Newsletter

Three Urban Legends

6/14/2021

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.
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"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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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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The Devil's Footprints

1/8/2021

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All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
~ Robert Frost, “An Old Man’s Winter Night”

Mid-winter in the country is a desolate time of year. Days are short, nights are long, the cold bites through even the warmest clothing, and a deathly quiet blankets the countryside. At this time of year, those who dare to venture outside on cold, clear nights can sometimes walk by the light of the moon shining softly through tree branches, throwing strange shadows on the ground. If there is snow, the fields and forests are bathed in a soft, otherworldly blue glow. But when there is no moon, it’s best to stay indoors because you just don’t know who--or what--may be sharing the darkness with you.
     Today we have the means to chase away the shadows of winter, but before the age of electricity a winter’s night was best left outside, behind tightly locked doors, a fire burning brightly on the hearth to keep the dark from stealing in. But just imagine what the countryside must have looked like at night before the age of electricity--no light pollution from nearby cities, not even the far distant blinking of aircraft lights; just the night and all that comes with it.
     Midwinter daylight has a short lifespan, so in those days people never traveled very far from home after sundown. In fact, most didn’t travel very far from their own front door after dark if they could help it. Farmers finished their work before sunset, took one last look at the farmyard, then retired into their safe, warm homes to spend a quiet evening with family, followed by an early bed, and the promise of an early rise.
     On the night of February 8, 1855, a snowstorm hit the rural countryside of Devon, England. The weather had been particularly harsh that winter--the worst winter that the oldest residents of the town had ever seen--so the storm wasn’t much of a surprise to the folks who lived there. It was so cold that the two nearby rivers, the Exe and Teign, froze over to the point where the townsfolk were able to play games on the ice. So the snow that visited the countryside that night wasn’t unusual or unexpected, but the thing that the snow brought with it was.
     If one rarely ventured out at night even in good weather, you can be sure that few if any risked going out during the storm that bore down on farms, houses, churches and villages that blustery night. The snow began falling at midnight, but towards dawn the temperature rose slightly and there was a brief period of rain. A short time later, the temperature fell once again, and the snow iced over.
     As the citizens of Devon slept safely in their beds, they were totally unaware of the thing that walked past their windows that night. No one heard it coming. No one heard it pass. But in the morning, there was no question about it--something stealthy and silent had visited Devon that night, and although no one saw it or heard it, it certainly left its mark.
     On the morning of February 9, residents across the countryside were greeted with a blanket of iced-over snow that glistened in the morning sun. But there was something else waiting for them in the snow that morning, something so strange that no one had ever seen anything like it before.
     In South Devon, a farmer on his way to check on his cows noticed it right away--tracks in the snow going right past the front windows of his house toward the barn. At first he was just curious. The tracks were definitely made by a biped, but he knew every type of track an animal makes, and these were unlike anything he had ever seen before. Each was approximately 4 inches long, nearly three inches wide, and they were shaped like donkey hooves. The snow was around four inches deep that morning, and the tracks were sunk so low into it that it looked as if whatever had made them had melted the snow as they touched it. And if that weren’t strange enough, the tracks walked in a perfectly straight line. Whatever had walked across his farmyard that night had put one foot directly in front of the other, very different from the way a person, a bear, or some other two footed animal would walk; and certainly not the way a four footed animal would walk.
     The farmer looked off into the distance and saw that the tracks lead straight to his barn. ‘The animals!’ he thought in a panic. He rushed toward the barn following the strange tracks, then stopped and stared in disbelief. The tracks led directly to the barn, but they didn’t turn and go into the barn door where the animals were kept. They headed straight for the side of the barn, then stopped. The farmer looked to the right and left of the tracks to see if they hugged the side of the barn, but they didn’t. They just stopped. Or so it seemed, because as he stood there trying to solve this strange puzzle, he happened to look up. The barn’s roof was covered with snow, and across the top ran a perfectly straight line of hoofprints. Whatever made the prints in the snow didn’t stop when they got to the barn. It seems they walked straight up the side of the barn and across the roof.
     The farmer’s jaw dropped in amazement, and a mounting sense of horror came over him. He opened the barn door and walked carefully through the dark interior, past the cows and the horses in their stalls to the back door. The snow had piled up against the door because of the wind, but he managed to push it open just enough to squeeze through and step outside. He looked to his right. The tracks started up again at the back of the barn right underneath where they ran across the roof, and they continued straight across the barnyard. He followed them with his eyes and saw that they cut straight across the field, their course never deviating an inch, and they continued on and on until they were lost in the distance.
     The mysterious tracks didn’t just end at the edge of the farmer’s property, and they weren't witnessed by just a few people. Groups of people across multiple villages in Devon followed the tracks, and within a few hours of their discovery a number of attempts were made to follow the hoofprints in order to discover what might have made them.
     In Dawlish, a town on the south coast, a group of armed men followed the tracks for five miles, but they were unable to determine their source. At Clyst Saint George in East Devon, several groups of people followed the same strange hoofprints. They reported that the tracks stopped and started suddenly in the middle of fields, as if they were made by a bird, or by some other creature that took flight, then landed and resumed walking. Most groups followed the tracks for two or more miles before turning back. Once all the reports were in, it was determined that the tracks ran for at least 40 miles. Some say they ran as far as 100 miles.
     On the day that the hoofprints were discovered, several people from different parts of Devon made tracings of the mysterious prints, and it was a good thing that they did. Later comparison of the drawings showed that the tracks were nearly identical in size and shape even though they were traced in places that were very far apart from one another, and in different types of terrain such as farms, towns, churches, and fields.
     In addition to tracing the hoofprints, several people measured the prints. The sizes varied, but not by very much. One measurement put the tracks at 3.5 inches long by 2.5 wide. Another measured them at 4 x 2.75 inches. Other measurements suggested that the tracks were narrower, around 1.5 or 2.5 inches wide.
     The stride of the tracks were also measured, and these varied slightly as well. While most were between 8 and 9 inches long, some measured the stride as being 12, 14, or even 16 inches long. In any case, the distance between steps would be considered very small were they made by any animal capable of producing footprints that large.
     When considering these measurements, it’s important to remember that the people who made them weren’t scientists. Some may have measured the stride from the toe of one print to the heel of another. Others may be toe-to-toe measurements, or heel-to-heel measurements. Still others may have simply estimated the length of the strides, but submitted them as actual measurements; so it’s impossible to say for sure how long the strides actually were.
     The description of the prints were also noted by several people, and even though they came from different parts of Devon, their appearance were, for the most part, remarkably similar. Phrases used to describe them were: “like a donkey’s foot”, “closely resembled a donkey’s shoe”, “Cloven, like a donkey’s”, “the perfect impression of a donkey’s hoof”, and “like a donkey shoe, sharply defined”.
     Those who described the prints slightly differently described them as: “some whole, some cloven”, “claw or toe marks”, “marks of toes and pads”, “in the shape of a small hoof containing marks of claws”, and “like the cloven hoof of a calf”.
     It’s worth noting that some described the marks as being cloven--divided into two parts--”like donkey hooves” or “like calves hooves”. In reality, neither a donkey nor a calf has cloven hooves. This might sound like a minor detail, but it’s actually quite important. If some tracks were cloven and others not, then some of the tracks might have been unrelated to the event. The investigation of the tracks went on for days, so it would be natural for a number of animals to, in a sense, “pollute the crime scene”.
     It’s also possible that just one creature made the tracks, but that the overnight rain and refreezing distorted some so that some were whole while others appeared cloven. What’s more, very early on people associated the tracks with the devil who is said to have cloven hooves. So some may have allowed their superstitions to influence their observations. Others may have simply lied about the cloven hooves hoping to further the mystery of the tracks.
     The mysterious footprints that appeared overnight were truly vast in number. A resident from East Devon wrote, “There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where these footprints were not observable, and in this parish he appears to have jumped about with inexpressible activity.” On the south coast of Devon, one witness reported that “his footprints were traced through the greater part of town.”
     There’s a good reason why people thought that the tracks might have been made by the Devil himself. The creature who made them seemed to possess the supernatural ability to scale walls, haystacks, and walk across rooftops. The hoof-prints were found in fields, gardens, roads, on housetops, windowsills, and on top of haystacks.
     The being that made the tracks also seemed to have the ability to walk up to the very edge of an obstruction, and to appear on the other side without climbing over it. One report said that the tracks stopped at the edge of a 14-foot high wall, and then appeared on the other side as if the creature had leapt over it, or walked through it. In another instance, the tracks were followed to the edge of a haystack where they stopped completely. There were no marks on top of the haystack, yet the tracks resumed their course on the other side.
     In the port town of Exmouth, one man reported that “there were marks in the middle of a field, insulated without any approach or retreat.” In the same town, another resident reported that, “the footprints came up to the front garden to within a few feet of the house, stopped abruptly, and began again at the back within a few feet of the building.” Because such feats would be impossible for any living creature, the idea that the tracks could have been made by an ordinary animal were seriously called into question.
     People weren’t simply puzzled or amused by the mysterious footprints that were found across Devon that morning; many were truly horror-struck. Soon after the discovery of the tracks, the Illustrated London News received letters from a number of readers who expressed just how terrified some residents were. One correspondent wrote, “laborers, their wives and children, old crones, and trembling old men dread to stir out after sunset, or to go half a mile into lanes or byways on a call or message, under the conviction that this was the Devil’s walk, and no other, and that it was wicked to trifle with such a manifest proof of the Great Enemy’s immediate presence.”
     Although the event was covered in many local newspapers for months after the actual event, the most valuable resource about the ‘Devil’s Hoofmarks’ is a contemporary collection of documents assembled by the Reverend H.T. Ellacombe from Clyst Saint George, Devon. These include a number of letters written to Ellacombe by friends, the draft of a letter sent to the Illustrated London News, a letter from the Reverend G.M. Musgrave, and actual tracings of the hoofmarks made on the spot. There are also letters with references to the tracks being found on the outskirts of the city of Exeter, the furthest north that the tracks were reported.
     In his own writing, Ellecombe said that a number of tracks were found on the grounds of his rectory. He recorded the weather conditions on the night that the tracks were made, and wrote how his dog was barking and acting strangely that night. He also described the marks in the snow as all being similar in shape and size.
     Ellacombe also made note of a conversation he had with a group of men who had attempted to track whatever had made the marks. The group obtained samples of droppings found alongside the trail which were described as “four oblong globes of whitish excrement the size of a large grape alongside the tracks”. A sample of the droppings was sent to acclaimed naturalist Richard Owen, but he never replied to the inquiry. Although the droppings were found near the tracks, it’s entirely possible that they were unrelated to the creature who made them.
     The tracings of the tracks preserved among the Ellacombe papers are perhaps the most valuable piece of evidence. They show the exact shape and size of the tracks, and they included marks that the vicar believed to have been left by claws.
     The drawings are interesting because they show that the tracks were not uniformly shaped. Some appear to be roughly horseshoe shaped, while others seem to be missing a bit of the rear part resulting in a cloven shaped print. This inconsistency seems to be the result of the melting and refreezing of the snow.
     Another important piece of contemporary documentation is a series of letters that were written to and published in the Illustrated London News. The letters were written by William D’Urban who later became the first curator of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum at Exeter. Although he was just 19-years-old at the time that he wrote the letters, he was an experienced hunter who was, in his own words, ‘much experienced in tracking wild animals and birds upon the snow.’
     In his letter to the newspaper, D’Urban wrote, “At present, no satisfactory solution has been given. No known animal could have traversed this extent of country in one night, besides having to cross an estuary of the sea two miles broad. Neither does any known animal walk in a line of single footeps, not even man.”
     Later in this same letter, D’Urban rejected the idea that the overnight thawing refreezing might have distorted the prints, pointing out that “on the morning that the tracks were observed, the snow bore the fresh marks of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and men clearly defined. Why, then, should a continuous track, far more clearly defined--so clearly even that the raising in the centre of the frog of the foot could be plainly seen--why then should this particular mark be the only one which was affected by the atmosphere, and all the others left as they were?” For those unacquainted with the anatomy of an animal’s hoof, the “frog of the foot” D’Urban mentions in his letter refers to a triangular-shaped mark on the bottom of the hoof extending midway from the heel toward the toe.

The Theories
     As soon as the tracks in the snow were discovered, people began to formulate theories about their sources. Many believed they were the work of the Devil, and the tracks were early on called, The Devil’s Footprints, The Devil’s Hoofprints and The Devil’s Hoofmarks. Of course, not everyone believed this. Many attributed the tracks to animals, the main suspects being the heron, badger, mouse, rat, otter, swan, kangaroo, cat, wolf, hare, flocks of birds, or a donkey. Unfortunately, upon close consideration, every animal-related theory falls apart in one way or another.
     Since the majority of people described the tracks as looking remarkably like donkey hoofprints, a donkey was the first suspect. Although some of the trails might have later been left by a donkey or a pony, many cannot have been. One problem with the donkey theory is the observation that D’Urban made--that the tracks were made, for the most part, in a perfectly straight line with one foot being put directly in front of the other. Donkey’s leave tracks where the feet are side-by-side, and the fact that the tracks were found on the tops of buildings puts to rest the theory that the lowly donkey was the culprit.
     Another animal suspect was the badger who, because of the way it walks, also leaves tracks that look as if they were made by a biped. But the badger theory is dismissed by animal experts because a single badger simply could not have traveled 40 miles or more in a single night. In addition, when a badger stops to rest, its tracks clearly show it to be a four-footed animal. But most importantly, badger tracks are not hoofed or cloven. Their tracks show clear toes and claws. But even if a badger left the tracks in snow, and they were partially melted and refrozen, this would not have resulted in a uniform set of hoof-like tracks extending as far as 100 miles.
     The most creative animal theory at the time was that the tracks were made by an escaped kangaroo. There was a pair of kangaroos kept at a private menagerie in Exmouth, but there was no evidence that they ever escaped. What’s more, kangaroo tracks simply don’t resemble hoofmarks or cloven tracks, and unlike the tracks discovered in the snow that morning, their stride is very long. In addition, even two kangaroos couldn’t have left all of the tracks found on the morning of February 9. Although a kangaroo might be able to jump over a high wall and leave tracks on both sides without disturbing the snow on top, there are so many holes in the kangaroo theory that no one takes it seriously.
     An escaped monkey was also suggested because of the ability of the creature to scale walls and walk on roofs, but no single monkey could have left all of the tracks, and monkey tracks don’t resemble those found that morning. What’s more, there were no reports of an escaped monkey anywhere in Devon, so that theory has also been put to rest.
     A hopping rodent, such as a mouse, could have been responsible for some of the tracks, especially if they thawed and froze over; but proponents of the rodent theory are unable to explain why large numbers of mice or rats would have hopped such long distances rather than walked. And if a number of rodents were hopping along, they surely wouldn’t have all hopped together without at some point breaking off and making a number of trails.
     If it were a single mouse or rat who made the tracks, it is seriously doubtful that it could have covered the distance of 100 miles, or even the 5 miles that one party followed the footprints. And while it’s possible that rodents could have climbed houses and rooftops, there seems to be no good reason why they would want to. They would more likely run along the edge of a house, in which case they would have left tracks showing that they had done so.
     The theory that flocks of birds touched down repeatedly in a single line, and in doing so created a long line of uniform tracks isn’t worth exploring. Likewise, a swan or some other single type of bird simply couldn’t have left that many tracks in such a short span of time, and bird footprints don’t even vaguely resemble the hoofmarks found in the snow in Devon that morning.
     A farmer in Dawlish reported that the tracks his cat left in the snow that night were found to be half-melted in the morning leaving them ‘in the shape of a small hoof, with still the impression of a cat’s claws enclosed.’ Although cats were certainly plentiful in Devon, there must be some doubt as to whether the thawing and refreezing of a single cat’s tracks could have made so uniform a trail of identical hoofprints over so vast a distance.
     Several non-animal theories have been suggested and quickly discarded. One was that a balloon flew over Devon that morning, and that a rope with a weight that resembled a hoofprint was repeatedly dropped in a straight line across the countryside, and on top of houses. Why anyone would risk their lives being out in a snowstorm in a balloon is beyond me; and a rope being dropped from a moving balloon would surely have left drag marks in the snow, something that was not reported anywhere in Devon.
     Another theory is that a freak weather phenomenon was responsible for the tracks. In 1952, a man from Scotland named J. Allan Rennie claimed to have witnessed large globules of water falling from the sky. He said that one even struck him in the face, and that these large drops of water left tracks in the snow. But meteorologists say that it would be impossible for any known weather phenomenon to produce such tracks, and that even if these blobs of water were some sort of ultra-rare weather event, there is simply no way that they could have left uniformly shaped tracks over such a vast distance.
     Animal theories aside, one of the most outlandish theories about the source of the mysterious tracks in Devon was proposed by author Manfri Wood in his autobiography In the Life of a Romany Gypsy (1973). According to Wood, the footprints were the result of a hoax by Romany tribes. He claimed that after 18 months of careful planning, more than 400 pairs of specially-made stilts and boots were used to leave the trail in an attempt to scare away rival Gypsy tribes who were fervent believers in devils. The scheme’s success depended upon the tracks being left in inaccessible and bizarre places, which is why they were found on rooftops, windowsills, and on opposite sides of high walls.
     One problem with the Gypsie theory is that while it is certainly possible that four or five hundred of them could have left all of the trials found in Devon, how in God’s name could that many people have walked through so many farms, towns, private gardens, and across so many rooftops without having been seen or heard? Another hole in this theory is that in order to make it look like the work of the Devil, the Gypsies were supposed to have made tracks in a single line without deviating or making any detours around houses, churches or barns. The footsteps were to go straight up one wall, over the roof, and down the other wall. In reality, the footsteps reported in Devon sometimes appeared disorderly.
     It is highly unlikely that a well rehearsed group of Gypsies were responsible for the hoofprints found in Devon. It’s more likely that the Romanies came up with the idea of a “Devil’s Walk” after hearing the story of the footprints, and that they added the story to their traditions rather than being responsible for the event themselves.
     While it’s doubtful that the footprints were the work of a troupe of Gypsies, it is almost certain that at least some of the tracks were the result of hoaxes after the first reports of the hoofprints were publicized. Some prints were discovered well after February 9, and based on where they showed up, they seemed to have been staged. In Topsham, for example, prints appeared five days later than they did in other parts of the county. Some crossed the churchyard and led to the door of the vestibule. Similarly, tracks were found in Dawlish that lead directly from the vicarage to the vestry door and left marks all over the churchyard and between the graves.
     Hoaxers may have been responsible for the creation of faux footprints after February 9, but it’s impossible for them to have made all of the tracks the night they first appeared. There were so many tracks over such a large area of Devon that a conspiracy of dozens if not hundreds would have to have been involved.
     Of course, there are other theories about the Devil’s footprints, one more far fetched than the next. Author George Lyall, for example, suggested that they were made by a laser beam shot from a UFO as a measuring device. However, the meandering tracks found in Devon don’t seem to have been made in such a manner. Although some described the tracks as looking as if they were made by a hot object that melted the snow, they were definitely made by something solid coming into contact with the snow rather than a laser beam melting the snow.
     More than one person has suggested that the hoofprints were made by some sort of a water monster due to the proximity of some of the tracks to the sea. Although it’s an odd theory, it does have some substance to it. In 1840, small horse-shoe looking tracks were found in the snow on the uninhabited Kerguelen Island in the Antarctic. In the book Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions (vol. 1, p. 87) Captain Sir James Clark Ross wrote, “Of land animals we saw none; and the only traces we could discover of there being any on this island were the singular footsteps of a pony or ass, found by the party detached for surveying purposes.”
     Ross recorded the footprints as being “3 inches in length and 2 inches in breadth, having a small and deeper depression on each side, and shaped like a horseshoe.” The tracks were tracked for a distance in the newly fallen snow, but they were lost on a large space of rocky ground that was free from snow.
     Though it’s possible that the tracks seen on the island were made by some unknown sea creature, Captain Ross himself suggested that they may very well have been made by a donkey or other such animal that was cast ashore from a wrecked vessel. What’s more, Ross was in England at the time of the Devil’s Footprints panic, and he never came forward with the idea that the tracks he saw on the island might be related to the tracks in Devon.
     When the residents of Devon looked out their doors and saw the hoofprints in the snow, it was clear that no one had seen anything like them before. If they had, no one would have thought twice about them, and no one would have taken the time to investigate them. And here we are, one hundred fifty-five years later, still puzzled--and more than a little spooked--by the Devil’s Footprints.
     What do I think it was that made the Devil’s Footprints that night? To answer that question, I have to imagine that I am the farmer who discovered the tracks in the snow, and who followed them to his barn, and who looked with amazement as they continued up the side of the barn and across the rooftop. If I was that farmer, I would be familiar with all kinds of animal tracks, and having lived through decades of winters, I would also have been familiar with the look of tracks that thawed slightly and then froze over.
     When I try to answer the question of who or what made the tracks, I also imagine that I am one of the town residents who followed the hoofprints right to the edge of a 14-foot high stone wall where they stopped, only to appear on the other side.
     When trying to answer the question of who or what made the tracks, I also imagine that I’m one of the people who opened their second or third story window that morning to look at the footprints in the snow far below, only to find that they were also imprinted in the snow on their windowsill.
     When I put myself in the shoes of the people who witnessed the Devil’s Footprints that cold, glistening morning, I can only think that whatever made them was not of this earth. I believe that something inhuman walked across Devon in the middle of the snowstorm that night, leaving hoofprints in the snow.
     One theory that I would like to propose is that the Devil’s Footprints might have been made by the same creature that was seen in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966 known as The Mothman. Witnesses described the Mothman as a seven-foot tall flying man with large, glowing red eyes and ten-foot wings. There were reports that the creature left “strange footprints”, though these were never photographed or even described. But a Mothman-like creature who could both walk and fly could very well have made the hoofprints in the snow in Devon the night of February 8, 1855. Such a creature could walk across rooftops, could fly over walls and haystacks, and could leave tracks that start in one part of a field, and resume a great distance later. I would be curious to know if there are any legends of such a creature in England.
     I’ve know about the story of the Devil’s Footprints so many years, and it has left such an impression on me, that to this day on the morning after each snowfall, I have to admit that I find myself half expecting--half hoping--to find a line of mysterious hoofprints running in a straight line across my backyard; over the snow covered wheelbarrow, over the roof of the shed, running on and on, and disappearing into the distance.


Resources

https://www.stitcher.com/show/strange-animals-podcast/episode/episode-039-the-devils-footprints-52036130
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Footprints
https://www.darkhistories.com/the-devils-footprints-of-1855/

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Library Lecture Stories 2020

11/1/2020

1 Comment

2020 has been a challenging year for all of us, to say the least, so it was a real pleasure to be able to give my annual October library lecture series virtually this year thanks to the following libraries: Kent Library, Reed Memorial Library, New Britain Library, Mahopac Library, Danbury Library, Oxford Library, Somers Library, Seymour Library, The Mark Twain Library, and Lewisboro Library.
A tremendous thank you to all of the librarians who made the lectures possible, and to all of the attendees who shared their true ghost stories this year.
So without further ado, please enjoy the following 26 true, ghostly, chilling, thrilling, fascinating, uplifting, spooky, tales.

     The house we lived in when I was four years old was a Cape Cod style house. On one side of the upper floor of the house was a nursery, so it had a crib in it, and it was also a play area. On the other side was my sister’s bedroom.
I was upstairs playing in the playroom waiting for my best friend AnneMarie to come play with me because we had a play-date. While I was waiting and playing with toys, I saw her outside the window of the playroom. There was bright, bright white light all around her, and she was illuminated. It was this light that caught my attention, and she was just standing there in the window with all this white light around her. She was standing outside the window looking in, and 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 down to tell my parents what had just happened, that I 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, my mother 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, 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 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, and that she said that she couldn’t play with me anymore.
     It was such a powerful memory, but I never really thought about it or talked about it again until I was a teenager and I asked my mom if it really happened or if I just imagined it and my parents sat down and told me the actual story of the events.
     It’s funny, because my first reaction was probably like just a little kid. I was angry with her 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.
_____

I was taking a tour of the palace of Versailles in France. I was in the hall of mirrors and I let the tour group go ahead and I stayed for a short while in the hall by myself. One side of the hall is all mirrors, if I remember correctly, and the other side is all gorgeous windows. There are chandeliers hanging in the middle, and a few furniture pieces.
At one point I looked into the mirrors. I stood a few feet away from a mirror looking at myself, and then I noticed that a man was standing a few feet behind me. He looked like a man from the time of the palace, say from the 1600’s or 1700’s. He had long black curly hair, and was dressed in the clothing of that era, and I was really astonished. I was thinking, ‘Is this guy in the hallway in costume or something?’ I really studied him for a short while. It must have been just for a few seconds.
He was a young man about 30 years old and very good looking. I was looking at him in the mirror, but he didn’t seem to see me. I could see him, but his eyes never really noticed me. It was as if he was also, in the old days at one point, standing in that hall and looking at himself in the mirror as I had been doing. I could see he was just studying himself. He had a sort of a sombre expression. I turned around to see who he was, and to maybe talk to him, and there was no one behind me. I turned back to look into the mirror, and the reflection of the young man was gone. Then I quickly went ahead to follow the tour where they had proceeded beyond that hallway.
_____

I was on the Italian Island of Capri. It was New Year’s eve, and I went on a hike to the top of a mountain with my boyfriend to see a palace that emperor Tiberius had built. We did it during the day of New Year’s eve while the museum of that palace was opened. There were very few people there because it was winter and New Year’s eve day, so there were hardly any tourists.
We separated, and there was just me and two or three other people in a huge area. He went to look around at something else and I stayed by myself and was looking from high up on the hill down the pathway that we had walked up to to come up to this palace. It’s along the side of a mountain and it’s quite a steep walk. And I saw an apparition, I believe, of a group of people in Roman clothing about half-way up that pathway. There was a man on a litter, one of those carry-litters where someone was sitting in a chair being carried up the mountain, I guess by slaves. There were about 12 people. It wasn’t a big party, but it was the man sitting in the chair on the litter being carried, several carriers, a couple of guards or something, and some other guy walking behind. They also had a few donkeys. I watched it for quite a while, and then I decided I’ve got to run and find my boyfriend so he could check this out. I ran to find him and I dragged him quickly back to where I had been standing by a fence overlooking that pathway, and of course there was nothing at all on the hill. When we went home we walked down the same way on that pathway that leads up to the palace, but I saw nothing.
_____

I’m a real estate appraiser, and a few years ago I appraised a house in Weston. I knew that it was vacant because I was there the day after a blizzard, and it hadn’t been shoveled. So, it was a vacant house, it was on the market, but nobody was there.
     My process as an appraiser is that I’ll walk all the way around the outside taking pictures of the exterior, and then I start in the basement, work my way up to the attic, work in circles. So I always have the same process in every house so I don’t skip any rooms, so I don’t miss anything. 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.
     So I went down to the basement and started taking pictures. 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. So one of the pictures I took was of the oil tank to make sure there was no leaking. I wanted to document that in case somebody came back and said, ‘Hey, the oil tank is leaking. You should have caught that.’ I can go to my folder and say, ‘I did take a picture and here you go.’ Well, in this case, over the oil tank was a shelf. In the middle of the shelf was a resin statue of two angels, and they were hugging, but one of the angels was missing its head. So, I’m framing the picture to make sure that there’s no leaking in the oil tank. I’ve got everything in the frame. 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 all the way to the side of the shelf, and was so close to the edge it was about to fall off.
     But it gets better. I get back to my office. I’m pulling comps, and I’m trying to find houses that are similar to this to find out what the value is, and I’m coming up about $30,000 short of all the other comps that are in similar condition and in similar location, recent sales, etc. And 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 got a deal and I wanted to know why. I ended up calling the real estate agent and I said, “What’s going on? Was there some reason this wasn’t an arms-length transaction?” She said, “Well, no but ... I mean, you do know that the last owner killed himself in the basement, right?” True story! Every appraiser I know has ghost stories. That is a true Connecticut ghost story.
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This happened when I was about 12-years-old or so when I was in summer camp in Massachusetts. I’ve always been interested in religion since I was a little kid. I used to like to follow other people’s religions. Just learn about it, just experience it, learn about it. One night we were in a tent. There were just a few of us. No more than four in a tent. I remember going to sleep in the tent and nothing else was happening, and when I woke up I saw the Virgin Mary in the tent in the upper corner of the tent. I just saw her there, and she was looking straight. I saw that her face was very, very vivid. It stayed with me. I said to the person next to me, the other camper, I said, “Do you see the Virgin Mary up there?” and they said, “No, I don’t see anything.” I don’t know why I could see her, but I kept seeing her. I fell asleep, then I woke up startled and there she was again. I just saw her, and it was extremely real. I don’t care what anybody says to me, she was there.

Barry: Did you see her full body, or did you just see her face?

Woman: It was probably from her chest up. But her face was there, and every little detail was there.

Barry: Was she looking at you?

Woman: I don’t know as much as at me, but just there. I don’t know if she was actually looking at me. I don’t remember that part, but I do remember seeing her.

Barry: Was there any feeling associated with her when you saw her?

Woman: Yeah. I felt very eerie about it. Like, ‘Why am I seeing this?’. I went back to sleep, and then I woke up and there she was again. I was like, ‘Oh God …”

Barry: I take it that this wasn’t your faith?

Woman: No it wasn’t. But it was the Virgin Mary, I’m pretty sure it was.

Barry: So, you didn’t grow up Catholic?

Woman: I grew up Orthodox Jewish, but I really think it was the Virgin Mary. I just think it was her.
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This is actually my father’s story. He’s Native American, and it happened when he was about 13 or 14 years old. One day his dad took him to a yard sale, and my father sat down in a recliner chair that the people were selling. He always had a habit of sliding his hands down the sides to see how much money he could pocket, so he slid his hand around the sides of the cushion; but instead of finding money, he pulled out a tomahawk! He slipped it into his jacket and brought it home.
     Now this was back in the 1940’s or early 1950s and they didn’t have a bathroom, they had an outhouse. Between the house and the outhouse was an old T-shaped clothes line. That night my father had to go to the bathroom, so he started walking out and he saw a shadow disappear behind the clothesline on his way to the outhouse. He said that he did what he had to do right then, and then went back into the house.
     The first thing he thought of was the tomahawk, so when he got inside the house he gave it to his cousin. She was in the kitchen doing dishes, and she saw a hand outside on the screen right in front of where she was doing the dishes. She let out a scream and everybody came running. They all went outside and walked around the house but nothing was there. My father immediately thought again about the tomahawk, so he ran and grabbed it from where his cousin left it on the kitchen counter. He opened the back door and just chucked it. He didn’t overhand throw it like a baseball. He just tossed it out the back door, so it didn’t go very far. He went to bed, and when he got up the next morning he went out and looked all over his backyard but he could not find that tomahawk anywhere. They never found it ever again. He said that he felt that the Native American it had belonged to had passed, and must have decided that he needed to come back for his tomahawk. He needed that in the afterlife, so he came and got it.
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     I’m not the type of person who picks up on things. I’m usually kind of oblivious. But about ten years ago I had gone over to my mom’s house and she was complaining that all of her plants were dying and she’s been getting sick, and that everything was just off. I was coming home from work in the city and she said, “Your aunt just brought some holy water. Could you just say some prayers around the house? She can’t do it because she doesn’t feel well.” I was like, “Well, what do you want me to do?” So, I did as she said.
     I went around the house, everything was fine. I went down into the basement and put the holy water around the basement, then started coming up the stairs. All of a sudden I started feeling like a pulling on my body and my face, a downward pulling. By the time I got to the top of the stairs I was kind of nauseous. I sat down and thought, ‘I feel off, I feel weird’ and I started kind of shaking a little. I was like, ‘My God!’ I had no idea what was going on. My mom lived by the water so he said, “Let’s go to the beach. Let’s see if the water helps you.” It was early summer, so I put my feet in the water and started feeling better instantly.
     Afterwards I was trying to figure out what had happened and I found out that my mom had been storing some furniture in the basement for a friend who was in a transition. I was telling a friend about the reaction I had in the basement and she said, “Well, you know that that person is cursed, don’t you?” I’m like, “What do you mean? This is the year 2010”. They said, “Well, this person is from Latin America, and they had some voodoo done on them. It was pretty bad apparently. I think it was his ex-wife that did this, but I’m not sure.” So maybe this person’s furniture was also cursed and I somehow picked up on it when I went down into the basement.
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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. During the battle, the Confederates took over and they were using the attic to shoot at the Confederate soldiers’ snipers. When the sharp-shooters were killed in battle.
     The room that I was in, The Sweeney Room, is probably one of the most active rooms in that hotel. What you can hear is dragging back-and-forth in the attic. I heard it that night. 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 said that guests often hear footsteps in the attic, but I didn’t hear them.
     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. The electricity on my phone charger kept getting unplugged throughout the night.
     When I was going in I took a video. I didn’t notice it at first, but you see an orb for about five seconds moving around the bottom, and then moving into the bathroom. You can actually see it in the bathroom mirror. It was probably one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been to. I’m pretty sensitive to things myself, and it was a scary place.
     I also visited the battlefields in Gettysburg, and I got an overwhelming smell of death on one of the battlefields. 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.” My friend said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “I can smell the guy who was just over here, and he was over a hundred feet away from where we had been standing.”
     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.
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     When I was around 17-years-old I had a really close group of friends. We all grew up together since we were in kindergarten, and at this point we were in high school in our junior or senior year.
     One night we were at my friend’s house. Her mom had passed away about ten years earlier in a fire in the house that my friend still lived in. So, we were all at the house and we got out an Ouija board. I think it was already in the house. She had two older brothers, and I think they might have had it and that’s why it was there so we decided to use it.
     We lived in a town where all the houses are really old, and there’s a lot of history in that town. It’s a really small town. So generations went before us in the same houses that we all lived in, so there was already a lot of history there to begin with. There were always things going on in that house. I was never comfortable spending the night there because it was just really, really creepy. A door would close every night at the same time by itself. I think it was the bathroom door right next to her bedroom. It would close every night in the middle of the night at some specific time of night. Her mom passed away in the front bedroom, and so nobody ever used that bedroom. It kind of became like the room nobody goes in.
    So anyway, we brought out the Ouija board and thought we’d try it. There were four of us with our hands on the planchette, and there were three people sitting on the side. They didn’t want to participate, and there wasn’t enough room because the room was small. It started off with the planchette moving in a figure-eight like it always does, and we started asking it questions. We first asked questions that we thought our friends weren’t going to know the answers to. We were testing each other to make sure that no one was cheating. It started off slow. We started asking it questions. We started with basic questions first like, “Who’s here?”, “Who are you?”, “Is so-and-so here?”, “Is somebody else here?”
     After a while we tried to get in contact with my friend’s mom who had passed away in the house in the fire. We were teenagers, and she wanted to talk to her mom, so we thought maybe we could get to her mom. Clearly we never got through to her mom, but we got through to something else because that Ouija board gave us answers that have come true even until today.
     What blew our minds was that we had to ask it something that nobody else knew, and that nobody could figure out in a really quick fragment of time. There were lots of bookshelves in the room where we were doing this Ouija board in, so we said just at random, “How many books are in this room?” and it gave us a number. We counted the books in the room and it was exact. It told us the exact number of books in the room.
     As typical teenage girls, we asked, “Who am I going to marry?” “How many kids am I going to have?” “What are the initials of the person I’m going to be with?” I personally asked it that question, and the answer it gave me actually did come out to be true. I have twin boys, and the initials were the person that they were born with. So, I don’t know how to explain it because at the time, I didn’t know anybody who had those initials. And then we went on to ask it when we would die. Like, we went really far into the water!
     I’m still best friends with this person, and we still talk about it today. I was just talking about it again today to her. We still don’t know exactly who we contacted on the board that night, but that was it, and after that we didn’t mess with the Ouija board anymore.
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   This story happened right after my father passed away, and after my friend’s boyfriend also had passed away. The two of us went on a trip to Puerto Rico together, and we stayed at her grandfather’s house through the weekend.
     We were both sleeping in the same bed in the guest room, and for whatever reason we both woke up at the same time in the middle of the night and we saw a black, smoky shadow. It was kind of long and billowey, and it was just kind of like moving at the foot of the bed, about six feet above the bed, and it seemed to be looking at us. It didn’t have a face or anything, it was just a dark thing.
     I looked at my friend and said, “Do you see that?”
     “Yeah,” she said, “do you see that too?”
     “What do you see?” I asked her.
     “It’s a big, black, billowey, smokey looking figure,” she said.
“That’s the exact same thing I’m seeing,” I said
     I jumped out of the bed and turned the light on and it disappeared. We both saw the exact same thing in real time, both looking at it at the same time. We initially felt like it was either my father or her boyfriend. They had just passed away within the same week of each other. But we were never really sure what it was; if it was a ghost or what it could have been. But it was really terrifying.
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     Some of my family members live in New York City, and when I was about 5-years-old they took me to visit the Morris Jumel Mansion. My aunts and I were talking about the trip about 20 years later and I said, “Oh, I really hated that place.” They said, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, I can remember being in the attic and I was very frightened. I would never go back there.” They told me that there were supposedly ghosts in the attic, and the day that we had visited the mansion they had actually brought a medium/channeler in. Everybody was supposed to leave the place, all the people who came in for the day, but for whatever reason we were in the attic when they ushered everyone out, so we didn’t end up leaving.
     To this day, I remember being there, I just don’t remember why I was afraid. But my aunts told me that while we were there, the medium went into a trance and started speaking French.
I can tell you that I was there. I can tell you that I WAS afraid of the place, and that I never wanted to go back. But I don’t remember it actually happening.
     I have to say, there is lore about the Jumel Mansion. Eliza Jumel was married to Aaron Burr, and his ghost is supposed to be down in the district down near Wall Street. I did look into it after my aunts told me this, and apparently there supposedly is a ghost in the mansion, and Madam Jumel was from France.

[Note: As of 2019, The Morris-Jumel Mansion offered Ghost Tours twice a month. You can read more about the haunting in this article:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunting-ghosts-at-morris-jumel-mansion-paranormal-investigator-vincent-carbone/]
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I had gone on a vacation with a friend of mine. We each had our own rooms at the Skyranch Lodge in Sedona, Arizona. When I got there and got to my room I was absolutely exhausted. And I went and I sat down on the end of my bed. I was just sort of sitting there, just sort of meditating trying to get myself together to go to bed, and I felt someone sit down right next to me. Literally felt the bed indent. I looked over to see if there was an indentation, but there wasn’t. But I didn’t feel anything that was a bad spirit per se. I didn’t feel that it was there to harm me or anything, but it did frighten me.
     So, after that I got ready, went to bed, got in bed, put the sheets up, and someone sat down right there on the side of the bed again. It sat right on the side of me where I was laying, near where my waist was. I felt the whole bed, just like a man, a large man just sat down there. I could feel it go in again. And it really, really frightened me this time. But I was just too tired, and I just took the sheet, put it over my head and said, “I am really tired. You are not invited. I need you to leave. I know you don’t mean to harm me, but you are not invited. I need you to leave.” And after that, I was there for five days and I never had anything else happen.

[Note: The Sky Ranch Lodge is reported to be haunted. You can read about it here https://www.weirdfresno.com/2011/10/ghosts-and-legends-of-sierra-sky-ranch.html]
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     These were actually recorded by one of my grandfather’s siblings, and they both took place in the old farm house they grew up in in Laceyville, Pennsylvania. One story is that frequently, family members were wakened in the middle of the night by a cat batting a marble down the hallway-- uncarpeted--until it reached the stairs and then the marble would bounce down the stairs. But they never had a cat, and they never found a marble. So, that was weird.
     The other story is about my great Aunt, the youngest of the family. Over the dresser in her bedroom there hung a mirror. It was just a kind of conventional, not very big mirror. One night she was awakened and screamed because of a thud in her room. The family ran in and they found the mirror laying in front of the dresser. The nail in the wall was intact, the wire that hung it was not damaged, and nothing on top of her dresser was disturbed. So, they carefully hung it back up. It happened again at least once, and then finally one night there was a huge crash. The mirror was across the room in pieces. But again, the nail on the wall was still fine, the wire that hung it had not broken, the piece with the wire was still fine, and nothing on the dresser had been disturbed.
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     When I was about six-years-old, my father used to go to work at about 4:30 in the morning, and what he would do is he’d carry me in from my bed to sleep with my mom. He’d put me back in with her so I could sleep in later. One morning I got up. The sun was rising and I had to use the bathroom. I walked all the way to the other end of our apartment, went to the bathroom, and when I came out of the bathroom I saw my father. It was about 7:00 in the morning, and I said, “Hi daddy! Where are you going?” He said to me, “I’m going to work now.” I said, “OK. Have a good day daddy. Bye!” I walked back into the bedroom with my mom into her bed and she said, “Sarah, who were you talking to?” and I said, “I was saying goodbye to daddy. He just left for work.”
     Now, the main entrance that we had, if you left the house you would lock it from the outside. So when my father left for work, he’d wake my mom up so she could lock it from the inside because it didn’t have a deadbolt or anything like that that you could slide from either side. So my mom gets up, she looks and the door is still locked like she had locked it after he left. We still don’t know what I saw, who I saw leaving our apartment, or how the door became locked from the inside and not the outside.

    I have another story. In 2017 my family moved here to New Britain, and we went to an establishment down the street from us for some pizza. The owner of the restaurant told us that paranormal activity frequently occured in his establishment. We were like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Well, one day my mom and I were sitting there having some appetizers. It’s was just her and I and the owner in the restaurant. It wasn’t a windy day, there weren’t any windows open. All of a sudden, the door from the basement opened up, and then shut all by itself. No one was there. It was really weird.
     The restaurant owner has pictures on his security cameras, of shadows, of men’s faces, of women’s faces. He’s heard voices and everything. So after seeing that door open and close by itself, I’m like, ‘OK, I believe you now!’
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     Many years ago I was in a newly-single, providing-for-my-children, no-income situation. My father gave me a one hundred dollar bill, and he said, “I want you to always keep this with you in case you’re ever without money, you’ll know you always have this money.” Twenty-five years later I had a great job and I gave my father back the hundred dollar bill. I said, “I’m good now.”
     About ten years later, my dad passed away and I was in the process of cleaning his house. I was going through his desk and looking through things. He was a local deputy sheriff, and I just happened to pick up a folder where he kept his badges. I opened it up and I saw something sticking out from one of the compartments. I pulled it out, and it was the one hundred dollar bill he had given me thirty-five years earlier!
     I think that was his sign that he was there with me because right after that, that same day, I was taking my laundry downstairs into the basement. As I walked down the stairs I felt something grab hold of my ankles and I stopped because they were old, old cellar stairs. It was a very old, hundred-year-old house. So I stopped and stepped back and I looked, and my feet were right on the edge of the stairs. If I hadn’t felt that on my ankle I would have fallen down the stairs.
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A 12-year-old girl shared the following story, and her parents were on-hand to corroborate the stories and to provide further details.

Girl: When I was about four years old, I was walking in the hallway between my parent’s room and my room, I saw a cowboy in the corner! I took a picture of it, and my parents were very shocked. The figure actually appeared in the picture that I took. It was very, very shocking to my parents. I didn’t really understand that much of what was going on when I was younger, but I knew that it was a ghost.

Father: She actually walked into the room and said, “There’s a cowboy in the hallway”. So my wife and I were kind of joking around and said to her, “OK, take this camera and take a picture of him.” She went into the hallway and took a picture, and it looks like a picture of the shadow of a cowboy in a duster jacket.
     Just a few years ago she saw a train conductor in the corner of our bedroom. We live right near where the old Putnam county railroad had been, where the bike trail is now. She said the conductor told her that he was the brakeman--the guy who used to operate the train’s brakes. She said he was wearing some kind of a patch or a pin, and she was able to describe it to us. I looked it up, and the description of the pin was what the conductor who used to operate the brakes used to wear.
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     I have a few experiences I’d like to share. The first two are actual experiences, the last two are dreams.
     The first experience was around 1993. I was in 5th grade and my family and I were visiting a family friend in La Rochelle, France. I had one of those calculator watches with all of those digits on them, which Ioved because I was a kid. That night I woke up and the battery on my watch was completely dead, and very bright bluish-white light appeared in the window that was on the opposite side of the room from where my bed was. The light was pretty much the size of the window, which was a pretty big window. It looked like it was a light that was shining from behind the window. It would go bright, and then it would kind of disappear. It would flash, and then it would diminish, back-and-forth with no set periodic motion. It would just be random. I was really petrified and then, fortunately, one of my parents came to check up on me and I immediately ran into their arms.
     The second experience I had a few years ago. We were living in Florida. I was walking down the hallway. There were rooms to the left and to the right, and at the end of the hallway was a bathroom and as I walked towards it the bathroom door began to close. I was about five or six feet from the door when it did this. It didn’t close all the way, but it moved about a foot. There were no drafts in the house, and nothing like this had ever happened before. It was really weird because if anything, the air that I’m pushing as I’m going forward would push the door in the opposite direction.
     The third experience was a dream I had when I was in my 20’s. A good friend’s mother was really sick. I knew that she was in bad shape. She had cancer, and I knew she wasn’t going to make it because it was terminal. But I wasn’t exactly up to date week-by-week or month-by-month on how she was progressing. I just knew that it was terminal. The morning that she passed away I dreamt of her. She was radiant, she was so happy. She was wearing this beautiful white dress with diamonds.
     I took her by the hand, and we were in a place that kind of looked like Grand Central, you know with people waiting in lines; maybe not so tall a ceiling as Grand Central, but there were about eight lines of people waiting to go somewhere. Each line had 20 - 30 people, and they were all just waiting to go through these lines. I didn’t really see what was at the end of it, but people were going through the lines trying to get somewhere.
     My friend’s mother was just so carefree, so happy, so full of joy, resplendent. And that was the dream, and that was the same morning that she actually passed. I found out when I woke up. That morning friend texted me, ‘My mom passed’. I called him and I told him my dream. He’s not a believer, so I think maybe she was trying to send him a message through me.
     The last experience was the freakiest one of all. I’m 39 now, so I had this dream when I was 33 or so. In the dream I saw the date, a specific date. I don’t know if I want to mention it, because it might come true if I mention it! The date was kind of like an obituary, and I got the sense that it was the date of my death.
     Now, at the time, I had an iPhone app called Numerous. The app was kind of cool because it would track things like how many days you’ve been alive, how many days until the next full moon--all kinds of random stuff that you wanted to track. In this app I had saved the number of days alive for every member of our family. The day that I woke up from that dream I plugged the date that I saw in the dream into the app to find out how many days it would be until that date, and it was the exact same number of days that I had lived! So, if that date is true, that was the exact midpoint of my life. So, I don’t know if it was some kind of calculation that I made, but that was really crazy.

[Note: I suggested that this man think back on what was going on in his life at the time he had this dream. Dreams are often a suggestion from our higher selves that it is time to make changes in our lives. I interpret the dream as ‘If you continue along the path you are on now, this is when your life may end. But if you make some changes and lead a healthier, happier, less stressful life, then you can change the outcome of that dream and live much longer.’]
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     This is a dream that my grandfather had. It was so vivid that he had told my mom, and my mom had told me. I remember it because it’s a little creepy. But it’s interesting to think that people in your family can still come back in that sense. Maybe not as a ghost. I don’t know.
     My mom said that when she was a young girl, when she was around 12-years-old, she remembers her father waking up really startled. You know when you have a really intense dream and you wake up? It’s a really startling wake-up. She remembers him getting out of bed and pacing back-and-forth. The next day he told them what he dreamt about.
     At that time his mother was alive, and his father had passed away. Their house was such that there was a long driveway, and there was a backyard. The backyard was kind of fenced, and there was a little stoop that went into the house. In his dream, my grandfather had gone out onto the stoop and he saw his father walking up the driveway, then saw him coming into the yard. My grandfather went up to the stoop and said, “Dad, dad! Nice to see you! How are you?!” and he went out to the yard to see him. His father looked up, and as soon he saw him his father looked a little startled and he turned around and started walking back down the driveway. My grandfather went out and tried to follow him down the driveway, and as soon as my great-grandfather hit the end of the driveway, my grandfather woke up.
     About two weeks after he had that dream, my great-grandmother passed away. My grandfather was like, ‘Wow, I wonder if my dad had come back to bring her with him, and he came to the wrong person!’
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     My brother passed away unexpectedly a couple of years ago, and something odd happened to me the morning after. At around five in the morning I went downstairs in my home, no one was up yet, it was dark yet. I didn’t turn on any lights. Then all of a sudden I saw something that looked like a spark, almost like static energy. It was a small, yellowish-white spark in the middle of the air that faded away after a couple of seconds. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but it was odd because it was just there in the middle of the air. I was wondering if a spirit could manifest itself like that, like static electricity.

[Note: I told the speaker that spirits are made up of energy, and they often manifest as bright lights, flashes of light, or as orbs. Spirits show themselves to us because they want to be known, and I suggested that this spark was just her brother’s way of showing himself to her. He knew it was something that she would see, and he hoped that she would associate it with him to let her know that he was OK and still around.]
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     I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, I have my couch along a window. I’m very sensitive to smells. I’m sitting there one day in the middle of April and I smell cigarette smoke, and it goes on everyday at all different times. I’m looking out the window and there’s nobody out there. I do genealogy. I was going to a genealogy conference in May in Raleigh. I made reservations like eight months prior, and I go start looking through my emails and I can’t find my reservations. I call ten hotels and nobody has my reservation. So I go on AirBnB and I booked a place and it was very inexpensive, and I was like, “Yes!”
     When I got to the place I drove around, and the oldest cemetery in Raleigh was three blocks from this AirBnB. Whenever I go anywhere I always go to cemeteries and take photos for genealogy purposes. So I thought, “I’m going to that cemetery.”
     I headed up to that cemetery one night, and I had the list of people I was looking for. I found this one name and he was in the back section of the cemetery. I looked at my list and there was another guy with the same name that was supposed to be in that area, but it started raining so I had to leave really fast because I didn’t want to get wet. I said, “I’ll be back”. I talked to the cemetery and I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back and I’m going to find you.” Now I’m in the back of the cemetery and I leave.
     The next day I come back and I start on the left hand side of the cemetery just kind of mowing the rows, taking pictures of the stones, and in the middle of the cemetery I smell cigarette smoke. I’m like, ‘OK, what’s going on?’ So I talked to the guy. I said, “I know you want me to find you. Just give me time, or give me some hints.” I followed the smoke and looked down and lo-and-behold there was the name of the guy who matched the name of the guy in the backside of the cemetery. I took his picture and I talked to him. I said, “You know what. I’ve got your picture. I’m going to get this to your descendants to let them know where you’re at.” And the smoke smell went away, and I have not smelled smoke since. I have no clue who the guy was. But it was like everything fell into place. He made sure that I couldn’t find my reservation, and that I got into that AirBnB three blocks from the cemetery where I was supposed to find him at.
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I don’t have my own story, but my roommate from college and some of his friends had gone to Union Cemetery in Easton. This cemetery is supposedly very haunted, and was investigated by the Warrens. This was in the middle of the day, and they had a recorder with them that they ran the whole time they were there. On the recording you can hear the person holding the recorder going from headstone to headstone saying things like, “Would you like to talk to me? Do you have a message for me?” That type of thing. They played the recording for me, and at one point you can hear a very clear EVP saying in a deep voice, “Get out!” You can hear it clear as day on the recording, and he was kind enough to send that to me.
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     When I was in college, some friends of mine were in a local band. One night they called me up and said “Come on over. After band practice we’re going to play around with the Ouija board.” I said, “Ouija board? What’s that?” I didn’t quite understand what that was all about. But, what happened that night. They shut the light out. We were in this room, an anteroom of some sort, and everyone was sitting at a table with their hands on the Ouija board. I think there might have been five or seven people with their hands on the board. I didn’t really participate, I was just there as an observer. What they did, they started moving this board and all of a sudden. I’m looking at the people, I’m looking at their faces, and the table started rising. It rose up about five inches from the floor, maybe more. I said, “What’s going guys? You’re playing with me. Don’t do this.” But their knees were on the floor, their hands were on the table on the board, and the table began moving around and it began spinning. And I just said, “I’m out of here!” It scared the hell out of me. It really did. I never forgot that, and I’ve just stayed away from this sort of stuff ever since.
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     About seven years ago my mom passed away in her house, and for a long period of time I could smell her perfume. She lived not within the main part of her house, but in a separate part of the house. Every once in a while, I could smell her perfume. There was no perfume in there. I had cleaned it out. I Cloroxed everything after she passed, but to this day I still smell her perfume. I’m wondering if it’s real, if it’s just my imagination, or if mom’s popping up to say, “I’m still here!”
     One caveat to that was I had her cremated and I didn’t know what to do with the ashes for almost three years. I decided, let me throw it into the bathroom into the cabinet that was emptied and cleaned, and the perfume smell was most prevalent during those three years. I finally took her ashes out to the cemetery where my dad is, and it’s not quite as prevalent, but every once in a while, there’s that scent again.
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     I have a little story. I was watching a movie called “The Red Violin”. I had hung my grandfather’s mandolin in my house. As I was watching the movie, during the scene when they were burying the violin with this young protege, the mandolin fell. It just leapt off the wall and crashed onto the floor. It was fine. It wasn’t harmed. I watched the rest of the movie and just held it.
     My sister-in-law had given me a ceramic mother swan and three baby swans because I have three sons. These little statues were sitting on a table underneath where the mandolin had been hanging. When the crash happened the three baby swans got pushed away from the mother swan, but nothing was broken. The mandolin was hanging over all sorts of little statues and breakable things, but nothing was damaged.
     My youngest son had just moved out of the house, and the movie is about the life of the violin after the mother and child die, and then this violin goes on to have it’s own life. To me it was like my grandfather was saying to me, “Your boys are on their own now, but you still have more life ahead of you.”
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     About 10 years ago, my husband and I went down to Key West, Florida and someone had told us about a museum down there, and there was a doll. Robert the doll. It’s a creepy looking doll. It’s dressed in a sailor suit, and there’s hardly any face. At the time, the doll was out in the open. It wasn’t covered or anything.
     They say that things will happen to you if you make fun of it or if you touch it. My husband was like, ‘I don’t believe in that. I think this is silly.’ I started taking pictures of the doll using a camera that still used film. When we got home, the roll of film that the pictures of the doll was on was gone. Just gone, and we never found it after that. All of the other rolls of film we took on the trip were there, but that one roll with the pictures of the doll just disappeared. We always thought it was strange because of the way my husband was saying that the stories about Robert the doll weren’t true. I guess they were! [Note: "Robert has been said to exact his vengeance in many ways, but especially on electronic devices. Cellphones and cameras have been known to break. Photos in cameras have disappeared or been destroyed. Letters tacked around his plexiglass home attest to that and much more." (1)
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     I go to a school called SUNY Purchase, and Purchase is very notoriously haunted. My freshman year I lived in a suite with eight girls, and all of them were home for the weekend except for me. We would hear knocks in the corner where no one could reach, usually in threes which always freaked me out. A couple of times I would wake up in a sleep paralysis. I would feel like somebody was holding my chest down and I couldn’t get up. It just freaked me out. There have been other instances where I would see things out of the corner of my eyes and shadows. There is a cemetery on campus and people have apparently passed away there, so that always freaked me out.
     My roommates who lived across from me would hear knocks all night. They would hear shadow figures. We would go through cycles where some of us would have sleep paralysis. We never really thought too much of it, but the more I’ve done research the more I’ve been freaked out. I was talking to someone whose mom went to the school in the 80’s and she said that one of her friends passed away in the same building, and the body wasn’t found for a couple of days until people realized that they weren’t showing up for classes.
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     At night, my mom and I share a room and my grandma and brother have two separate rooms down the hall. I wasn’t sleeping, I was just laying in bed facing the wall and my cat was up next to me. Everyone else was asleep, and it felt like someone tapped my right thigh. No one else was awake. I looked behind me, but no one was there. I was so scared, like what the heck just happened. It only tapped me once, but it was like someone was trying to get my attention as if I was asleep.
     Also, we have this standup clock next to the mantle, and there were these random prints like someone had put their hand there. It was all covered in dust, and nobody had touched it since we moved. The only time we touch it is if we put coins in this little bowl. That was just on its own shelf, and no one ever touched anything else.
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The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

8/12/2020

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     Looking like something out of a Steven King novel, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia is widely considered to be one of the most haunted places in America. Visitors have reported apparition sightings, unexplained voices, odd sounds, and other paranormal activity. The current owner of the facility runs historic tours and ghost tours to raise money for ongoing restoration of the buildings and grounds; and many paranormal TV shows have conducted investigations at the 162-year-old asylum.
     As scary as some of the asylum ghost stories may be, the history of the Trans-Allegheny is far more horrifying; and it is this horrific background that is the cause of so much paranormal activity.
     When it was conceived, the Trans-Allegheny asylum was a big step forward in the treatment of mentally ill patients. The asylum was the brainchild of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, a crusader for the mentally ill. He conceived of a facility that would provide patients with an abundance of light and fresh air which he thought were essential in the treatment of those with mental illness. He envisioned long hallways with 12-foot-high ceilings, and an abundance of windows to allow cross-breezes throughout the hospital. Dr. Kirkbride imagined spaces where patients would gather to socialize and eat. He also felt that patients should be allowed to roam freely around the hospital and grounds to help stimulate their minds and their senses, and to give them more control of their own lives.
    Once plans for the hospital were underway, he ordered for the grounds to be landscaped in such a way that patients looking out windows would see only rolling hills and openness so that nothing would suggest that their hospital was also surrounded by gates to keep them locked inside.
The asylum was designed by Baltimore architect Richard Snowden Andres in a combination of Gothic Revival and Tutor Revival styles, and construction began in 1858. When it was completed, the hospital’s main building was nearly a quarter mile long and had the distinction of being one of the largest hand-cut stone masonry buildings in the United States. It was the second largest hand-cut sandstone building in the world, second only to the Kremlin in Moscow.
     Prior to its opening, the name of the facility was changed from the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum to ‘The West Virginia Hospital for the Insane’, and patients were first admitted in 1864. The hospital was designed to be totally self-sufficient, so it had its own farm, dairy, waterworks and, of course, its own cemetery. Naturally, the amount of land needed to make this possible was massive. By the time of its completion, it encompassed 666 acres in area and included 13 buildings. Interesting numbers!
     As early as 1881 the asylum began to become overcrowded, housing 500 more patients than it was designed for. The hospital’s resources couldn’t keep up with the increased patient load, and conditions began to rapidly decline. Rooms intended for one person now held up to five. The farm and dairy compound designed for just 300 patients couldn’t meet the increased demand and patients began to become malnourished. As a result, their mental health issues worsened.
     By 1938, the asylum was running at six times over capacity. Patients were running wild inside of the building because there weren’t enough staff members to contain them. By the 1950s, the hospital housed 2,600 patients--nearly ten times the number it was intended to care for.
     A local newspaper, The Charleston Gazette, sent reporters to the hospital to expose its horrific conditions. Inside the walls of the facility they were shocked to find patients sleeping on the floor, and in freezing rooms because of lack of heat and furniture. The windows were covered with dirt and grime to the point where they allowed little light into the once bright hallways. Wallpaper was peeling and decayed, and some had been ripped off the walls by frantic patients.
     Patients who were deemed “uncontrollable” were found locked in cages and in large wooden cribs in hallways, and bedrooms were only available for the more cooperative patients. Other cruel methods to help control the patients included ice water baths, bloodletting, and electroshock therapy.
     Often, the treatments for mental illness were worse than the condition itself. One was insulin coma therapy in which patients would be repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin to produce daily comas. This wasn’t a method to control an unruly patient, it was thought to be an effective treatment for some mental illnesses. The theory was that drastically changing insulin levels lead to an altering of the electrical impulses in the brain. Although some doctors swore that patients who underwent the treatment had positive results, insulin coma therapy faded from use and stopped in the 1960s.
     In the 1930s, the Trans-Allegheny asylum began giving lobotomies to many of its residents under the direction of surgeon Walter Freeman. His “ice-pick” method involved slipping a thin, pointed rod into a patient's eye sockets, and using a hammer to drive it into their brain to sever the connective tissue in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The damage done to these poor people was unimaginable. President Kennedy’s sister Rosemary was a victim of Dr. Freeman’s ice pick operation when she was just 23 years old. It failed, and she ended up spending the rest of her life in an institution.
     Dr. Freeman performed over 4,000 lobotomies at the Trans-Allegheny, and hundreds of perfectly healthy patients were left with life-long physical and cognitive damage. This barbaric procedure also resulted in a number of deaths.
     The Trans-Allegheny also had its share of gruesome murders. One night, two patients pulled another from his bed and tied him up with bed sheets, then hung him from the ceiling. The sheets didn’t hold, so they put his head under a metal bed frame, then killed him by jumping up and down on the mattress until his skull was crushed.
     One would think that the hospital would have been closed down once such horrific conditions and medical practices were discovered. Not so. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the patient population began to decline due to changes in the treatment of mental illness, and the asylum finally closed its doors in 1994 after a new facility was opened in Weston.
     The hospital and grounds remained vacant until they were auctioned off by the state in 2007. The winning bidder, Joe Jordan, an asbestos demolition contractor, got the 242,000 square foot building and the surrounding property for $1.5 million.
     Places where tragedies occurred are often ripe with ghosts, so the Trans-Allegheny asylum is the perfect breeding-ground for paranormal activity. It is a storehouse of all of the negative emotions, abuse, and the confusion of madness, and anyone entering that space can pick up on those past impressions.
     But what about ghosts? Spirits often stay rooted in places where they died a tragic or untimely death. Many don’t realize they have died, and so they live on in a sort of twilight dreamstate seeing images from their past, and images from the present which they don’t always understand.
     When dealing with the Trans-Allegheny asylum, it’s important to remember what it is built out of--sandstone. There is something called ‘the stone tape theory’ which speculates that ghosts and other hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions during emotional or traumatic events can be projected in the form of energy, "recorded" onto rocks and other items and "replayed" under certain conditions. Quartz is the mineral that holds the most energy, and sandstone is made up primarily of quartz. This might explain why the asylum is so haunted--the building itself is one, huge, 242,000 square-foot sandstone memory cell; and the memories it holds are misery, sorrow, and madness.
When the TV show Ghost Adventures visited the asylum, Sue Parker, a former hospital employee was interviewed for the episode. She said that she had an experience once while giving a tour of the asylum. She said, “I had a group of people on a tour, and we were walking down one of the hallways. When we got to one of the doors a woman who was on the tour said, ‘Oh my God, did you see that?’ I asked the woman, ‘What did you see?’ She just kept saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’. I said, ‘Tell me what you saw’ and the woman said, ‘There was a lady dressed in a Victorian style dress with a high-neck collar. The dress fit her tight around the waist, then was wide at the bottom.’ The woman told the guide that this mysterious figure walked right up to her, almost face to face, and she just looked at her. Then, all of a sudden, she was gone.’
     The Ghost Adventures team collected a lot of evidence during the investigation, the most compelling of which were the strange voices and noises that were picked up as they were filming. These included screaming, moaning, banging sounds, doors slamming, loud breathing, and grunting sounds. They also picked up a number of disembodied voices. One was a little girl talking, another was an adult male voice. At one point, their film equipment picked up a muffled conversation between two people coming from somewhere deep in the empty asylum.
     In addition, their digital recorders picked up several clear EVP. These included the phrases, “Who are you?”, “You wanna fight me?”, “I don’t want it”, “Be quiet”, “I’m okay”, and “Zack and Nick, get out”.
Brenda Reed told a story about an experience she had while using the facility to hold a town festival. She said, “We were having a festival one day. It was after the place had closed for the day, and we were concerned that people might still be in the building. A couple of employees went to take a look around to make sure that it was clear. They came down and said that they had run into a gentleman on the second floor. They asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’. The man just looked down and said, ‘I’m looking for a way to get out of here.’ The man walked away, and when they went to find him, he had disappeared.”
Many spirits roam the halls of the Trans-Allegheny asylum. Some are angry, and many are confused. One spirit who seems to be very active is a little girl known as Lily. Many believe she still wanders the halls of the asylum where she lived and died.
     Shelley Bailey, a local researcher, shared an experience she had with the little girl’s spirit when she and three other women tried to contact Lily by using a child’s rubber ball. “We asked Lily if she wanted to play,” she said, “and one of the ladies set a ball down on the floor. She set it directly in the middle of the floor. A few minutes later, the ball rolled all the way over to the wall. It went straight to the wall. No one else in the group touched it. The ball then bounced from that wall and rolled over to another wall. One of the women in the group picked up the ball and bounced it back to the wall, and it bounced back to her. We did this over and over again, we just kept bouncing back and forth.”
     Psychic Tammy Wilson met with the Ghost Adventures team while they were filming at the Trans-Allegheny, and after doing a walkthrough of the facility she said that she connected with Lily’s spirit and had an idea why she haunts the building. She said, “She’s here because she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know how to cross over, and I think she’s waiting for someone.” Who is Lily? No one knows for sure, but one theory is that she was a former child patient, or she was born to a female patient and died at the age of 9 at the hospital.
     As for the other spirits who still roam the halls of the asylum, Tammy said, “I think that not knowing what to do, and wanting to be home but can’t be, is what holds them here.”
     People often report a feeling of being watched throughout the asylum. One day a security guard was making his rounds, and when he got to the kitchen a feeling of anxiety suddenly overtook him. He said that he felt as if someone was staring at him. He saw movement near a doorway out of the corner of his eye, and as he turned to look at it he was shocked to see a human figure beginning to form. He described it as a grey, smokey shape roughly in the form of a woman wearing a dress. As he looked at it, he said that it felt as if a woman was watching him from the doorway.
     Rebecca Jordan, operations manager of the Trans-Allegheny, insists that there are at least 7 spirits who haunt the asylum. Some make themselves known to visitors and paranormal investigators; others have interacted with her directly. Once while giving a tour of the facility, something reached out to her and made physical contact. “He laid his hand on my shoulder and squeezed,” said Jordan. “I was scared to death. The group in front of me was asking what happened to you? That was the last year I worked in the haunted house.”
     The Trans-Allegheny asylum is open to the public, and there are several tour packages available. The ‘Heritage and History’ tours of the facility delve into the history of the treatment of the insane, medical procedures used at the asylum, and facts and features unique to the hospital.
     Ghost hunters have a number of tour options, including daytime paranormal tours, flashlight tours, and even an opportunity to spend a night in the asylum. Ticket prices for the evening ghost tours and overnight investigations are pricey, but well worth it. After all, it’s not every day that you get to hunt for ghosts in the most haunted asylum in the United States.
     The ways in which modern medicine understands and treats mental illness have come a long way from the days when the Trans-Allegheny asylum was up and running. If there is a silver lining in Trans-Allegheny's shameful history, it is that we can learn from the mistakes of the past in order to forge a better future for the mentally ill.
     As for the ghosts, for now they’ll remain to roam the halls and occupy the rooms of the asylum; a place they knew as home, and where their suffering seems to continue to this very day. One day, perhaps, someone will visit the asylum not just to ‘hunt ghosts’, but to free these spirits and to reunite them with their loved ones. Until then, all we can do is pray for these poor lost souls, and for the souls of those who were, in many cases, unwittingly responsible for the horrors inflicted on so many innocent people at the Trans-Allegheny Asylum.

Resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Allegheny_Lunatic_Asylum
https://www.travelchannel.com/videos/stranded-souls-in-the-asylum-0141838
https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/10/25/i-spent-the-night-in-a-haunted-trans-allegheny-lunatic-asylum-and-i-still-cant-explain-what-i-saw/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_shock_therapy
https://articles.ghostwalks.com/trans-allegheny-asylum/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asylum/201905/why-are-asylums-scary

https://www.wowktv.com/news/west-virginia/the-haunting-history-of-the-trans-allegheny-lunatic-asylum/
https://www.wtfwanderers.com/home/transalleghenyghosthunt
http://terrireid.com/archives/2354
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/reasons-admission-insane-asylum-1800s/
http://bookbuilder.cast.org/view_print.php?book=95935

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Bigfoot Sightings in Connecticut and New York

6/4/2020

1 Comment

     It was a little after 11PM, and the two police officers from Whitehall, New York were driving slowly down a long, lonely stretch of country road. The headlights of their patrol cars illuminated the road directly in front of them, and the yellow fields of tall grass on either side of the road swayed softly in the pale moonlight. The sound of crickets filled the August night, and moths and other night insects made soft sounds as they batted against the cars’ windshields. In the lead patrol car was officer Jim Spencer. Following close behind was officer Frank Morrissey.
     The night shift was an easy one, and this part of the job was one they didn’t mind at all. They just had to drive out to the edge of Whitehall—keeping half-an-eye out for teenagers who often used this stretch of road for partying—then loop back into town. The ride was a little boring, but it never took more than 40 minutes to make the run. Besides, it was a pretty night. The stars were out, and the night sounds were relaxing.
     Frank was lost in his thoughts as the fields of grass moved slowly past his squad car windows. After a while he radioed his partner, “Jim, let’s turn around in the field up ahead and head back. There aren’t any kids out this late on a school night.”
     “Roger that,” Jim said. “I was just about to suggest the same thing.”
     Frank watched as Jim’s car slowed down, then pulled off to the right onto the edge of the field to make the U-turn. Suddenly, Jim’s car came to a complete stop at the edge of the field and his high beams came on. Then, the car radio crackled to life. “Frank. Frank! What … What the hell is that! Holy shit! What IS that?! What is it?! I’m getting the hell out of here!” The tires on Jim’s squad car screeched on the pavement as he pulled back on to the road and drove at top speed back towards Whitehall. His car flew by Frank, and minutes later, Frank was left alone. ‘What the hell just happened?’, he thought. He picked up his radio mic. “Jim,” Frank called on his radio. “Jim, can you hear me? What did you see? Jim. Can you hear me?” But the radio was silent.
   Frank was about to head back to Whitehall, but he decided to wait a few more minutes. He was hoping to see what Jim had seen, but nothing showed in his headlights, and everything was quiet. Everything was—too quiet. It was then that Frank noticed the crickets, or the lack of them. They had stopped making their chirping sounds. Now, the only sound was the breeze blowing across tall grass. Frank’s lights illuminated the road in front of him, but he couldn’t see very far. He could just about see where Jim had turned his car around. Then, he heard something moving around in the grass very close by. It was a loud rustling sound. The sound grew louder and louder until it sounded like whatever was making it was right there in front of him. Jim slowly reached over to the side of his car and turned on his spotlight.
     There in the field, no more than 20 feet away was an enormous creature. It stood upright on two legs, towering over the field, its arms hanging at its sides and falling well below its knees. The beast was covered with long, shaggy brown hair, but its face was fleshy looking, and its eyes glowed red in the beam of the spotlight. It was a huge, hulking creature with no neck, that weighed around 400 pounds. As soon as the spotlight hit it, the beast brought its huge hands up to its face and covered its eyes. Then, it raised its face to the sky and let out a deep guttural scream. It looked back at Jim, blinked its red eyes a few times, growled loudly, then turned quickly and took three enormous strides into the field and vanished into the darkness. Later, Jim would say, “When you hear people say that your life flashes before your eyes when you think you’re about to die—believe you me, it does.”
     Sometimes the things we least expect to find show up in the most unlikely places. Bigfoot sightings in New York and Connecticut? That’s impossible! Not so fast. Although Bigfoot are primarily thought of as a Pacific Northwest phenomenon, sightings have been reported all over the United State including New York and Connecticut. In fact, New York has had one of the highest number of reported sightings.
     Although interest in Bigfoot has had a resurgence in recent years thanks to shows like Expedition Bigfoot and Finding Bigfoot, legends of similar humongous, shaggy beasts go back centuries.
     Many Native American tribes have legends of a Bigfoot-like creature, and each tribe has a different name for it--The Hairy Man, Big Elder Brother, The Night People, Big Spirit Being, The Wood Man, and of course Sasquatch. To indigenous people, Bigfoot is considered to be a spiritual or interdimensional being who can enter or leave our physical dimension as they please; and if you see a Bigfoot, it indicates that man has somehow upset the harmony and balance of existence. If this is true, then it’s no surprise that Bigfoot sightings are on the uprise.
     Accounts of a Bigfoot-like creature in the Connecticut area have been around for ages, but things really took off in 1895 when reports of “The Wild Man” began showing up in local newspapers. The Wild Man sightings took place in Colebrook, Connecticut, a small town about 30 miles northwest of Hartford. According to one newspaper article of the time, the town selectman, Riley Smith, reported seeing a “large man, stark naked, and covered with hair all over his body” running out of a clump of bushes. He described it as “a wild, hairy man of the woods, six foot in height … the man’s hair was black and hung down long on his shoulders, and his body was thickly covered with black hair.”
     In the weeks that followed, word of the Wildman spread. A reward was offered for its capture and a search party of more than 100 armed men was dispatched. But in spite of the thorough search, the Wildman eluded capture. In the ensuing weeks, reports of Wildman sightings lessened, then stopped altogether.
     Decades later, reports of a huge, elusive, shaggy creature began to surface in 1972. One sighting took place in Winchester, Connecticut, just seven miles from the Wild Man sightings. The Hartford Courant reported that two men observed “a strange, man-like creature” on Winchester Road near Crystal Lake Reservoir. They described it as an upright hominid “about eight feet tall and covered with hair’. The creature eventually disappeared into the woods. When it was suggested that the men might have seen a bear, they laughed and said, “This was not a bear.”
     In 1974, a similar creature was spotted near Rugg Brook Reservoir in Winchester, Connecticut, just a few miles from Crystal Lake Reservoir. One night, two couples were parked by the reservoir when they spotted in the moonlight what they described as a “six-foot, 300-pound creature covered with dark-colored hair”. Because they were so terrified, they quickly drove off and notified the police. The police searched the area, but failed to turn up any conclusive evidence.
     In 2007 a man from the northwestern part of Connecticut claims he saw a Bigfoot in an open field at the top of a hill. The 26 year old man, Derek, was scanning the field for deer when he spotted the creature 150 yards from where he stood. The beast looked right at him, and he estimated the animal’s height at around 6-and-a-half feet tall.
     Derek reported, “Its skin looked black and leathery. I would say it was a pretty even mix between a gorilla and a person,” he recalled. “It had a broader chest and more of a narrow waist. It was lanky, it was actually a little more lanky at the bottom and kind of bulky at the top.
     It must have seen me come up over the hill, and that was the thing that actually scared me the most--having it looking right at me. There is no question that it knew I was there.” The creature suddenly turned and walked quickly into the woods.
     Not all of the Connecticut Bigfoot sightings occur in the wild. In 2009 a woman reported seeing a strange creature outside of her home in Windham County, Connecticut. It was 2 AM and the woman couldn’t sleep, so she decided to go downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She turned on the overhead kitchen light, then turned and got the milk from the refrigerator. As she turned around she glanced at the back window and saw two red, golf ball sized eyes staring at her from the rear kitchen window. She described the eyes as being set farther apart than human eyes, with possible light grey skin under each eye. She maintained eye contact with the creature which she estimated to be 7 feet tall for approximately 5-6 seconds before ducking down behind an island counter between her and the kitchen window.
     Once she was sure the creature had left, she turned on the back and front yard spotlights, but she couldn’t see anything. The next morning she inspected the area in front of the rear kitchen window where the animal had been standing and noticed two foot-like impressions in the soil immediately beneath the kitchen window.
     On Saturday, August 4, 2018, a woman was taking a drive with her boyfriend on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut. They were traveling from Berlin to Woodbridge, and it was raining lightly. The road runs through residential areas, as well as through heavily forested state park land. As the car made its way through one of the more wooded areas of the parkway, the woman looked out of her passenger side window and saw something that she didn’t understand at first. It looked like an extremely tall man with shoulder length dirty-blonde hair was standing in a clearing of the woods about 75 feet away. As she focused on the figure, she realized that it wasn’t a man, it was some kind of an animal, and its chest, arms and legs were also covered in long, shaggy, dirty-blonde hair which hung down about 6 inches all over its body. This hulking creature stood about 8 feet tall, had a large head, and its shoulders were about three feet wide. Their car was traveling south, but the creature was traveling north, so its face was clearly visible. It too was covered with hair. As it walked upright on two legs, its arms hung down at its sides, and they swayed like a gorilla’s. As the car passed it, the woman jumped out of her seat and turned around, keeping her eyes locked on the beast for as long as she could. As she jumped in her seat, her boyfriend said, “What are you doing? What are you looking at?” She said, “I just saw the weirdest thing, and it was not a human. I think I just saw a Sasquatch!”
A 2019 survey from the Travel Channel and the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization lists New York as having some of the highest bigfoot sightings in the United States. In fact, New York ranks fifth in the US behind Washington, California, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in the number of reported sightings. There have been so many sightings in Whitehall, New York, an area near the Vermont border, that it is known as the Bigfoot capital of the east coast.
In the Autumn of 1992, a motorist in Warren County, New York had a stand-off with a strange creature that came out of the woods early one morning. The witness said, “It was about 6 AM and I was on my way to work when something came from the right side of the road, out of the woods, and forced me to either stop or run into it. It was dark, so it took a few seconds to get my thoughts together. When I did I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was a huge creature, somewhere between 7-8 feet tall at least with white or light gray hair from head to toe. It was standing around 10 feet in front of my car directly in the headlights so I had a perfect view. The creature was standing facing the left side of the road with a slight left twist to its body in my direction. We stared at each other for what seemed to be minutes but I can't say for sure how long it actually was. I had absolutely no fear of this creature. It seemed to have a sad demeanor, and it made no sound at all. Then it just turned away from me, took a few huge strides into the woods, and it was gone. Needless to say I’ve carried my camera with me wherever I go ever since, but I believe that it was a once in a lifetime incident.”
     Another sighting in Warren County took place on the shores of Lake George, New York in the Spring of 1990. After reading the witness's description of the creature and seeing the drawing he submitted, I’d say that it wasn’t exactly a Bigfoot, but rather some other mysterious creature. Maybe a Littlefoot!
The witness said, “My brother and I were canoeing on Lake George, in NY state at around sunset. We headed south for 10 minutes to an area known as Deer Leap. At the lakeside is a boulder strewn area with cliffs rising 600 feet above the shoreline. As we were beginning to come on to this area we saw something standing on shore. It was brownish in color and standing straight up with it's arms at its side. It was about the size of a small man and extremely skinny, like a teenage boy. It appeared to be covered with reddish brown hair, and had a pale face, and expressive eyes and mouth. But the weird thing was that it had a deranged smile or smirk on its face. This thing wasn’t a baby bear or anything like that. Unlike a bear, its arms were long and it didn’t have a snout.
    When we saw it, its body was facing south, and it was looking down the shoreline. Suddenly, it turned its head directly towards us and stared at us very intently. We whispered to each other and watched it while it watched us. Here we were, two grown men paddling parallel to the shore about 200 feet out from this thing, but we couldn’t get up the courage to go in closer.
     Like I said, this thing had a strange look on its face, almost a crazed grin. It looked almost like a giant Lemur. The sun was setting now as we continued to watch it in the shadows of the mountain. It was standing next to an old, dead pine tree, and it turned and climbed, sloth-like up the tree about 20 feet to the first large limb, and then onto the crook of a branch. We paddled back around and as we approached it again it cocked its head directly at us, after a minute or so it turned its face downward into its body and it looked like it became part of the tree. It blended in so perfectly it looked just like a lump in the crook of the branch. You would never have known that it was there unless you saw it move. I have been in this area all my life and have never seen anything like this and have not seen it since.” The witness submitted this eerie sketch with his report ...

In January of 1989 a man named Robert Townshend submitted a Bigfoot sighting to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization after staying over at a friend’s house in Whitehall, New York. In the morning, Mr. Townsend and his friend were walking in the woods when they noticed strange tracks in the snow. Townsend said, “My friend and I saw footprints while walking in the woods that must have been 20 inches long, and we also found some tree branches broken down that were from about 15 feet off of the ground. We decided to head back to his house right away because we both felt as if we were being watched and it was close to dark.
The entire way home we felt as if we were being followed. I slept on a fold out couch in the living room and the entire front of the house has windows. The next morning I awoke at around 6:30AM and I saw a large creature about 20 feet from the house. It must have been at least 10 feet tall, because the windows are 15 feet off the ground and it was no more than 5 feet below me.
I watched it wandering around for a while, but I didn’t dare move. It was brown and looked very human except for its size and forehead, and obviously the hair it was covered with. After about five minutes it walked toward the house and up a bank. As it passed the house it banged so hard on the wall that I thought it's arm would come right through. My friend was awakened by this and came in and I told him what I had seen. We saw that this thing left tracks in the snow, but we decided to stay in rather than follow them. Can you blame us?”
     In 2010, a retired policeman and army veterine was camping at Cascade Lake in the Adirondacks. He spent the day hiking and fishing, then had a quiet night at his campsite where he slept soundly. At 7AM he woke up and started to make breakfast. It was a beautiful, clear sunny morning, and mist was rising off the surface of the lake. He thought that it would make a great photo, so he grabbed his iPhone and walked about 50 yards to the edge of the lake to take the picture. As he approached the breakwall, he noticed a dark brown object on the opposite side of the lake on the shore. At first he couldn’t make out what it was, but it seemed to be some sort of an animal, and it looked like it was sitting at the water’s edge. The animal looked like it was doing something in the water with its paws, as a faint splashing sound could be heard.
     The man thought it would be a good idea to get a picture, so he brought the phone up to eye level and tried zooming in on the animal. As he was focusing in, the animal suddenly stood up on two legs. The man was startled and pulled the phone down to get a better look at this creature with his own eyes. The creature stood about 8 feet tall, and was covered head to toe with long, dark, shaggy hair or fur. It was too far away to see any facial features, but its upper body was massive and stocky like a football player’s build. It had very long arms that hung well below its waist, and it had hands, not paws. It took a step towards the tree line, then stopped and turned its whole upper body to the left and stared at the man for about 10 seconds. As it turned back towards the woods, sunlight shone off of its back. It took two gigantic steps, and disappeared into the forest. Although he was a retired policeman and military man, he had never seen anything like this in his life. He quickly returned to his campsite, packed up, and drove away as fast as he could.
     In a 2012 New York Daily News video, an elderly man named Frank Siecienski from Whitehall, New York was interviewed about a photo his wildlife camera captured one night. He said, “In my yard I have an apple tree that was loaded with so many apples that one year it was unbelievable. One day I was going through my yard and I happened to look at the apple tree, and all the apples in one section, like a 5-foot-high section, all the apples were devoured. They were completely gone. So I set up a game camera and left it there for seven days and seven nights. Both my wife and I when we first saw it on the computer said, ‘What in the world is that?’ We got this picture of some creature, and it was estimated to be over 400 pounds. So right now I have a picture of a creature that everyone is telling me—and I believe it is—a female Sasquatch with a youngun.” The photo shows a huge animal with its back to the camera. It is covered with fur, has a cone-shaped head, and seems to be hunched over a very young fur covered animal. The hand of this ‘baby Bigfoot’ can be seen holding onto the arm of the larger creature. It is an incredible photo, and one of the most convincing I’ve seen to date.

Although the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot is primarily anecdotal, it’s hard to ignore the similarities in the description of the creatures reported by so many people--a huge, hulking creature that stands and walks upright. It has a cone-shaped head, broad shoulders, arms that hang well below the knees, shaggy hair or fur, and a face that is often described as fleshy. In some reports, a smaller creature is described as being very thin, but also completely covered with hair or fur. It seems to be related to Bigfoot, but maybe a different species; or, it’s a young Bigfoot.
     Of course, skeptics argue that by now there should be an abundance of physical evidence to prove that Bigfoot really exists. In addition, now that nearly everyone on the planet has a smartphone, there should be no shortage of photo and video evidence. And with all of the Bigfoot hunters out there, both on TV and in the private sector, someone would have caught one by now.
     If Bigfoot is real, then what is it? Surely, by now we’ve discovered every type of animal there is on the planet, right? In 2019 alone, scientists discovered seventy-one new species of animals, fish, and plants. Shannon Bennet is the head of the California Academy of Sciences and Dean of research. In a recent interview she said, “Despite decades of tirelessly scouring some of the most familiar and remote places on Earth, biodiversity scientists estimate that more than 90% of nature’s species remain unknown.”
     So, it’s very possible that Bigfoot falls into the undiscovered 90% category. But there are others who think that Bigfoot is more than just an elusive animal. They feel that Bigfoot is a highly evolved, and highly misunderstood, race of people.
     In 2016 I received a curious email which read:
I see that you investigate paranormal activities around Connecticut and New York, and I was wondering if you have ever come across recent Sasquatch or Dogman sightings in the Litchfield hills area?
     I wrote back that I had heard rumors of Bigfoot sightings in Connecticut, but I have never been contacted by anyone who had actually seen one. I asked if he had ever seen a Bigfoot, and his answer really piqued my interest. He wrote:
I have had contact and sightings with The Sasquatch people, but I am not at liberty to disclose where I've had them, for the simple reason I respect their forest home, and do not want "Bigfoot Hunters" or so called "researchers" trying to track them down. This is by no means directed at you, just in general to the folks who have a specific agenda of disrupting things.
     After the writer discovered that I had not heard from any other Bigfoot eyewitnesses, he emailed me one last time. At the very end of his message he said something that stuck with me, and I think there may be some truth to it. He wrote:
I was just wondering if you ever came across other individuals who have had encounters in the past. I am always interested in hearing other people’s stories when it comes to The Sasquatch. I will say this much, they are a highly evolved race of ‘people’ who put us humans to shame with their ability to shape shift, teleport and communicate using telepathy. The reason no one has ever captured them is because they know way in advance a person's intention through energy vibrations and auric fields.
     Is Bigfoot an advanced, shape-shifting, interdimensional being or just an undiscovered species of animal? Is he seemingly impossible to catch because he’s an extremely introverted and elusive animal, or because he ducks back-and-forth between dimensions? Does Bigfoot blend in with the scenery because he’s developed the ability to camouflage himself like a chameleon, or because he can shape-shift and look like anything he wants to whenever anyone is near? The jury is still out, and maybe that’s a good thing. What fun would life be without a good mystery, and Bigfoot is one of the biggest mysteries of all. I think Albert Einstein summed it up best when he said, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
     So if you’re out hiking in the woods and you spot an 8-foot-tall creature covered with long brown hair and red eyes, don’t be afraid. It’s probably just Bigfoot, and he’s probably just waiting for an opportunity to quietly slip away into the woods and melt away into the shadows.

Resources
https://www.bfro.net/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ykywtai_cw
https://www.saranaclake.com/story/2015/03/bigfoot-adirondacks
https://dailygazette.com/article/2018/06/28/the-hunt-for-bigfoot-continues-in-whitehall-new-york
http://www.northernbigfoot.net/
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Searching-for-Sasquatch-in-Whitehall-13264456.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBkrkf5Mnpw “Searching For Bigfoot in Whitehall, New York” New York Daily News Video.
http://www.bigfootreality.com/

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