive camping would be a good place to start. It was a remote area, and I wouldn’t be around a lot of people. Also, I went during the week in October in the mountains, so there was even less of a chance that there would be many people there. In fact I had the entire mountain to myself.
     At night, there were a bunch of coyotes around. There was a whole pack, and they were all around. I was dozing, but I heard them hunting and yipping and going off all night. I even had a recorder with me, but of course I didn’t have it on at this time. To the east of me, down by where there was a big lake, I heard this very low sound that glided up in pitch. It sounded like something doing an imitation of a wolf. It was really weird. It went up into a wolf howl, then glided back down into a “woo” sound. There was no barking or anything like that. But the coyotes went nuts after they heard this. It sounded like they were all excited. I thought, that has to be like a big dog or something. But it was so strange sounding, and it was just the one sound. 
     The next day I asked the farmer if he or any of the neighbors had any big dogs. There were a few houses scattered around here and there, so I thought maybe one of them might have had a big dog. But he said, “No, there are no big dogs that I know of.” I thought that was pretty neat. Of course, it could have been something else, but it sounded just so strange. It could have been a dog or something else, but it sure didn’t seem like it. It was very unusual.
​     I almost got the impression from the way it was doing it that it was trying to set the coyotes off. It was almost having fun with them. Or maybe it was trying to get them to shut up because they were going off all night long. It was very strange. I’m going to keep primitive camping, because that was just one night that I was up there and that’. Now, it could have been a dog or something else, but it sure didn’t seem like it.

Little Girl Lost
     I was at my friend Mike’s house in Cooperstown, New York. I had never been there before. My son walked in the house first, and in my mind’s eye I saw a little girl playing and running around my son. It was like I was watching a movie. She looked very happy to see another young child. I could tell from the style of her clothes that this little girl was from another time period, maybe the 1800s’.
​     When Mike came in with the luggage I asked, “Was there a little girl that lived here at one point?” He said “No, we’ve owned the house for many years''. While Mike was out getting more luggage from the car, the name “Emily” suddenly came to me. When he came back in, I asked him again if a little girl might have lived in the house years ago. “No, not that I know of," he said. 
     That afternoon Mike took us to where the house had originally stood. It was up on a hill, and there was a family cemetery there. It hadn’t been visited in years, so it was very overgrown. I said, “It’s a shame that no one is taking care of this place,” and I started taking away some branches. As soon as I moved the first branch, I saw that it was covering a little headstone. On it was the name “Emily”. In those days, they would put the age of the person who died, and this one said that the girl had been two-years and eleven-months-old. I showed it to my friend and said, “This is the little girl that I saw downstairs in the house.” 
     The next day I felt a presence walking up and down the hall on the second floor. When we sat down for breakfast, I told my friend what I had felt. He said, “Oh, the colonel! I feel him too in the house.” I said, “He seems to be confused. He walks down the hall and right up to the window, but he feels trapped.” 
     Mike showed me the original blueprints for the house, and it turns out that the staircase was originally on the opposite side of the hall. I guess this spirit was going down the hallway expecting to find the staircase, but he kept coming to a wall instead. I think he was remembering the house as it was in his time.

A Ghost at Gettysburg
     I don’t have any ghost stories of my own, but everyone I talk to I ask if they’ve ever had any ghostly encounters. I filter them out based on the believability of the storyteller. The ones I tell you are from people who I consider to be 100% reliable. 
     I’m a board member at a library in Connecticut. I was talking to one of our older librarians, and of course I asked her if the library was haunted, and if she had seen anything. She said, “No, I’ve never seen anything in the library, but I did see a ghost down in Pennsylvania.” 
     She said that about ten years ago, she and two other adults were escorting a group of high school students on a trip to Gettysburg. They had rented a van and that afternoon they were driving around the battlefield. It was getting toward the end of the afternoon, so it was near dusk, but it wasn’t dark. They decided to drive on a dirt road out to Devil’s den which is one of the areas out on the battlefield. People had pretty much left for the day, so the battlefield was pretty much empty. There were not many people around at all. 
     As they were driving down this dirt road, they came into a field and they saw a man walking up ahead of them on the right side of the road. He was heading in the same direction as they were driving, so they saw the gentleman’s back. He was a fellow that looked like a Civil war Confederate general with a hat on, a sash, and they could see his insignia on his shoulder. He was clearly a Confederate general. He was walking along in front of them, and then they passed him and drove on for about twenty feet or so.
     They decided to stop and ask him where he was going, and about the events that were going on there in Gettysburg, so they stopped the car and rolled down the windows and opened the doors. Of course, you know the end of the story--there was nobody there.
     This took place in a big, open field. There was no forest nearby, no rocks to hide behind, no structures, no nothing, and all of a sudden the person is just gone. Everyone in the van had seen this gentleman as they drove by him. They thought it was a real person. It wasn’t a wispy looking figure or anything like that.
     Again, this story comes from a very, very believable older librarian. When she told me the story, there was no snickering or anything like that, and there was no reason for her to make this story up.  

Don't I Know You?
     This isn’t exactly a doppelgänger story, but all of my life people come up to me and say, “Hello! How are you doing?” These are people I’ve never met before, but they insist that they know me. I always just laugh and say, “I have a familiar face”. This has happened to me for my whole life, ever since I was a child. I’m sixty-nine years old, and it’s still happening. It happened just the other day as a matter of fact. Because of Covid, I was wearing a mask, so you couldn’t see half of my face. I went to get my eyes checked and as I was waiting for my appointment a woman said to me, “I’ve met you before.” I told her that she didn’t, and it was only later that I thought about the fact that she could only see half of my face, yet she thought she knew me. I was wondering if it might be an energy thing, like something in me is familiar to people.
     Barry: I was wondering the same thing, but you have to keep in mind that they are reacting visually, so you want to think about that first. If we consider the possibility of reincarnation, people may be recognizing you from one of their past lives. Maybe in a past life you knew a lot of people, or you were connected to these people somehow, and it makes them feel that they know you in this life.

One Last Goodbye
     I'm friendly with a couple here in town. They’re a little older than I am, and they are very staid, respectable individuals. They’re very, very believable. They have no flights of fantasy, no weird beliefs, nothing like that. Just good people.
     One of their children developed brain cancer when he was in his early twenties. I offered to help, and they asked if I could help with the transportation, so I went over and picked him up a few times and took him to his treatments. So, I knew the son and I know his parents. 
     Unfortunately, the son took a turn for the worst and he passed away. A little over  a year later I ended up getting together with that same couple for dinner at a restaurant. I asked the wife, the boy’s mother, something about her son and told her how sorry I was, and what a great boy he was. There were a lot of people at the table, so the two of us were leaning over and talking to one another. She said, “I saw him. Two weeks ago was the anniversary of his death. I was very very sad the whole day.” 
     That night, she woke up in the middle of the night, and she swore to me that she was awake. She wasn’t dreaming or in a semi-conscious state. She was on the right side of the bed, and she sensed that there was somebody standing beside the bed. She looked over and she saw a solid black figure. She couldn’t make out any facial features, it was just black, but she instantly knew that it was her son. She said, “I can’t tell you why, but I knew that that was him.” 
     She said, “He looked down at me in silence, then turned sideways to me, and he put one hand up at a 45 degree angle. Picture the way Superman would put his hands when he was about to fly.” She said that he proceeded to float in the direction that his hands were pointing. He floated up over to the corner of the room and through the ceiling. He just disappeared into the ceiling. She said that he didn’t say anything at all to her. There were no mental words that came into her mind, but she was overwhelmed with the feeling that he was safe and happy and OK where he was. So she took it that she needed to let her know that he was OK. And she looked over at her husband who missed the whole thing. She swears that she was 100% awake, and that that’s what happened.

The Gade House Ghost
     In Southbury, Connecticut there’s an historic park. Inside of the park is the Glade House. That was an old house where the minister in town used to live. Glade used to be a term that you gave the minister to stay alive. There was the house he had to live in, and then there was the Glade field that was given to rent out to get some income so he could keep his family alive. So, the Glade house is this historic building that’s been maintained by the town in this historic area. They have a fancy garden out front, and they give tours of the house. 
     A few years ago I was there for a cemetery tour, and I spoke to an older woman who was one of the volunteers there at the house. She took care of things around this historic house, and taught classes. I asked her the question I always ask everybody, “Is this place haunted, and have you seen any ghosts?” She said, “Well, Yes!” 
     To understand the story, you have to know the layout of the house.  It’s a typical old, one-and-a-half story colonial house, and there’s a breezeway that connects it to another small building which they now use for classes. The woman said that she was there by herself at night cleaning up after a class. There was no one else in the building at all. She was one hundred percent sure of that. 
     She walked through the breezeway to the classroom side, and as she was cleaning up over there she happened to look out the window. The window faces a garden, and on the other side of the garden is the main Glade house. So, she would have been looking across an area of garden that was ten or fifteen feet between the two buildings. 
     As she was looking across she saw a silhouette, head and shoulders, of a person walking past the window on the inside of the building. Then there was a pause, and that same silhouette walked past the next window, there was a pause and that same silhouette walked past a third window. So, she saw this silhouette three times walking past three windows, but there was nobody in the house. 
     The woman got a little nervous and she got out of there. Now, I consider her to be a very honest, believable person. She had no motivation for making up a story. She didn't know me from a hole in the wall. She was just a very, very believable lady.

The Haunted Painting
     I’m Irish, and I’m French Canadian. We have a painting that originated from Ireland that’s been in the family for ages, a painting of a horse. My great-grandmother, God rest her soul, always said that from the time that she was a little girl until she died, this horse in the painting would neigh, and it would run in the field. It would also come close to the edge of the painting and it seemed like it wanted to talk to her.
     My great-grandmother said that this wasn't her imagination, and it didn't just happen to her when she was young. She saw the horse in the painting move right up until the time that she passed away. 

Ghostly Woman in the Stacks
     We had a fire at the library I work at, so we’re now in a temporary location; but the story I’m about to tell took place in the original library before the fire. Back in the 1800’s, the building was a manse for the Presbyterian Church; so, it was where the minister used to live. It was a regular house until 1977 when it was renovated and made it into the library. 
     I’ve worked at the library for seventeen years, and after the first several years I started seeing what looked like a woman from the Victorian era walking around the library. She wasn’t always in the same place or even walking in the same direction, but it always seemed to be the same person. I saw her about five or six times, and she didn’t look solid like a regular person. I’m pretty skeptical about things, but I also know what I see. 
     I didn’t see her out of the corner of my eye, I saw her straight on. I’d catch her in the corner, and then she’d turn. The first couple of times it was a corner view. It got to the point that when I saw something I would immediately turn, and I did catch it twice head-on. She wasn’t looking at me or anything, she was just walking around. It was really cool. 
     So, I kind of had to start thinking about it. I would share the story with people here and there, and they said, “Well, it could be possible. It’s a very old building.” The room where my desk was had originally been the kitchen when it was a house.  
     A couple of years later, some paintings were found up in the attic and we decided to hang them in the library. After this weird things started happening in one particular aisle in the library. I think it was around the 700’s in the non-fiction section. We would find books that had been turned around, and when our shelver would walk in, random books would fall off of the shelves on different sides of the aisle. He said that he got a weird feeling whenever he walked in that part of the library. 
     At the end of the aisle in this section was one of the paintings. It was a portrait of a woman. The funny thing was, she looked Victorian because she had on a high collar, and her hair was up in a bun, but she wasn’t from that era. Her name was Virginia, and she had been the town historian during the 1940s and 50s. Once I saw the painting, I realized that that’s the woman who I had been seeing. 
     We had some paranormal investigators come in. We camped out at night, which was really cool, but we didn’t really get much of anything. After a couple of hours of hanging out in that same isle we were getting pretty antsy. At around midnight, all of a sudden we started hearing somebody shushing us, like a very loud librarian “Shush!” The investigators actually got it on tape. 
     Like I said, we had a fire, so we’re in a temporary location now, but the firemen were able to save some of the paintings. One was the painting of Virginia. Now she’s in a temporary place where I can keep an eye on her, right in front of my desk. It’s been pretty quiet, but I’m kind of curious when we get back over there. I wonder, is it related to the building? Is it related to the painting? So far she hasn’t done a thing when the painting was in the temporary place.

A Haunting in Bergen County
     In the early 1980s grew up in a house in Bergen County, New Jersey. The house was on a hill, and it was the highest point in the area. From what I understand, it’s an area where a lot of indigenous Native Americans lived, and they used this hill as a sacred burial ground. My parents didn’t tell me this at this at the time, but the house was built on a sacred Native American burial ground.
     We had a lot of paranormal incidents happen in that house, but I didn’t find out about some of them until I was older.  My mother didn’t want to share the stories with us because she didn’t want to frighten us.
     I experienced feeling extremely cold in certain rooms of the house. Once,  I saw a male figure floating above me. I couldn’t identify this figure, but it spoke to me. I was completely frozen, so I couldn’t respond. It wasn’t a solid figure, just the vague figure of a man floating above me. I don’t remember what he said to me, but it scared me and I cried. I was in high school at the time. 
     One thing that’s really interesting is that when I told my mother about it, she asked me a ton of questions about what I saw. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was going through a period where she was being bruised in the middle of the night. She would wake up in the morning with bruises on her body. 
     The refrigerator doors used to open for no reason, blankets were taken from one place and thrown on the floor. When my brother was around eight or nine years old, he said that there were people gathering around his bed in the middle of the night. This didn’t happen just once. He said that they were talking to him consistently. 
     When my sister was in middle school she had an experience one night where she heard very, very loud music. She couldn’t identify the music type, but she said it sounded like it was from another time period. It was the sound of clanging percussion instruments. The music kept getting louder and louder, and then she opened her eyes and saw a figure at her door. It wasn’t a solid figure, more like a kind of a shadow. Then the person pointed at her and the music got really loud. She screamed and everything just disappeared. That was really the most profound physical manifestation that anyone experienced in the house.
     An interesting thing happened. One night our carbon monoxide detector went off and the police and the fire department came over to check it out. While they were there one of them said, “Uh, oh. Another haunting on your block”. Apparently the police had had calls about multiple paranormal experiences in this neighborhood.
     When I was an adult, my mom told me that about five years after we moved in, she had a priest come in to bless the house to see if it would help stop the activity. She said that he went through the house and blessed each room with holy water.
     We lived in that house for about fifteen years, but all of the strange activity happened over the period of four or five years. After the priest blessed the house, it seemed to have just stopped.

The Octagon House - Washington, DC
     I was returning from an IT training session in North Carolina, and on the way back I stopped off at Washington, DC and spent the weekend there. In the lobby of the hotel was a pamphlet for a ghost tour, so of course I wanted to go on that.
     I was the only one on the tour that night. It was just slightly before dusk, and the tour started at the Octagon House which was owned by Colonel John Tayloe III. Interestingly, the house actually only has six sides, but it was called “The Octagon'' by the Tayloes. 
     What supposedly happened there was that two of Colonel Tayloe's daughters died in the house under mysterious circumstances. One apparently fell down through the staircase, down to the bottom floor, and the other seemed to have been pushed down these same stairs. The house is rumored to be haunted by the two daughters. 
     We started the tour in the back of the building, which is kind of creepy to begin with. The tour guide mentioned that apparitions are sometimes seen in the windows, so I took out my phone to take pictures. Just as I was about to take a picture of the windows, and for the first time since I had that phone, it completely died. I kept trying to get it to go back on, but it just wouldn’t work. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. 
     All of a sudden, I felt a hand wrap around my upper arm, just kind of squeezing it. It felt very energetic, and very static-like. I turned around and looked, but there was no one there. I said to the tour guide, “Does anything happen here?” He looked at me with a straight face and said, “A lot of things happen here John.” We continued on with the tour and suddenly the phone just mysteriously came on. 
     The tour ended at the White House, and by now it was dark out. As the tour guide walked away I thought, ‘I never got a chance to take those pictures in the back of the place. I’m going to go back.’ I went back to the Octagon House, by now it was really dark and creepy with only a couple of street lights off in the distance. I took out my phone to take the photos. Just before I was about to take the first picture, the phone died again. I just left!
     If it had happened today instead of back in 2012, I probably would have handled it differently. I’ve since discovered that I’m a psychic medium, so I think I’m lit up to that kind of world when I go into these houses. A lot of things like that happen to me now. For example, a friend of mine purchased an old hotel. He didn’t know it was haunted until I started talking about things, and then things made sense to him. I was mentioning the energies and things like that. 

Note: The following is from a Wikipedia article about the Octagon House.
The legend, which made its first appearance in a 1908 article run by the Minneapolis Tribune, has appeared on TV shows, and in numerous ghost books, and usually follows a story-line similar to this:
     Two of Colonel Tayloe's daughters are said to haunt The Octagon. The first allegedly died before the War of 1812. Colonel Tayloe and his daughter quarreled on the second floor landing over the girl's relationship with a British officer stationed in the city. When the daughter turned in anger to go down the stairs, she fell down the stairs--or over the railing; stories differ--and died. Her specter is allegedly seen crumpled at the bottom of the steps or on the stairs near the second floor landing, and sometimes exhibits itself as the light of a candle moving up the staircase. 
     The other death, stories claim, occurred in 1817 or shortly thereafter. Another of Colonel Tayloe's daughters eloped with a young man, incurring her father's wrath. When she returned home to reconcile with her father, they argued on the third-floor landing. This daughter, too, fell to her death down the stairs or over the railing. Her shade is alleged to haunt the third floor landing and stairs between the second and third floors.

"The Priest" -- Peekskill's Theater Ghost
     There are two theaters in Peekskill, New York. The big one called the Paramount, and the other is a small theater that used to be the old library. When I was in middle school, I worked in the small theater and everybody that worked there said that they had seen ghosts. There were two prominent ones, the tall one that everyone called ‘The Priest’ because he was all dressed in black, and the small one that everyone called ‘Danny DeVito’. 
     I was working at this theater one night, and I was closing the concussion stand down for the night. The concession stand is downstairs in the basement area. At the foot of the stairs were folding chairs. I looked over and I saw the ghost known as ‘The Priest’ forming in front of the chair. He was forming in front of the chair, but I could see the chair through him. As I looked at it, the figure was becoming more and more solid. I could see where the clothes stopped and where the skin began, and where the hands and face would be was a lighter grey. So, the figure was darker where the clothes would be, and where the hands and the face would be was a lighter grey. The whole time the form was getting darker and more solid looking, but I could still see the folding chair through this figure. 
     I had to go up the stairs to get out. Like I said, I was in middle school when this happened. When I saw this thing forming there by the stairs I almost yanked the light out of the ceiling. It was the old fashioned type of light with a pull-chain. I pole-vaulted over the bannister to avoid the bottom steps and ran upstairs.  
     Years later at the current Peekskill Library, there was a ghost lecture. I brought up the story and an older gentleman that worked at the library grabbed me afterward and started asking me all these questions. I’m kind of like, “I know what I saw. I’m not making money off of this. I don’t really care if you believe me or not.”
     He took me upstairs and there was an oil painting of a gentleman. He said, “Is this the person you saw?” I said, “Dude, I didn’t stay long enough for the person to fully form.” He gave me the guy’s name, but I don’t remember it. He said, “He ran the children’s library. That was his office down where the concession stand was.” 
     The guy continued, “I didn’t believe you, which is why I asked you all of those questions. You answered every question correctly. You should have stayed around. He was a great person. If you didn’t know him, he always wore black so you would think he was a priest.”
     After he showed me the picture and told me about this guy I was like, ‘Wow, it makes a lot more sense now. That was his office, and he always wore black clothing.’ He said that that was the part that really convinced him of my story. "If you didn’t know who he was," he said, "you would have thought he was a priest because of the way he dressed, and how he walked around town."

The Haunted Whaling Ship - Mystic, Connecticut
     My wife and I went over to Mystic Seaport just this past Fall. It was pretty empty because of Covid, but it was a really beautiful day. We walked around and ended up on one of the whaling ships where there were a couple of tour guides showing people around. 
     As I always do, I pulled one of them aside and I asked, “Have you ever seen any ghosts here on the ships or in the buildings?” The guide said, “I’ve been here for about three years, and there was only one day that something happened that was very odd.”
     He said that one morning after opening the ship, a woman came up to him and said, “Listen, I don’t want to bother you or anything, but I’m a psychic and I can tell you that there’s a ghost down in the first mate’s cabin. I didn’t see anything, but I definitely felt him and it’s there. I just wanted to let you know.” The guy thought, ‘Well, who the heck knows’ and thanked the woman and then kind of dismissed it. 
     That afternoon there were a number of different tourists on the ship, and all of a sudden there was a big hubbub downstairs from the foredeck. A French family came up the stairs. All of them were very excited, but the guide couldn’t figure out what was going on because they were speaking in French. He thought that someone might have had a heart attack because this family was helping an elderly man up the stairs. 
     One of the French tourists spoke some English, so the guide asked him, "Is everything OK. Do you need an ambulance?” The guy said, “No, my grandfather just saw a ghost down in the first mate’s cabin.” The guide couldn’t believe it because this was the exact same room in the ship that the woman earlier said was haunted. 
     The guide said that that was the only time in the three years that he had worked there that anything ever happened. I believe the guy’s story. He was just a stranger to me, and he had nothing to gain from telling me this, so I believe him. 
​
Note: ABC news ran a story about the ghosts of the ships at Mystic Seaport. You can read the story by clicking HERE.
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Phone Calls from the Dead

3/15/2021

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     When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, he could never have imagined that his invention would turn into the phone we know today. The first phone call was made from one room to another. The first long distance call was made over a distance of just 2 ½ miles. And now here we are today, making and receiving calls from one end of the earth to the other. But if the stories that people tell are true, then the telephone is capable of receiving calls from a much greater distance--from ‘the other side’, from ‘the great beyond’. In other words, people are receiving phone calls from the dead.      
     In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla constructed a crystal radio powered by electromagnetic waves. One night while he was experimenting with his radio, it began emitting strange, otherworldly sounds. The signals he heard were so unsettling that even his scientific mind began to consider the possibility that he was hearing the voices of the dead. He wrote in his diary, “My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night.” Tesla didn’t know it at the time, but what he was hearing were the sounds of ultra-low frequency radio signals coming from electrical storms and other natural sources. 
     When Thomas Edison heard that Tesla was tinkering with an invention that picked up strange voices, he began designing one that he hoped would allow people to actually communicate with the dead. 
     In 1920, The American Magazine interviewed Edison about the inventions he was currently working on. Edison said, “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this Earth to communicate with us. If this is ever accomplished it will be accomplished not by any occult, mystifying, mysterious or weird means, such as are employed by so-called mediums, but by scientific methods.” 
     Edison was clearly excited by the prospect of communicating with the dead. In the same interview he said, “If the units of life which compose an individual’s memory hold together after that individual's ‘death, is it not within range of possibility that these memory swarms could retain the powers they formerly possessed, and thus retain what we call the individual’s personality after dissolution of the body? If so, then that individual’s memory, or personality, ought to be able to function as before.” 
     He went on to say, “If the apparatus I am now constructing should provide a channel for the inflow of knowledge from the unknown world--a form of existence different from that of this life--we may be brought an important step nearer the fountainhead of all knowledge, nearer the intelligence which directs it all.” (1)
     Rumor has it that Edison invited a group of scientists and famous mediums to a clandestine demonstration of a prototype of his invention commonly known as the ‘spirit phone’. Most historians think that the meeting never happened. After all, no one ever came forward saying they were there. 
     Many believe that the spirit phone was simply Edison’s idea of a practical joke. No blueprints or prototypes of the invention were ever discovered, and he never took a patent out on the device. But others think that Edison was serious about attempting to contact the dead through electronic means. He seemed very sincere when he discussed the subject in The American Magazine interview, and he continued working on his spirit phone until just a few years before his death.
     Whether Edison’s ghost phone was fact or fiction, it seems that people really do receive electronic messages from their deceased loved ones. Messages from the dead have appeared on answering machines, in text messages, and through radios and televisions. What’s more, people claim to have heard their loved ones’ voices speaking to them on the telephone from beyond the grave.
     There are thousands of reports of mysterious, otherworldly phone calls each year. The following story is one that a man used to tell his family, and he swore up and down that the story was absolutely true. It concerns a phone call he received from two people he thought he would never hear from again. 
     One day the man’s home phone rang, and when he picked it up he could hear his sister-in-law talking on the other end. Why would that be unusual? The woman had died three years earlier. “I have something to tell you,” she said. There was a pause, and the man could hear two people talking in the background. One was his wife who had died years earlier, and it sounded like his sister-in-law was trying to convince her to get on the phone to talk to him but she didn’t want to. Suddenly, the line went dead. The man was never able to figure out the meaning of the phone call, but he is absolutely certain that the voices he heard that day were those of his deceased wife and sister-in-law.
     Not all phone calls from the dead come in the form of audible speech. In this next story, we’ll hear how a spirit used a phone to effectively communicate with his loved ones without saying a word. 
     On September 12, 2008, a California commuter train carrying 225 passengers collided with a freight train injuring 135 people and killing 25. On the train that day was Charles Peck, a 49-year-old man who was soon to be married. Peck’s fiancé was on her way to the train station to pick him up when she heard about the crash on the radio, and she quickly notified Charles’ parents.
    As his fiancé and parents waited at the train station for news about whether or not he was OK, something strange happened. Peck’s loved ones began receiving phone calls from his cell phone. Calls from his phone were placed to his brother, his stepmother, his sister, his son from a previous marriage, and to his fiancé. Over the course of eleven hours his family members received a total of 35 calls from his cell phone, but when they answered the only thing they heard on the other end of the line was static. When they tried calling him, their calls went straight to his voice mail. 
     The calls gave the family hope. Perhaps he was trying to reach them because he was alive and trapped somewhere in the wreckage. The search crews were notified about the phone calls and they were able to trace the phone through its signal. The calls were coming from the wreckage of the first car. An hour after the phone calls stopped, Charles Peck’s body was recovered from the first car. The coroner said that he had died on impact. 
     Did Charles Peck try to reach out to his loved ones for one last conversation? Or, was Peck desperately trying to lead the searchers to his body so it could be recovered? The calls did lead the searchers to his body, but the silent calls also served another purpose--they allowed Peck to let his family know that he was still with them, even after death. 
     Sometimes the dead will make phone calls from beyond the grave just to let everyone know that they are ‘alive and well’ on the other side. These messages can come in the form of  phone conversations, voicemail, and even texts. A woman named Christie told a story about a strange text message she received on her cell phone. 
     About a month after her mother passed away, Christie received a text message at 3 AM from her daughter-in-law's phone number. It wasn’t an actual typed message, just a photo of Christie's deceased mother holding her great-grandchild. The photo was one that was taken just a few days before the woman passed away. The woman thought that her daughter-in-law must have gotten up in the early hours of the morning to nurse the baby, and that she decided to send her the picture. 
     A few days later, Christie texted her daughter-in-law to thank her for the picture. ‘What picture?’ the woman replied. Christie sent her daughter-in-law the photo. ‘I didn’t send that!’ she texted. ‘That picture isn’t even on my phone. It was taken with an old phone that my son broke!’ Since it was impossible for the photo to be sent from Christie’s daughter-in-law’s phone, the only conclusion we can make is that Christie’s mother was responsible for sending the photo. And it proved to Christie that her mom wanted to let her know that she is OK. 
     In 2011, CNN ran a story called “Do Loved Ones Bid Farewell From the Beyond the Grave?” In it is the story of a woman named Simma Lieberman who received an eerie phone call that she never forgot.
     It was the late 1960s, and Simma and her boyfriend Johnny had just purchased an apartment together and were about to be married. Everyone described Johnny as a mellow hippie who loved everyone. He was so nice that his friends often called him a pushover. 
     One night when Simma was at her mother’s home in the Bronx, the phone rang. She answered it and it was Johnny. He sounded rushed and very far away, and there was a lot of static on the line. “I just want you to know that I love you,” he said, “and I’ll never be mean to anybody again.” After he said this, there was a burst of static and the line went dead. 
     Simma tried calling Johnny back, but he didn’t pick up. The next morning, she woke up with an unsettled feeling. The best way she could describe it is that she could no longer feel Johnny’s presence. Several hours later, she received a call from Johnny’s distraught mother saying that he had been murdered the night before while sitting in his car. He was shot in the head and died instantly. 
     Cell phones weren’t invented yet, and it’s doubtful that Johnny’s murderer would have brought him to a payphone to call his fiance before killing him. The distant sound of Johnny’s voice was strange, as was the static that accompanied it; and given Johnny’s gentle personality, the message he gave was also very mysterious, as no one considered him to be a mean person. 
     Years later, after reading an article about similar calls people received from beyond the grave, Simma realized what the static-filled phone call from Johnny meant all those years ago. He was calling to say goodbye. Perhaps his cryptic message also meant “I’m going to a place where I’ll never be mean to anyone again, because in heaven, such a thing would be impossible.”
    Phone calls from the dead almost always contain some information that positively identifies the caller. A perfect example of this is a phone call a woman from the Department of Social Services received while at work. Her name was Pamela, and one of her jobs was to issue checks to those in need. She had just issued a $100 check to one of her clients to help with her utility bills, and just as she was about to close the file on the case the phone rang. Pamela picked up the phone and the woman she just issued the check to was on the line. The woman sounded distracted and a bit confused, but she clearly said, “I won’t be needing that $100 after all.” Pamela thanked her for the call, made a note of it in the woman’s file, then finished her other work. 
     That night, Pamela was at home reading the local newspaper when she saw the obituary of the woman she had talked to on the phone that morning. The problem is, she had died the previous day! The strange call Pamela received that day was correct. The woman who called certainly wouldn’t be needing the $100 after all.
     Apart from the static that many report hearing during these strange phone calls, as we’ve just heard, it’s also common for the deceased to sound agitated or confused. One example of this is a call that a woman named Bonnie received three years after her mother passed away. 
     It was Christmas evening, and Bonnie was awoken in the middle of the night by the phone ringing. She answered it, and a woman speaking with a Norweigian accent said, “Hello there!” Bonnie immediately recognized the voice as her mother’s. The line had a lot of static on it, and the sound kept cutting in and out, but Bonnie continued talking. “Mom? This can’t be you, mom. You’re dead.” The woman on the other end sounded agitated. After being told that she was dead the woman said, “Oh, come on now,” as if she just couldn’t believe such a thing was possible. As soon as she said this, the line suddenly went dead. Bonnie had no doubt that the woman was her mother. It was definitely her mother’s voice, and it even had the dead woman’s Norweigian accent. 
     Not all phone calls from the dead involve actual telephones. Some messages come through other electronic devices. A very close friend of mine recently lost his father, and he and his family were naturally distraught. The family had taken very good care of the man during the two weeks that he was ill, and they were all with him when he passed away at home in the early morning hours of January 16, 2021.  
     Within days of the man’s death, each family member received an unmistakable personal message from him that proved that he was doing just fine on the other side. The message that the man’s daughter received is a beautiful example of just how intricate, symbolic, intimate, and poetic spirit communication often is.
     A few days after her father’s funeral, the woman fell asleep while watching TV, and she had an unusual dream. In the dream, she was in an old house when she heard a telephone ring. She walked over to the phone, an old style landline phone from the 1970s, and picked it up. It was her father. She knew it was him because of the way he greeted her. When her father was alive, whenever he would call her he would always start the conversation by saying, “What are you doing?”. When he said this, he would pronounce every word in kind of a ‘give me your situation report’ way. That’s exactly what he said to her in the dream “What are you doing?” The strange thing was, in the dream, he didn’t say these words to her, he whispered them loudly into the phone. 
     Even though she was dreaming, the woman was fully aware that this was a communication from her father, and it woke her because of the special nature of the "caller." As soon as she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the television that was still on. A movie had come on after she dozed off, and on the screen was a close-up of a wristwatch. The time on the watch was 2:01 AM. Why is this significant? 2:01 AM is the exact time that her father had passed away. 
     I love this story because of all the intricacies the universe had to have set in motion for the message to come through as perfectly as it did. First there was the personal, familiar phrase in the dream. By itself, the woman probably would have thought that it was just a strange dream mixed with a familiar memory of her father. But God surely played a hand in this one. I mean, what are the odds that a movie would be playing that contained a close up of a watch showing the exact time of her father’s death? And what are the odds that she would wake up from a dream of her father saying that familiar phrase at the exact moment that his time of death flashed across the TV screen? What are the odds? I’d say they're absolutely impossible.
    Spirits will use any means they can to communicate with us. When I was doing research for this article/podcast, I heard from a woman named Lauren who had at least two spirits communicate with her through her car radio. 
    Lauren had just gotten off of work, and she was sitting in her car relaxing before heading home. Suddenly, the radio turned on by itself and the display showed a song by Swtichfoot. Strangely, there was no sound at all coming from the car speakers. A few seconds later the silence was broken by strange, unearthly sounding voices coming from the car speakers. Lauren quickly grabbed her phone and recorded the voices. 
     Lauren contacted me about the incident, and I asked her to send me the recording. The clip is very interesting. The voices sound like they are coming from a distant place, and although some are unintelligible, others are very clear. At the beginning of the recording is a male voice saying, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.” After this a voice comes in saying something like, “What’s that name for?” and another voice that says “Memories”. This is followed by a few seconds of unintelligible talk and odd sounds. The recording ends with two very clear voices. The first is a male voice saying, “I love you” followed by another voice that says, “I’ll miss you”.
    I asked Lauren if she recognized the voices that came through her radio, and if any of the messages had any meaning to her.
    “Definitely,” she said. “The voice that said ‘I love you’ was that of a very dear boyfriend of mine who lost his life ten years ago in a car accident. He was just 24-years-old when he died. His death really affected me. To this day, I think of him every time I get in the car, and I always say, ‘Keep me safe. I know you’re with me. I know you’re with me every day and I love you’. So, to hear his voice say, ‘I love you’ meant everything to me. 
     The lyrics of the Switchfoot song also had special meaning. To be clear, the song wasn’t playing on the radio, just the title came up on the screen. But I know the lyrics to that song, and they have a lot of meaning to things that are going on in my life right now. 
     The other voice that said, “I’ll miss you” belonged to my mother-in-law who had an accident at home and lost her life unexpectedly. She was a great person. We had a lot of great memories together. 
     The two messages taken together have a lot of meaning. I recently made a decision to let go of my past traumas and the things that have been weighing me down. I was thinking of my mother-in-law the other day when I had made the decision to put the past behind me, so I think that both of those messages are in a sense saying, ‘We love you, and we’ll miss you, but it’s OK for you to move forward’”.
     Who do the other voices on the recording belong to? Spirits will often ‘jump in’ whenever they get an opportunity to communicate, so the other voices may be those of deceased relatives, friends, or even total strangers  who tried to get their messages across. I especially wonder about the voice at the beginning of the recording that says, “Don’t leave me” twice. The voice is loud and clear, and the fact that he gives the same message two times in a row, makes it feel particularly urgent. We may never know who some of the voices are on the recording, but Lauren is a very spiritual person. I’m certain that she’ll have a heart-to-heart chat with these poor souls and send them to the light where they belong. You can hear the full recording of this mysterious recording on the homepage of my website, ConnecticutGhostHunter.com.
     On September 20, 1988, author Dean Koontz received a mysterious phone call that he considered to be a warning from the great beyond. One day the phone rang in his office. When he picked it up, he could hear a distant female voice who said with a sense of great urgency, “Please, be careful!”
     “Who is this?” Dean asked, but the woman didn’t seem to hear him.
     “Please, be careful,” the voice repeated. It repeated the message three more times, and each time the voice became more and more distant. Finally, the line fell silent. 
     Dean sat there for a while feeling totally perplexed. He hated to admit it, but the woman’s voice sounded eerily like his mother’s voice. However, she had been dead for nearly twenty years. 
     In an interview with Psychology Today, Dean said, “It was such a strange call. I don’t claim that it was a ghost. I don’t know what I believe. It certainly was odd.” (3) But two days after receiving the phone call, something happened that gave the call a whole new meaning.
    Dean’s father lived in a nursing home, and staff had been dealing with some behavioral problems. He had punched one of the residents, and attacked a man on a walker. The nursing staff was worried, and they asked Dean to come over and talk to his father.
    Dean headed over to the facility, and when he arrived he went straight to his father’s room. As soon as he walked into the room, Dean’s father quickly grabbed a knife from a drawer and attacked his son. While Dean was trying to wrestle the knife from his father, the police were called. He finally managed to get the knife away from his father, and he carried it out into the hall so he could give it to one of the staff. 
     Unfortunately, the police had arrived at that very moment and thought that Dean was the perpetrator. “Drop the knife!” they said. Dean tried to explain that the staff had called about his father, not him. But he was still holding the knife and the police again ordered him to drop it. It finally dawned on him that he would be shot if he didn’t didn’t obey them. He dropped the knife, and the police were finally told that Dean’s father was the dangerous party. His father was taken to a psychiatric ward for observation and treatment.
    After the incident, Dean thought about the phone call from the woman who sounded like his mother saying, “Please, be careful. Please, be careful.” He realized that the call had made him more wary when he went to visit his father, and during the ordeal that followed, and that it had probably saved his life. 
     While most phone calls from the dead seem to be short and filled with static, others are rather long and crystal clear. In the following story, a man named John related an amazing story about a phone call he received from a deceased friend.
    John was going through a tough time. He was in the middle of a messy divorce and needed a place to stay until he got his life back on track, so he moved in with his parents. One day when he was out, the phone rang and John’s father answered it. The caller was a man asking for John, so his father grabbed a piece of paper and took the message. The man said that his name was Ted, and that he and John used to work together. He reminisced about the fun times they had at work, then asked that John call him as soon as he got home.
    When John arrived home, his father gave him the message. ‘Ted!’ he thought. ‘I haven’t spoken to him in ages. I wonder what made him call me out of the blue like that.’ John immediately picked up the phone and dialed the number that Ted had given to his father. After a few rings, a woman picked up. 
     “Hi, can I speak to Ted?” he asked. 
     The woman on the other end of the line paused. “Who is this?” she asked. 
     “It’s John Daniels. Ted and I used to work together, and he just left a message with my dad to give him a call back.” 
     After a long pause the woman said, “This is Ted’s wife. I’m sorry, but you must be mistaken.”
    John was confused. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Ted just called a few minutes ago. He gave my dad this phone number and asked that I call him back. If this is a bad time, I can call back later.”
    “It’s impossible for Ted to have called you,” the woman said “He died of lung cancer three months ago!”
    Why did John receive this mysterious call? Ted didn’t seem to have a message for him, and the two friends hadn’t seen one another in ages. Sure, they were co-workers at one time, but it had been years since they last spoke. Maybe the message wasn’t meant for John. Maybe John’s phone call was the perfect way for Ted to let his wife know that he’s doing just fine on the other side. And here’s food for thought--when Ted called his old friend, he must have known that he would be out. After all, if the two friends had actually spoken to one another over the phone, then Ted’s wife would never have known about her husband’s call from beyond the grave.  (4)
    Things sure have changed since Bell invented the first telephone. Back then, people didn’t quite know what to do with it. They didn’t even know what to say when they picked up the telephone. If Bell had his way, whenever we received a phone call, we wouldn’t say ‘Hello”, we’d say “Ahoy!”--which is pretty comical. I guess telephone greeting etiquette was a pretty hot topic in those days. The first telephone book ever published in 1887 in New Haven, Connecticut instructed telephone users to begin their conversations with “a firm and cherry ‘Hulloa’”. Luckily, everyone ignored that advice and just went with Thomas Edison’s suggestion to say “Hello” when answering the phone.
    One thing that hasn’t changed since the early days of the telephone is the mystery surrounding its use as a means of communication with the dead. Based on the stories we’ve just heard, and upon personal experience, I’m a firm believer that our deceased loved ones can and do communicate with us through telephones and other electronic means. 
     So the next time the phone rings and you hear silence at the other end of the line, hang on just a little while longer. Listen carefully. That very faint whisper deep in the background may just be a long forgotten, but much loved voice from your past. 
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Resources
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/art511_j/emerging2003.f/SDandanmaster/sherrie.proj2/ghostcall.html
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/602456/thomas-edison-nikola-tesla-spirit-phone
https://theface.com/life/ghosts-paranormal-activity-technology-smartphones
http://www.city-data.com/forum/unexplained-mysteries-paranormal/3088361-phone-calls-dead.html
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/calls-from-beyond/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/shadow-boxing/201309/phone-call-the-dead
https://222paranormal.libsyn.com/phone-calls-from-the-dead-089
https://ghostsnghouls.com/phone-calls-from-dead/
https://www.liveabout.com/phantom-phone-call-stories-2593179  
https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/23/living/crisis-apparitions/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas-edisons-least-successful-invention-the-spirit-phone#:~:text=Edison's%20idea%20became%20known%20as,he%20experimented%20with%20the%20idea.
https://griefandmourning.com/phonecall-from-heaven
https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/ahoy-alexander-graham-bell-and-first-telephone-call
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/02/17/133785829/a-shockingly-short-history-of-hello
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My Haunted Valentine

2/1/2021

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     In my December newsletter, I talked about the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas eve. You would think that by now, someone would have started a tradition of telling ghost stories around Valentine’s Day. Why? Because the vast majority of ghost stories have some connection to a jilted lover, an adulterous affair, a murderous lover triangle, or a romance-gone-wrong related suicide. So I’m starting a new tradition called My Haunted Valentine.
     Valentine’s Day has interesting roots. February 14th commemorates the anniversary of the death or burial of St. Valentine in A.D. 270, but the church placed the celebration on that date in order to Christianize the pagan celebration of Lupercalia which was celebrated on February 13 or 15. Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, and to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
     To begin the festival, Roman priests would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been raised by a she-wolf. In this cave, the priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would cut the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood, then walk through the streets gently slapping women and crop fields with the bloody goat hide. Roman women welcomed being hit with the bloody strips because they believed that it would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, all the young women in the city would place their names in a large urn. The city’s bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Thus, the romantic association with February 14. 
     Love, sex, and romance are wonderful things, but as we all know not all romantic encounters have happy endings. In fact, many spurned lovers end up in tragic situations such as murder or suicide, which is why so many ghost stories have their roots in love affairs gone bad. There are countless ghost stories that center around some type of romance gone wrong, but the following six spooky tales seem to have just the right balance of romance and haunted happenings to be included in this collection. 

     This first story is a dramatic retelling of a true ghost story that was submitted to my website in 2012. It tells of a ghostly encounter a young man had while exploring the ruins of an abandoned 19th-century castle in Belgium. The castle has since been demolished, and unfortunately I haven’t received any reports of unearthly screams, or of misty figures hovering above the rubble. But once you read what the young man saw that night, you’ll know why I was anxious to include his tale in this collection of Valentine’s Day ghost stories.  

If I Was Just 150 Years Younger -- Celles, Belgium
     Before I start, let me get one thing out of the way. Yes, I know I wasn’t supposed to be there. But, it’s just something I do; and I’ve been at it for years. I’m known as an urban explorer, someone who breaks into and explores abandoned buildings. This isn’t just a hobby, this is my passion. 
     I’ve traveled all over the world and explored the most amazing abandoned places you can imagine--hotels, mansions, army bases, missile-silos, you name it. Hey, did you know that there are not one, but two abandoned space shuttles that were just left to rot in a massive hanger in the Central Asian desert? Well, there are, and I saw them. I really did! And I actually sat in one. I was at an all-time high sitting in the cockpit of an actual space shuttle, and I took tons of pictures to put on my YouTube channel, Facebook, and Instagram pages.
     Walking out of the hanger that day--careful not to get arrested in the process--I thought that I had seen it all. But nothing could be farther from the truth, because what I saw one night at an abandoned Belgium estate made everything that came before it pale in comparison.
     Chateau Miranda was built in 1866, and was home to a French family until WWII when it was occupied by German forces. In the mid-1900s, the estate was turned into an orphanage and holiday camp for sick children, and the place was abandoned in the early 1990s due to the high cost of maintaining the place. Now, fast-forward to 2009 and enter yours truly. I was more than a little excited to get into the place. I mean, it is literally a castle, and I had heard that all four floors were accessible and in decent shape. The police kept a close eye on the place, so I decided to make this a night excursion. If I was careful, my flashlight wouldn’t be seen from outside. And even though I would be using a flash to take pictures, I made sure to bring black fabric to cover the windows of the rooms on the side facing the main road.
     It was 1AM when I tossed my backpack and camera equipment through a broken window into what was once the estate’s dining room. I hoisted myself up, and somehow managed to land without breaking any bones. I was in! Even at night, the place was incredible. It was beautiful in the way that all abandoned places are. The scrolled woodwork around the doorways seemed to be in perfect condition, and the wallpaper that hung off the wall in curled strips made it look as if someone had gone mad and tore the place to shreds. Broken glass crackled under my feet as I made my way down the long hallway that led to the front entrance. I had seen pictures of the grand entryway, and I was anxious to see it for myself. 
     It was pitch black in this part of the house because there were no windows, and light from the distant street lamps only illuminated spots outside of each doorway. I was about half-way down the hallway when I saw movement up ahead and I stopped dead in my tracks. Now, it wasn’t unheard of to encounter other urban explorers in places like this, but you also have to be careful not to run into drug addicts or squatters who are sometimes very territorial--even though they were here illegally too. 
     The movement came from a room on the right side of the hallway. The light from the street lit the room up to the point where I could see the shadow of someone moving around in there. I considered turning off my flashlight, but didn’t want to scare the person. They were probably just here exploring the place just like me, and if they were living here, well, more power to them. After all, who deserves to live in a castle more than a homeless person, right?
     As I walked toward the room I called out in as cheerful a voice as I could, “Hello! Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m just taking a look around the place.” I stopped and listened. There was no reply. The shadow continued to move, and it looked like whoever was in there was pacing back and forth. But there was something wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something just wasn’t right. “Hello?” I called. “Sorry to disturb you. Just taking a look around.” Silence. The room was about 10 steps away, and the shadow kept moving as if the person hadn’t heard me, which was weird. I took a few more steps, then stopped and listened. Then I realized what was wrong. There was definitely someone in that room pacing back-and-forth, but there was no sound. I should be hearing the sound of feet crushing broken glass and fallen plaster, but there was no sound at all. Even if the person had cleaned the place up, I should at least hear their footsteps. 
     I turned off my flashlight, then crept toward the open doorway. I slowly put my head around the corner and peered into the room. Like the rest of the house, the room was in shambles. But strangely, there was still furniture in it. Against the wall just to the left of the doorway was a mirrored dressing table with a cushioned chair; the type that a woman would sit at to put on her makeup. On this sat an oil-lamp that burned with a soft yellow glow. Against the far wall was a dresser, but all of the drawers were pulled out, and most were broken. The floor was bare, and the wood was warped from decades of rain coming in through the open window. I put my head in a bit farther, and against the far wall I could see a four-poster bed, the mattress of which was swollen and bursting with cotton and feather stuffing. And then I saw her. 
     Coming out from a small room to the right of the bed was a woman. I could see her very clearly, even though the room was poorly lit; and the way she looked literally took my breath away. She was a young woman, about 25 years old, and she was totally naked. She had long, dark brown hair that she was brushing as she walked. Her skin was milky white, and her bare feet were totally unaffected by the broken glass that littered the floor. Her back was to me as she walked up to the dresser and put the brush down on top. She then put her hands into one of the open drawers, and took something out of it. She turned in my direction, and I could see that there was nothing in her hands, but she was holding them apart from one another as if she was holding up and admiring a dress. She was absolutely beautiful, and her body was perfect and seemed to glow from within. As she held up the non-existent garment in front of her, a slight smile played across her lips. She held the invisible dress up to her naked body and walked over to the dresser, then turned this way and that in front of the mirror, as if admiring herself. She smiled at her reflection, as if she was pleased at what she saw.
     Suddenly, she turned back toward the bed, a look of alarm on her face. She ran toward the small room next to the bed, then as she was about to enter it, she held her hands up in front of her face, and her mouth opened in a scream of terror. I could hear no sound, but somehow I could actually feel her scream in the air. The woman fell backward, and her head struck the corner of the bed. Her body went slack, and then became still. 
     All this time I was literally frozen in place. I was unable to move a muscle even if I wanted to,  as if I was being forced to witness this grizzly scene. Then, I watched in amazement as the woman’s body slowly faded away into something like a soft pale mist, and then it was gone.
     The trance-like state I had been in was broken, and I turned and ran back down the hall to the dining room as fast as I could. I threw my backpack and camera gear out the window, then climbed onto the window sill and jumped out. I tore ass across the field toward the fence that surrounded the estate, and just as I was about to climb it to get to my car, I turned and looked back at the castle. The room that I had seen the woman in was totally dark, but I could just make out a very pale, white shape moving back-and-forth in front of the open window. 

Emily’s Bridge - Stowe, Vermont
     Covered bridges are an iconic American image. At one time, there were as many as 12,000 in the US, but over the years their numbers have diminished considerably, so today fewer than 1,000 remain. Old timers used to call covered bridges “kissing bridges” because of the countless couples who have undoubtedly taken advantage of the privacy that they provide. So it’s no wonder that so many romance novels use covered bridges as their backdrop. But even when romance is involved, some covered bridges have a more sinister reputation. 
     In Stowe, Vermont is a single-lane, 48 foot long covered bridge called the Gold Brook bridge. Built in 1844 by John W. Smith, the 17 foot wide bridge is made entirely of wood, and the exterior is covered in vertical board siding extending most of the way up to the eaves. A narrow space was left along the top to allow light and air into the bridge’s interior. The bridge’s decking is still made of wooden planks, and the structure is topped by a gabled tin roof.
    These days, hardly anyone knows the bridge by its original name. Walk into any tourist spot in the area and you’ll find the bridge featured on postcards, cedar boxes, keychains, and other souvenirs with the name “Emily’s Bridge” written in quaint lettering. But the picturesque scenes these trinkets depict don’t even hint at the ghost story that gives Emily’s bridge its name.
    Legend has it that in the 1850’s, a teenaged girl named Emily and her lover set a date to meet on the bridge. The young man was from a rich family, and Emily’s family was poor. His parents had refused the wedding, so the young couple decided to elope. They thought that the covered bridge would be a perfect, romantic meeting place to begin their journey through life together.
    Emily arrived at the bridge at midnight and waited for her lover to arrive. Rain was falling that night, and one can imagine her listening to the soft sound of the rain on the tin roof, and of the brook flowing gently below, excited by the prospect of finally marrying the one she loved. But as the hours slowly passed, it was clear that her lover had changed his mind. Infuriated that her lover had stood her up, and distraught at the thought of living her life without him, Emily hung herself from the rafters using the rope she had used to tie together her sack of belongings.
    Emily’s ghost isn’t your typical sweet, sorrowful spirit. Emily was so enraged at her jilted lover that to this day she takes her wrath out on those who pass through the bridge’s dark interior. Many have reported that deep, claw-like gouges appear on the sides of their car after parking on the bridge or driving through it. If you walk through the bridge, you might feel as if someone is touching you lightly on your arms and face. Or, you could end up with claw marks across your back, as some have reported. If you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of a misty white apparition floating high up near the bridge’s rafters.
    Some have reported hearing the sound of footsteps and strange voices coming from the bridge's interior, as well as the scream of a young woman. Other strange sounds include loud banging on cars, as if someone is hitting them from the outside, and a strange dragging sound on the roof of the car as you drive through. What could that sound be? Emily’s dangling feet dragging across the roof as she hangs from the rafters, of course.
    So, if you value your car’s paint job, by all means avoid crossing Emily’s bridge, especially between the hours of midnight and 3AM when her spirit is said to be most active.

The Haunted Texas Governor's Mansion -- Austin, Texas
    In 1853 the Texas legislature earmarked over $15,000 for the construction of the governor’s mansion in Austin. That was quite a bit of money in those days. How much? $15,000 in the 1850’s is equivalent to $500,000 today. Construction on the mansion began in 1853, and it was completed in 1856.
    Today, the white Greek Revival style house is the fourth oldest executive residence in the United States, and the oldest located west of the Mississippi. Visitors can take a guided tour of the mansion, and if they’re lucky, they just might see or hear one of the ghosts said to haunt the place.
    One story revolves around a young woman who worked as the governor’s maid. Although we don’t have a time-frame for the story, we do know that the woman became pregnant by someone in the mansion, and that she was fired from her job when her employer found out. Details are also fuzzy around whether she committed suicide, or if she just died of natural causes; but many people have reported seeing a woman outside the house looking longingly at the mansion as if yearning to be forgiven for her past indiscretion. Or, her spirit may be stuck in the past, waiting for her lover to come to the window and tell her that he will take care of her and their child.
    The most widely reported and best known story attached to the mansion involved Governor Pendleton Murrah, the tenth governor of Texas who served his term in office during the Civil War. Murrah’s political career ended in controversy when he drafted Texas militia troops into the Confederate army. Murrah never finished his term in office. He fled to Mexico with other Confederate leaders when he heard that the Union troops were on their way to Texas.
    Although the exact details of the story seem to have faded over the years, there was a nineteen-year old man associated with the Murrah family who lived at the mansion. He fell in love with a young woman, possibly his cousin, but was rejected by her. While much of the story is vague, one thing is certain. The young man committed suicide in a small guest room on the north side of the mansion. Most accounts say that he shot himself in the head, but regardless of how he died, it is a fact that the room was bathed in blood. The haunting of the guest room began hours after the young man’s suicide. The staff refused to clean the room of the blood because they said that they heard moaning and wailing coming from the room immediately after he killed himself. The disturbances in the room continued, and expanded to include strange banging sounds, mysterious cold spots, and the rattling of the room’s doorknob.
    The activity must have been pretty frightening because the governor who took over for Murrah, Andrew J. Hamilton, walled up the door to the room sometime around 1865. But even after the room was sealed, the mansion’s staff continued to report a feeling of dread whenever they worked in the mansion’s north wing.
    The room was finally unsealed when the mansion was renovated in the 20th century. Since that time, many have reported hearing strange, unexplained noises coming from the room. The haunting is most active on Sundays, the day that the young man committed suicide.

Three’s A Crowd - St. Augustine, Florida
    St. Augustine, Florida is home to the oldest masonry fort in the United States, The Castillo de San Marcos. The fort was ordered by the governor after a raid by an English privateer destroyed much of St. Augustine, including the existing wooden fort. Construction began in 1672, and the fort was finished in 1695. Today, the site is known to paranormal enthusiasts as one of the most haunted places in Florida. One ghost story associated with the fort revolves around an adulterous affair that ended in murder.
    In 1784, Colonel Garcia Marti was assigned duty at Castillo de San Marcos, and he brought his young wife Dolores to live there with him. Soon after settling into the routines of life at the fort, Dolores began to get bored. Her husband was busy with his work, and he ignored her romantically, so Dolores sought affection elsewhere and began having an affair with her husband’s assistant, Captain Manuel Abela. Late at night, when her husband was asleep, Dolores would sneak away to meet her lover, then she would steal back into her room hours later unnoticed.
    The two lovers were successful at not getting caught until one day the colonel noticed the smell of Dolores’ perfume on his assistant. He became enraged, but didn’t say a word to his wife or his assistant. He came up with a plan to get his revenge. A few days later, Dolores and Manuel Abela both went missing. When asked where his wife was, Garcia said that she had returned to Spain. He also said that Manuel was suddenly called to a special assignment in Cuba, and that he had left in the middle of the night because of its urgency.
    A half-century later, a hidden dungeon was discovered behind a brick wall. In it, the remains of a man and a woman were found chained to the wall. The colonel had walled up his wife and her lover, and had gotten away murder. But apparently, his wife’s ghost lives on to this day. Tourists have reported sighting the apparition of a woman dressed in a white dress who many believe is Dolore’s ghost. Tourists also often comment on smelling the odor of strong perfume in the dungeon where the two lovers had been walled in alive.
    If Dolores does haunt the fort, she’s in good company. Many spirits are said to roam the facility. The disembodied head of a Native America has been seen floating above the cannon deck, visitors have been pushed by unseen hands in the cannon room, and a ghostly soldier carrying a lantern has been sighted on the cannon deck. There have also been reports of the sound of marching boots in the soldier’s quarters, and a visitor took a photo at the execution wall that seems to show the spirit of a pirate who was put to death there.
    In 2018, the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures team ran an overnight investigation at the fort and got a lot of very convincing evidence to support the ghostly sightings.

The Haunting of the Octoroon Mistress - New Orleans, Louisiana
The following story was first posted in my “Naked Ghosts” newsletter, but since it deals with a love affair that went terribly wrong, I’m reprinting it here. 
     New Orleans has more than its share of ghosts. It is, perhaps, one of the most haunted areas of the United States, and it too has a naked ghost story known as the ‘Haunting of the Octoroon Mistress’.
    In the 1800s, people of mixed race were discriminated against, and those who were ⅛ African American and ⅞ White were labeled “Octoroon”. Julie was a beautiful woman with black hair and dark eyes. She met a rich, handsome Frenchman and fell in love with him. To the Frenchman, Julie was just his mistress, a secret lover. But Julie wanted to marry the Frenchman in spite of her mixed race background and the difference in their social status.
    After months of Julie begging the Frenchman to marry her, he came up with a test that he said would prove that she really loved him. He had invited some friends over to his house, and he would be playing cards with them in the downstairs parlor. He told Julie to strip off all of her clothing and to wait for him on the rooftop until he was done with the game. It was a bizarre request, and the Frenchman thought that Julie would never take him seriously, but she did. Julie undressed in her room, then climbed naked onto the rooftop to wait for her lover to return. It was December, and the night was cold and damp. The Frenchman finished his card game, then went to bed and waited for Julie to come to him as she always had. He didn’t think that she had taken him seriously, but when he realized that she was nowhere to be found he ran to the roof to look for her. There he found her naked, frozen body huddled in a corner waiting for him.
    The octoroon mistress is said to haunt the house to this day. Some say that on cold, damp December evenings you can see her naked figure pacing back and forth on the rooftop, trying to keep warm, and waiting for her lover to return.

The Copper Queen Hotel - Bisbee, Arizona
     In 1898 the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company built their own hotel in the heart of Bisbee for investors to stay in while conducting business. The seventy-two room hotel opened in 1902 and was considered rather lavish for its time. Heat was pumped through a tunnel from a large boiler in the basement of a building across the street. Tiffany stained glass was used in the sky light of the Palm Room. The room was constructed to serve as an air well to provide cool air to the rooms during the summer. The hotel had its own restaurant, known as the Copper Queen Cafe, as well as a saloon. Today, the hotel holds the distinction of being Arizona’s oldest continually operated hotel. 
     But there’s one more thing the hotel is known for--its ghosts. According to eyewitness accounts, there are a number of ghosts who haunt the hotel. One is known simply as Billy. He is thought to be the spirit of an adolescent boy who drowned in the San Pedro River. Although Billy has rarely been seen by guests, he is blamed for stealing and moving personal items in the hotel rooms. Others have heard the laughter and crying of a little boy. 
     On April 11, 2000, a hostess at the hotel caught a glimpse of another ghostly boy. She said that she was standing outside in front of the hotel acting as a hostess when she happened to look into the hotel towards the staircase. She was surprised to see a little boy around four-years old dressed in blue shorts and a white t-shirt climbing up over the railing. He had dark hair and light colored skin. Suddenly, the boy fell over the high railing and the woman ran to check to see if he was hurt. But when she got to the spot where he had fallen, there was no one there. 
     Other ghosts have been reported at the Copper Queen hotel, but the most famous is that of a woman in her 30’s, Julia Lowell, a prostitute who used the hotel for her clients. In the 1920’s-30’s, prostitution was legal in the state, and Julia used room 315 to entertain her gentlemen guests. The story goes that Julia had a frequent client who she fell in love with, but when she told him of her feelings he immediately stopped seeing her. The man was married, and he told her that he wasn’t about to leave his wife for a prostitute. She was so distraught that she killed herself in the hotel. 
     The presence of Julia’s ghost has been felt on many occasions. Male guests have heard a female voice whispering in their ears. Perfume is often smelled in room 315, and some men have felt a soft touch on their arms and faces as they try to sleep in that room. Some men have reported their blankets being pulled back in the middle of the night exposing their feet, then feeling as if two warm hands are rubbing their feet. Other men have reported feeling as if someone is lying in bed with them and tugging at the covers. 
     Male guests have reported seeing Julia dancing provocatively at the foot of a staircase. On February 2, 2000, a male guest woke up at 4 AM and saw Julia’s ghostly figure sitting on top of a TV cabinet. Her legs were crossed, and she was wearing a black dress. She took a few sips from a bottle that she was holding, smiled and laughed. She was breathing heavily and said to the man, ‘You missed my dance’ before vanishing. 

     There are poems about love, and poems about death, but there are very few poems about ghosts. The following is one I wrote with the ghost of the young man from the governor’s mansion in mind, though it’s not specifically about him. It could be about a couple who drifted so far apart that the narrator feels that he’s invisible in their relationship. But just between you and me--it’s really about a ghost!

At Day’s End
A ticking clock
my love, my love, the beating of your heart
you turn in bed
your dreaming eyes are closed, two hidden stars
Soft falling rain
your gentle hands so still, I watch you sleep
The sun is gone
a sight so rare these days, my shades are drawn
I lost my head,
or else, I woke to find that it was gone
(the walls were red
I think the stains were mine, I half recall
my breaking heart,
a roaring sound, then all was still as black)
But here I am
I hoped I wouldn’t see another day
I reach to touch you
but my hand goes through your naked form
You lock the door,
you never stop or give another thought
It’s just as if
I never happened in your life, and now
I’m forced to watch
another day go by here by myself
as you go gliding
mist-like through the rooms, I’m here, I’m not
Can this be
the price I have to pay? It’s getting dark
I’ll wait until
you come back home from work, and then I’ll try
again to make 
you see that I am right in front of you, 
my love, I’ll try 
again to make you see, that I am right 
in front of you 
my love, my love, I’m right in front of you
my love

​_________
Resources
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/emilys-bridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Brook_Covered_Bridge
https://vermonter.com/emilys-bridge-ghost/
https://stowecountryhomes.com/attractions/emilys-covered-bridge-stowe-vt/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Brook_Covered_Bridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Queen_Hotel
https://michaelkleen.com/2017/07/26/the-copper-queens-lady-julia-and-other-unearthly-guests/
https://austinghosts.com/the-haunting-of-governors-mansion/
https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1850?amount=15000


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Doppelgangers

1/24/2021

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Picture
Doppelgänger
Pronunciation /ˈdäpəlˌɡaNGər/ /ˈdɑpəlˌɡæŋər/
noun
An apparition or double of a living person.
‘He has been replaced by an evil doppelgänger’  ~ Oxford Dictionary
The following is a true story ...

    Michael burst through the backdoor, snow swirling in after him. He slammed the door shut, threw his book bag on the mudroom floor and pried off his snow-caked sneakers, losing one soggy sock in the process. He pulled off the other drenched sock and threw both on top of his book bag, then threw his wet jacket on top of the pile. ‘I’ll pick that stuff up later,’ he thought; but in reality, he knew that his mother would pick up after him like she always did.
     Music was blasting in Michael’s headphones as he headed to the kitchen to grab a snack. School was let out early because of the snow, and with more than a foot predicted by morning, it looked like tomorrow would definitely be a snow day. ‘Yes!’ he thought, ‘one less day of 11th grade!’ He riffled through the junk food cabinet and settled on something he considered to be highly nutritious--Strawberry Pop-tarts. His reasoning? They’re made with real fruit. 
     He tore open the two-pack of Pop-Tarts and said in his best announcer voice: “Jump-start your day with a blast of gooey, strawberry-flavored filling!” Taking a bite, Michael headed out into the living room and made for the staircase. When he was half-way across the room he slowed, took another bite of his Pop-Tart, then stopped and looked at the crucifixes that hung on all four walls of the room and thought, ‘Christ, dad, What the hell did you get us into?’
     Three months ago, crazy things started happening in the house after Michael’s father bought an antique pump-organ he saw while doing a job at a house in Elmsford. His father was an electrician, and a musician on the side. So, when he saw the organ he bought it from the guy, even though it came with a warning. The guy told his father that that organ was ... Michael shook the thought away and started walking to the staircase, then he slowed and eyed the big wooden crucifix that hung above the front door. To the right of the door hung a string of rosary beads, and on the door itself was a picture of Jesus, his eyes lifted to heaven. Michael shook his head and said out loud, “I don’t believe any of this crap,” and turned up the volume on his headphones. ‘Haunted my ass,’ he thought as he turned the corner and headed upstairs.      
     Michael was on the third step when he looked up, then quickly pulled the headphones off of his ears and turned off the music. His mother was standing at the top of the stairs. She was looking down at him, and she didn’t seem very happy. ‘Christ,’ he thought. ‘What did I do wrong now?’ 
     “Hey mom! I didn’t know you were home. What’s up?” he asked, making his voice sound just a tad too cheerful. His mother just stood there looking at him. Michael smiled up at her and climbed a few more steps until he was just eight steps down from her. “We got let out early because of the snow. Kelly should be home soon too. They let the middle school out a half-hour after the high school. I bet we’ll be off tomorrow. We’re supposed to get a foot of snow!” His mother stared.      
     “Mom? What’s up?” he said as she continued her accusatory stare. “Oh, sorry I didn’t clean my room this morning. I’ll do it now,” he said and started to climb the rest of the stairs. But she just stood there on the landing at the top of the stairs looking down at him as if she wanted to confront him about something. She was holding a dish towel, so he guessed she had just come up from the kitchen for something. But what was her problem? She was literally blocking his way, but she wasn’t saying anything; just holding the towel in one hand, twisting it with the other, and staring at him.
     “Mom, what’s the matter?” Michael asked. He was genuinely beginning to get concerned. ‘Oh Christ, maybe she had a stroke or something’, he thought. Then, as he looked up at her, the corners of her mouth turned up slightly, and she shifted the weight off of one foot and took a step back as if she was about to let him pass. But just as Michael started to climb the stairs again, she slowly took a step forward and twisted the towel tighter. 
     “Mom? What’s the matter? Did I do something wrong? Talk to me!” he yelled. Then, the corners of her mouth slowly turned upward into a big grin, as if she had just been playing some kind of a joke on him. He sighed with relief and smiled back at her. He laughed, “Mom, you really had me fooled there for a minute,” he said. 
     From downstairs, he heard someone walk in from the kitchen and through the living room. “There’s Kelly now,” he said. “Her school bus must have just dropped her off.”      
     Suddenly, a voice called to him from the bottom of the stairs, “Michael, who are you talking to honey? I could hear your voice from all the way in the basement.” Michael turned around quickly and stared down the stairs in total disbelief. The skin on his scalp crawled, and he began to shake. His mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs smiling up at him. She was holding a roll of paper towels in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaner in the other. “Who are you talking to up there?” she asked again. 
     Michael’s head jerked around back to the top of the stairs. There was no one there, just a twisted dish towel laying limp on the top step. 
     “Michael? Michael? What’s wrong honey? Michael?”

     The story you just read isn’t fiction. It comes from a paranormal investigation I conducted in Weschester County, New York. The family had a number of bizarre experiences after the father brought the haunted organ home, but Michael coming face-to-face with his doppelgänger-mother was by far the strangest.  
     Almost everyone has heard the term “Doppelgänger”. It’s a German word that means “double-walker” or “double-goer”. Basically, a doppelgänger is someone who looks, acts, and sounds exactly like another person. Stories of doppelgängers have been around for literally thousands of years, and many theories surround these mysterious doubles. 
     One theory is that a doppelgänger is a duplicate version of ourselves from an alternate reality or from another dimension; that they actually are our double, but in their reality, they are living an entirely different life than the one we live in this reality. We’ve all pondered the question of what our life would be like today if we had taken a different path--gone to a different college, taken a different job, met and married someone else. In the alternate reality theory, there are multitudinous ‘versions’ of ourselves who did all of those things, each living an entirely different life than the one we’re living. And when both realities line-up in one way or another, one of us ‘bleeds over’ into the other’s world and we end up seeing each other. In this scenario, the sightings are usually brief, and the doppelgängers usually vanish when sighted.  
     Another theory is that a doppelgänger is our exact double, a cell-for-cell duplicate  living in the same reality. Some think that it’s impossible for two of the same person to live in the same reality or in the same dimension, so when the two meet up, one must die. If this is true, then, seeing your own doppelgänger is never a good thing. Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. In 1860, Lincoln had an eerie vision of his own double while looking into a mirror. One of Lincoln’s friends, Noah Brooks, remembered the story as Lincoln told it to him on November 9, 1864. Recalling Lincoln’s words as best as he remembered them, he remembered him saying: 

     “It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day ... so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. 
     Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it, and looking in that glass I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler--say five shades--than the other. I got up, and the thing melted away, and I went off, and in the excitement of the hour forgot all about it--nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang as if something uncomfortable had happened. 
     When I went home again that night, I told my wife about it, and a few days afterward I made the experiment again when, sure enough the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife who was somewhat worried about it. She thought it was a “sign” that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term.” 

     Critics of Lincoln’s story argue that what he saw was nothing more than a defect in the mirror. But those who believe that Lincoln saw his double point out that he saw himself “reflected nearly at full length”, yet he only reported seeing a pale, double-image of his face floating about three inches above his actual face. Had this been a problem with the mirror, his entire image would have been shown as double, not just the pale phantom face. 
     Did Lincoln’s doppelgänger vision actually foretell his death? We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, three months into his second term, just as Mary Todd Lincoln predicted, and just five months after sharing his doppelgänger story with his friend. 
     Lincoln wasn’t the only historic figure to die after seeing his doppelgänger. A number of famous people have reported seeing their double shortly before they died.
     Catherine the Great, the longest-ruling female leader of Russia, reported seeing her doppelgänger just a few months before she died. According to the account, Catherine was in her bedroom when two of her servants knocked on her door in a panic. They said that they had just seen the Empress entering the throne room, even though they knew she had been lying in bed at the time. Catherine called her guards, then went to the throne room to investigate the servants’ claims. Once inside the room, she was shocked to see a duplicate version of herself seated calmly on the throne. The guards saw this mysterious figure as well, and Catherine wasted no time in ordering them to fire at the woman--but the bullets seemed to go right through the spectral queen. The queen’s doppelgänger slowly vanished and was never seen again. Not long after, Catherine suffered a stroke. She fell into a coma and died.
     It seems that royalty is no stranger to doppelgängers. Elizabeth I ruled England from 1558 until 1603. According to historians, Elizabeth is said to have seen a deathly pale version of herself lying in her chambers like a corpse. She described the doppelgänger as “pallid, shivered, and bloodless”. 
     The story of Queen Elizabeth’s death is an interesting one. In 1563, the queen was stricken with smallpox. She made a full recovery, but her face was left with disfiguring scars. The queen believed that her beauty was part of her power, so she wore thick, white makeup to cover the scars. Unfortunately, the main ingredient of the makeup she wore was lead. It was this foundational mask of lead that, over time, most likely poisoned the Queen to death. Near the end of her life she suffered extensive hair loss, mental disorientation, memory loss, fatigue, and digestive problems. All of these are symptoms of lead toxicity. Soon after seeing her doppelgänger, Queen Elizabeth I died. 
     Of course, it’s possible that the doppelgänger Queen Elizabeth saw could have been just another symptom of lead poison. But then again, one can make a case that she didn’t die until right after seeing her ‘evil twin’, so the jury is still out. 
     The English Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, had a short life filled with tragedy. When he was 19-years-old he eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, whom his father had forbidden him to see. After three years, he abandoned Harriet and started living with another woman. Two years later, Harriet committed suicide by drowning herself in a lake. He had several other failed love affairs before marrying Mary Shelley, author of the novel Frankenstein. But tragedy was to mar their marriage as well. The couple lost three of their four children, and Mary’s sister, Fanny, committed suicide. 
     Shortly before he died, Percy confessed to his wife that he had seen his doppelgänger many times. Once, Percy was walking on the terrace of his house when he came face-to-face with his exact double. Not only that, the phantom actually spoke to him and asked him the curious question, “How long do you mean to be content?”    
     Other people also reported seeing Percy’s doppelgänger. One day, his friend Jane Williams saw his spectral twin walking on the terrace of his home. Mary Shelley recounted the story after Percy’s death. She said: 
     “Now Jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination and is not in the slightest degree nervous, neither in dreams nor otherwise. One day she and Edward Trelawny were standing at a window that looked onto the terrace. It was daytime, and Jane saw Percy pass by the window. As he often was then, he was without a coat or jacket. Soon after, he passed by the window again. Now, as he passed both times from the same direction, and as there was no way to get back from the side towards which he went each time except past the window again--or over a wall twenty feet from the ground--she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus. 
     Looking out and seeing him no more, Jane cried, ‘Good God! Can Percy have leapt from the wall? Where can he have gone?’ Edward Trelawny replied, ‘What do you mean? Percy hasn’t passed.’ When she heard this, Jane trembled exceedingly; and it proved indeed that Percy had never been on the terrace. He was, in fact, far off at the time she saw him.” 
     Percy Shelley’s last encounter with his doppelgänger was when he saw himself on a beach pointing out at the sea. He ran towards the mysterious figure, but it vanished as he approached it. Not long afterward, Percy drowned in a sailing accident in 1812 at the age of 29.
     One of the most fascinating reports of a doppelganger comes from writer Robert Dale Owen, who recounted the tale of a French woman named Emilie Sagée. In 1845, Emilie was a teacher at an exclusive girls' school, and one day while she was writing on the blackboard, her exact double appeared beside her. The doppelgänger copied the teacher's every move as she wrote, except that it was not holding any chalk. Thirteen students in the classroom witnessed the event and were understandably frightened.
    Another time, Emilie’s doppelgänger appeared next to her in the dining hall. As Emilie ate her dinner, her phantom twin was seen sitting next to her mimicking her every move.       
     During the next year, Emilie’s doppelgänger was seen several times. The most amazing instance of this took place in full view of the entire student body of 42 students.
    One afternoon, Emilie gave sewing assignments to her class and then went out in the garden outside to pick some flowers while the girls were working on the assignment. While she was in the garden, her students looked on in amazement as ‘another’ Emilie was nonchalantly sitting in her seat looking out the window at the real Emilie. Most of the students were so frightened that they ran from the class. A few, however, were brave enough to go and touch the doppelgänger. They later reported that their hands went right through it, and that it felt as if they were going through cobwebs. By the time the real Emilie came back, the mysterious twin had gone.
    While Emilie apparently never saw her doppelgänger, it was reported that when the entity was present "the color would drain from her face and, overcome with fatigue, her movements would become listless."
     Eventually, Emilie was let go from her teaching position due to the disturbing presence of her double. If the school had looked into her background before hiring her, they would have noticed something strange about her employment record. In the eighteen years that Emilie had been teaching, she had been hired and let go from sixteen different schools. Apparently, her mysterious double had been around for a very long time. 
     So far, the stories we’ve heard happened a long time ago, but sightings of doppelgängers isn’t just a thing of the past. There are many current reports of the sighting of mysterious doubles. 
     Susan from Texas reported encountering the doppelgängers of various family members in her childhood home. One night, she was in her parent’s bedroom talking to her mother on her bed. The girl fell asleep, but she woke up when she heard the bedroom door slam. When she woke up, her mother was sitting on the bed drinking a cup of milk. When Susan asked what the loud slamming sound was, her mother said that the girl’s sister, Amy, had just brought her a cup of warm milk. But she must have been mad or something because after handing her mother the milk, Amy walked away without saying a word and slammed the door.
     The next morning the mother asked Amy if she was angry about something, and she told her the story about how she had slammed the door after handing her the cup of milk. Amy looked at her mother and said, “What are you talking about? I didn’t bring you a cup of milk last night. I know I usually do, but I was tired so I went straight to bed. I heard a door slam really loud too, though. I thought that maybe you and dad had a fight or something, and that one of you slammed the door.”
     Another time, Amy was making dinner with her mother. She had to go upstairs to get something from her room, and when she got to the top of the stairs she saw her sister Susan coming out of the bathroom. She told her that dinner was almost ready, and to come down to eat, but her sister just ignored her. Amy went down to the kitchen and said to her mom, “What’s up with Susan? I just told her that dinner was ready, but she just ignored me and walked into her room.” Her mother said, “What do you mean? Susan isn’t here. She went out to a friend’s house a few hours ago.”
     Amy was so sure that she had seen her sister coming out of the bathroom that she drove over to the friend’s house to ask her if she had gone home briefly, then left to go back to her friend’s house. But Susan said that she had been at her friend’s house the whole time. 
     Doppelgänger are often silent, and they often behave in a way that is uncharacteristic of their double. One day, a young man was sitting in the kitchen with his mother drinking coffee while his father was outside in the driveway working on his truck. His father came in to get a drink of water, then said, “I’m going to take out the trash, then take a shower. After that we can go out for dinner.” He grabbed the trash bag from the kitchen, then went out the back door to put it in the trash can at the end of the driveway. About 10 seconds later, he came storming back into the house. He walked into the bedroom and slammed the door.
     The young man and his mother called out to him asking what he was mad about. They thought his behavior was odd because he was in such a good mood when he left to empty the garbage a few seconds earlier, and because he came back so quickly. A few seconds later, the father came in again through the same door they had just seen him come through. The mother and son were shocked, and the father swore that it was the first time he had come into the house since he went out to empty the trash. 
     There is a strange audio doppelgänger phenomenon common to hauntings whereby people living in haunted houses have reported hearing their family members calling their names, asking them questions, or even having full conversations with them, only to discover that the person was either not at home, or that they weren’t talking at all. I call these doppelgänger voices Spookpraat, which is Dutch for “Ghost Talk”
     A perfect example of spookpraat comes from an investigation I conducted at a home in Oxford, Connecticut. The family reported seeing the ghost of a dark-haired girl around eight-years-old, and an amazingly clear video of this little ghost girl was captured on the family’s home security camera. 
     In addition to the sightings of this mysterious child, the family reported hearing voices in the house. But it wasn’t the voice of the little girl they heard--the voices sounded exactly like members of the family. 
     These spookpraat voices were heard by several family members. During the investigation, the homeowner explained, “My husband had a job videotaping weddings, and he would often get home late at night. Before coming up to our bedroom, he would sometimes hear me calling for him very loudly at the top of the stairs. He would hear me calling his name, and then he would go upstairs only to find that I was asleep in bed. He said it sounded just like me. I don’t have a history of talking in my sleep, so we don’t have any explanation for this.
     I’ve also heard someone who sounds like my daughter calling ‘Mom! Mom!’, and several times I’ve heard someone calling my name. To me it always sounds like it’s one of my kids calling to me or talking. My husband swears that the voice that he hears sounds just like me
     One time our family friend Jack came to visit. My sons, Jake and Spencer, were upstairs, and Jack and I both heard one of the boys calling loudly from upstairs, ‘Mom! Mom! Mom!’ All I could think was, ‘My husband is upstairs with them, what could they want?’ A few minutes later, Jack and I heard the voice calling me again, so I excused myself and went upstairs to see what the problem was. When I got up there, everyone was asleep!” 
     Another woman shared a story with me about the mysterious spookpraat voices heard in her Connecticut home. She said, "My husband was away on business and the kids were in the family room. All of a sudden, they came running in and said, “Oh my God mommy, did you hear that?” I’m like, “What, what did you hear.” They said, “We heard daddy’s chair pull away from the desk upstairs, and we heard his voice say, “Hey ... bed!” as if he was telling them to come upstairs to go to bed. The thing is, my husband wasn’t home, and I reminded them of this. The kids were so positive that they heard his voice that they didn’t believe me. They thought that maybe he came home and went upstairs without telling anyone. So, I walked them upstairs to show them that he wasn’t there, but they still didn’t believe me. I actually had to call my husband and put them on the phone with him to assure them that he wasn’t in the house. 
     About three weeks later I came home and I heard my daughter in our family room call out to me, ‘Hi Mommy! How are you? Did you have a good morning?’ It was like a sing-songy way that she talks sometimes, and I called out to her, ‘Oh, I’m doing good honey,’ and I started having a conversation with her about my morning. I went around the corner to the family room, and all of a sudden I realized that something just wasn't right. Then I’m like, wait a minute, I’m still talking to her, but she’s not talking back. I said, ‘Samantha, are you there?’ Dead silence. I walked into the family room, and the room was empty. I ran upstairs and found my daughter fast asleep in her bed.”
     Another Connecticut resident reported that her husband heard a spookpraat voice in their apartment through the baby monitor. She said, “We moved into the apartment on Christian Street when my son Logan was about four months old. During the time we lived there we experienced a number of strange things, like lights turned on and off, and sometimes it felt like somebody was watching you, especially in the bathroom.
     Logan had his own room, and we installed a baby monitor so we could hear him if he woke up. One night after I put him to bed, I was in the living room folding clothes watching TV, and my husband was in our bedroom. All of a sudden he comes out of the bedroom yelling, ‘What is the matter with you? Why would you say that? Why would you talk to Logan like that?’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? I’m here folding clothes?’ He said, ‘You didn’t say anything?’ I said, ‘No!’ He goes, ‘I just heard your voice over the monitor yelling ‘Shut the F_ _ _ up Logan’.’ I actually had trouble convincing my husband that it wasn’t me that he heard on the baby monitor because he said that it sounded exactly like my voice.”
     Sometimes, sightings of a doppelgänger are accompanied by voices other than family members. And it seems that some spirits have the ability not only to imitate anyone’s voice, but they can also take on the appearance of anyone they want. 
     A woman from Newtown, Connecticut who lives next to an old abandoned mental institution reported hearing the voice of a little girl in her house. Her father heard the voice as well. “Sometimes I would be in one room,” she said, “and I would hear her talking in another room. One time my brother was getting off the bus and I heard downstairs, as clear as day, a little girl saying, ‘Is he getting off the bus?’. 
     Another time I was down in the basement when I heard footsteps on the wood floors above me, and the sound of a little girl giggling. My dad heard her too, and came down and screamed at the ghost! 
     I’m sure that this girl’s spirit came from Fairfield hills, but I think there was another spirit with her; a non-human spirit that would act as a doppelgänger. My brother said that he would often see me wandering around the yard when I wasn’t even home. One time I was in the basement and I suddenly saw my brother running at me from across the room. Right as he was about to hit me, he vanished. 
     One night I got out of the shower and went into my bedroom. I was sitting on a beanbag chair in my room. The hallway was dark, but I could see the area just outside of it clearly because of the light from my room. I was on my phone, and I looked up and I saw my brother clear as day standing in the hallway just outside of my room. He was bent over and flailing his arms around wildly. It was really weird. I watched him doing this for a good five or ten seconds, and all the while I’m thinking, ‘What is going on? What’s his problem?’ I thought it was just my brother acting goofy. But then I blinked, and he was gone. I ran to the hallway, but there was no one there. It turns out my brother was downstairs the whole time.”
     There is another category of doppelgängers that has nothing at all to do with ghosts or hauntings. It is called ‘bilocation’, and it is often associated with saints and mystics. Bilocation is the simultaneous presence of the same person in two different places. 
     One little known Catholic story of biocation is about the Virgin Mary. “Our Lady of the Pillar” is the name given to the blessed Virgin Mary in the context of the belief that she appeared to the apostle James the Greater while he was preaching in Spain in 40 AD. It is the only instance of Mary exhibiting the mystical phenomenon of bilocation while she was alive on earth.
     Padre Pio is a Catholic saint known for exhibiting stigmata for over 50 years. In Christianity, stigmata are the bodily appearance of wounds, scars, and pain corresponding to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ, such as the hands, wrists and feet. (*) In addition to exhibiting stigmata, Padre Pio was known for his ability to appear in two places at once. In one story, Padre Pio appeared to a family in Flushing, New York. A woman’s grandfather became gravely ill. He went into a coma, and the family stayed by his bedside. One day, a young Capuchin monk dressed in the traditional dark brown robe knocked on the door and said that he had come to pray for their grandfather. This was odd since there were no Capuchin monks in their local parish, or in any other parish in the area. After praying with the family and giving the man his last rites, the monk left. As soon as he left a family member exclaimed, ”Don’t you know who that was? It was Padre Pio. He looked exactly like I remember him when I used to deliver eggs to him in Pietrelcina.”
     Other stories of Padre Pio’s ability to bilocate involve the saint appearing to people and speaking to them before vanishing.
     But Catholic saints are not the only people who seem to have the ability to bilocate. Many prominent Hindu gurus are reported to have this same ability. 
     Of course, good people don’t have the monopoly on biolcation. During the Salem witch trials, many women were accused of appearing to people, either in dreams or in the flesh. And the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley was reported to have appeared to friends and acquaintances when he was actually miles away at the time. Crowley never denied having the ability to bilocate, but he said he was not conscious of it happening. 
     Then, there are doppelgängers who show up in old photographs or paintings who look eerily similar to people from the present. You can find a lot of photos online of famous people who look exactly like people in old tintype photos. Yeah, I know--it’s probably just a coincidence, but seeing some of these photos does make you wonder. One old photograph looks amazingly like Nicholas Cage, and another looks strikingly similar to John Travolta. Justin Timberlake looks exactly like an old-time criminal in a mugshot, and Daniel Radcliffe seems to have a number of people who look like him, including women! 
     I’m no stranger to this phenomenon. I stumbled upon a painting while on a family vacation that left me speechless. My wife and I had taken the kids on a trip down South and we stopped by the Wright Brothers National Memorial Museum in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. We viewed the outdoor stone monuments, then made our way into the museum and viewed the various exhibits which included a wall displaying paintings of famous aviators. My daughter suddenly came running over to me and said, “That lady looks just like Amy!”  At first I looked around the room thinking there was a visitor in the museum who resembled my wife, but my daughter said, “No, the painting!”  I looked and was stunned to see that the woman in the painting bore an uncanny resemblance to my wife. I quickly called her over and asked, “Who does that woman look like?" Without missing a beat my wife said, “She looks like me!”  I took a photo of the painting and it became a topic of conversation for years. 
     I recently came across the photo and decided to see if there were any photos of Louise Thaden online. I figured that the painting might look like my wife, but a photograph probably wouldn’t resemble her. It would be too much of a coincidence. Not so. My wife really does bear an eerie resemblance to the famous aviator. But I’ll take it one step further. Louise Thaden not only looks like my wife, the painting and the photographs of her seem to have my wife’s energy, her personality, her spirit. 
     Now, is this proof that Louise Thaden was actually my wife’s doppelgänger? Maybe not, but it makes me think that, perhaps, each of us actually has a double out there somewhere, either in this time period or from somewhere in the distant past. Or, maybe we are someone’s doppelgänger from the future.
     By the way, if you’re interested in seeing photos of my wife, and of Louise Thaden side-by-side, you can see them by clicking HERE.

     Have you ever had a dream that you remembered for years? I had one as a teenager that I remember to this very day. In the dream, I was walking down a road when I saw someone walking toward me; a boy who looked to be around my age. He was quite a distance away, so I didn’t pay much attention to him, but as he got closer, I realized that he looked exactly like me. When we were within arms-length of one another he stopped and looked at me. We were both amazed. We were dressed alike, looked alike, were the same height, had the same hairstyle--we had the same everything. I said to him, “You look just like me!” and he said, “No, you look just like me!” I said, “That’s impossible. That’s just amazing! You’re me!” “No, you’re me!” he said. We both laughed, then the boy turned and walked with me. The dream cut away to a scene of the two of us walking away down the road together, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, our conversation and laughter fading until the two of us were out of sight.
     I wonder if that boy was actually me in some other dimension or in some other reality--a version of myself living a totally different but parallel life. If so, I wonder if today he remembers a dream he had as a boy when he met himself, and the two of him walked off together laughing and talking and comparing notes about their lives.

Resources
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160712-you-are-surprisingly-likely-to-have-a-living-doppelganger
http://www.francoisbrunelle.com/webn/e-project.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/strangers-who-look-like-twins-im-not-a-lookalike_n_4575750
https://globalnews.ca/news/2300048/your-doppelganger-exists-according-to-science-heres-why/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAcwp-PuiOQ Top 10 Scary Doppelganger Stories
https://www.bustle.com/p/8-creepy-doppelganger-superstitions-that-will-make-you-hope-you-never-meet-your-double-12273817
https://www.martianherald.com/9-mystifying-cases-doppelganger-phenomenon/page/6
https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-blog/5-historical-figures-who-saw-their-doppelganger-and-then-died
https://erenow.net/common/occult-america/3.php
https://www.caccioppoli.com/6%20Examinations%20of%20the%20wounds.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilocation
https://www.businessinsider.com/check-out-these-celebrities-and-their-ridiculous-historical-dopplegangers-2012-8
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/27/dickens-exhibition-spooky-plagiarism-scare
https://www.liveabout.com/true-stories-of-doppelgangers-2593448
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