Library Lecture Ghost Stories 2023

     Minor Memorial Library, Seymour, Connecticut
     We’ve lived in our house for the past ten years, and until recently I had never felt anything. I think the house was built in the 40s or 50s. We’re only the third owners. The previous owner before us was my father-in-law, so it only really had one owner outside of the family. 
     I’m sensitive, so I can feel if there’s a spirit present. Like, I can walk into a place and say, “No, we can’t be here.” But I never had any eerie feelings in the house in all those years. 
     We recently did some remodeling, and after that we started hearing and experiencing things. We moved my son from his upstairs bedroom to a bedroom in the basement. His upstairs bedroom was right next to our bedroom, and after he moved downstairs, when I would go to bed I would hear things. One night I heard a pencil drop in that room. Another night I heard my doorknob moving. But at first I didn’t give it much thought. I thought maybe it was my husband because I was in bed alone. 
     One day my friend came over for a visit, and she said, “You know you got a spook here, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I do.” So we figured out that it was the ghost of a little boy. Nothing dangerous. He’s turned on the lights for me.      One day I was in my dining room, and I was looking for something, and it was kind of dark. I was just thinking, “I need to turn on the light,” and before I hit the light switch, when I was about six inches away from it, it turned on. I wasn’t afraid when this happened. I just said, “Oh, thank you!” 
     It’s funny, but most of these things happen right before bedtime. Like, when a kid gets wound up before bedtime. So at night I’ll say to him, “Okay, it’s time for bed.” I also keep the door cracked a little so he can come and go as he pleases. 
     I feel that it’s because my son went downstairs. My son never had any issue in his upstairs bedroom. He never felt scared or anything. I just think the little boy got lonely because my son moved downstairs. Even today, the room feels fine. My grandkids love that room. 
     One day my sister-in-law came for a visit, and it was the first time that she had slept over. I went to work that morning and when I got home she said, “I kept hearing somebody yell “Mom!” all day.  My friend was ‘free-writing’ – a form of automatic writing – and it kept on referring to me as ‘mom’. 
     I’ve never seen anything in the house. Not even a shadow. I just know when he’s there. I can feel him. I’ll say, “Hey! How’s it going?” I just talk to him like he’s one of the family. 
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     So, my grandmother and my mother lived in a second story apartment; a single family house, but with a second apartment. And the owner had to go out of town to visit her daughter. My mother was away at nursing school, so my grandmother was the only person in the house. 
     She had a strange feeling that something wasn’t right in the downstairs apartment.  So she went downstairs, and the room was dark, and she saw a bright, yellowish light shining on various things in the room. The light would move from one thing to another, to another, like a little spotlight moving on different things in the apartment. 
     My grandmother went back upstairs, and she heard the next that the owner of the house had died. And so we feel that that was her spirit going around, looking at things that were important to her in the apartment. Almost like she was saying her goodbyes to the paintings and whatever was important to her. My grandmother was pretty spooked about it, and I’m still thinking about it after all these years. 
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     So, we were really little. I moved out of this house when I was about 5-years-old. It was a duplex in Bridgeport. My grandparents owned it, my father, mother, my brother and I lived on one side, and my aunt and uncle and their child lived on the other side. So, we shared one wall, and on both sides of the wall was a staircase that went up to the second floor. On our side of the house we had a big mirror right before the staircase. There was a closet when you walked into the front door, and the stairs were in front of it.      One day my mother was cleaning the closet out, and she heard an electrical sound. She got up and she looked and there was a man on the bottom of the stairs. It was an older man, and my mother just froze because it’s not typically what you would see in the house. Nobody was home at the time. The man walked up the stairs and then he just disappeared. 
     This electrical noise was happening every night. My mother thought my aunt was going to sleep, like maybe they flicked the light switch on their side of the house. Meanwhile, my aunt would hear the same electrical noise and thought that it was my parents turning off a light switch before going to sleep.      But all along, it was this light energy on that mirror. It would make this loud electrical sound, and you would see a streak of light go right across the mirror. And that’s what would happen every night when the light switched. 
     Another thing that happened was that you’d be sitting at the table, and there’d be glasses on the table, you’d hear a ‘ping’ sound, and the glass would be broken. You could actually lift half the glass up and the other part of the glass would still be there. My father would say that it was just because they bought cheap glasses. But all of them would just go “swish”, right across and each one would break. 
     That mirror’s in my parents’ house now in the dining room. When I was younger, I had a very fine gold cross that I got for my first communion. It was on a very thin, delicate chain. I had broken it one time, and they had to solder it back together. Since that time I wasn’t allowed to wear it anymore because my mom was afraid that the chain would break again. So my mother had it hanging on her dresser mirror, and it would always hang there. 
     One day, around the time when I was a teenager, my father was painting that room. I saw all of the drop-cloths hanging over everything including the mirror, and I said, “Dad, my cross.” He said, “I’m sorry, I forgot about it.” I lifted the drop-cloth off the mirror, and the chain with the cross had fallen off and it was broken. We held it in two pieces and I said, “That’s okay dad. I’ll take it to Michael’s Jewelers and I'll get it fixed.” My dad was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” and I was like “Dad, don’t worry about it. It was a mistake”
     I took the cross and put it in a jewelry box that had a little hidden drawer that nobody knew about and I forgot about it. Every time we would go to the mall my parents would say, “We should have brought the cross to be fixed.” That went on for a couple times, every time we would go to the mall. 
     One day we were heading for the mall and my parents said, “Marnie, remember to get the cross,” and I said, “Oh yeah!” I went up the stairs and when I went to my jewelry box and took out the cross, it was all in one piece with only one gold solder on it. So, it was fixed. I said, “Thank you!” out loud. I just knew it was the spirit of the man who had lived in the previous house who was responsible for fixing it. 
     I was in such shock by what had happened that it felt like everything was moving in slow motion as I bright the cross downstairs to show my parents. So as I’m coming down the stairs I’m thinking, ‘Marnie, you’re crazy’. When I got downstairs I said to my parents, “Oh, you got it fixed!” and I showed them the cross. They looked at each other, then said, “We didn’t get it fixed.” I said, “Well, it’s fixed!” I remember going over the bannister and holding it and showing it to them. 
     They were in shock, and of course the magnifying glass came out because everybody had to check it out, but nobody fixed it. It only had one solder mark from the original time it had been fixed. 
     That mirror from the other house is in the dining room. My brother and my mother were at the kitchen table, and when you’re at the kitchen table you can see the dining room where that mirror is. My brother and my mother were talking, and then they both heard that electrical sound again. My brother looked up, and there was a white, foggy mist in the corner of the dining room. My brother said, “Mom,” and she said, “What’s up Tom?” My brother said, “Mom, look!” They both went into the dining room and they could see that white mist next to the mirror. They put their hand right through it, and then it slowly just disappeared after some time. 
     Another time I was feeling nostalgic and thought I’d take pictures of what it’s like to walk into the house so I’d be able to look back on it when we moved some day. I took a random picture with my phone, then didn’t really think about it again. But much later, I looked at the picture, and in the picture there’s a white, misty thing with a shadow behind it on the wall. And it was a similar fog that my mother and brother saw in the corner that time. 
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     So, before you were talking about how sometimes you’ll smell different things that are associated with someone who passed away, and sometimes there’s a reason for it. Well, my grandmother lost her brother to lung cancer several years ago, a few years before my grandfather passed away. He would travel back and forth from work, so he would only come home on weekends. 
     One day during the week, she was asleep, and she could smell my grand-uncle’s tobacco smoke in the hallway. She was thinking, ‘I haven’t smelled that in years. What is it?’ The smell actually woke her up, and she sat up in bed and there he was standing next to her. And he said to her, “Everything’s going to be okay.” She thought she was dreaming, but she also thought it was really weird and she didn’t know what to think. 
     ​She went back to sleep, and the next morning she called her son – my uncle – and said, “There’s something just not right today,” and he went and checked and found that my grandfather had died of a sudden massive heart attack. 

Oxford Public Library 
     When I was a kid, I would always make my grandfather shave before I would give him a kiss. I’d say, “Get rid of those scruffs!” So when I was a little girl I used to sit there and watch him shave. I was much older when my grandfather died in Florida. After he passed away, I was standing in my grandparents’ bedroom and I smelled his shaving cream. And, I just knew it was him. It gave me goosebumps, and I left the room because I got scared. Even though this happened when I was older, it still freaked me out. 
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     I worked here at the library for many years, and this story involves my cat, Dewey. He wasn’t feeling particularly well, and this had been going on for a few weeks. I was here at the library, and I wasn’t thinking about it when all of a sudden I looked up and I saw Dewey go around the corner of the book stacks in the biography section. He looked at me, and then continued walking and went around the corner. When I got home, I found that he had died while I was at work. So I saw him when he passed, right down there in the adult section. 
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     The Homosassa Public Library in Homosassa, Florida is very haunted. I worked there for sixteen years, and I was actually hired in the early 2000’s to help open the library at the new location which was built on a dump. 
I can’t even tell you how many staff members had multiple things happen to them. But one of the craziest stories I have is that early one morning, my close colleague and I came into work at about eight o'clock. Our community meeting room had a separate entrance, and we would often give the key to our tax preparers or election officials. So we came in that morning, and we heard all this talking going on in the room down there. It sounded like a party was going on, that’s how loud it was. 
     The community room was at the end of a very long hallway, so we looked at each other and said, “Gee, who’s here?” and the two of us walked down the hallway expecting to see a whole room full of people. We heard all of this going on the whole time we were walking down the hall. I put my hand on the doorknob, turned it, and when we went in, it stopped. We looked at each other and said, “You heard that, right?” 
     Not too long after that I had an evening cleaner, and when her cart was pushed all the way down that long hallway she left and never came back. 
One time, the children’s librarian freaked out because she heard the door handle going crazy. You know, like when somebody’s trying to jiggle the handle when a door is locked
     We had vending machines in the hallway, and they would just go berserk! One time when it was doing this I put my hand on it and said, “Listen, I know you’re here you need to cut this out. I’m acknowledging you, but if you’re not of Jesus Christ, then get the hell out of my library!” I would say this, and it would stop. It was crazy what went on in that place

The Mark Twain Library -  Redding, Connecticut
     I was actually an atheist when I was a kid, and I moved into my first apartment that was actually an old house that had three apartments in it that was haunted – very haunted. And it completely changed my whole outlook on life. I told my wife about it, and she kind of looked at me like I was not all. But then we both experienced a ghost in our house in Redding, Connecticut two weeks after my father died. It was his spirit for sure. 
     My first apartment was in Armonk, New York. The first night I moved into the apartment, I was there with a friend and had moved everything into the house. It was about 1:30 in the morning. I was totally exhausted and had just laid down to go to sleep.
     The front door of the apartment was downstairs, and the stairs led from the front door straight up to the second floor where my apartment was. So I’m lying in bed, and I heard these really loud footsteps coming up the stairs. It sounded like someone wearing work boots or construction boots just went pounding up those steps, going from the bottom of the step right up to the top where my apartment was.
     Right after the footsteps, I heard the sound of someone running their hand right across the keys of a piano. It was shocking, and I’m thinking, ‘What is going on’. There wasn’t even a piano in the building or in any of the apartments. So I opened the door to my apartment to confront whoever it was, because I thought somebody was breaking into the house. But when I got out there, there was nothing. 
     So I went back into the bedroom, and I was just still really charged. But about twenty or thirty minutes later it happened again. This time it was in the kitchen, and it was different. The cabinets were opening and closing. Loud. Like someone was working in the kitchen doing things. That went on for about a year. It was usually around 2 in the morning, and it went on and off over that time. Over time it happened less and less. 
     You just told us how you speak to the ghosts during investigations. I was telling my wife that I had conversations with this ghost that you were dead, and that you had to leave and move on. Because I researched. I started to look into this stuff. I had no clue before. 
     So it turns out that, first of all, it was an old house. I could tell by looking at the construction of the home, and from the windows that it was built around 1900. But I learned that there was a suicide, and it was a woman. She hung herself in that house. 
     There was one other time I remember, I went away for a weekend to see my mother who was in Avalon, New Jersey. I had locked the door and everything before I left. 
     There were two other families who lived in that house, and we all were friends. When I came back from Avalon, the woman who rented the place below me saw me in the driveway. She said, “Bob, I just wanted to say that somebody must have been in your apartment.” 
     “What are you talking about?” I said. 
     “You weren’t around, right?” 
     “No,” I said, “I was in Avalon.” 
    “Last night,” she said, “we heard people walking and talking in your apartment. It sounded like there was a party going on up there. I’m telling you it was so loud that you could hear the people walking and talking. We ran up there and opened the door, but everything was perfect.” 
I looked at her and she looked at me and I said, “It’s got to be the ghost,” because everyone in the house knew about the ghost. 
     This next story is about a first-hand experience that my wife and kids and I had in our home in Redding, Connecticut. My father passed on eight years ago. His health had been declining seriously for quite a while. He was not in a nursing home, and one day he died at his home in Florida. 
     They could not release the death certificate because they lost it, so they kept the poor guy on ice for a couple of weeks and eventually he was cremated. This story took place that day he was cremated.
     It was in January, and we had had a bad storm here in Redding. The storm happened on Saturday, and by Sunday there was still a lot of snow around so I was outside shoveling and cleaning the driveway. It was at the end of the day, and I was at the front door shoveling off the stoop when my wife came outside and said, “Bob, can you be a little more careful.” Now, as you come in the front door there’s a foyer, and there’s a corner shelf with three levels, and our kids’ pictures are on each of the shelves. My wife told me to be careful because all three of the pictures were lying face down on the shelves. She thought they fell over, and that it had something to do with me working outside, so she put them back up again the way they had been. 
     After I finished shoveling, I came inside. We had a fire going in the family room, and the kids were in for the night. I was sort of suspicious about the pictures falling, but I didn’t really think it was paranormal or anything like that. 
     So we’re all in the family room, the wood stove is going and it’s cozy. About fifteen minutes later my wife walked back out into the foyer, and all three of the pictures were lying down flat again on the shelves.
     I knew at that point what was going on. I said, “It’s my father. He’s letting us know his presence.” But my wife didn’t believe me. She thought someone was in the house, and that they were robbing the house. I told her that nobody was in the house, but she told me to check the house out to make sure no one had broken in. Meanwhile, the kids are terrified and she's terrified. So, I walked around and there was no one in the house. So I went back to the foyer and put the pictures back upright.
     We all went back to the family room, and ten minutes later I looked out and all three pictures were laying down flat again. Now, this happened five times, and the kids were terrified. I walked over to the pictures and I said, “Dad, you’re scaring the kids. If you’re going to show your presence, just rotate the pictures.” 
     Now, this is where it gets really interesting. I went back into the family room. Fifteen minutes later I came back out to the foyer and all three pictures were rotated. Each was turned sideways at a ninety degree angle, and all were facing the same direction. This happened a couple more times that night.
     The next morning school was delayed. We were all having breakfast, and when we checked the pictures they were all rotated again, but not as much. It happened about two more times with just a few of the pictures. 
     My son was getting the 10 AM bus, and when he and I walked into the foyer the pictures were rotated just a little bit. I said to my son, “Tell your grandfather that you love him. He’s probably crossing now.” 
It was like he was losing the energy to move the pictures because at first they were laying flat down several times, then they were fully turned, but now they were just ajar a little bit, and it had gotten less and less. 
     The day he died – two weeks before all this happened – I got a phone call from my brother in the morning. Early the next morning I came downstairs to the family room. It was dark, so I turned on the light. I’m a designer, and we have this big wood vault made out of stone. So we fill it up with stone, and then you have the wood stove that’s built into the fireplace. As I was coming into the room, an acorn husk came out of that thing and landed at my feet. It traveled somewhere between 10 to 12 feet and landed right at my feet. 
     I walked over to the mantle, I put my hands on the mantle, and I said, “Dad, you’ve always done things in a big way. So if you’re going to show your presence, really show it like you mean it.” That was my prayer. That’s what I said. Two weeks later he showed it by moving the pictures. Those pictures have never moved since that day. That was the only time they had ever moved in fifteen years. He was saying goodbye. 
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(Story shared by a young adult)
     We have this small movie projector at my house, and one time we went outside because our family wanted to watch a movie. My dad put a screen up against the house, and we were all sitting on the hill because he was going to project something to watch. All of a sudden, my older sister ran inside the house, and when I saw her go into the house I got up and ran after her. Her bedroom is upstairs, and as I was running up the stairs I heard the sound of the cabinet doors closing in her room. 
     When I got to her room, I went in and all of her cabinets were all open and all of her clothes were overflowing onto the floor, but she wasn’t in there. I got super scared so I immediately ran out. When I got downstairs I ran into my sister. She said that she had her phone the whole time, and that she hadn’t gone back into the house.
     Besides that, other things have happened. Picture frames have fallen, doors shut by themselves, and I’ve heard voices. They sounded like the voices of relatives who I haven’t seen in years, but I recognized their voices. These aren’t the voices of people who died, they sound like relatives who are still alive. 
     One time last year, I was home alone and I heard this really loud, really deep rough sounding voice that reminded me of one of my relatives. It said, “Are you hungry?” I was so scared. 
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(Story shared by a young adult)
     So, this was a few years back. I was home alone with my brother and I heard someone walking up the stairs. So I went with my brother into the same room, and we were listening to someone walking up the stairs. It actually sounded like they were hopping up the stairs. They didn’t sound like they were going up and down the stairs, they were just going up. It would start at the bottom of the steps and go all the way up, the it would start again at the bottom, and it would repeat over and over. 
     When my mom came home and I told her, she said that it was probably just one of the doors. But I remember that all the doors were closed. The sound was repairing over and over for about five minutes, so it couldn’t have just been one of the doors.
      Another time, when my sister and I were sharing a room, we were on bunk beds. My sister was on the top bunk, and I was on the bottom bunk. I saw a figure, so I turned on a lamp and my dad was standing there facing towards the door. I didn’t see his face because he was facing away from me, but I knew it was him. My sister was like, “Ooo! It’s a ghost!”
     I got out of bed and walked up behind my dad and I asked, “What are you doing here?” and he just walked out the door. So I followed him, but by the time I looked out into the hallway, I didn’t see him. The next day I asked him why he came into our room, because it was really late, and he said that he was never there. At the time, I thought that he was just playing with us and lying. But, he still says that he was never in the room that night.
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(Story shared by a young adult)
     My story is ridiculously connected to that story you told about the doppelgangers. I woke up in the middle of the night, just randomly. I couldn't see my clock from my bed, and I didn’t want to get up to see what time it was because I didn't want to move. There was one corner of my room that my dad was standing in. It’s next to this big white dresser. I sleep far away from that corner, and I always have because I don’t particularly like walking by that dresser in the middle of the night. It’s the darkest corner of the room, and my room isn’t particularly well lit, especially at night.
     So, my dad was standing there and I thought it was my dad. He was facing the wall corner. I couldn’t see his face or his clothes, but I could tell it was a man, so in my mind I’m thinking that it’s my dad. 
     So I called out to him. I said, “Dad?” and he walked along the dresser to the end of my bed, and then turned and walked calmly out of the room. After he left, I kind of just stared at my ceiling for a while, and eventually I went back to sleep. 
     When I woke up in the morning, I said, “Dad, why were you in my room at around 3 AM last night?” He said, “What do you mean? I wasn’t in your room last night.” So, either I saw something, like a ghost or something, or my dad was just sleep walking – but that’s not something he does.

Sherman Library, Sherman, Connecticut
     My husband and I were traveling cross country, and we stopped in Winslow, Arizona. We decided to spend the night in this antique railroad Hacienda Hotel. We had been there before, and we knew that hotel existed, so we just thought we’d spend the night there because it would be kind of cool. A lot of famous people had stayed there. The rooms were not that big because it was an old hotel, so when we went to our room there were two twin beds there. It was supposedly the same room that the actor Douglas Fairbanks had slept in many years ago. 
     We went to sleep, and I had never had a paranormal experience before in my life. We went to sleep, and you know how sometimes you’re somewhere and you feel like somebody’s looking at you? Well, it was probably around two in the morning and I woke up, and there was this woman dressed all in white. She was elderly, and she was standing at the foot of my husband’s bed. So, I started screaming. I kept screaming over and over, “What are you doing here? Why are you here? What are you doing here?” 
     So finally I got up out of bed because my husband wasn’t waking up. I’m still yelling at her and I’m fumbling for this big antique lamp trying to get the light on. She’s still standing at the foot of the bed staring at my husband. Then she turned and looked at me, and it was not too long after that that I turned the light on, and she was gone. 
     But during the time I was doing this, I was looking around the room because I was trying to see if there was any way that something could have been projecting this figure. There was nothing. As soon as I turned the light on, the entire room went ice cold. Absolutely ice cold. 
     So I looked at my husband because now he’s awake. I said, “Didn’t you hear me screaming that there was a ghost in the room?” He said, “I thought I was dreaming that you were screaming that there was a ghost in the room!”
     So the next day, we had to leave early. We didn’t really say anything to the people who owned the place. But it was the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona. They own another place, and I read online that they had had paranormal sightings in both places. The hotel is owned by a very large Spanish family over multiple generations. They think that it’s a grandmother that visits various rooms. 
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     ​So, it’s when my family and I moved into our new house around two years ago. I was ten. I noticed that there was something there, and my dog would bark at the laundry room all the time. One day I asked my mom if there were people working the laundry room. She said that there weren’t, but I saw this tall guy. He didn’t have any hair. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was a guy. He was just standing there about five feet away from me and he didn’t say anything.
     I’ve seen him a couple of other times. At night I saw him standing at the end of the hallway, and he didn’t say anything. He was about twenty feet away from me, and he just walked away.
     There was also another time when I was sitting in my room watching something on TV. I looked up at the TV which had a reflection, and I could see him standing about two feet behind me. He started moving closer, and then grabbed my shoulders and I jumped. I could feel him grab my shoulders. It was scary, so I left my room and didn’t go back there for the day.
     I told my mom, and she didn’t believe me, but I really felt him. She asked someone to come over to see if she could get rid of him because he was scaring us. He would also turn the TV on and leave the doors open. My mom would ask my dad, “Did you leave the TV on?” and he would say no because he wasn’t even there. The lady came over and cleansed the house so he could leave, and I haven’t seen him since.
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     My dad passed away, and a week to the day I was home from work alone. I was in the kitchen making lunch for the next day, and my cat was in my bedroom. My dad used to always ask how the cat was doing, because he never met him. He always wanted to meet him but he never did. So I’m in the kitchen, and in the next room I could see my cat’s toy – a big plastic ball with another ball inside of it. As I’m looking into the room, that ball moved on its own, and the cat came out of the bedroom to see what was going on – to see why it had moved.   
     Just before that happened I had said, “Dad, I want to make sure you’re OK”, and then I saw and heard the ball move. I just knew it was him coming to meet the cat. 
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     My sister bought a house in New Jersey, and she was doing work on it. It had a rose garden out front, and she’s not much of a gardener so she spent an afternoon ripping out the rose garden. 
     The next morning, she was in her kitchen. Her dog was staring at this pantry and barking at the pantry. That’s where they kept the dog food, so she figured he was just hungry. My sister turned around and saw a teenage girl in her kitchen in a nightgown. There’s obviously no one else in the house, so my sister kind of did a double-take and the kid disappeared. 
     My sister did a little investigation about the history of the house, and she found out that there was a teenage girl who had committed suicide in that pantry, and the mother had planted the rose garden in memory of her daughter. So, by disturbing the rose garden, my sister must have messed things up. 
     She has a friend who’s a priest. She called him up and said can you come and bless my house? She never had anything happen again, so I guess it worked.  
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     This happened in the early 2000’s around Halloween time. My friends and I were bored, and we’re thinking ‘What should we go and do?’ They had told me about a road somewhere in this area, that there was like a mile or two portion of it that had no construction on it. No houses. It had been developed a couple of times throughout history, but supposedly fires took down all the houses or anything that was built, but just in this mile or two stretch. 
     My friends said that the road was haunted, and they had been on it before. So I’m like, “Alright, let’s go for a drive. Show me where the road is.” It was around midnight, and they showed me where it was and sure enough it’s residential, then it’s just woods. As soon as we crossed over to the wooded area, it got pitch black. 
     I got a really negative feeling. The car got quiet, and we were just driving through. I’m doing maybe ten miles per hour when all of a sudden this 8 - 10 year old boy shows up right outside my car – floating alongside my car window. I’m driving, and he’s right outside my driver side window, literally touching my car. His head was right at the same level as mine, so we were at eye level with one another. 
     He was dressed in 1600s or 1700s period clothing. He had a roundish-shaped face, short brown hair, and he was wearing some kind of a hat. He had on an indigo blue shirt, but I couldn’t see his pants or his feet. His skin was kind of yellowish-white, and the whole figure was kind of see-through. He wasn’t completely opaque. 
     I can hear him talking to me, but I’m hearing him in my head. His mouth was moving, but I wasn’t hearing anything in my ears. He told me this is not a good place for me to be, that there’s much negativity there, and that he’s going to keep me safe but it can only be this one time. He’ll never be able to do it again.
     This entire time I’m seeing all of these really dark shadows darting through the woods on either side of me. Just horrible negativity, but I’m feeling this sphere of protection around me. 
     So, we’re slowly driving down this road. The lights on my dashboard start flickering, and we finally get to the end of this stretch of road. The boy was like, “Go, and never come back.” When we got to the end of this stretch of road there were houses, so I stopped the car and said to my two friends, “Did you guys see anything?” They said they had seen the dark shadows, and they had felt the bad energy. I said to them, “How about that ten-year-old boy that was hanging out with us?” They didn’t see him. 
     That was good enough for me. I’m going to heed this kid’s warning and I’m never going to come back again. Well, about five years later we’re all driving around and we’re bored and I said, “Remember that road we went down? I really want to go back, just out of curiosity.” So they said, “Alright, let’s go.” I said, “Great, where is it again?” And they said, “No, you told us about it.” I said, “No, you told me about it because you even said that you had walked part of it.” They were like, “No, it was you.” 
     We had about a half hour discussion, and we don’t know where it came from. I’ve driven around trying to find it. I think it was either in Brookfield or New Millford. If I remember correctly it was right off of Route 7, but it was before Super 7 was built. 

Dover Plains Library, Dover Plains, New York 
     My husband’s mom had passed away, and he had a hard time believing in God. That was always a big subject. He was sitting in the living room. I went to bed because I don’t like sports and he was watching the baseball playoffs. So I went up to bed. 
     Well, for two days he didn’t speak to me, and he was not nice. Finally I said to him, “What did I do?” because the last thing I know is that I said good night! He said, “Do you want to know what happened? I was watching the game and the cat ran by me. I turned around to tell him to move out of the way, and when I turned back around my mother was standing right in front of me. 
     Now, me being the type of person I am, I said, “What did she look like? Tell me all about it.” He said that she never talked, and she looked like she was in her 40s. She died when she was 80. He said that she was wearing her housecoat, the same thing that she always wore. He said, “I went to say something to her, and she just dissipated.” I said, “Do you believe in God now? Because that’s what your mother is telling you, that there’s life after death.” 
     Another time, my sister-in-law saw my mother two years after she passed away. My father was dying of lung cancer, and we knew that he was going very soon. My sister-in-law was sitting in her family room and she saw my mother standing next to her washer and dryer. She said to me, “Your mother came to get your father”. He died the next morning at his home, and my mother had come to take him. I really believe that that’s what happened. I wish she would visit me. I want to see her so badly. But I think she came where she thought she was needed. 
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     This happened back in the 1950s. I was only three years old, and my seven year old cousin used to play with me all the time. He had a heart condition and had to have open-heart surgery. The whole family was down at the hospital when he was having the surgery, and my mom and my aunt were with me at the house. All of a sudden the lights went out, and I just disappeared. My mom went around looking for me calling, “Laura, where are you?” 
     When the lights finally came back on, I was standing at the top of the stairs. During the time I was missing, my cousin Joseph came to play with me. He said, “Tell everybody I’m OK.” 
     I told my mom about it and said, “Joseph’s OK.” She said, “What are you talking about?” They didn’t know yet, but he had passed away on the operating table during the open-heart surgery. 
     I didn’t hear about this story until I was about 12 years old. I overheard them talking when they had company. I was supposed to be sleeping, and I overheard them. I asked my mother the next day. I said, “What is this that you were talking about last night?” She said, “Well, we were afraid to tell you. 
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     Our family were all going up to Lake George. This was right before my daughter was going to get married. It was in the winter, and we were staying at a spa doing a girl’s weekend. We went to bed, and we woke up in the morning. I said good morning to my daughter, and she had been sleeping with me in my room. I said, “How did you sleep?” 
     ​“Not good,” she said. “Grammy kept me up all night.”
     “What do you mean Grammy kept you up all night,” I asked. 
     “Well, she sat right in that chair and she wouldn’t leave. So I finally said to her, ‘Grammy, you have to go. I gotta get some sleep.’ And she finally left.” 
     My mother lived in Florida, and she never could do anything with us as a group with my family. She used to say all the time, “I just wish once we could all get together and do something special.” 
     My grandmother was looking forward to my daughter’s wedding. But she died about six months before the wedding, and we actually buried her in the dress she had bought for the wedding. 
     ​When my daughter told me that she saw her in the room that night I said, “She just wants to be a part of this. She wants to be a part of this weekend.” It was comforting to know that she was there. 
     My daughter has seen her a couple of times, but she makes herself known to everybody but me. I don’t know why. 
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     There’s a house up in Amenia, New York that my family rented when I was six-years-old. There was a long hallway that went back to the kitchen, and there was a bedroom on either side. Off the kitchen was a porch that had steps that went down and outside. 
     I remember, and this is so vivid that I’m sure that it really happened. I remember hearing the sound of a horse coming up the porch stairs, going down the hallway, and straight out the front door. 
     What I had seen was a person galloping on a horse. They were on the horse, riding like they were racing off to somewhere – like a Paul Revere kind of thing. It was only about three or four feet away from where I was standing, and I felt the breeze from it and everything as it went by me. 
I had my head out the door watching it. I actually saw it! I told people about it. I told my mother, but no one believed me. But I believe to this day that something went through the house. 
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     There was an old abandoned colonial that was down the road on Newtown Road in Stormville, New York. As a kid, my girlfriend and I used to take walks there. We used to say, “This house is so cool!” because it was just such a cool looking house. So, we used to hear stories about the house, and sometimes people would try to sleep in there and they’d run out. 
Well, one day I said, “Let’s go in there.” So we went into the house, and it was beautiful! It had window-seats and fireplaces in every room. Even upstairs in the bedrooms, every room had a fireplace. 
     So after we left, I told my mom and dad and my grandparents about it. So one day my grandmother said, “Let’s take a ride over there.” So my grandmother, my cousin and I all got in the car and we went down there. 
When we got there, the kids walked up the stairs first, and my grandmother came in after us. She had a hard time walking, but she loved stuff like this so she really wanted to see it. Now, before I tell you what happened, I have to say that it was a dry day. There was no wind, no storms or anything like that. The air was still.  
     When we were all in the house, we started going up the stairs to the second floor when all of a sudden every single door just slammed shut so hard that it was impossible for anybody to do that. They all slammed so hard that my grandmother ran down the stairs. And that was it for her. She said, “I’m never going back there again!” 
     It was just so unbelievable, and I could never understand it because my girlfriend and I always went there. We always used to say, “Someday we’re going to buy this house. We’re going to share it.” It was beautiful. But nothing ever happened to us when the two of us went there together. Everybody said that all sorts of things used to happen to them when they went in the house, but my girlfriend and I were able to go in all the time and nothing ever happened. The only thing that ever happened was when I brought my grandmother there to see the place. 
     We heard that anyone who tried to buy the house, something would happen and they would move out after a short time. So, they ended up burning it down. They called the fire department and burned it down. 
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     My house, when we first moved in, my husband had lived there. We got married, and I moved in. The first few nights that I was there I kept hearing these chimes. The chimes would go “Doo, doo, doo, doo. Doo, doo, doo, doo.” From a high note, and going lower and lower each time. And it would happen over and over. So one morning when he got up I said, “Do you have chimes in the house? Like a chime clock or something?” And he said, “Oh, you hear it too?” Everybody in the house would hear it. 
     My husband did see a ghost there, but he only saw this person once. He saw her going down the hall. I’ve never seen her, but one time when I was playing the piano I felt something move behind me. I could almost feel it. I was thinking, ‘Maybe it’s my dad coming to see me,’ because he used to love to hear me play the piano when I was a kid.
     My sister was having a lot of problems with depression, so she came to live with us. One day she was in her bedroom with the door open, and the bedroom door slammed shut. She got up to look, but there was no window open. You know, sometimes you’ll get suction from a window being open in the house somewhere, but it was nothing like that. My sister was like, “What’s going on here?!” I got the feeling that this lady didn’t like my sister being here at all. 
     Weird stuff like that would happen … doors slamming. We think it was the woman who lived there before we bought the house, because she was there all her life. 
     We still live in that house, and we still hear the chimes. Sometimes they go away and you don’t hear them for a long time – and then all of a sudden I’ll say to my husband, “I heard the chimes again,” and he’ll say, “Yeah, me too.”  

Brewster Public Library, Brewster, New York
     Sometimes I would go to sleep worrying about my children, because they slept on the floor above me so I wasn’t near them. So, I would sometimes think, ‘Oh my God, what if there’s a crime or something in the middle of the night and I couldn’t be there for them.’ 
     Well, one morning my daughter came to breakfast and told me that that night, she had seen me standing in her doorway. She said I was wearing a blue shirt, and I was just standing in the doorway looking at her. She said that when she saw me, she said, “Mommy? Mommy?” and I didn’t say anything – and then I disappeared.
     So, all I can think is that maybe I was astral traveling because I was worried about my kids. 
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     I used to go out with this guy, and I remember seeing him in my room one night. Right across from my bed was a desk where I would study. And this one night he just appeared. I saw him as a silhouette with blue, starry light. But I could still see that it was him. I could see his face, but he was transparent. And he was just looking at me. He crossed his legs one way, then crossed them the other. When I saw him, it scared me so I screamed and he disappeared. My dad came into the room and said, “Are you OK?” 
     Now, this guy didn’t die or anything. He was still alive. So, like the other lady who just told her story, maybe it was his astral projection coming to visit me. 
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     When I was a child, I would sometimes put something down, then I’d leave the room and come back and find it in a different place. One night I was going to sleep over at a friend's house and I had a doll with me. Just as I was about to leave the house, I realized I had left something upstairs, so I put the doll on the television next to the front door. I ran upstairs and got what I had left there, and when I came back down the doll was gone. Totally gone. We checked the whole house dozens of times. My mom still lives there, we’ve cleaned out the house multiple times, and to this day the doll is still gone. I have no idea what happened to her. 
     My whole family started to believe that something was going on in the house because of something that happened with my dad. One day he had taken around two hundred dollars out of the bank, and he put it on the piano for later. My sister decided to play a joke on him. She took the money, went upstairs, and put it next to one of our beds because we shared a bedroom. 
     My dad came into the room looking for his money on the piano, and my sister said, “Ha! Ha! I took the money.” 
     “Real funny,” he said. “Go get it.” 
     So she went upstairs and the money was gone. She had put it right next to the post of the bed, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. She just wanted to put it somewhere until the joke was over, but the money was totally gone. 
     We cleaned the room, and it was getting to the point where my dad was really pissed. He said, “You’re going to have to pay me back for the money you lost.” 
     A couple of weeks later, my sister was in the room brushing her hair. As she was looking in the mirror, she noticed something next to the bedpost. She turned around, and it was the money right where she had put it weeks earlier! 
     In addition to that story, there were a couple of times where I’ve gone to sleep and I’ve woken up paralyzed. I can’t even twitch my finger. But I’m aware of everything. I could hear my mom downstairs, I could hear the television. And then I’d sense this presence in the room, and I felt the bed shift, and then I felt an arm go across me. I could feel the weight of it. It wasn’t scary. It was comforting. This happened in the house I grew up in, and it also happened once in the house I live in now. When I feel this arm cradling me, I actually get so relaxed that I fall asleep, and then the next time I wake up I’m fine. I actually felt like it might be my dad, because this only happened after he passed away. 
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     I was just listening to the woman talk about her sleep paralysis, and the same thing happened to me. It used to happen to me a lot, especially in the house we used to live in in Mt. Kisco, New York. But one time it was a really frightening experience. 
     One night when I was sleeping, all of a sudden I felt sleep paralysis come over me. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t. All of a sudden, I heard this diabolic voice. It was really loud, and it was talking right into my ear. I was trying to wake up, and I was making all of these sounds, so my husband was yelling, “Wake up! Wake up!” Finally, I woke up. It was really terrifying. 

John C Hart Memorial Library, Shrub Oak, NY
     Where I live, I see a lot of ghosts. I never saw them before, but now I’m starting to see them. I said to my friend, “I have a good heart, so maybe that’s why they’re coming to see me.” 
     Once I saw a woman all dressed in white. I saw her on one side of the room, and I watched her walk out and into another room. When I went to look for her, there was nobody there. 
     Another time I was downstairs and I saw the door open, and then close, but there was no one there. I’ve also seen people passing by like shadows. I’ve heard that the land where my house is was once an Indian burial ground, so maybe it’s the spirits of the Indians. I don’t know.
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     My house was built before 1806. One day, everyone was out of the house except me. I went upstairs because I wanted to take a bath, and the dog came with me but he wouldn’t come into the bathroom so he sat outside.
As I was running the water for my bath, I heard a little girl talking to the dog so I thought my kids had come home. I opened the door and said, “You’re back already?” and there was no answer. The dog was just looking at me, and looking at one of the rooms up there. 
     I went back into the bathroom and shut the door, and I figured that the sound of the water was matrixing and it just sounded like a voice. So when the tub was full, I turned the water off and got into the tub and I heard the little girl talking to my dog again. The dog was all excited when I got out. 
After my dog passed away, not too long ago, one day we came into our living room and his ball was right in the middle of the living room floor. Prior to this, the ball was kept in a cabinet in another room. We don’t know if it was the spirit of our dog who put it there, or if it was the little girl I heard talking that day. We weren’t afraid when we saw it. It was just cute that the ball was there. 
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     My house is haunted, and we believe it’s the ghost of a farmhand. I called in an intuitive because of all the happenings in the house, and she told us that that’s who it is. A farmhand. 
     At first the house was really quiet. Nothing happened there until we knocked the original house down, then built another one on the same site. That’s when it all started. My husband started hearing sounds, I heard sounds. Then my daughter started to see things and I saw things.
Before these things started happening in my house, one neighbor two houses away said that her house was haunted. So it seems that this farmhand is angry, and that he goes to different houses and tries to get the people who live there to leave. 
     What was happening in our house was we were getting a lot of loud banging sounds up in the attic, boxes moving, crashing sounds. It would happen in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden the whole family would get up and go into the hallway at the same time. We’d be like, “What’s going on?” because of the noise. 
     After that, we started to see black shadows. First it was my daughter who said that she saw a black shadow of a person. I said to her, “Oh honey, it’s probably just the lights from a car driving by the house.” But she said, “Mom, it came up the stairs and then started coming down the hallway.” I told her that everything was alright, and she went back to sleep. 
     After she was asleep, I went downstairs to watch television. In the backyard there isn’t a road or anything nearby where cars could drive by. As I was watching television, I saw a black figure go right through the French doors, right by me, then it went up the stairs to the hallway just like my daughter had said. 
     I got all creeped out. ‘Oh my God’ I thought, ‘It’s true!’ I really did see something. It comes and goes, but one time it escalated and I got really angry. I was trying to go to sleep one night. I was closing my eyes, and when I opened my eyes there was a man’s face staring right at me. It scared the daylights out of me! And then it disappeared.
     But I got really angry. I was like, ‘No, no. We’re not going there. Enough’s enough.’ And I had a conversation with him. 
     The intuitive said that he was angry because this was all his old apple orchard and he was a farmhand and this was his land. Then all of this track-housing was built on the land in 1955. He was angry about the development of the land, and that was where he felt comfortable where he wanted to be and we were intruding on his space. 
     It’s been quiet now, but he comes and goes. 
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     We live in an apartment above the garage of a house that was built in the early 1900’s. It was originally a farmhouse, but it had been totally updated and renovated. Our apartment is above the garage which is separate from the house. 
     We hear a lot of clicking and banging and things like that all the time. It’s definitely not the sound of the house settling or anything like that. We’ll hear really loud bangs, and the sound of things moving. 
     When you walk up the stairs, there’s the door to our apartment and directly across from that is the bathroom. I’ll be in the shower getting ready for work, and my wife leaves earlier for work than I do. Several times it sounds like she’s coming back up the stairs. We keep a key under the smoke detector to get back into the apartment. When you move the smoke detector to get the key out, it makes a distinctive sound. Another thing is that the door sticks. 
     One morning I was taking a shower, and I heard all of that and I called out, “What did you forget?” I didn’t get a response, so I shut the water off and opened the door, but there was nobody there and the door leading out of the apartment was closed. 
     We have things like this happen all the time. Some of our friends like this paranormal stuff, so we decided to do the flashlight test. I have this high-end police flashlight and I put it on the TV stand. We said, “Can you make this flashlight turn off?” And it turned off several times as we sat there watching it.      There were also sounds as we were asking it to do this. I have a video if you want to see it. (Shows me the video)

Newburgh Free Library, Newburgh, New York
     My parents bought a Victorian house in Bonnville (?). My mom had seen a male ghost walking through the upstairs hallway. He would also just stand in the doorway and look at her.
     When my son was around four years old, he would sleep over there once in a while. He told my mother that he saw a man. My mom asked him to describe what the man looked like. He described him as wearing these very formal clothes. He was describing period clothes from the 1800s. What was interesting about this is that my son described the same clothing as she had seen the ghost wearing. There’s no way that he could have known that. He said that he saw this man a couple of times. Maybe twice. And my mom had seen the same man a handful of times.
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     I woke up one night, and I saw a farmer standing in the corner of the room. He was wearing a hat and had on overalls. It was a new house, but prior to it being built, there had been a farmhouse there. I only saw him that one time.  
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     My mother passed away when I was fourteen. I was raised by my grandmother, and in her house. Her room and mine share a wall, so it’s pretty easy to hear when someone says something in one room, you can hear it in the other.
     One night, in the middle of the night, I heard my mother’s voice say, “Rhonda!”. She had passed away not too long before this happened, so I was afraid when I heard her calling my name. I put my covers over my head, and the next day I didn’t tell my grandmother about it.
     The following night I was sleeping when I woke up to my grandmother calling to me from her room. She always used to call me Penny. “Penny,” she said. “What do you want?” 
     “I didn’t say anything grandma,” I said.
      “Yes you did,” she said. You said, ‘Mommy!’”
   The sound she heard wasn’t me. It was my mother visiting my grandmother the next day, and calling out to her as mommy. 
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     I have a doppelgänger story for you. I had been told for about a year that people had been seeing a girl that looked like me in my neighborhood. I lived in a high-rise in Manhattan, and the Avenue to Avenue blocks are very long.
So one day I was looking out my apartment window, and I saw this girl from the back. I thought, ‘Wow, she does look like me!’ So I boogied downstairs and ran out onto the sidewalk. I was halfway down the block running towards her, and I could see her about 100 feet ahead of me. So I started yelling, “Hey! Hey!” to get her attention. 
     I was still running towards her, when she suddenly turned around. And the second she turned around, she was gone. She just vanished right in front of my eyes.  

Mount Kisco Library, Mt. Kisco, New York
     Soon after my father passed away I said, “Show me a sign that you’re still with us.” Not too long after his passing, I was at home and I went downstairs into the basement. I was taking something out of the closet and I had my back to the TV that was down there. All of a sudden, the TV went on. It wasn’t on a channel or anything, it was just static. I turned the TV off. 
     After that happened I bought a dining room set from a company called Galway Bay, and that’s where my father came from. The hutch had a light, and it would often turn on and off by itself. If it went on I’d say, “Hi dad!” and then I’d walk over and turn it off. It was just my father talking to me by turning the light on and off. 
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     The day that my dad died, it was my birthday. We knew my dad was going to pass away soon, but we didn’t know when. My family was all together at my house for my birthday, and my dad was at my sister’s house. 
     At one point we all went out on the porch, and while we were standing there I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my hand. It felt like a knife went right through my hand. I didn’t think anything of it. I even laughed about it because it was so sudden and painful. I hadn’t touched anything, but I just felt this severe pain in my hand. 
     When we went back inside, we got the news that he had passed around the same time that I felt that pain. I really think that that was him passing. It literally felt like a knife went right through my hand. 

West Regional Library, North Carolina
     I’ll tell you about when my sister turned off the life-support of her husband rather suddenly. He had been disabled, and the stair-climber started going up and down all night. It had never done that before. It was turned off. We unplugged it, and it still kept going up and down. Finally, we had to beat it with a hammer and a screwdriver and take it out of the wall, and it stopped. 
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     Once I had my younger sister living with me, and I also had a daughter. I was looking to move to another house, something a little bit bigger to accommodate us. There was one listed that I liked the look of, so I called the landlord and asked to see it. He said, “Go to the house, take a look in the windows and see if you like it. If you do and you want to see the inside, let me know and I’ll give you a tour of the place.” So I went over to the house. 
Now, whenever I’m looking to buy or rent a place, I always say a prayer. I’ll say something like, ‘Lord if this is not for me, give me a sign.’ 
     So when I went over to this house and was walking around the outside, I got a really strange feeling about it for some reason. The price was right, but I just kept having this strange feeling. When I got to this particular part of the backyard and I would look into the family room, I would get this weird feeling. 
     I found out that one of my co-workers actually had lived in this house at one time. I had told some of my friends about the feeling I was having at the house, and one of my friends said, “I think you need to go and talk to her about it.” 
     So I went and talked to the co-worker who had lived there, and I asked her if he liked the house. She said, “Oh, it’s a great house. Everything is great.” After I talked to her for a while, I left her office, but something in my head said, ‘No. Go back and ask her if there are ghosts in this house.’ 
So I went back to her and said, “I have to ask you, does this house have spirits or anything in it?” She looked at me kind of funny and said, “Well, yeah. But it’s a really great house. We never had anything bad happen to us or anything.” 
     Then she starts telling me that things used to go missing. They suspected that whatever was in the house was a child because it would also play with her daughter’s toys. After hearing that I was like, “I’m going to pass on this house, because I have two kids, and I don’t know how nice it’s going to be to my kids.”  
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     About twenty years ago, I lived in a small town in Virginia for a few months. There’s a Civil War battle field, and I was walking for exercise along the road, and I had my earbuds in. I looked up and about five feet away was this young gentleman with dark curly hair and a mustache wearing all gray. He looked to be between twenty and twenty-five years old. He walked by me and nodded and said, “Ma’am”. I had my earbuds and music in. 
Immediately after I saw him, I walked through what felt like a cold electric wall, just like cold electricity. And I turned around, and he wasn’t there anymore. 
     When I first saw him, I really thought it was just somebody else jogging, because I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have been. I was in my old little world listening to music and all of a sudden he was right there. 

Pleasant Valley Library, Pleasant Valley, New York 
     ​My parents lived in Florida for a very long time. My father passed away first, and then my mom passed away several years later. My parents were buried in a mausoleum in Florida, and their spots were up near the ceiling of the building. 
     When I was at her funeral at the mausoleum, there was a forklift kind of machine that lifted up her casket to put it in the wall. The second the coffin started to move, I smelled this sweet scent that smelled exactly like the perfume that my mother used to wear – a French perfume called Beaujolais. She always wore this perfume. My husband was sitting to my left, and I said to my husband, “Do you smell that?” and he said, “I do!” We both smelled the same thing. 
     I have smelled her perfume a few times after that. Not the same day, but at various times. Once I smelled it during the spring when it was still cold, and there were no flowers blooming yet. I was just walking down my street taking a walk and I smelled it then. One other time I remember smelling this perfume was, she had a friend from childhood. Her friend’s husband had passed away. After the funeral the family invited everybody to a restaurant, and I smelled it then.
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     This only happened to me once. My father passed away a long time ago. It was probably about two days after he passed away, I was laying down because I was very tired because of grief and everything. At the time, I loved Olivia Newton John, and I said to my husband, “Make sure to wake me up at eight o’clock because Olivia Newton John is on this special program and I don’t want to miss it.” 
     So all of a sudden I woke up at about five minutes to eight, and there’s my dad standing at the end of the bed. He said, “Babe, it’s time to wake up. She’s on.” He died of pancreatic cancer, so he lost a lot of weight before he passed. But when I saw him standing there he looked just like my dad used to look before he was sick. 
     When I saw him I sat straight up in bed, and after he said this to me he disappeared. Then my husband came in and said, “Oh! I was just about to wake you up because Olivia Newton John is on.” I said, “Yeah, my dad already woke me up and told me.” He never appeared again, and nothing else ever happened. 
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     I was in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I was on a haunted history tour which was underground. We were in a room that was like a semi-circle. We were all standing there, and I was standing with a group of people that I didn’t know at all. The only person I knew was my friend Margaret and her husband who were also on the tour. 
     As I was standing there, all of a sudden I felt his little cold hand in my hand. I got scared because I’m very open to this stuff. I said, “Margaret, is that you?” and she said, “No”. She was way on the other side of the room. A woman standing next to me said, “It was me,” but it couldn’t have been because the hand I felt was on the other side. It felt just like a little cold hand in my hand. I was scared to death, I had the shivers all night!
     About six months later I was watching TV. It was a show about ghost stories, and they were in Edinburgh in the same place where I had had this experience. They were telling a story that there’s a little boy down there in this underground area. They set up a teddy bear, and the little boy ghost knocked it over. They said that when he’s down there when tours are going on, he’ll actually grab people’s hands. When I heard this I got goosebumps all over my body. I really think that what I felt that day was that little boy.  
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     One night I was driving on Salt Point Turnpike, right where you pass where Van Wagner Road comes through. If you know the area, there’s a greenish farm house on the left, and there’s a pasture on the right. I was driving with the farmhouse on my left, and all of a sudden I saw this young man dart across the road. He was about 25 feet away from my car. It scared me because I thought I was going to hit him, he went so fast. He ran from the driver’s side across the road, and diagonal across. As he ran across the road, it was almost like he floated, and then I didn’t see him. There’s a fence there, and he was running toward the pasture and the fence, but I didn’t see him hop over the fence. So, where did he go?
     He was a young man, African American, about fourteen or fifteen years old, and he looked like he was wearing some kind of pajamas, but they weren’t pajamas like we wear today. But something didn’t seem right about him. I thought about it afterwards, and he was wearing these pajama bottoms, but they were made out of cloth like they used to wear ages ago. But they were too small for him. Like he grew out of them. 
     I think that he was a slave. I really think I saw the ghost of a slave running across the road. He didn’t look like a young person today, and he went so fast it didn’t seem natural. He shouldn't be wearing those clothes, and where did he go? 

New Fairfield Library, New Fairfield, Connecticut
     We bought our first house in South Carolina. My son was a baby then, and nothing really happened at first until I became pregnant with my second child. 
     When I became pregnant, little things started happening around the house that I would blame my husband for. The drawers would be all open in the kitchen in the morning. I’d get really frustrated with my husband and think, ‘Shut the drawers!’ One day I went out, and when I came home every single pot and pan was laying out on the floor in the kitchen. I still thought it was my husband. I was thinking, ‘What is he doing?’ And I cleaned it all up.
     Then after my daughter was born, the activity kicked up a notch. My son started having night terrors every night. He would wake up, “It’s in the corner! It’s in the corner! It’s in the corner!” Of course, we didn’t know what that meant. 
     The dog who slept at the foot of our bed for four years, stopped sleeping there and started sleeping next to my baby daughter’s crib every night. Then my husband started getting freaked out, but we decided that it was just a friendly ghost and that we were going to be OK with it. We figured that because it didn’t do very much, it just opened cabinets, and the dog protected the baby, so let’s not worry about it. 
     Not too long after that when my daughter was eighteen months old, we decided to move here to New Fairfield. During the time that we were selling the house, we felt like the ghost became angry. At that point, at night, all the cabinets would swing open with a big BANG. We’d get up, and all the cabinets in the kitchen would be open. We also had issues with lights turning off and on. 
     A lot of the activity was centered in our bedroom. The closet lights would turn off and on. I would think my husband was in the bathroom because I could hear somebody in there, and then he’d walk in the room from the hallway. 
     Right before we were going to move out, we had a going away party. The night of the party, the bedroom TV turned off and on a minimum of ten times. It was a small party, not a huge party. After the second time I went back there and saw that the TV was on with a children’s show, I went out and asked if anyone had been inside watching TV. I thought that maybe one of the guys was checking the football score or something, but no one claimed to have turned on the TV. 
     This kept happening. I’d shut it off, go back outside to the party, then I’d come in to use the bathroom and it would be back on again. 
     We felt that whoever was there liked the children being there, because everything that happened up until that time was gentle and cute – until we were moving. Then it got a little bit creepy. We did some research afterward and found that the woman who lived there before died in what was our bedroom. So, I guess it’s possible it was her and that she liked the kids being around. 
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     This happened at the Merwinsville Hotel in Gaylordsville, Connecticut. It was built on the railroad line as a meal-stop and a hotel. The story goes that the fellah overheard some surveyors talking at a local bar that they were surveying for a railroad line. And he went ahead and purchased that piece of property, then made a deal with the railroad that he’d give them the right-of-way through his property if they would let him put up a hotel. 
     They had an event there, like a ghost walk where people were walking around with flashlights taking pictures. While we were there, we heard about someone who had been killed behind the railroad crossing that was behind the hotel. So my wife and I went to that area of the railroad tracks. My wife being something of a joker laid on the railroad tracks, and I got my camera out and took a picture of her lying on the tracks. When I looked at the picture, there was this misty figure of somebody running across the tracks between me and her. I didn’t see it at the time I took the photo, but it showed up when I looked at the picture later. I blew the photo up and gave it to the hotel, and they hung it up for everybody to see.

Mahopac Library, Mahopac, New York
     I had a condominium that was built next to a place called Preston High School in the Bronx. Years later, I found out that the condominium had been built on the site of a burial ground for nuns who had worked at this school. I don't know what they did with the graves, but it was built on the site of that burial ground. 
     I have two free-standing mirrors made out of redwood, and they're extremely heavy. They fold, and there is one one each side of my bed. I woke up one morning, and the mirrors had moved all the way to the other side of the room in the middle of the night. They had been on either side of my bed, and now they were blocking my picture window. 
     I have no idea how that happened. These mirrors are so heavy that I can't lift them. Redwood is a very dense wood, and they weighted a ton. When we moved there I had to hire someone from the furniture store to put them on either side of the bed. Whenever I wanted to vacuum I had to close them, then prop them up.
     Sometime after that happened, I was asleep in bed one night, and when I woke up I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't move. I was being held down and I knew it. I felt that it was evil, and I was determined that it was not going to get me. In my mind I kept saying, 'You're not going to get me! You're not going to get me!' and then all of a sudden I was let loose. That happened twice while I was living there. 
     One other time, I was on the phone in the kitchen. There was a huge pass-through window into the dining area. I was on the telephone and I saw a monk walk by from left to right passed that window. 
     After my husband and I got married and moved, and I rented the condo out to a man who lived there for several years. After he moved out, I rented it to two young ladies. That Christmas I received a card from them that said, "Merry Christmas from Mary and Jane and the ghost". 
     I called the girl up and said, "What do you know about the ghost?" and she said, "Oh, there's a ghost that lives here." They didn't care about the ghost. They were young, and they thought it was kind of cute, but that was the first time they had told me anything about it. 
      The one story she told me was that she had a birthday party in the condo, and her friends stayed over. They were all loaded, and they all fell asleep all over the place -- the couch, the floor, etc.
     The girl that sent me the card said that as she was waking up, she saw all of her friends sleeping all over the place and she thought it was funny. There was a big bunch of balloons that had a weight on it that had fallen on the floor. She sat up, and as she did the balloons with the weight lifted itself up and shook itself in her face. 
     After I moved out of the condo I moved into my husband's house, and this evil thing followed me to his house. My husband plays the fife and it's very loud, so one night he went into one room and I went into the bedroom to sleep. I closed the door, and the sleep paralysis happened again. I couldn't move, but this time I could talk. I called out, "Joe! Joe! I can't move!" 
     I started talking to one of the nuns, and she just happened to say, "Do you know those condominiums that you lived in? I don't know if the builders knew it, but that was once a graveyard." So, that's how I found out that my condo had been built on a graveyard.