Somers Library - Saturday 6 October
I once went to see Lorraine Warren when she was giving a lecture, and I went up and tried to get near her at the lectern and I started to get some kind of a connection. And when I saw her there I saw this image behind her of a man in a robe. And I immediately thought, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s got a demon with her!’ And then I also thought like, ‘He doesn’t seem bad. He seems good.” I couldn’t figure it out. So the next day we were there and she was telling us her stories and she was saying that, like you, she also has a strong connection to Padre Pio. She believes Padre Pio protects her and watches over her. And all of a sudden it dawned on me who I thought I might have seen. So I went up and I talked to her about it and I said, “You know last night I was thinking about you and I saw Padre Pio.” and she goes, “Oh you see him too!” She said, “A lot of people will connect him to me.” And I was just amazed by that. And then when you brought your connection to Padre Pio, and you don’t even have a connection to her (Lorraine Warren) I thought that was pretty cool. She said that he was there during the Amityville case. That was her first connection to Padre Pio.
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[The following was told by a young girl in the audience who sat with her dad during the lecture]
My mom told me a story about two friends. One of the friends was going to move, and the woman that was coming to see her brought her kids. On the way back they got in a car crash and they all died. But then the night after, the woman that was moving fell asleep and she dreamt of the woman who had died with her kids. In the dream she was holding up a girl and saying, “This is your baby.” And then a few weeks later the woman found out that she was pregnant. The baby she saw in her dream had a red streak in her hair, and that was the baby that was born.
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I have two daughters, but one in particular is an empath. And we get spiritual activity a lot in the house. She knows now -- she’s old enough that she understands. She turns on the light, she calls it ‘the light’, which means that she’s open for business. But when she goes to sleep she doesn’t want the spirits to come to her, so she pushes them out with the ‘white light’. So when she was much younger we had a menacing male spirit in the house and he would come to her in dreams. He had been murdered and he wanted someone to avenge his death. And my daughter was like, “No, no, no. You have to go to the light. I can’t help you. I’m just a little girl.”
Barry: How old was she at the time?
Ten or maybe eleven. So when the girls were at school, it always seems to be her bedroom. She’s the one they seem to go to. So, I’m asking basically about your clearing. I had a heart-to-heart with whoever this person was and I basically had to say, “She’s just a little girl. You can’t be here. This is our home. We’re taking it back. Thank you for visiting, but you gotta go.” And I was strong. I wasn’t fresh, but I had to be strong for the family, like ‘You’re out’. And I have to tell you -- that worked! But I never did it before, so I want to hear from you what you do. And I did say, “It’s time for you to go to the light.” And I did say, “You have family -- you have family waiting.”
Barry: You did it! And that’s basically what I do.
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It was on my bucket list to go to the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, MA., and I finally got a hold of a friend of mine who wanted to go. We drove out, went on the tour. It’s about an hour. A very nice, nicely restored house. After the tour, the tour guide said, “Do you have any questions?” And I said, “I understand that there’s a new theory that Andrew and his wife were murdered because Andrew was having an incestuous relationship with Lizzie. And there was so much rage it appear from the physical look of … you know, he was beaten over and over again in the face. And likewise upstairs with her, it was theorized that she was just venting on him and that the step-mother was killed because she knew about it but didn’t do anything to stop it.” And after I went through that the tour guide said, “I’ve learned not to say anything bad about Andrew in the house because I get very bad vibes. But I’ve been told by two different mediums that have come to the house that my grandmother stays in the house with me and guards me while I’m giving the tours.”
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I can tell you one about my daughter who is an empath. She’s was up at college. She has an apartment. She comes in one night and she goes to bed. Her closet is open. It just has a sheet, there’s no door. It’s an old, old house. She can see, but before she sees them she feels them, and she knew there was somebody in the closet. I would have died! I would have just been out of there. But she’s just so brave. I don't’ know how she does it. So she does the whole thing in her head. “So sorry I can’t help you. You need to move on.” And she has this whole conversation. He comes out and he gets closer, slowly. It’s menacing.
B: Is she seeing this or is she feeling this.
No. First she felt him in the closet, then he made his appearance, he came out of the closet. He’s a dark figure. A dark, dark figure. He’s a man. She sees him, and she’s having the whole conversation with him, “I can’t help you. I can’t help you.” To me, this is my worst nightmare, but he comes closer. Comes very close. It’s not a very big room. It’s stronger than she is. She said that she’s never encountered anything so strong, so she knows she can’t do it on her own. She enlisted the help of Archangel Michael, and she prayed. She prayed to him. And this makes me cry. If I cry, I’m sorry because this is my daughter. With that, Archangel Michael comes and lays on the bed, and she felt his arms come around her and she said that she felt a thousand times better. She felt brighter and happier and lighter. And with that this dark figure slowly moved back and went into the closet.
And he [Archangel Michael] stayed with her I can’t tell you how long, and then all of a sudden she felt that he was gone. And with that he disappeared. But she said, “Mom, it was so strong. I’ll name my son Michael because he was wonderful.”
And I want everyone to know that if you ever just count on them ... you have to ask them for their help. They’re there to help. And my daughter did. She called upon Archangel Michael and he was there. So, please utilize them. They’re waiting. Those angels are there for our protection, and that’s exactly what he did.
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This happened to me when I was a kid. So, here I am -- I’m an innocent 16-year-old who’s in a basement with a girlfriend of mine, and her boyfriend, and my boyfriend. The four of us. And my boyfriend and her boyfriend go off into a corner and they’re using an Ouija board. We said, ‘OK, goodbye. We’re going to be over here giggling and laughing’. So this went on for a couple of hours. We’re like, ‘Stay away from us with the Ouija board.’ But we weren’t scared. I just want you to know that even though we didn’t know what they were doing or who they were calling, we were having our own good time.
So, it’s now like two o’clock in the morning and it’s late, and my boyfriend said, ‘Let me drive them home. Are you going to be here when I come back?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ So I stayed and it was like a 15 minute drive and he came back. We said our goodnights and then I left and went home. And again, I pointed that out because I wasn’t scared to be alone. I didn’t feel like anything, I didn’t feel threatened.
But when I came home I didn’t want to wake my sister ‘cause I shared a room with her, so I slept on the couch. It was late now, probably around four o’clock in the morning, and my cat jumps up on me and goes to sleep on my chest, which is not unusual. Then all of a sudden when I was just at that point of about to go to sleep I felt a burning sensation at my feet. I felt like I was almost being burned at the stake. And while this is happening to me I’m looking at my cat and I could feel this like heavy, heaviness on my chest. Like all of a sudden my cat is now like a man laying on my chest, and heavy, heaviness. And the breath was coming out of my mouth like I couldn’t breathe. And the only thing I could think to do is pray, because I’m Christian. So I started saying prayers. I started saying the Our Father and ‘In the name of Jesus Christ you need to leave.’ Because I did feel that it was evil all of a sudden. So with that, it leaves.
I waited for the sun to come up and I called my boyfriend and said, ‘What happened last night?’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ I go ‘What were you doing with the Ouija board? Because something really freaky happened.’ He’s like, ‘We were calling Aleister Crowley.’ Now, I didn’t know to much about Aleister Crowley, but I found out that he was really evil. I ended up looking him up and it said that he used to sacrifice cats and burn cats. So I felt like there was this connection with my cat and this burning feeling.
So when I called my friend, she said that she woke up at 4:15 AM, the same exact time this was happening to me. She said that she had a dream that she and I were doing the Ouija board and she asked the Ouija board, ‘Have we contacted spirits?’ and it said, ‘Yes’. And she said, “Are they good’ and it went to ‘No’. And she shot up out of bed and said, ‘Oh my god that was freaky’ and she couldn’t get back to sleep. So we found out like twelve hours later when we started comparing stories, that the same thing happened at the same time.
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Carmel Library - Saturday, 13 October 2018
This happened at least ten years ago. We were visiting my son and my daughter. They were young, ten or seven years old. We were watching TV and my daughter and another little boy was watching TV with the blanket over their legs up in the bedroom upstairs. And, my son who was like seven at the time or ten at the time was trying to read in the living room with me and my friend and her mother. And it was dark and I kept saying, “Matthew, you’re going to ruin your eyes. Turn the light on. Turn the light on.” And then all of a sudden, the overhead light went on like after five minutes of me saying this to him. The overhead light went on. We all freaked out. But at the same time, my daughter who was upstairs watching TV with the other little boy with the blanket over them, they both screamed and ran down the stairs. They said that a wind or something went across their feet underneath the blanket at the same time as the light went on. We were ready to just go home, but we were upstate and didn’t want to drive home in the middle of the night. It was scary.
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Years ago I was at an historic place around Tarrytown, and as they were doing the tour I started feeling that there was a little slave girl in the corner. I didn’t see it, but I felt it. And this little girl was trying to tell me how hard her life was, and she was crying. So, I was a little upset. I went home and I thought, ‘I have some imagination!’ And I was kind of ignorant of the fact that there was actual slavery in New York back then. Since that happened I’ve gotten a history degree. I went back with my sister, and they have re-done the whole house. There are shackles on the windowsill. And when I saw that I got really pale, and I felt sick. Since then, any time I’ve been there for any kind of event, I can feel her. So the last time we were there I kind of said, “You can go over now.” And it worked.
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This is a story that my dad told me. About 10 years after his father had passed away, he looks at the couch in his home and his father’s keys are laying on the couch. And the keys had not been seen since he had died. And the couch didn’t exist when he was alive, so it’s not like they fell out of the couch. That couch was not in the room.
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I work at a school in New Jersey which was once the house of a very famous family. I’ve had many things happen in the room that I teach in, but most recently I was giving an evening parent/teacher conference and the door to my room kept opening, and the mom was getting really annoyed by it. So she got up and went to go close it -- these are very tall doors -- then she went to sit down. She sat down and all of a sudden she said that someone pushed her chair. She went like that (rocks chair back and forth with considerable force) and she said, “Oh my gosh!” And her husband said, “Are you OK?” and then HIS chair got pushed the same way!
Another teacher and I have also smelled the same candle, and there are no candles lit. This isn’t the smell of a modern scented candle. It’s just like the smell of a wax candle. We’ve both smelled this in my room, and right outside of it. The first day I ever taught in the room I felt a swish of air or something go right past my leg, which I knew was some sort of a presence.
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Sherman Library - Saturday, 13 October 2018
I live right next to Fairfield Hills, which is an old abandoned mental institution in Newtown. There have been a lot of horrible things that happened there. When I was younger I started hearing the voice of this little girl in my house. At that time my dad was still alive, and he would hear it too. I would be in one room and hear her talking in another room. One time my brother was getting off the bus and I heard downstairs as clear as day, “Is he getting off the bus?”. Another time I was down in the basement and I heard footsteps on the wood floors, and giggling. My dad came down and screamed at the ghost! I’m sure that this girl’s spirit came from Fairfield hills, but there was another spirit with her that was a non-human spirit that would act as a doppelganger. My brother would often see me wandering around the yard when I wasn’t even home. One time I was walking down in the basement and I see my brother running at me, and right as he’s 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, and I was just on my phone and I looked up and I saw my brother clear as day. I see him like bent over, and he’s flailing his arms weirdly. I see it for a good five or ten seconds and am thinking, ‘What is going on?’ And I blink and it’s gone. I did a clearing on my house and haven’t had any issues since. But me and my friend have both seen a very tall Native American man standing in the woods at night. This is at the same house on Manawalk road. So, we think there may be some connection.
We’ve had lights turn on and off. There was even one time when my mom was home alone and she was in the shower. There was a knock on the bathroom door. She opened the door and said, ‘Who’s there?” and then she closed and and said, “Nobody better knock on that door again”. Nobody does, but she gets back in the shower and the hot water is running and then all of a sudden the water goes totally cold. It stays that way, so she called a plumber. He came over and took a look at the water heater in the basement and he takes a look at it for no more than a minute. He said, “I’m not even going to charge you. The hot water heater is switched off.” So, it switched off when my mother was alone in the house, right in the middle of her taking a shower.
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I went to school in MA, so it was closer by the water near Quincy. I was staying at my friend’s house for the weekend just to get away from school. And basically we saw a shadow girl on the wall. It was like a little girl dressed in an old gown and stuff, and we both saw it. But I didn’t really say anything about it until way later. I said, “did you see that” and she was like “Yup, I saw it!” It was a tiny room, like an office or a den where the computer was. There was a window with the six panels, and then there was this space where the door was and we saw it right in that space. We did just about everything to debunk it, but we couldn’t figure out what caused that.
B: Did it look solid, or like a shadow on the wall?
It looked like a shadow. You know when your shadow goes by. The other weird thing was it smelled like a campfire, but there wasn’t a fire or anything in the house. The only other person that was home at the time was her father who was downstairs. I don’t know what caused that.
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I worked at a daycare in Tucson Arizona, and the buildings were made up of two different houses that were kitty-cornered to one another. And then in between the two houses was the playground. So you walked into the front door of the daycare and there was a staircase that went up to where there was a storeroom and the staff restroom. The kids never went up there. It was early in the morning, about 6:30 in the morning. There were two teachers in the school and the first little boy shows up for the day. He’s two years old. He looks at the stairs and says in Spanish, “Quien es ese?” which means, “Who is that?” And the teacher says, “Quien is quien?” -- “Who is who?” And he said, “La Mujer!” -- “The woman!” And she said to him, “There’s no woman up there. It’s just me and the other teacher, and she’s right there.” And the boy said, “No, the woman on the stairs. She’s there every day. She says hello to me every day.” In the same building, one time the same teacher was there with the last couple of kids at night and she heard like a bowling ball rolling upstairs in the same area upstairs. The dad walked in and said, “What’s going on up there?” and she said, “I don’t know. I’m the only one here with the kids”. He said, “Are you sure? Because there’s definitely somebody up there.” The dad goes up, looks all around, but there was nobody there. We shut down the school about a year later, and a Frat house was built right there, so who knows what’s going on there now!
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I moved into an apartment in Millford by the beach, and the told me that two people had died in the apartment I was moving into. Now, as a kid I would have been frightened of things like that, but when I moved in I said out loud, “I’m here. My name is Maryanne. You don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.” And that’s just the kind of attitude I had with the whole thing. So I didn’t ask about anything. What room they died in. I didn’t want to know anything. So, at Christmas time I’m putting my tree up. I’m untangling the lights, going up and down, up and down. ALl of a sudden I pick up the last string and there’s this full body apparition. I saw not through him. It was my height. He was this close to me. I didn’t even. I’m thinking, “Is he breathing or isn’t he?” (laughs) But when I described it to the neighbor downstairs, they said, ‘That was the fella who died in your apartment.” I mean, the hair, the coat. Just the whole look about him. And I never knew if it was a kid or whatever. I just looked up at him and thought, “Where did you come from?” And then all of a sudden, in a split second it was gone. But that was freaky! It looked as real as anything. It really did. It was like if you touched it, you would have really felt someone solid. That was the only time that anything like that ever happened.
Barry: Were you standing at the time? How tall was he?
He was as tall as me. I bent down to get the Christmas lights and stood up. I wasn’t dizzy or anything. I stood up and there he was right in front of me. It was like if you were a little closer to me now and I looked him right in the face and thought, “Where did you come from?”
Barry: Did you notice what he was wearing?
Yes. He had a green army, like the US reserve jackets, the green. He had it up a little bit. He had a flannel shirt I noticed. His face was a little dirty. I was like, “What, did you crawl out of a hole or something?” And his hair was kind of wild, but they said that this kid had punked hair with colors and whatever. And probably all the way down, I could feel that he was down to the floor. He wasn’t floating or anything. But he was dressed for outside for that time of the year. But I don’t know where he was or where he came from. I never saw him again after that, but the dogs would sit there and follow something with their eyes. They’d look up and follow something from room to room with their eyes and I’d say, “What the hell are you looking at?!” (laughs)
Barry: Do you still live there?
Hell no! (laughs) But one time, if any of you have pets, you know how they come up to you and they jump on the bed next to you. Well, I felt that and I out of the norm, it doesn’t faze you. Oh good, the dog’s in the bed. I felt it. My dog wasn’t even home! And I said, “What is this?!” I didn’t move out because it was scary. It wasn’t scary whatsoever. But that particular thing, I am amazing that I was able to let it roll off of my shoulders. But I didn’t let it bother me.
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This sounds kind of cliche, but it all started after my sister got her car from a family friend. We were cleaning it out and we found this tape of children’s nursery rhymes. And it was these weird nursery rhymes about old horses and stuff. Not like normal nursery rhymes. A couple weeks later my sister is cleaning out the car again, and she’s on the phone with her boyfriend who lives down in Florida, and all of a sudden they both hear this screaming on the phone. Like, really weird screaming. She’s freaking out, he’s freaking out. She tells me and I’m like, ‘It’s probably nothing’. But then, weird things start happening to my dog. I’m super protective of my dog. Nothing happens to my dog, ever. And so all of a sudden my sister’s car starts setting off the dog’s electric collar around the car, which never happens anywhere. Then, I’m home alone. Her car isn’t there. But still, in the area of her car I’m starting to feel uneasy. I’m outside with my dog. Then all of a sudden I hear what sounds like a little kid scream, “Puppy!” And my dog’s freaking out. She’s getting super excited about nothing. So I’m like, ‘What are you seeing that I’m not?’ So it’s a couple of weeks later, it’s the middle of the summer. I start hearing leaves crunching outside, really loud. I’m watching TV and it’s just loud leaves crunching outside. So I go and I check it out. Nothing’s out there. I take my dog out. And then all of a sudden I see this light almost in the shape of a person, and it runs off into the woods. And nothing has happened since.
Barry: This was a used car?
This was a used car.
Barry: So it sounds like something came with the used car besides the creepy tape.
But ever since it ran off I haven’t, and my sister and i haven’t seen or heard or felt anything since.
Barry: I wonder what made it leave? You don’t care, right? As long as it’s gone.
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My husband’s family’s house was an old farmhouse in Pine Plains which is just at the top of Dutchess and Columbia counties. His sister and I were best friends in high school. And many, many, many strange things happened. But two that put us on edge. It was during the day, the middle of the day. We were by ourselves. The back door came into the kitchen, but the floor of the kitchen had been ripped up. It was just two-by-fours. And we were sitting in the front part of the house. It was a great big farmhouse. We were sitting in the front part watching TV. And they had a flapping door that went from the dining room to the kitchen, and it was shut because there was no kitchen at the time because it had been gutted. It was in the summer, and we lived in the middle of nowhere. Nobody locked doors or anything. And we heard the door flap. And we were like … how could somebody come in? There wasn’t even a floor. We walked into the dining room which had hardwood floors and there were wet footprints going across the floor. Like, I can picture it today. We were like, holy crap! And they just dissipated. They were full sized footprints. They were like little footprints. They were men’s … and they weren't shoes. They were bare feet. A man’s bare feet going across. And they dissipated. There were like four or five steps, and then they were just nothing.
Barry: Well, it would be like if someone walked in a puddle ….
Then they would dry as you went along. Right. So, the same house happened to be just the two of us again. They had a lot of dogs. They raised Afghan dogs. So they went to a dog show, her sisters and her mother and we were dog sitting. This time it was at night, and we kept two dogs with us. We were going to sleep in the living room and watch TV, and we kept two of the big dogs. A big greyhound and a really aggressive Afghan, because we’re in the middle of nowhere and nobody locks doors. And we’re watching TV and we hear music playing. Clear as day. And one of the back bedrooms upstairs on the second floor on the back corner that was also like two rooms within a room, and it also had a staircase that was a walk-up to the attic. This was all in one room. At the time it was Jimmy’s bedroom, but he was not there. His stuff was in there, but he wasn’t living there. And we hear music. And the door was closed because nobody used the room. And it was LOUD. And we’re like, “There’s music coming from upstairs.” It was current music. Like a radio playing. Current music. And we were of course afraid. We were like, ‘Someone’s in the house,’ because it’s just an impossibility.
We took the dogs and they’re growling as we’re going up the stairs. We come to the door. The door’s shut. The music is playing. I’ve got chills going up and down my body thinking about it. The dogs are growling. We open the door. The music stops. There is no music. We put on the lights. There is no one there. We walk in, the dogs, the hair is up on their backs, and they’re still growling. And there’s like, so there’s the bedroom, and then there’s a little room off of it that also has a closet in it. And we walked into there. The dogs’ hair was up on their backs, and they went over to a corner and were growling at this corner. They could sense something … we couldn’t see anything, but there was something. It was so frightening that we slept with the lights on, and the dogs were on the couch with us. That upstairs room always had a funny feeling to it. I don’t know if it was the attic. You always felt like somebody was going to come in on you. Do you know what I mean? Like, you felt as if something would come out of that door and come down. Yeah. A lot of very strange things happened in that house. There are a lot of good stories about that house. You’d make a pot of coffee, you’d go in and half a pot would be gone. It made absolutely no sense. Five cups of coffee would just vanish, and it would be just half a pot. At the time, everybody smoked. Cigarettes, whole packs, would just disappear. Gone. So, I guess he liked coffee and cigarettes.
Barry: So I guess he was a barefoot, coffee drinking smoking ghost!
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Mount Kisco Library - Saturday, 20 October 2018
My dad’s offices were in the city, and every time go back or forth he would let me throw the dime into the bucket at the Henry Hudson toll booth. To this day I find dimes everywhere I go. I’ve gotten up and found dimes in my slippers at home, or gone to change the sheets and there’s a dime in my sheets. Everywhere I go. At one point I took them to the bank and I had $33 dollars worth of dimes. And I find them everywhere.
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My grandmother was from Puerto Rico, so I grew up in an Hispanic culture, so this was very much a part of my upbringing. And she used to take me to seances when I was little. I’ve seen exorcisms, I’ve seen things that were good and bad. I choose not to acknowledge the bad, so I’m open only to the good. I sell houses for a living, and when i walk into a house I can feel the energy. And when I go to funerals, standing in front of a casket or even just walking into the funeral home, I can feel that it’s sort of like an energy that’s a wave. It almost makes me feel like I want to pass out. It like passes right through me, but I can feel that a person is still attached to this plane. Or changes in temperature. When my grandmother died, it still happens sometimes, I walk into my bedroom and the TV would be on. So, they like electronics too.
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This took place quite a while back and basically I woke up feeling like I had to go to the bathroom. So I went to the bathroom and I saw something in my kitchen doorway. When I looked back in walking back from the bathroom, there were blue eyes glowing bright. Everything else was like dark, like there was no light source, but it was only illuminating the thing itself. It looked like it had some kind of dark hair going across it. It looked like it had some kind of white on the bottom of it. But once I saw it I though, ‘Hell no!’ and ran right to my bed and hid under the sheets.
Mark Twain Library, Saturday 27 October 2018
I was at the Old State House in Hartford and they have this Hall of Oddities, which is this museum of really creepy stuff. We had a couple of Boy Scouts with us who were working on a badge, and I’m walking out of the room and something tugged on my sleeve and a voice said, “Mom!, And I turned around and everybody was at the other side of the room. And the director of the Old State House was with us and she saw my reaction and she said, “What happened?” So I told her, and she said they have a lot of activity in that room.
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I lived in a house in Ridgefield that belonged to my great aunt. I had two things that happened to me in that house. Once I was sitting in the living room on the couch and I was looking straight at the hallway and I saw a vision of what looked like a see-through almost like silk object just pass down the hallway. Another time I was sitting on the living room floor, it was in summer. They have no fans, no air conditioning, and there was no wind outside. I was on the floor playing with my youngest daughter and I felt like extreme cold. Like something came on and passed right through me.
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My story is, I was about six-years-old and for like my entire life before that I always had a nightmare every night. ANd I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. One year we moved down to the basement because it was bigger and we had more space down there. And a week or two in, I had this weird nightmare of being chased by buffalo and they trampled me and I shot up like this … and I looked around and I looked back, and I saw something that at first I thought was clothes hanging, but then all of a sudden it formed into what looked like a witch holding a cane with a skull on it. And it stared at me, turned around, and walked away from me into the hall. And then i just snapped into day, still in the same position. And then since that I had not had a single nightmare. Not one. Even after seeing anything else, not one single nightmare.
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I was at a hotel once, and I was watching a movie real late and just as I was going to bed, I was really tired. I don’t know if it was an illusion, but I saw a transparent man in the corner of the room. And so then I fell asleep, and the like two years after when i was at my house, like a similar story. I saw a movie and I was really tired, and I saw the same shape in the left hand corner. The same person.
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A few years back we were in Memphis, Tennessee, and there’s a section with victorian houses that they give tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So we went on a tour of the Mallory-Neeley House and we toured the first floor. The rules when you walked in the house were you could take pictures but no flash, and don’t touch anything. So we toured the whole first floor, toured the whole second floor. And we were with her for about an hour and after and hour she goes, “There’s actually a widow’s watch” and we were compliant for the whole time and she said “You could go up by yourselves if you like” because she had some kind of a respiratory thing that prevented her from climbing the stairs. It was basically a third and fourth floor. So there’s a stairwell going up to the third floor, about a twelve by twelve room. And then another stairwell that went up to the fourth floor. So my wife Karen was recording it on her camera the whole time. So she scanned the room when we were on the third floor, and then we walked up to the fourth floor. Along the way from the fourth floor there’s a stairwell and there’s a curtain. And the curtain was kind of draped across the window so Karen pulled the curtain back, scanned out the window. We walked up to the next floor, scanned around. The next day we were on the highway driving from Memphis to Nashville and she looked back at the video and she actually captured a ‘Class A’ EVP. The moment that she touches the curtain and pulls the curtain back, you hear a voice that says, “Maybe you shouldn’t touch it.” Because that was the rule in the house when we came in. It’s not something that sounds like that, it’s right there with us. Now, I’m a skeptic but I can’t explain it.
Note from Barry: I was running my digital recorder while listening to the EVP that the woman was sharing with me, and I was able to get a recording of it. But what's really strange is that I picked up an EVP at the Mark Twain Library! As I was listening to the woman's EVP, a man's voice jumped in and said what sounds like the name "Mike Goldman". If the couple who shared the EVP from the Mallory-Neeley House are reading this, and that name means anything to you, please contact me. Both EVP are below
I once went to see Lorraine Warren when she was giving a lecture, and I went up and tried to get near her at the lectern and I started to get some kind of a connection. And when I saw her there I saw this image behind her of a man in a robe. And I immediately thought, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s got a demon with her!’ And then I also thought like, ‘He doesn’t seem bad. He seems good.” I couldn’t figure it out. So the next day we were there and she was telling us her stories and she was saying that, like you, she also has a strong connection to Padre Pio. She believes Padre Pio protects her and watches over her. And all of a sudden it dawned on me who I thought I might have seen. So I went up and I talked to her about it and I said, “You know last night I was thinking about you and I saw Padre Pio.” and she goes, “Oh you see him too!” She said, “A lot of people will connect him to me.” And I was just amazed by that. And then when you brought your connection to Padre Pio, and you don’t even have a connection to her (Lorraine Warren) I thought that was pretty cool. She said that he was there during the Amityville case. That was her first connection to Padre Pio.
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[The following was told by a young girl in the audience who sat with her dad during the lecture]
My mom told me a story about two friends. One of the friends was going to move, and the woman that was coming to see her brought her kids. On the way back they got in a car crash and they all died. But then the night after, the woman that was moving fell asleep and she dreamt of the woman who had died with her kids. In the dream she was holding up a girl and saying, “This is your baby.” And then a few weeks later the woman found out that she was pregnant. The baby she saw in her dream had a red streak in her hair, and that was the baby that was born.
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I have two daughters, but one in particular is an empath. And we get spiritual activity a lot in the house. She knows now -- she’s old enough that she understands. She turns on the light, she calls it ‘the light’, which means that she’s open for business. But when she goes to sleep she doesn’t want the spirits to come to her, so she pushes them out with the ‘white light’. So when she was much younger we had a menacing male spirit in the house and he would come to her in dreams. He had been murdered and he wanted someone to avenge his death. And my daughter was like, “No, no, no. You have to go to the light. I can’t help you. I’m just a little girl.”
Barry: How old was she at the time?
Ten or maybe eleven. So when the girls were at school, it always seems to be her bedroom. She’s the one they seem to go to. So, I’m asking basically about your clearing. I had a heart-to-heart with whoever this person was and I basically had to say, “She’s just a little girl. You can’t be here. This is our home. We’re taking it back. Thank you for visiting, but you gotta go.” And I was strong. I wasn’t fresh, but I had to be strong for the family, like ‘You’re out’. And I have to tell you -- that worked! But I never did it before, so I want to hear from you what you do. And I did say, “It’s time for you to go to the light.” And I did say, “You have family -- you have family waiting.”
Barry: You did it! And that’s basically what I do.
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It was on my bucket list to go to the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, MA., and I finally got a hold of a friend of mine who wanted to go. We drove out, went on the tour. It’s about an hour. A very nice, nicely restored house. After the tour, the tour guide said, “Do you have any questions?” And I said, “I understand that there’s a new theory that Andrew and his wife were murdered because Andrew was having an incestuous relationship with Lizzie. And there was so much rage it appear from the physical look of … you know, he was beaten over and over again in the face. And likewise upstairs with her, it was theorized that she was just venting on him and that the step-mother was killed because she knew about it but didn’t do anything to stop it.” And after I went through that the tour guide said, “I’ve learned not to say anything bad about Andrew in the house because I get very bad vibes. But I’ve been told by two different mediums that have come to the house that my grandmother stays in the house with me and guards me while I’m giving the tours.”
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I can tell you one about my daughter who is an empath. She’s was up at college. She has an apartment. She comes in one night and she goes to bed. Her closet is open. It just has a sheet, there’s no door. It’s an old, old house. She can see, but before she sees them she feels them, and she knew there was somebody in the closet. I would have died! I would have just been out of there. But she’s just so brave. I don't’ know how she does it. So she does the whole thing in her head. “So sorry I can’t help you. You need to move on.” And she has this whole conversation. He comes out and he gets closer, slowly. It’s menacing.
B: Is she seeing this or is she feeling this.
No. First she felt him in the closet, then he made his appearance, he came out of the closet. He’s a dark figure. A dark, dark figure. He’s a man. She sees him, and she’s having the whole conversation with him, “I can’t help you. I can’t help you.” To me, this is my worst nightmare, but he comes closer. Comes very close. It’s not a very big room. It’s stronger than she is. She said that she’s never encountered anything so strong, so she knows she can’t do it on her own. She enlisted the help of Archangel Michael, and she prayed. She prayed to him. And this makes me cry. If I cry, I’m sorry because this is my daughter. With that, Archangel Michael comes and lays on the bed, and she felt his arms come around her and she said that she felt a thousand times better. She felt brighter and happier and lighter. And with that this dark figure slowly moved back and went into the closet.
And he [Archangel Michael] stayed with her I can’t tell you how long, and then all of a sudden she felt that he was gone. And with that he disappeared. But she said, “Mom, it was so strong. I’ll name my son Michael because he was wonderful.”
And I want everyone to know that if you ever just count on them ... you have to ask them for their help. They’re there to help. And my daughter did. She called upon Archangel Michael and he was there. So, please utilize them. They’re waiting. Those angels are there for our protection, and that’s exactly what he did.
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This happened to me when I was a kid. So, here I am -- I’m an innocent 16-year-old who’s in a basement with a girlfriend of mine, and her boyfriend, and my boyfriend. The four of us. And my boyfriend and her boyfriend go off into a corner and they’re using an Ouija board. We said, ‘OK, goodbye. We’re going to be over here giggling and laughing’. So this went on for a couple of hours. We’re like, ‘Stay away from us with the Ouija board.’ But we weren’t scared. I just want you to know that even though we didn’t know what they were doing or who they were calling, we were having our own good time.
So, it’s now like two o’clock in the morning and it’s late, and my boyfriend said, ‘Let me drive them home. Are you going to be here when I come back?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ So I stayed and it was like a 15 minute drive and he came back. We said our goodnights and then I left and went home. And again, I pointed that out because I wasn’t scared to be alone. I didn’t feel like anything, I didn’t feel threatened.
But when I came home I didn’t want to wake my sister ‘cause I shared a room with her, so I slept on the couch. It was late now, probably around four o’clock in the morning, and my cat jumps up on me and goes to sleep on my chest, which is not unusual. Then all of a sudden when I was just at that point of about to go to sleep I felt a burning sensation at my feet. I felt like I was almost being burned at the stake. And while this is happening to me I’m looking at my cat and I could feel this like heavy, heaviness on my chest. Like all of a sudden my cat is now like a man laying on my chest, and heavy, heaviness. And the breath was coming out of my mouth like I couldn’t breathe. And the only thing I could think to do is pray, because I’m Christian. So I started saying prayers. I started saying the Our Father and ‘In the name of Jesus Christ you need to leave.’ Because I did feel that it was evil all of a sudden. So with that, it leaves.
I waited for the sun to come up and I called my boyfriend and said, ‘What happened last night?’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ I go ‘What were you doing with the Ouija board? Because something really freaky happened.’ He’s like, ‘We were calling Aleister Crowley.’ Now, I didn’t know to much about Aleister Crowley, but I found out that he was really evil. I ended up looking him up and it said that he used to sacrifice cats and burn cats. So I felt like there was this connection with my cat and this burning feeling.
So when I called my friend, she said that she woke up at 4:15 AM, the same exact time this was happening to me. She said that she had a dream that she and I were doing the Ouija board and she asked the Ouija board, ‘Have we contacted spirits?’ and it said, ‘Yes’. And she said, “Are they good’ and it went to ‘No’. And she shot up out of bed and said, ‘Oh my god that was freaky’ and she couldn’t get back to sleep. So we found out like twelve hours later when we started comparing stories, that the same thing happened at the same time.
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Carmel Library - Saturday, 13 October 2018
This happened at least ten years ago. We were visiting my son and my daughter. They were young, ten or seven years old. We were watching TV and my daughter and another little boy was watching TV with the blanket over their legs up in the bedroom upstairs. And, my son who was like seven at the time or ten at the time was trying to read in the living room with me and my friend and her mother. And it was dark and I kept saying, “Matthew, you’re going to ruin your eyes. Turn the light on. Turn the light on.” And then all of a sudden, the overhead light went on like after five minutes of me saying this to him. The overhead light went on. We all freaked out. But at the same time, my daughter who was upstairs watching TV with the other little boy with the blanket over them, they both screamed and ran down the stairs. They said that a wind or something went across their feet underneath the blanket at the same time as the light went on. We were ready to just go home, but we were upstate and didn’t want to drive home in the middle of the night. It was scary.
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Years ago I was at an historic place around Tarrytown, and as they were doing the tour I started feeling that there was a little slave girl in the corner. I didn’t see it, but I felt it. And this little girl was trying to tell me how hard her life was, and she was crying. So, I was a little upset. I went home and I thought, ‘I have some imagination!’ And I was kind of ignorant of the fact that there was actual slavery in New York back then. Since that happened I’ve gotten a history degree. I went back with my sister, and they have re-done the whole house. There are shackles on the windowsill. And when I saw that I got really pale, and I felt sick. Since then, any time I’ve been there for any kind of event, I can feel her. So the last time we were there I kind of said, “You can go over now.” And it worked.
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This is a story that my dad told me. About 10 years after his father had passed away, he looks at the couch in his home and his father’s keys are laying on the couch. And the keys had not been seen since he had died. And the couch didn’t exist when he was alive, so it’s not like they fell out of the couch. That couch was not in the room.
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I work at a school in New Jersey which was once the house of a very famous family. I’ve had many things happen in the room that I teach in, but most recently I was giving an evening parent/teacher conference and the door to my room kept opening, and the mom was getting really annoyed by it. So she got up and went to go close it -- these are very tall doors -- then she went to sit down. She sat down and all of a sudden she said that someone pushed her chair. She went like that (rocks chair back and forth with considerable force) and she said, “Oh my gosh!” And her husband said, “Are you OK?” and then HIS chair got pushed the same way!
Another teacher and I have also smelled the same candle, and there are no candles lit. This isn’t the smell of a modern scented candle. It’s just like the smell of a wax candle. We’ve both smelled this in my room, and right outside of it. The first day I ever taught in the room I felt a swish of air or something go right past my leg, which I knew was some sort of a presence.
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Sherman Library - Saturday, 13 October 2018
I live right next to Fairfield Hills, which is an old abandoned mental institution in Newtown. There have been a lot of horrible things that happened there. When I was younger I started hearing the voice of this little girl in my house. At that time my dad was still alive, and he would hear it too. I would be in one room and hear her talking in another room. One time my brother was getting off the bus and I heard downstairs as clear as day, “Is he getting off the bus?”. Another time I was down in the basement and I heard footsteps on the wood floors, and giggling. My dad came down and screamed at the ghost! I’m sure that this girl’s spirit came from Fairfield hills, but there was another spirit with her that was a non-human spirit that would act as a doppelganger. My brother would often see me wandering around the yard when I wasn’t even home. One time I was walking down in the basement and I see my brother running at me, and right as he’s 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, and I was just on my phone and I looked up and I saw my brother clear as day. I see him like bent over, and he’s flailing his arms weirdly. I see it for a good five or ten seconds and am thinking, ‘What is going on?’ And I blink and it’s gone. I did a clearing on my house and haven’t had any issues since. But me and my friend have both seen a very tall Native American man standing in the woods at night. This is at the same house on Manawalk road. So, we think there may be some connection.
We’ve had lights turn on and off. There was even one time when my mom was home alone and she was in the shower. There was a knock on the bathroom door. She opened the door and said, ‘Who’s there?” and then she closed and and said, “Nobody better knock on that door again”. Nobody does, but she gets back in the shower and the hot water is running and then all of a sudden the water goes totally cold. It stays that way, so she called a plumber. He came over and took a look at the water heater in the basement and he takes a look at it for no more than a minute. He said, “I’m not even going to charge you. The hot water heater is switched off.” So, it switched off when my mother was alone in the house, right in the middle of her taking a shower.
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I went to school in MA, so it was closer by the water near Quincy. I was staying at my friend’s house for the weekend just to get away from school. And basically we saw a shadow girl on the wall. It was like a little girl dressed in an old gown and stuff, and we both saw it. But I didn’t really say anything about it until way later. I said, “did you see that” and she was like “Yup, I saw it!” It was a tiny room, like an office or a den where the computer was. There was a window with the six panels, and then there was this space where the door was and we saw it right in that space. We did just about everything to debunk it, but we couldn’t figure out what caused that.
B: Did it look solid, or like a shadow on the wall?
It looked like a shadow. You know when your shadow goes by. The other weird thing was it smelled like a campfire, but there wasn’t a fire or anything in the house. The only other person that was home at the time was her father who was downstairs. I don’t know what caused that.
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I worked at a daycare in Tucson Arizona, and the buildings were made up of two different houses that were kitty-cornered to one another. And then in between the two houses was the playground. So you walked into the front door of the daycare and there was a staircase that went up to where there was a storeroom and the staff restroom. The kids never went up there. It was early in the morning, about 6:30 in the morning. There were two teachers in the school and the first little boy shows up for the day. He’s two years old. He looks at the stairs and says in Spanish, “Quien es ese?” which means, “Who is that?” And the teacher says, “Quien is quien?” -- “Who is who?” And he said, “La Mujer!” -- “The woman!” And she said to him, “There’s no woman up there. It’s just me and the other teacher, and she’s right there.” And the boy said, “No, the woman on the stairs. She’s there every day. She says hello to me every day.” In the same building, one time the same teacher was there with the last couple of kids at night and she heard like a bowling ball rolling upstairs in the same area upstairs. The dad walked in and said, “What’s going on up there?” and she said, “I don’t know. I’m the only one here with the kids”. He said, “Are you sure? Because there’s definitely somebody up there.” The dad goes up, looks all around, but there was nobody there. We shut down the school about a year later, and a Frat house was built right there, so who knows what’s going on there now!
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I moved into an apartment in Millford by the beach, and the told me that two people had died in the apartment I was moving into. Now, as a kid I would have been frightened of things like that, but when I moved in I said out loud, “I’m here. My name is Maryanne. You don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.” And that’s just the kind of attitude I had with the whole thing. So I didn’t ask about anything. What room they died in. I didn’t want to know anything. So, at Christmas time I’m putting my tree up. I’m untangling the lights, going up and down, up and down. ALl of a sudden I pick up the last string and there’s this full body apparition. I saw not through him. It was my height. He was this close to me. I didn’t even. I’m thinking, “Is he breathing or isn’t he?” (laughs) But when I described it to the neighbor downstairs, they said, ‘That was the fella who died in your apartment.” I mean, the hair, the coat. Just the whole look about him. And I never knew if it was a kid or whatever. I just looked up at him and thought, “Where did you come from?” And then all of a sudden, in a split second it was gone. But that was freaky! It looked as real as anything. It really did. It was like if you touched it, you would have really felt someone solid. That was the only time that anything like that ever happened.
Barry: Were you standing at the time? How tall was he?
He was as tall as me. I bent down to get the Christmas lights and stood up. I wasn’t dizzy or anything. I stood up and there he was right in front of me. It was like if you were a little closer to me now and I looked him right in the face and thought, “Where did you come from?”
Barry: Did you notice what he was wearing?
Yes. He had a green army, like the US reserve jackets, the green. He had it up a little bit. He had a flannel shirt I noticed. His face was a little dirty. I was like, “What, did you crawl out of a hole or something?” And his hair was kind of wild, but they said that this kid had punked hair with colors and whatever. And probably all the way down, I could feel that he was down to the floor. He wasn’t floating or anything. But he was dressed for outside for that time of the year. But I don’t know where he was or where he came from. I never saw him again after that, but the dogs would sit there and follow something with their eyes. They’d look up and follow something from room to room with their eyes and I’d say, “What the hell are you looking at?!” (laughs)
Barry: Do you still live there?
Hell no! (laughs) But one time, if any of you have pets, you know how they come up to you and they jump on the bed next to you. Well, I felt that and I out of the norm, it doesn’t faze you. Oh good, the dog’s in the bed. I felt it. My dog wasn’t even home! And I said, “What is this?!” I didn’t move out because it was scary. It wasn’t scary whatsoever. But that particular thing, I am amazing that I was able to let it roll off of my shoulders. But I didn’t let it bother me.
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This sounds kind of cliche, but it all started after my sister got her car from a family friend. We were cleaning it out and we found this tape of children’s nursery rhymes. And it was these weird nursery rhymes about old horses and stuff. Not like normal nursery rhymes. A couple weeks later my sister is cleaning out the car again, and she’s on the phone with her boyfriend who lives down in Florida, and all of a sudden they both hear this screaming on the phone. Like, really weird screaming. She’s freaking out, he’s freaking out. She tells me and I’m like, ‘It’s probably nothing’. But then, weird things start happening to my dog. I’m super protective of my dog. Nothing happens to my dog, ever. And so all of a sudden my sister’s car starts setting off the dog’s electric collar around the car, which never happens anywhere. Then, I’m home alone. Her car isn’t there. But still, in the area of her car I’m starting to feel uneasy. I’m outside with my dog. Then all of a sudden I hear what sounds like a little kid scream, “Puppy!” And my dog’s freaking out. She’s getting super excited about nothing. So I’m like, ‘What are you seeing that I’m not?’ So it’s a couple of weeks later, it’s the middle of the summer. I start hearing leaves crunching outside, really loud. I’m watching TV and it’s just loud leaves crunching outside. So I go and I check it out. Nothing’s out there. I take my dog out. And then all of a sudden I see this light almost in the shape of a person, and it runs off into the woods. And nothing has happened since.
Barry: This was a used car?
This was a used car.
Barry: So it sounds like something came with the used car besides the creepy tape.
But ever since it ran off I haven’t, and my sister and i haven’t seen or heard or felt anything since.
Barry: I wonder what made it leave? You don’t care, right? As long as it’s gone.
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My husband’s family’s house was an old farmhouse in Pine Plains which is just at the top of Dutchess and Columbia counties. His sister and I were best friends in high school. And many, many, many strange things happened. But two that put us on edge. It was during the day, the middle of the day. We were by ourselves. The back door came into the kitchen, but the floor of the kitchen had been ripped up. It was just two-by-fours. And we were sitting in the front part of the house. It was a great big farmhouse. We were sitting in the front part watching TV. And they had a flapping door that went from the dining room to the kitchen, and it was shut because there was no kitchen at the time because it had been gutted. It was in the summer, and we lived in the middle of nowhere. Nobody locked doors or anything. And we heard the door flap. And we were like … how could somebody come in? There wasn’t even a floor. We walked into the dining room which had hardwood floors and there were wet footprints going across the floor. Like, I can picture it today. We were like, holy crap! And they just dissipated. They were full sized footprints. They were like little footprints. They were men’s … and they weren't shoes. They were bare feet. A man’s bare feet going across. And they dissipated. There were like four or five steps, and then they were just nothing.
Barry: Well, it would be like if someone walked in a puddle ….
Then they would dry as you went along. Right. So, the same house happened to be just the two of us again. They had a lot of dogs. They raised Afghan dogs. So they went to a dog show, her sisters and her mother and we were dog sitting. This time it was at night, and we kept two dogs with us. We were going to sleep in the living room and watch TV, and we kept two of the big dogs. A big greyhound and a really aggressive Afghan, because we’re in the middle of nowhere and nobody locks doors. And we’re watching TV and we hear music playing. Clear as day. And one of the back bedrooms upstairs on the second floor on the back corner that was also like two rooms within a room, and it also had a staircase that was a walk-up to the attic. This was all in one room. At the time it was Jimmy’s bedroom, but he was not there. His stuff was in there, but he wasn’t living there. And we hear music. And the door was closed because nobody used the room. And it was LOUD. And we’re like, “There’s music coming from upstairs.” It was current music. Like a radio playing. Current music. And we were of course afraid. We were like, ‘Someone’s in the house,’ because it’s just an impossibility.
We took the dogs and they’re growling as we’re going up the stairs. We come to the door. The door’s shut. The music is playing. I’ve got chills going up and down my body thinking about it. The dogs are growling. We open the door. The music stops. There is no music. We put on the lights. There is no one there. We walk in, the dogs, the hair is up on their backs, and they’re still growling. And there’s like, so there’s the bedroom, and then there’s a little room off of it that also has a closet in it. And we walked into there. The dogs’ hair was up on their backs, and they went over to a corner and were growling at this corner. They could sense something … we couldn’t see anything, but there was something. It was so frightening that we slept with the lights on, and the dogs were on the couch with us. That upstairs room always had a funny feeling to it. I don’t know if it was the attic. You always felt like somebody was going to come in on you. Do you know what I mean? Like, you felt as if something would come out of that door and come down. Yeah. A lot of very strange things happened in that house. There are a lot of good stories about that house. You’d make a pot of coffee, you’d go in and half a pot would be gone. It made absolutely no sense. Five cups of coffee would just vanish, and it would be just half a pot. At the time, everybody smoked. Cigarettes, whole packs, would just disappear. Gone. So, I guess he liked coffee and cigarettes.
Barry: So I guess he was a barefoot, coffee drinking smoking ghost!
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Mount Kisco Library - Saturday, 20 October 2018
My dad’s offices were in the city, and every time go back or forth he would let me throw the dime into the bucket at the Henry Hudson toll booth. To this day I find dimes everywhere I go. I’ve gotten up and found dimes in my slippers at home, or gone to change the sheets and there’s a dime in my sheets. Everywhere I go. At one point I took them to the bank and I had $33 dollars worth of dimes. And I find them everywhere.
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My grandmother was from Puerto Rico, so I grew up in an Hispanic culture, so this was very much a part of my upbringing. And she used to take me to seances when I was little. I’ve seen exorcisms, I’ve seen things that were good and bad. I choose not to acknowledge the bad, so I’m open only to the good. I sell houses for a living, and when i walk into a house I can feel the energy. And when I go to funerals, standing in front of a casket or even just walking into the funeral home, I can feel that it’s sort of like an energy that’s a wave. It almost makes me feel like I want to pass out. It like passes right through me, but I can feel that a person is still attached to this plane. Or changes in temperature. When my grandmother died, it still happens sometimes, I walk into my bedroom and the TV would be on. So, they like electronics too.
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This took place quite a while back and basically I woke up feeling like I had to go to the bathroom. So I went to the bathroom and I saw something in my kitchen doorway. When I looked back in walking back from the bathroom, there were blue eyes glowing bright. Everything else was like dark, like there was no light source, but it was only illuminating the thing itself. It looked like it had some kind of dark hair going across it. It looked like it had some kind of white on the bottom of it. But once I saw it I though, ‘Hell no!’ and ran right to my bed and hid under the sheets.
Mark Twain Library, Saturday 27 October 2018
I was at the Old State House in Hartford and they have this Hall of Oddities, which is this museum of really creepy stuff. We had a couple of Boy Scouts with us who were working on a badge, and I’m walking out of the room and something tugged on my sleeve and a voice said, “Mom!, And I turned around and everybody was at the other side of the room. And the director of the Old State House was with us and she saw my reaction and she said, “What happened?” So I told her, and she said they have a lot of activity in that room.
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I lived in a house in Ridgefield that belonged to my great aunt. I had two things that happened to me in that house. Once I was sitting in the living room on the couch and I was looking straight at the hallway and I saw a vision of what looked like a see-through almost like silk object just pass down the hallway. Another time I was sitting on the living room floor, it was in summer. They have no fans, no air conditioning, and there was no wind outside. I was on the floor playing with my youngest daughter and I felt like extreme cold. Like something came on and passed right through me.
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My story is, I was about six-years-old and for like my entire life before that I always had a nightmare every night. ANd I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. One year we moved down to the basement because it was bigger and we had more space down there. And a week or two in, I had this weird nightmare of being chased by buffalo and they trampled me and I shot up like this … and I looked around and I looked back, and I saw something that at first I thought was clothes hanging, but then all of a sudden it formed into what looked like a witch holding a cane with a skull on it. And it stared at me, turned around, and walked away from me into the hall. And then i just snapped into day, still in the same position. And then since that I had not had a single nightmare. Not one. Even after seeing anything else, not one single nightmare.
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I was at a hotel once, and I was watching a movie real late and just as I was going to bed, I was really tired. I don’t know if it was an illusion, but I saw a transparent man in the corner of the room. And so then I fell asleep, and the like two years after when i was at my house, like a similar story. I saw a movie and I was really tired, and I saw the same shape in the left hand corner. The same person.
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A few years back we were in Memphis, Tennessee, and there’s a section with victorian houses that they give tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So we went on a tour of the Mallory-Neeley House and we toured the first floor. The rules when you walked in the house were you could take pictures but no flash, and don’t touch anything. So we toured the whole first floor, toured the whole second floor. And we were with her for about an hour and after and hour she goes, “There’s actually a widow’s watch” and we were compliant for the whole time and she said “You could go up by yourselves if you like” because she had some kind of a respiratory thing that prevented her from climbing the stairs. It was basically a third and fourth floor. So there’s a stairwell going up to the third floor, about a twelve by twelve room. And then another stairwell that went up to the fourth floor. So my wife Karen was recording it on her camera the whole time. So she scanned the room when we were on the third floor, and then we walked up to the fourth floor. Along the way from the fourth floor there’s a stairwell and there’s a curtain. And the curtain was kind of draped across the window so Karen pulled the curtain back, scanned out the window. We walked up to the next floor, scanned around. The next day we were on the highway driving from Memphis to Nashville and she looked back at the video and she actually captured a ‘Class A’ EVP. The moment that she touches the curtain and pulls the curtain back, you hear a voice that says, “Maybe you shouldn’t touch it.” Because that was the rule in the house when we came in. It’s not something that sounds like that, it’s right there with us. Now, I’m a skeptic but I can’t explain it.
Note from Barry: I was running my digital recorder while listening to the EVP that the woman was sharing with me, and I was able to get a recording of it. But what's really strange is that I picked up an EVP at the Mark Twain Library! As I was listening to the woman's EVP, a man's voice jumped in and said what sounds like the name "Mike Goldman". If the couple who shared the EVP from the Mallory-Neeley House are reading this, and that name means anything to you, please contact me. Both EVP are below
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I lived in a duplex here in Redding, and this guy committed suicide at the end of June. I was living on the other side of the wall. Before he died I used to hear his footsteps every morning at about 5AM before he died. But the morning he died, I hadn’t heard his footsteps. He used to be a smoker, he would smoke on the front porch. After he died, I came home twice that first week and I smelled cigarette smoke. After that, I started hearing his footsteps at around 5 AM, the same time that he used to walk around in his apartment when he was alive. And it woke me up.
Now I didn’t know it at the time, but there was another guy who killed himself in the house. I would hear stuff in the attic. It sounded like there were people above me. I’ve heard footsteps in the room above me. So I think the whole place was haunted even before my neighbor killed himself.
The night I was moving out I heard voices. Men’s and women’s voices. I thought it was my sister and her two male friends coming back from the storage unit, but it wasn’t. I checked the street, but there was nobody walking outside. I could see the street clearly, and I would have seen someone if there were out there.
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Lewisboro Library, Friday 26 October 2018
My grandfather’s very tidy, and he had moved a cup from the living room and put it into the sink. A few minutes later, the cup showed up back in the living room. It had moved about 20 feet from one room to the other. I don’t think that it traveled through the air or anything like that. It was almost as if it had dematerialized in the kitchen, then rematerialized in the living room. My grandparents were both very serious freaked out when this happened.
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I was in fourth grade and my mom had died when I was four, so I used to pray at night that she would come to me. We had bunk beds when we were kids, and I was the youngest so I was on the third bunk. There were three windows against the wall, and we just had blinds so you could see shadows in the room. I went to Catholic school, and before this happened I said to the nun in religion class, ‘How about if you see something, or you don’t understand something and it’s bad.” And she said, “Just say, ‘In God’s name, who are you?” I remembered that.
At that time, the nuns had very distinct habits. They were very high with a huge bib in front. And one night this nun appeared over where the windows were, and she started coming towards me. Now, I’m on the third bunk and her shoulders were that high. I couldn’t see a face, but I could see the habit, but there was something different about the habit. I don’t know. But she was so huge and she almost touched my bed. I said, “In the name of God who are you?!” And I jumped off of the bed and ran in my dad’s room and shook him and said, “Pop, I’m sleeping with you.” And he said, “What’s wrong?” And I said, “I just saw a nun!” and he said, “Guilty conscience.” So I had to go back into my room. But I never forgot that.
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When I was nine my dad was suddenly killed in a car accident. He was only in the hospital a few days. We were young. At that time they thought that nine was young, so they kept saying, ‘He’s going to be fine.’ But then three days later my mom woke us up and said that he died. This was the 1960s and they didn’t let you go to the funeral back then, so she didn’t want to bring us to the funeral. She let us stay with my neighbor who had children our age. I remember feeling very lonely. I wanted to be with my mother, and I was scared. I was sleeping in the same room with the three girls who were about my age, but I couldn’t sleep. I was just laying there with my eyes shut thinking, ‘I want to be in my own house, I’m sad.’ And all of a sudden it got very bright in the room. Even though my eyes were shut, it got very bright in the room. And a voice very clearly said to me, “Don’t be afraid. Open your eyes. Everything’s going to be OK.” And I did NOT open my eyes because I was very, very afraid. Then it got dark again, and as soon as it got dark I sensed that whatever had said that to me wasn’t there anymore.
I jumped up and went into the room next to me and the mom said, “What’s the matter, you can’t sleep?” And I said, “No, I can’t sleep. It’s lightning out and it’s just too bright in the room.” And she said, “There’s no storm outside!” I hadn’t told anybody that story until I was about nineteen-years-old because I thought that I had just imagined it, but it was as clear as day.
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Unfortunately a couple of years ago, we had to have our beagle euthanized because she had cancer. I loved my beagle, and I was grieving terribly about that. It was a couple of nights later. We were going to bed and she used to have a habit of jumping on the bed, and when she did I could feel her jumping on the bed and she would come up between Mike and me and cuddle. Well, I felt that again. I distinctly felt the bed go down and come up. She was big. She was a big beagle, so you couldn’t miss it. And I looked down and went, ‘Oh!’ And it was just a habit and I said, “Come on Chloe!” And I looked, but of course nobody was there, nothing was there. And then I felt the grief again and it really affected me. And I realized that she’s probably still here. She’s probably comforting me for awhile anyway. So, it wasn’t much, but I remember it very distinctly. It’s amazing how pets will do that.
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What you said kind of confirmed the experiences I’ve had. My family’s apartment house, in two separate instances a few years apart. One of my uncles had died, and then another one had died. And in each case, the first one was ill for a while and he had a certain way of breathing and it was distinctive. The other uncle would sit in the back of one of the apartments and play the guitar in the most terrible way. It was very annoying because I was at college at time and it would disturb me in the middle of the day. And in each case when they passed away, I kept hearing the breathing of this one uncle several days in a row at least. It was freaking me out. And finally I just turned around and said, ‘I can’t take this anymore, can you please stop Uncle Eddie,’ and it stopped. And in the other case I was trying to study and by that time I accepted that it was him, my uncle Charlie, and finally I couldn’t get any peace because of the guitar and I said, ‘Can you please stop uncle Charlie, I’m trying to study,’ and it stopped. It went on one more time about two weeks later and I said, ‘Are you going to keep this up?’ and it stopped finally.
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Like you, I saw something that didn’t scare me. It had to be something. At two in the morning about 20 years ago I was riding back home in Newtown, and it’s pretty rural with no street lights. And a huge white horse with a man in full English riding habit with a scarlet red hat just came out of the side of the road. And I’m driving home and all I’m thinking is, ‘Don’t hit the horse!’ And then I got home and my husband said, ‘Do you think ….?’ And that was in Newtown where they used to run the hounds. But it didn’t scare me at the time. But it was a HUGE white horse and the scarlet red hat. It was very solid! I thought I was going to hit it because it was coming right at me, and I thought, ‘Don’t hit the horse’. And then it just went. But what IDIOT would be out riding at two in the morning?!
Barry: Were you riding towards it?
It was coming toward me. I was at a four way intersection, I was going across and it was coming across someone’s front lawn, and it was coming down the lawn toward where the hounds used to ride down Fox Hill. So it was headed down that way.
There’s another road in Newtown that freaks me out. Poverty Hill. I avoid it at all cost. I had been driving down with my son who was about seven. I didn’t tell him that this road creeps me out. But it’s night and he’s looking out at the woods and he turns back slowly to me and says, “Lots of eyes looking back out there!”
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Oxford Library - Monday, 29 October 2018
I grew up in a house in Ansonia. It was a two family. I didn’t move out until I was eleven, so this happened when I was a little girl. The house is, the first floor in the front is built on a cliff, so my sister and I shared a bedroom that was three stories up. So, one night she looked out the window and there were eyes staring at her. So the following morning my mom made sure that she put me next to the window and put her against the wall because my sister would never sleep in that room again. And then my brother who slept in the other room, he woke up to the shades going up and down, up and down, really quick. That happened a couple of times to him. The people above us had a big dog -- named Satan by the way! (laughs) One day we thought the dog was rolling a bowling ball. That’s what it sounded like -- up and down the living room. And when my mom asked them, a few hours later she went there up to say hi and she said, “Oh my God the dog. What’s the dog playing with?” And the neighbor said, “Nobody was home”. They had the dog out, and it sounded just like a bowling ball.
And then we had, it was kind of like a walk-up attic. I would go up there when I was little, and there was this one room that I refused to go in. And of course, it was where my mom kept all the change of clothes for the seasons. And she would make me go in there and I refused. I absolutely hated that room. I didn’t know why. But there was a closet and all the clothes would be up in the closet, and I would NEVER open the closet door. I wouldn’t go into that room. And they actually put a cross in that room, and I still would not go in that room as a little girl. And so finally when we moved out I was like ten or eleven years old, we found out that the next people that moved in, a couple weeks after that, everything in the kitchen entirely shifted and moved in the kitchen. And then we never heard what happened after that. But the house looks like it’s in horrible shape now.
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I was always interested in stuff and read about it, but I never really had seen anything. I’m a plumber, and working in some houses you get like an eerie feeling in old houses. But this was in Harold Leever Cancer Center. I was working at night. We would go in after everybody had their chemo; so we had to work at night and get done and make it look like we weren’t there. So, my apprentice and I went up. The nurse said, “Everybody’s done. Go ahead. You can start.” We go up there and we’re starting to get ready, getting our cart and our tools. And we look across and i would say about fifty-feet away from us we saw a man go into one of the patient rooms. And I said, “I thought everybody was out of here.” And I go, “You seen that guy go in there.” So we walked down there, and we go in that room, and it was cold and every hair on the back of my neck and my arms stood up. And there was nobody in there. We both saw the same guy. Bald, tall, glasses, suit-and-tie on. And we told the nurses about it the next time we went to work. And they were like, “Look at this picture. Does it look like this guy?” And we were like, “Yeah. That’s the guy.” It was a doctor who had passed away there. It was the freakiest thing. And then I believed. And what was so cool was that my apprentice had seen the same thing.
Barry: Did they say how long ago he had passed away?
It was like only a couple of years earlier that he had passed.
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So, my grandmother had passed away, and she was a really neat lady. And so after the funeral and everything we were all sitting around in my mom’s kitchen. They were telling stories about her, and my mom’s kitchen has a little bathroom off the side, and just as we were talking the toilet flushed! And we just kind of felt, because it never does that, that she was just sort of giving us a sign that she was there. I’m not sure why that sign!
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I have a lot of stories, but I’ll share one of my favorite ones. I’ve lived in haunted houses and seen ghosts that seemed real to me that nobody else sees. They used to swing me on the swings when I was a kid, I was an only child. But I always had a lot of ‘friends’ around me, so it was kind of weird. But my very favorite story is when I went to Nashville and went into the Ryman Auditorium with a friend of mine. And we came down the hallway, down the walkway, and she said, “Oh, we’ll sit here.” And I was like, ‘I’ve got to cross by all these people!” And I’m going (pretending to walk past people who are sitting in chairs) “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me.” And all of the seats were empty. I didn’t see them empty though. I just saw a whole bunch of people waiting for a show just like we were.
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A woman and her sister were sitting together in the audience, and they shared this story ...
My parents moved to Monroe. This is going back to the 90’s. My father was a believer, and we never really knew why he was so interested. He would go to the library and he would look up literature on different paranormal topics and different people. He even went to Dudelytown in Connecticut where all of that paranormal stuff is supposed to happen. He loved US history and he would always research things. My mother is different. She’s not a believer. She’s a devout Catholic, and we were raised Catholic too. So she was that type, she just didn’t believe. Now, my sister lived with her son in my mother’s house. Different things would happen in that house. Things would go missing. When I’d go over to visit, the TV would turn on and off by itself. It was the old fashioned type of television. No remote control. You’d just be sitting there and it would turn on and off.
A lot of different things happened, but one day in particular, my sister was looking out of a big picture window. They lived on a dirt road, not one neighbor. It was by a camp, but the camp had closed down years before. And she said to my father, “Oh my God, some guy just walked by.” And he said to her, “Was he wearing a flannel shirt and overalls?” and she said, “Yeah! How did you know?” And he said, “I think that that’s our ghost.” He had that sense, my father. And other things happened in that house. My sister’s son’s baby pictures went missing.
Sister talking: There were a ton of my son’s baby pictures on a stereo in the living room. I went to dust one day and I asked my father, “Where are all of Justin’s pictures?” We literally moved the stereo, everything out of that whole section, and they never, never showed up. And there was a lot of them. Another time, I was on the phone one night talking to my friend and it started to thunder and lightning outside. And the lightning flashed under the tree and I saw a guy dressed in a sailor’s outfit. I saw him totally clear when the lightning flashed. We had this big tree in the backyard, and he was dressed like a sailor. And I saw him good enough so I could even see what his face looked like. He was cute!
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Two small things. I used to work with the person who had the “Annabelle” doll. I’m a nurse, and she was a nurse, and I worked with her in the operating room. I guess they wrote a book about it? I never read the book. But it was real. She didn’t like to talk about it, and she refused to have her real name in the book. She didn’t want to be associated with that doll.
The second thing, my husband and I live in Oxford. He was a Marine, and he doesn’t believe in ghosts at all. At the time that this happened, his buddy was with him. Also a Marine. So they were in their car coming down Punkup Road and Silano Drive and they stopped at the stop sign, and to the right there was a girl dressed in white. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground on the corner on the grass, and she was kind of levitating. So she turned her face around and she had this smile on her face, like this when she looked at him -- and she had silver eyes. He came home and he was scared shitless, because he doesn’t believe in ghosts. And I was like, ‘Oh, I want to go see. Take me back.’ and he would take me. This guy is never scared, so I know it was real to him.
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I’ve had dreams, my grandmother used to say that she was one of eighteen children, but I would say she was one of sixteen children because we never knew if her twin siblings actually survived. She lived in a small house in Asonia. She used to have big parties in the dining room at her house when she was younger with all of the brothers and sisters, brothers-in-laws. So I started having dreams, and one of my dreams was that all the people who had passed away were having a big Thanksgiving dinner. Then a couple of days later, one of my grandmother’s siblings passed away; my grandmother’s sister -- the one who everyone says I’m most like, her really bossy sister.
My grandmother passed a few years ago, she was ninety-four years old, and she was the last one left of the sixteen children. I just recently had another dream. In the dream, I’m at my grandmother’s house, and she looks at me and says, ‘Why are you here? Get out of here!’ and she was pushing me out of the house. I’m wondering, is that a sign that it’s not my time? Because in all of the other dreams I’m looking at the scene from above, and I’m watching everyone welcoming the next person coming over.
Barry: Did you see the next person in the dream?
Well, in this last dream she was pushing me away saying, ‘It’s not your time - why are you here?’, but in the other dreams it was my grandmother’s two brothers and one of her sisters. The actual day my grandmother died in her house three years ago, they found her on the floor. And when they were carrying her out, my dad said they saw a big bald eagle leaving the house.
I’m also a genealogist. My grandmother did the genealogy of the family for twenty years, and I picked up her work. In it she mentioned the twins who died when they were about seven months old. I was doing research online, and in January, on the exact day of my grandmother’s birthday, I discovered that her twin siblings were born in 1912, and they died a day apart. I found this out on her birthday, which I think is pretty significant. So I’m wondering; is she telling me from the other side to finish her history? Now I can say for sure that she really was one of eighteen because the twins were actually born, they had birth certificates and death certificates.
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Danbury Library, Tuesday 30 October 2018
This happened in Princeton, New Jersey off of Route 1. I lived in an old plantation house, and they converted it into eleven apartments. And I was able to compare it to other stories of people who had lived there the night I was moving out. I lived there for two year, but we were all so busy that we didn’t say anything about things that were happening. The house was huge, and there was a lot of space -- a huge living room and bedroom, but a little efficiency type kitchen. At the time I was working a lot - seven days a week, 12 hours a day. I was a computer programmer, and it was a brand-new job. So, of course I was really tired after work, and at first I just wrote off all of the things that were going on as my imagination because I was tired. But here’s the things that happened. Once I hit that sack, that’s it. And all the lights were off, but it happened all the time that the bathroom light would be turned on in the morning. And I’d be at the sink washing my dishes and it felt like someone came from behind and came real close to me. You know that feeling, when it feels real different when someone is right behind you? And then one night I go to bed, and it felt like there was somebody else in the bed! And I was really tired, so I would just go and sleep on the couch. It happened a few times. Sometimes Sunday mornings I’d just be laying there on the bed, not sleeping, just resting and relaxing to get some rest in, and I would hear my name being called. And it sounded like it was in a tunnel. “Lucy!” It was slow, like a hollow sound, like a tunnel sound. Another time the person who lived underneath me complained, “Why did you walk all night long? You kept us up!” But I didn’t, I was in bed. With just five hours sleep, I didn’t get up.
On the day that I was packing up and moving out, all of the people who lived in the building stopped by and we started comparing stories about all the the things that had happened to us. We were all saying, ‘Oh my God, this has been happening to you to?!’ The girl who lived in the attic apartment had the best story. She had a French horn hanging on her wall, and it would just go off. It would start playing by itself. She said that she would be getting ready for work and put her earring down, and the would turn around and they would be gone and it never turned up.
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This was my first ghost encounter ever. This happened in Cold Spring, New York when I was pretty young. My aunt used to own a restaurant, but it shut down so she converted that into her sewing company. She had people sewing all night and all times of the day. I must have been about four or five at the time. I was in that part of the former restaurant and I was sleeping in a hammock because my mom was sewing in a room upstairs. There was this big hole on the side of the restaurant where the old kitchen used to be, and as clear as day I felt a tingle go down my spine and I thought, ‘Oh, I have to get up.’ As I did, I watched these five figures walk in sync from the old kitchen. They had this green glow about them, and they all walked in sync. Then all of them turned their head at the same exact time and just stared at me. It felt like forever. They went from one door and then out into the outside; they just went through the wall and then outside. I remember screaming for my mom. Now, at the time there were monks staying in the building. They came to bless the house, not the restaurant. When they heard what happened, the monks blessed me so I could forget about it. So, that was my first encounter. And ever since then I’ve always seen things and sensed things.
I had sleep paralysis once when I was in high school, and I saw the form of a man. He had hair like a box-top kind of afro, he was wearing a dark green shirt and dark jeans, and he was standing on me. I heard him laughing as he was pressing down on me and I couldn’t breathe. That was my second one.
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I remember not too long ago me and my friend were kind of jokingly using a makeshift Ouija board. And we apparently talked to a man named Fred who was really into disco music. Then we were just joking around about it and then my friend got the bright idea to ask him where he was, and on the Ouija board it spelled out HALLWAY. So we kind of just flipped out and we said, ‘Goodbye!’ and we just packed up everything and we just left.
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I have a lot of stories, but this happened in the 90’s. I was living in East Norwalk in an old Victorian. There was a pizza place on the ground floor, and my apartment was above it. I had a couple of cats, and because I worked with the Department of Mental health I had borrowed a sound machine. I plugged it in because the apartment was across from a bar. I thought, ‘Let me just put it on and that way it’ll be nice and quiet.’ In the closet there was a ladder that lead up the attic door, and one day one of my cats thought they were going to go up there and check things out. I got the catfood and tried to get her down, but she wouldn’t come down. So I said, ‘You know what, I’m just going to let her come down when she wants to.’ And this man’s voice said, “You’re right”. And I freaked out. Something like that wouldn’t bother me now, but at the time I was in my twenties and I had never heard a voice before. I had seen things, but I had never heard a voice. It was a male voice. He was really nice, he was trying to be reassuring, but he scared the heck out of me!
I lived in a duplex here in Redding, and this guy committed suicide at the end of June. I was living on the other side of the wall. Before he died I used to hear his footsteps every morning at about 5AM before he died. But the morning he died, I hadn’t heard his footsteps. He used to be a smoker, he would smoke on the front porch. After he died, I came home twice that first week and I smelled cigarette smoke. After that, I started hearing his footsteps at around 5 AM, the same time that he used to walk around in his apartment when he was alive. And it woke me up.
Now I didn’t know it at the time, but there was another guy who killed himself in the house. I would hear stuff in the attic. It sounded like there were people above me. I’ve heard footsteps in the room above me. So I think the whole place was haunted even before my neighbor killed himself.
The night I was moving out I heard voices. Men’s and women’s voices. I thought it was my sister and her two male friends coming back from the storage unit, but it wasn’t. I checked the street, but there was nobody walking outside. I could see the street clearly, and I would have seen someone if there were out there.
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Lewisboro Library, Friday 26 October 2018
My grandfather’s very tidy, and he had moved a cup from the living room and put it into the sink. A few minutes later, the cup showed up back in the living room. It had moved about 20 feet from one room to the other. I don’t think that it traveled through the air or anything like that. It was almost as if it had dematerialized in the kitchen, then rematerialized in the living room. My grandparents were both very serious freaked out when this happened.
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I was in fourth grade and my mom had died when I was four, so I used to pray at night that she would come to me. We had bunk beds when we were kids, and I was the youngest so I was on the third bunk. There were three windows against the wall, and we just had blinds so you could see shadows in the room. I went to Catholic school, and before this happened I said to the nun in religion class, ‘How about if you see something, or you don’t understand something and it’s bad.” And she said, “Just say, ‘In God’s name, who are you?” I remembered that.
At that time, the nuns had very distinct habits. They were very high with a huge bib in front. And one night this nun appeared over where the windows were, and she started coming towards me. Now, I’m on the third bunk and her shoulders were that high. I couldn’t see a face, but I could see the habit, but there was something different about the habit. I don’t know. But she was so huge and she almost touched my bed. I said, “In the name of God who are you?!” And I jumped off of the bed and ran in my dad’s room and shook him and said, “Pop, I’m sleeping with you.” And he said, “What’s wrong?” And I said, “I just saw a nun!” and he said, “Guilty conscience.” So I had to go back into my room. But I never forgot that.
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When I was nine my dad was suddenly killed in a car accident. He was only in the hospital a few days. We were young. At that time they thought that nine was young, so they kept saying, ‘He’s going to be fine.’ But then three days later my mom woke us up and said that he died. This was the 1960s and they didn’t let you go to the funeral back then, so she didn’t want to bring us to the funeral. She let us stay with my neighbor who had children our age. I remember feeling very lonely. I wanted to be with my mother, and I was scared. I was sleeping in the same room with the three girls who were about my age, but I couldn’t sleep. I was just laying there with my eyes shut thinking, ‘I want to be in my own house, I’m sad.’ And all of a sudden it got very bright in the room. Even though my eyes were shut, it got very bright in the room. And a voice very clearly said to me, “Don’t be afraid. Open your eyes. Everything’s going to be OK.” And I did NOT open my eyes because I was very, very afraid. Then it got dark again, and as soon as it got dark I sensed that whatever had said that to me wasn’t there anymore.
I jumped up and went into the room next to me and the mom said, “What’s the matter, you can’t sleep?” And I said, “No, I can’t sleep. It’s lightning out and it’s just too bright in the room.” And she said, “There’s no storm outside!” I hadn’t told anybody that story until I was about nineteen-years-old because I thought that I had just imagined it, but it was as clear as day.
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Unfortunately a couple of years ago, we had to have our beagle euthanized because she had cancer. I loved my beagle, and I was grieving terribly about that. It was a couple of nights later. We were going to bed and she used to have a habit of jumping on the bed, and when she did I could feel her jumping on the bed and she would come up between Mike and me and cuddle. Well, I felt that again. I distinctly felt the bed go down and come up. She was big. She was a big beagle, so you couldn’t miss it. And I looked down and went, ‘Oh!’ And it was just a habit and I said, “Come on Chloe!” And I looked, but of course nobody was there, nothing was there. And then I felt the grief again and it really affected me. And I realized that she’s probably still here. She’s probably comforting me for awhile anyway. So, it wasn’t much, but I remember it very distinctly. It’s amazing how pets will do that.
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What you said kind of confirmed the experiences I’ve had. My family’s apartment house, in two separate instances a few years apart. One of my uncles had died, and then another one had died. And in each case, the first one was ill for a while and he had a certain way of breathing and it was distinctive. The other uncle would sit in the back of one of the apartments and play the guitar in the most terrible way. It was very annoying because I was at college at time and it would disturb me in the middle of the day. And in each case when they passed away, I kept hearing the breathing of this one uncle several days in a row at least. It was freaking me out. And finally I just turned around and said, ‘I can’t take this anymore, can you please stop Uncle Eddie,’ and it stopped. And in the other case I was trying to study and by that time I accepted that it was him, my uncle Charlie, and finally I couldn’t get any peace because of the guitar and I said, ‘Can you please stop uncle Charlie, I’m trying to study,’ and it stopped. It went on one more time about two weeks later and I said, ‘Are you going to keep this up?’ and it stopped finally.
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Like you, I saw something that didn’t scare me. It had to be something. At two in the morning about 20 years ago I was riding back home in Newtown, and it’s pretty rural with no street lights. And a huge white horse with a man in full English riding habit with a scarlet red hat just came out of the side of the road. And I’m driving home and all I’m thinking is, ‘Don’t hit the horse!’ And then I got home and my husband said, ‘Do you think ….?’ And that was in Newtown where they used to run the hounds. But it didn’t scare me at the time. But it was a HUGE white horse and the scarlet red hat. It was very solid! I thought I was going to hit it because it was coming right at me, and I thought, ‘Don’t hit the horse’. And then it just went. But what IDIOT would be out riding at two in the morning?!
Barry: Were you riding towards it?
It was coming toward me. I was at a four way intersection, I was going across and it was coming across someone’s front lawn, and it was coming down the lawn toward where the hounds used to ride down Fox Hill. So it was headed down that way.
There’s another road in Newtown that freaks me out. Poverty Hill. I avoid it at all cost. I had been driving down with my son who was about seven. I didn’t tell him that this road creeps me out. But it’s night and he’s looking out at the woods and he turns back slowly to me and says, “Lots of eyes looking back out there!”
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Oxford Library - Monday, 29 October 2018
I grew up in a house in Ansonia. It was a two family. I didn’t move out until I was eleven, so this happened when I was a little girl. The house is, the first floor in the front is built on a cliff, so my sister and I shared a bedroom that was three stories up. So, one night she looked out the window and there were eyes staring at her. So the following morning my mom made sure that she put me next to the window and put her against the wall because my sister would never sleep in that room again. And then my brother who slept in the other room, he woke up to the shades going up and down, up and down, really quick. That happened a couple of times to him. The people above us had a big dog -- named Satan by the way! (laughs) One day we thought the dog was rolling a bowling ball. That’s what it sounded like -- up and down the living room. And when my mom asked them, a few hours later she went there up to say hi and she said, “Oh my God the dog. What’s the dog playing with?” And the neighbor said, “Nobody was home”. They had the dog out, and it sounded just like a bowling ball.
And then we had, it was kind of like a walk-up attic. I would go up there when I was little, and there was this one room that I refused to go in. And of course, it was where my mom kept all the change of clothes for the seasons. And she would make me go in there and I refused. I absolutely hated that room. I didn’t know why. But there was a closet and all the clothes would be up in the closet, and I would NEVER open the closet door. I wouldn’t go into that room. And they actually put a cross in that room, and I still would not go in that room as a little girl. And so finally when we moved out I was like ten or eleven years old, we found out that the next people that moved in, a couple weeks after that, everything in the kitchen entirely shifted and moved in the kitchen. And then we never heard what happened after that. But the house looks like it’s in horrible shape now.
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I was always interested in stuff and read about it, but I never really had seen anything. I’m a plumber, and working in some houses you get like an eerie feeling in old houses. But this was in Harold Leever Cancer Center. I was working at night. We would go in after everybody had their chemo; so we had to work at night and get done and make it look like we weren’t there. So, my apprentice and I went up. The nurse said, “Everybody’s done. Go ahead. You can start.” We go up there and we’re starting to get ready, getting our cart and our tools. And we look across and i would say about fifty-feet away from us we saw a man go into one of the patient rooms. And I said, “I thought everybody was out of here.” And I go, “You seen that guy go in there.” So we walked down there, and we go in that room, and it was cold and every hair on the back of my neck and my arms stood up. And there was nobody in there. We both saw the same guy. Bald, tall, glasses, suit-and-tie on. And we told the nurses about it the next time we went to work. And they were like, “Look at this picture. Does it look like this guy?” And we were like, “Yeah. That’s the guy.” It was a doctor who had passed away there. It was the freakiest thing. And then I believed. And what was so cool was that my apprentice had seen the same thing.
Barry: Did they say how long ago he had passed away?
It was like only a couple of years earlier that he had passed.
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So, my grandmother had passed away, and she was a really neat lady. And so after the funeral and everything we were all sitting around in my mom’s kitchen. They were telling stories about her, and my mom’s kitchen has a little bathroom off the side, and just as we were talking the toilet flushed! And we just kind of felt, because it never does that, that she was just sort of giving us a sign that she was there. I’m not sure why that sign!
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I have a lot of stories, but I’ll share one of my favorite ones. I’ve lived in haunted houses and seen ghosts that seemed real to me that nobody else sees. They used to swing me on the swings when I was a kid, I was an only child. But I always had a lot of ‘friends’ around me, so it was kind of weird. But my very favorite story is when I went to Nashville and went into the Ryman Auditorium with a friend of mine. And we came down the hallway, down the walkway, and she said, “Oh, we’ll sit here.” And I was like, ‘I’ve got to cross by all these people!” And I’m going (pretending to walk past people who are sitting in chairs) “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me.” And all of the seats were empty. I didn’t see them empty though. I just saw a whole bunch of people waiting for a show just like we were.
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A woman and her sister were sitting together in the audience, and they shared this story ...
My parents moved to Monroe. This is going back to the 90’s. My father was a believer, and we never really knew why he was so interested. He would go to the library and he would look up literature on different paranormal topics and different people. He even went to Dudelytown in Connecticut where all of that paranormal stuff is supposed to happen. He loved US history and he would always research things. My mother is different. She’s not a believer. She’s a devout Catholic, and we were raised Catholic too. So she was that type, she just didn’t believe. Now, my sister lived with her son in my mother’s house. Different things would happen in that house. Things would go missing. When I’d go over to visit, the TV would turn on and off by itself. It was the old fashioned type of television. No remote control. You’d just be sitting there and it would turn on and off.
A lot of different things happened, but one day in particular, my sister was looking out of a big picture window. They lived on a dirt road, not one neighbor. It was by a camp, but the camp had closed down years before. And she said to my father, “Oh my God, some guy just walked by.” And he said to her, “Was he wearing a flannel shirt and overalls?” and she said, “Yeah! How did you know?” And he said, “I think that that’s our ghost.” He had that sense, my father. And other things happened in that house. My sister’s son’s baby pictures went missing.
Sister talking: There were a ton of my son’s baby pictures on a stereo in the living room. I went to dust one day and I asked my father, “Where are all of Justin’s pictures?” We literally moved the stereo, everything out of that whole section, and they never, never showed up. And there was a lot of them. Another time, I was on the phone one night talking to my friend and it started to thunder and lightning outside. And the lightning flashed under the tree and I saw a guy dressed in a sailor’s outfit. I saw him totally clear when the lightning flashed. We had this big tree in the backyard, and he was dressed like a sailor. And I saw him good enough so I could even see what his face looked like. He was cute!
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Two small things. I used to work with the person who had the “Annabelle” doll. I’m a nurse, and she was a nurse, and I worked with her in the operating room. I guess they wrote a book about it? I never read the book. But it was real. She didn’t like to talk about it, and she refused to have her real name in the book. She didn’t want to be associated with that doll.
The second thing, my husband and I live in Oxford. He was a Marine, and he doesn’t believe in ghosts at all. At the time that this happened, his buddy was with him. Also a Marine. So they were in their car coming down Punkup Road and Silano Drive and they stopped at the stop sign, and to the right there was a girl dressed in white. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground on the corner on the grass, and she was kind of levitating. So she turned her face around and she had this smile on her face, like this when she looked at him -- and she had silver eyes. He came home and he was scared shitless, because he doesn’t believe in ghosts. And I was like, ‘Oh, I want to go see. Take me back.’ and he would take me. This guy is never scared, so I know it was real to him.
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I’ve had dreams, my grandmother used to say that she was one of eighteen children, but I would say she was one of sixteen children because we never knew if her twin siblings actually survived. She lived in a small house in Asonia. She used to have big parties in the dining room at her house when she was younger with all of the brothers and sisters, brothers-in-laws. So I started having dreams, and one of my dreams was that all the people who had passed away were having a big Thanksgiving dinner. Then a couple of days later, one of my grandmother’s siblings passed away; my grandmother’s sister -- the one who everyone says I’m most like, her really bossy sister.
My grandmother passed a few years ago, she was ninety-four years old, and she was the last one left of the sixteen children. I just recently had another dream. In the dream, I’m at my grandmother’s house, and she looks at me and says, ‘Why are you here? Get out of here!’ and she was pushing me out of the house. I’m wondering, is that a sign that it’s not my time? Because in all of the other dreams I’m looking at the scene from above, and I’m watching everyone welcoming the next person coming over.
Barry: Did you see the next person in the dream?
Well, in this last dream she was pushing me away saying, ‘It’s not your time - why are you here?’, but in the other dreams it was my grandmother’s two brothers and one of her sisters. The actual day my grandmother died in her house three years ago, they found her on the floor. And when they were carrying her out, my dad said they saw a big bald eagle leaving the house.
I’m also a genealogist. My grandmother did the genealogy of the family for twenty years, and I picked up her work. In it she mentioned the twins who died when they were about seven months old. I was doing research online, and in January, on the exact day of my grandmother’s birthday, I discovered that her twin siblings were born in 1912, and they died a day apart. I found this out on her birthday, which I think is pretty significant. So I’m wondering; is she telling me from the other side to finish her history? Now I can say for sure that she really was one of eighteen because the twins were actually born, they had birth certificates and death certificates.
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Danbury Library, Tuesday 30 October 2018
This happened in Princeton, New Jersey off of Route 1. I lived in an old plantation house, and they converted it into eleven apartments. And I was able to compare it to other stories of people who had lived there the night I was moving out. I lived there for two year, but we were all so busy that we didn’t say anything about things that were happening. The house was huge, and there was a lot of space -- a huge living room and bedroom, but a little efficiency type kitchen. At the time I was working a lot - seven days a week, 12 hours a day. I was a computer programmer, and it was a brand-new job. So, of course I was really tired after work, and at first I just wrote off all of the things that were going on as my imagination because I was tired. But here’s the things that happened. Once I hit that sack, that’s it. And all the lights were off, but it happened all the time that the bathroom light would be turned on in the morning. And I’d be at the sink washing my dishes and it felt like someone came from behind and came real close to me. You know that feeling, when it feels real different when someone is right behind you? And then one night I go to bed, and it felt like there was somebody else in the bed! And I was really tired, so I would just go and sleep on the couch. It happened a few times. Sometimes Sunday mornings I’d just be laying there on the bed, not sleeping, just resting and relaxing to get some rest in, and I would hear my name being called. And it sounded like it was in a tunnel. “Lucy!” It was slow, like a hollow sound, like a tunnel sound. Another time the person who lived underneath me complained, “Why did you walk all night long? You kept us up!” But I didn’t, I was in bed. With just five hours sleep, I didn’t get up.
On the day that I was packing up and moving out, all of the people who lived in the building stopped by and we started comparing stories about all the the things that had happened to us. We were all saying, ‘Oh my God, this has been happening to you to?!’ The girl who lived in the attic apartment had the best story. She had a French horn hanging on her wall, and it would just go off. It would start playing by itself. She said that she would be getting ready for work and put her earring down, and the would turn around and they would be gone and it never turned up.
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This was my first ghost encounter ever. This happened in Cold Spring, New York when I was pretty young. My aunt used to own a restaurant, but it shut down so she converted that into her sewing company. She had people sewing all night and all times of the day. I must have been about four or five at the time. I was in that part of the former restaurant and I was sleeping in a hammock because my mom was sewing in a room upstairs. There was this big hole on the side of the restaurant where the old kitchen used to be, and as clear as day I felt a tingle go down my spine and I thought, ‘Oh, I have to get up.’ As I did, I watched these five figures walk in sync from the old kitchen. They had this green glow about them, and they all walked in sync. Then all of them turned their head at the same exact time and just stared at me. It felt like forever. They went from one door and then out into the outside; they just went through the wall and then outside. I remember screaming for my mom. Now, at the time there were monks staying in the building. They came to bless the house, not the restaurant. When they heard what happened, the monks blessed me so I could forget about it. So, that was my first encounter. And ever since then I’ve always seen things and sensed things.
I had sleep paralysis once when I was in high school, and I saw the form of a man. He had hair like a box-top kind of afro, he was wearing a dark green shirt and dark jeans, and he was standing on me. I heard him laughing as he was pressing down on me and I couldn’t breathe. That was my second one.
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I remember not too long ago me and my friend were kind of jokingly using a makeshift Ouija board. And we apparently talked to a man named Fred who was really into disco music. Then we were just joking around about it and then my friend got the bright idea to ask him where he was, and on the Ouija board it spelled out HALLWAY. So we kind of just flipped out and we said, ‘Goodbye!’ and we just packed up everything and we just left.
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I have a lot of stories, but this happened in the 90’s. I was living in East Norwalk in an old Victorian. There was a pizza place on the ground floor, and my apartment was above it. I had a couple of cats, and because I worked with the Department of Mental health I had borrowed a sound machine. I plugged it in because the apartment was across from a bar. I thought, ‘Let me just put it on and that way it’ll be nice and quiet.’ In the closet there was a ladder that lead up the attic door, and one day one of my cats thought they were going to go up there and check things out. I got the catfood and tried to get her down, but she wouldn’t come down. So I said, ‘You know what, I’m just going to let her come down when she wants to.’ And this man’s voice said, “You’re right”. And I freaked out. Something like that wouldn’t bother me now, but at the time I was in my twenties and I had never heard a voice before. I had seen things, but I had never heard a voice. It was a male voice. He was really nice, he was trying to be reassuring, but he scared the heck out of me!
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