Connecticut Ghost Hunter
  • Home
  • Events Calendar
  • About
  • Contact
  • Tarot Card Readings
  • Podcast
  • Paranormal Newsletter
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Radio Interviews
  • Case Files
  • Demonic Cases
  • Near Death Experiences
  • EVP Examples
  • Tarot Cards
  • Testimonials
  • Reader Submitted Ghost Stories
  • Publicity Articles
  • Frequently Asked Questions

The Devil's Footprints

1/8/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. 

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

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


Resources

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




0 Comments

Library Lecture Stories 2020

11/1/2020

1 Comment

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

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

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

Picture
     I was on the Italian Island of Capri. It was New Year’s eve, and I went on a hike to the top of a mountain with my boyfriend to see a palace that emperor Tiberius had built. We did it during the day of New Year’s eve while the museum of that palace was opened. There were very few people there because it was winter and New Year’s eve day, so there were hardly any tourists. 
     We separated, and there was just me and two or three other people in a huge area. He went to look around at something else and I stayed by myself and was looking from high up on the hill down the pathway that we had walked up to to come up to this palace. It’s along the side of a mountain and it’s quite a steep walk. And I saw an apparition, I believe, of a group of people in Roman clothing about half-way up that pathway. There was a man on a litter, one of those carry-litters where someone was sitting in a chair being carried up the mountain, I guess by slaves. There were about 12 people. It wasn’t a big party, but it was the man sitting in the chair on the litter being carried, several carriers, a couple of guards or something, and some other guy walking behind. They also had a few donkeys. I watched it for quite a while, and then I decided I’ve got to run and find my boyfriend so he could check this out. I ran to find him and I dragged him quickly back to where I had been standing by a fence overlooking that pathway, and of course there was nothing at all on the hill. When we went home we walked down the same way on that pathway that leads up to the palace, but I saw nothing. 
​_____
      I’m a real estate appraiser, and a few years ago I appraised a house in Weston. I knew that it was vacant because I was there the day after a blizzard, and it hadn’t been shoveled. So, it was a vacant house, it was on the market, but nobody was there.
     My process as an appraiser is that I’ll walk all the way around the outside taking pictures of the exterior, and then I start in the basement, work my way up to the attic, work in circles. So I always have the same process in every house so I don’t skip any rooms, so I don’t miss anything. As soon as I walked in the front door of this house I felt like somebody was watching me.  But this didn’t make any sense because I knew that the place was vacant, and I’m not particularly sensitive. I kept calling out, “Is anyone there?” but nobody answered. As I walked around the house taking pictures, I definitely felt like I was being followed around.
     So I went down to the basement and started taking pictures. Appraisers take a lot of pictures that don’t go into the report. They’re just for our files in case we get audited by the state. So one of the pictures I took was of the oil tank to make sure there was no leaking. I wanted to document that in case somebody came back and said, ‘Hey, the oil tank is leaking. You should have caught that.’ I can go to my folder and say, ‘I did take a picture and here you go.’ Well, in this case, over the oil tank was a shelf. In the middle of the shelf was a resin statue of two angels, and they were hugging, but one of the angels was missing its head. So, I’m framing the picture to make sure that there’s no leaking in the oil tank. I’ve got everything in the frame. I’m looking at it really carefully because I’m trying to make sure that I’m documenting this. I took a picture and then I looked back at my camera. I looked up again, and the statue is now at the end of the shelf about to fall over. It moved all the way to the side of the shelf, and was so close to the edge it was about to fall off.
     But it gets better. I get back to my office. I’m pulling comps, and I’m trying to find houses that are similar to this to find out what the value is, and I’m coming up about $30,000 short of all the other comps that are in similar condition and in similar location, recent sales, etc. And I couldn’t figure out why. I didn’t think I missed anything. I’m thinking, ‘Why is this thing selling so cheap? It makes no  sense to me.’ Weston is not a cheap area to buy in, so somebody got a deal and I wanted to know why. I ended up calling the real estate agent and I said, “What’s going on? Was there some reason this wasn’t an arms-length transaction?” She said, “Well, no but ... I mean, you do know that the last owner killed himself in the basement, right?” True story! Every appraiser I know has ghost stories. That is a true Connecticut ghost story. 
_____

     This happened when I was about 12-years-old or so when I was in summer camp in Massachusetts. I’ve always been interested in religion since I was a little kid. I used to like to follow other people’s religions. Just learn about it, just experience it, learn about it. One night we were in a tent. There were just a few of us. No more than four in a tent. I remember going to sleep in the tent and nothing else was happening, and when I woke up I saw the Virgin Mary in the tent in the upper corner of the tent. I just saw her there, and she was looking straight. I saw that her face was very, very vivid. It stayed with me. I said to the person next to me, the other camper, I said, “Do you see the Virgin Mary up there?” and they said, “No, I don’t see anything.” I don’t know why I could see her, but I kept seeing her. I fell asleep, then I woke up startled and there she was again. I just saw her, and it was extremely real. I don’t care what anybody says to me, she was there. 

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

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

Barry: Was she looking at you?

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

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

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


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

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

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

Woman: I grew up Orthodox Jewish, but I really think it was the Virgin Mary. I just think it was her.
​_____
Picture
     This is actually my father’s story. He’s Native American, and it happened when he was about 13 or 14 years old.  One day his dad took him to a yard sale, and my father sat down in a recliner chair that the people were selling. He always had a habit of sliding his hands down the sides to see how much money he could pocket, so he slid his hand around the sides of the cushion; but instead of finding money, he pulled out a tomahawk! He slipped it into his jacket and brought it home.
     Now this was back in the 1940’s or early 1950s and they didn’t have a bathroom, they had an outhouse. Between the house and the outhouse was an old T-shaped clothes line. That night my father had to go to the bathroom, so he started walking out and he saw a shadow disappear behind the clothesline on his way to the outhouse. He said that he did what he had to do right then, and then went back into the house. 
     The first thing he thought of was the tomahawk, so when he got inside the house he gave it to his cousin. She was in the kitchen doing dishes, and she saw a hand outside on the screen right in front of where she was doing the dishes. She let out a scream and everybody came running. They all went outside and walked around the house but nothing was there. My father immediately thought again about the tomahawk, so he ran and grabbed it from where his cousin left it on the kitchen counter. He opened the back door and just chucked it. He didn’t overhand throw it like a baseball. He just tossed it out the back door, so it didn’t go very far. He went to bed, and when he got up the next morning he went out and looked all over his backyard but he could not find that tomahawk anywhere. They never found it ever again. He said that he felt that the Native American it had belonged to had passed, and must have decided that he needed to come back for his tomahawk. He needed that in the afterlife, so he came and got it. 
_____
  
     I’m not the type of person who picks up on things. I’m usually kind of oblivious. But about ten years ago I had gone over to my mom’s house and she was complaining that all of her plants were dying and she’s been getting sick, and that everything was just off. I was coming home from work in the city and she said, “Your aunt just brought some holy water. Could you just say some prayers around the house? She can’t do it because she doesn’t feel well.” I was like, “Well, what do you want me to do?” So, I did as she said. 
     I went around the house, everything was fine. I went down into the basement and put the holy water around the basement, then started coming up the stairs. All of a sudden I started feeling like a pulling on my body and my face, a downward pulling. By the time I got to the top of the stairs I was kind of nauseous. I sat down and thought, ‘I feel off, I feel weird’ and I started kind of shaking a little. I was like, ‘My God!’ I had no idea what was going on. My mom lived by the water so he said, “Let’s go to the beach. Let’s see if the water helps you.” It was early summer, so I put my feet in the water and started feeling better instantly. 
     Afterwards I was trying to figure out what had happened and I found out that my mom had been storing some furniture in the basement for a friend who was in a transition. I was telling a friend about the reaction I had in the basement and she said, “Well, you know that that person is cursed, don’t you?” I’m like, “What do you mean? This is the year 2010”. They said, “Well, this person is from Latin America, and they had some voodoo done on them. It was pretty bad apparently. I think it was his ex-wife that did this, but I’m not sure.” So maybe this person’s furniture was also cursed and I somehow picked up on it when I went down into the basement. 
_____
Picture
     I spent a night at the Farnsworth Hotel. It’s right in the middle of the battle of Gettysburg, and it’s probably one of the most haunted hotels in America. During the battle, the Confederates took over and they were using the attic to shoot at the Confederate soldiers’ snipers. When the sharp-shooters were killed in battle. 
     The room that I was in, The Sweeney Room, is probably one of the most active rooms in that hotel. What you can hear is dragging back-and-forth in the attic. I heard it that night. I was in the room underneath the attic. When the sharpshooters were killed in the battle, they would drag their bodies to the other side of the attic and they would lay there for three or four days. I heard the dragging back-and-forth. The hotel said that guests often hear footsteps in the attic, but I didn’t hear them.
     The hotel is decorated in the style of the period, and the crystals on one of the lamps kept swinging during the night. The toilet would flush by itself. The electricity on my phone charger kept getting unplugged throughout the night. 
     When I was going in I took a video. I didn’t notice it at first, but you see an orb for about five seconds moving around the bottom, and then moving into the bathroom. You can actually see it in the bathroom mirror. It was probably one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been to. I’m pretty sensitive to things myself, and it was a scary place. 
     I also visited the battlefields in Gettysburg, and I got an overwhelming smell of death on one of the battlefields. It was pretty amazing. What happened is, I saw a person who was farther down who was looking at one of the exhibits. After he left my friend and I went over to where this guy had been standing and I said, “Wow, I can still smell this guy.” My friend said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “I can smell the guy who was just over here, and he was over a hundred feet away from where we had been standing.” 
     We walked down toward the battlefield and the smell got worse and worse and worse. It was a very putrid smell. I asked my friend and another person, “Do you smell anything out of the ordinary?” and they said, “No, not at all.” It was just an overwhelming smell. This happened on one of the main battlefields. Little Bighorn was the hill, and there was a tremendous battle there. It was a very moving experience. I could feel the energy. The energy of that place was like no other. 
____

     When I was around 17-years-old I had a really close group of friends. We all grew up together since we were in kindergarten, and at this point we were in high school in our junior or senior year. 
     One night we were at my friend’s house. Her mom had passed away about ten years earlier in a fire in the house that my friend still lived in. So, we were all at the house and we got out an Ouija board. I think it was already in the house. She had two older brothers, and I think they might have had it and that’s why it was there so we decided to use it. 
     We lived in a town where all the houses are really old, and there’s a lot of history in that town. It’s a really small town. So generations went before us in the same houses that we all lived in, so there was already a lot of history there to begin with. There were always things going on in that house. I was never comfortable spending the night there because it was just really, really creepy. A door would close every night at the same time by itself. I think it was the bathroom door right next to her bedroom. It would close every night in the middle of the night at some specific time of night. Her mom passed away in the front bedroom, and so nobody ever used that bedroom. It kind of became like the room nobody goes in.
    So anyway, we brought out the Ouija board and thought we’d try it. There were four of us with our hands on the planchette, and there were three people sitting on the side. They didn’t want to participate, and there wasn’t enough room because the room was small. It started off with the planchette moving in a figure-eight like it always does, and we started asking it questions. We first asked questions that we thought our friends weren’t going to know the answers to. We were testing each other to make sure that no one was cheating. It started off slow. We started asking it questions. We started with basic questions first like, “Who’s here?”, “Who are you?”, “Is so-and-so here?”, “Is somebody else here?”
     After a while we tried to get in contact with my friend’s mom who had passed away in the house in the fire. We were teenagers, and she wanted to talk to her mom, so we thought maybe we could get to her mom. Clearly we never got through to her mom, but we got through to something else because that Ouija board gave us answers that have come true even until today.
     What blew our minds was that we had to ask it something that nobody else knew, and that nobody could figure out in a really quick fragment of time. There were lots of bookshelves in the room where we were doing this Ouija board in, so we said just at random, “How many books are in this room?” and it gave us a number. We counted the books in the room and it was exact. It told us the exact number of books in the room. 
     As typical teenage girls, we asked, “Who am I going to marry?” “How many kids am I going to have?” “What are the initials of the person I’m going to be with?” I personally asked it that question, and the answer it gave me actually did come out to be true. I have twin boys, and the initials were the person that they were born with. So, I don’t know how to explain it because at the time, I didn’t know anybody who had those initials. And then we went on to ask it when we would die. Like, we went really far into the water! 
     I’m still best friends with this person, and we still talk about it today. I was just talking about it again today to her. We still don’t know exactly who we contacted on the board that night, but that was it, and after that we didn’t mess with the Ouija board anymore. 
_____

   This story happened right after my father passed away, and after my friend’s boyfriend also had passed away. The two of us went on a trip to Puerto Rico together, and we stayed at her grandfather’s house through the weekend.
     We were both sleeping in the same bed in the guest room, and for whatever reason we both woke up at the same time in the middle of the night and we saw a black, smoky shadow. It was kind of long and billowey, and it was just kind of like moving at the foot of the bed, about six feet above the bed, and it seemed to be looking at us. It didn’t have a face or anything, it was just a dark thing.
     I looked at my friend and said, “Do you see that?”
     “Yeah,” she said, “do you see that too?” 
     “What do you see?”  I asked her.
     “It’s a big, black, billowey, smokey looking figure,” she said.
    “That’s the exact same thing I’m seeing,” I said

     I jumped out of the bed and turned the light on and it disappeared. We both saw the exact same thing in real time, both looking at it at the same time. We initially felt like it was either my father or her boyfriend. They had just passed away within the same week of each other. But we were never really sure what it was; if it was a ghost or what it could have been. But it was really terrifying.
​_____
Picture

     Some of my family members live in New York City, and when I was about 5-years-old they took me to visit the Morris Jumel Mansion. My aunts and I were talking about the trip about 20 years later and I said, “Oh, I really hated that place.” They said, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, I can remember being in the attic and I was very frightened. I would never go back there.” They told me that there were supposedly ghosts in the attic, and the day that we had visited the mansion they had actually brought a medium/channeler in. Everybody was supposed to leave the place, all the people who came in for the day, but for whatever reason we were in the attic when they ushered everyone out, so we didn’t end up leaving.
     To this day, I remember being there, I just don’t remember why I was afraid. But my aunts told me that while we were there, the medium went into a trance and started speaking French.           
I can tell you that I was there. I can tell you that I WAS afraid of the place, and that I never wanted to go back. But I don’t remember it actually happening.
     I have to say, there is lore about the Jumel Mansion. Eliza Jumel was married to Aaron Burr, and his ghost is supposed to be down in the district down near Wall Street. I did look into it after my aunts told me this, and apparently there supposedly is a ghost in the mansion, and Madam Jumel was from France. 

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

[Note: The Sky Ranch Lodge is reported to be haunted. You can read about it here https://www.weirdfresno.com/2011/10/ghosts-and-legends-of-sierra-sky-ranch.html]
_____

     These were actually recorded by one of my grandfather’s siblings, and they both took place in the old farm house they grew up in in Laceyville, Pennsylvania. One story is that frequently, family members were wakened in the middle of the night by a cat batting a marble down the hallway-- uncarpeted--until it reached the stairs and then the marble would bounce down the stairs. But they never had a cat, and they never found a marble. So, that was weird. 
     The other story is about my great Aunt, the youngest of the family. Over the dresser in her bedroom there hung a mirror. It was just a kind of conventional, not very big mirror. One night she was awakened and screamed because of a thud in her room. The family ran in and they found the mirror laying in front of the dresser. The nail in the wall was intact, the wire that hung it was not damaged, and nothing on top of her dresser was disturbed. So, they carefully hung it back up. It happened again at least once, and then finally one night there was a huge crash. The mirror was across the room in pieces. But again, the nail on the wall was still fine, the wire that hung it had not broken, the piece with the wire was still fine, and nothing on the dresser had been disturbed.  
_____   

     When I was about six-years-old, my father used to go to work at about 4:30 in the morning, and what he would do is he’d carry me in from my bed to sleep with my mom. He’d put me back in with her so I could sleep in later. One morning I got up. The sun was rising and I had to use the bathroom. I walked all the way to the other end of our apartment, went to the bathroom, and when I came out of the bathroom I saw my father. It was about 7:00 in the morning, and I said, “Hi daddy! Where are you going?” He said to me, “I’m going to work now.” I said, “OK. Have a good day daddy. Bye!” I walked back into the bedroom with my mom into her bed and she said, “Sarah, who were you talking to?” and I said, “I was saying goodbye to daddy. He just left for work.” 
     Now, the main entrance that we had, if you left the house you would lock it from the outside. So when my father left for work, he’d wake my mom up so she could lock it from the inside because it didn’t have a deadbolt or anything like that that you could slide from either side. So my mom gets up, she looks and the door is still locked like she had locked it after he left. We still don’t know what I saw, who I saw leaving our apartment, or how the door became locked from the inside and not the outside. 

    I have another story.  In 2017 my family moved here to New Britain, and we went to an establishment down the street from us for some pizza. The owner of the restaurant told us that paranormal activity frequently occured in his establishment. We were like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Well, one day my mom and I were sitting there having some appetizers. It’s was just her and I and the owner in the restaurant. It wasn’t a windy day, there weren’t any windows open. All of a sudden, the door from the basement opened up, and then shut all by itself. No one was there. It was really weird.  
     The restaurant owner has pictures on his security cameras, of shadows, of men’s faces, of women’s faces. He’s heard voices and everything. So after seeing that door open and close by itself, I’m like, ‘OK, I believe you now!’ 
_____

     Many years ago I was in a newly-single, providing-for-my-children, no-income situation. My father gave me a one hundred dollar bill, and he said, “I want you to always keep this with you in case you’re ever without money, you’ll know you always have this money.” Twenty-five years later I had a great job and I gave my father back the hundred dollar bill. I said, “I’m good now.”
     About ten years later, my dad passed away and I was in the process of cleaning his house. I was going through his desk and looking through things. He was a local deputy sheriff, and I just happened to pick up a folder where he kept his badges. I opened it up and I saw something sticking out from one of the compartments. I pulled it out, and it was the one hundred dollar bill he had given me thirty-five years earlier! 
     I think that was his sign that he was there with me because right after that, that same day, I was taking my laundry downstairs into the basement. As I walked down the stairs I felt something grab hold of my ankles and I stopped because they were old, old cellar stairs. It was a very old, hundred-year-old house. So I stopped and stepped back and I looked, and my feet were right on the edge of the stairs. If I hadn’t felt that on my ankle I would have fallen down the stairs.
_____

A 12-year-old girl shared the following story, and her parents were on-hand to corroborate the stories and to provide further details. 

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

Father: She actually walked into the room and said, “There’s a cowboy in the hallway”. So my wife and I were kind of joking around and said to her, “OK, take this camera and take a picture of him.” She went into the hallway and took a picture, and it looks like a picture of the shadow of a cowboy in a duster jacket. 
     Just a few years ago she saw a train conductor in the corner of our bedroom. We live right near where the old Putnam county railroad had been, where the bike trail is now. She said the conductor told her that he was the brakeman--the guy who used to operate the train’s brakes. She said he was wearing some kind of a patch or a pin, and she was able to describe it to us. I looked it up, and the description of the pin was what the conductor who used to operate the brakes used to wear.
_____

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

[Note: I suggested that this man think back on what was going on in his life at the time he had this dream. Dreams are often a suggestion from our higher selves that it is time to make changes in our lives. I interpret the dream as ‘If you continue along the path you are on now, this is when your life may end. But if you make some changes and lead a healthier, happier, less stressful life, then you can change the outcome of that dream and live much longer.’]
_____

     This is a dream that my grandfather had. It was so vivid that he had told my mom, and my mom had told me. I remember it because it’s a little creepy. But it’s interesting to think that people in your family can still come back in that sense. Maybe not as a ghost. I don’t know. 
     My mom said that when she was a young girl, when she was around 12-years-old, she remembers her father waking up really startled. You know when you have a really intense dream and you wake up? It’s a really startling wake-up. She remembers him getting out of bed and pacing back-and-forth. The next day he told them what he dreamt about. 
     At that time his mother was alive, and his father had passed away. Their house was such that there was a long driveway, and there was a backyard. The backyard was kind of fenced, and there was a little stoop that went into the house. In his dream, my grandfather had gone out onto the stoop and he saw his father walking up the driveway, then saw him coming into the yard. My grandfather went up to the stoop and said, “Dad, dad! Nice to see you! How are you?!” and he went out to the yard to see him. His father looked up, and as soon he saw him his father looked a little startled and he turned around and started walking back down the driveway. My grandfather went out and tried to follow him down the driveway, and as soon as my great-grandfather hit the end of the driveway, my grandfather woke up. 
     About two weeks after he had that dream, my great-grandmother passed away. My grandfather was like, ‘Wow, I wonder if my dad had come back to bring her with him, and he came to the wrong person!’ 
_____

     My brother passed away unexpectedly a couple of years ago, and something odd happened to me the morning after. At around five in the morning I went downstairs in my home, no one was up yet, it was dark yet. I didn’t turn on any lights. Then all of a sudden I saw something that looked like a spark, almost like static energy. It was a small, yellowish-white spark in the middle of the air that faded away after a couple of seconds. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but it was odd because it was just there in the middle of the air. I was wondering if a spirit could manifest itself like that, like static electricity. 

[Note: I told the speaker that spirits are made up of energy, and they often manifest as bright lights, flashes of light, or as orbs. Spirits show themselves to us because they want to be known, and I suggested that this spark was just her brother’s way of showing himself to her. He knew it was something that she would see, and he hoped that she would associate it with him to let her know that he was OK and still around.]
_____

     I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, I have my couch along a window. I’m very sensitive to smells. I’m sitting there one day in the middle of April and I smell cigarette smoke, and it goes on everyday at all different times. I’m looking out the window and there’s nobody out there. I do genealogy. I was going to a genealogy conference in May in Raleigh. I made reservations like eight months prior, and I go start looking through my emails and I can’t find my reservations. I call ten hotels and nobody has my reservation. So I go on AirBnB and I booked a place and it was very inexpensive, and I was like, “Yes!” 
     When I got to the place I drove around, and the oldest cemetery in Raleigh was three blocks from this AirBnB. Whenever I go anywhere I always go to cemeteries and take photos for genealogy purposes. So I thought, “I’m going to that cemetery.” 
     I headed up to that cemetery one night, and I had the list of people I was looking for. I found this one name and he was in the back section of the cemetery. I looked at my list and there was another guy with the same name that was supposed to be in that area, but it started raining so I had to leave really fast because I didn’t want to get wet. I said, “I’ll be back”. I talked to the cemetery and I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back and I’m going to find you.” Now I’m in the back of the cemetery and I leave. 
     The next day I come back and I start on the left hand side of the cemetery just kind of mowing the rows, taking pictures of the stones, and in the middle of the cemetery I smell cigarette smoke. I’m like, ‘OK, what’s going on?’ So I talked to the guy. I said, “I know you want me to find you. Just give me time, or give me some hints.” I followed the smoke and looked down and lo-and-behold there was the name of the guy who matched the name of the guy in the backside of the cemetery. I took his picture and I talked to him. I said, “You know what. I’ve got your picture. I’m going to get this to your descendants to let them know where you’re at.” And the smoke smell went away, and I have not smelled smoke since. I have no clue who the guy was. But it was like everything fell into place. He made sure that I couldn’t find my reservation, and that I got into that AirBnB three blocks from the cemetery where I was supposed to find him at.
_____
Picture
     I don’t have my own story, but my roommate from college and some of his friends had gone to Union Cemetery in Easton. This cemetery is supposedly very haunted, and was investigated by the Warrens. This was in the middle of the day, and they had a recorder with them that they ran the whole time they were there. On the recording you can hear the person holding the recorder going from headstone to headstone saying things like, “Would you like to talk to me? Do you have a message for me?” That type of thing. They played the recording for me, and at one point you can hear a very clear EVP saying in a deep voice, “Get out!” You can hear it clear as day on the recording, and he was kind enough to send that to me. 
_____

     When I was in college, some friends of mine were in a local band. One night they called me up and said “Come on over. After band practice we’re going to play around with the Ouija board.” I said, “Ouija board? What’s that?” I didn’t quite understand what that was all about. But, what happened that night. They shut the light out. We were in this room, an anteroom of some sort, and everyone was sitting at a table with their hands on the Ouija board. I think there might have been five or seven people with their hands on the board. I didn’t really participate, I was just there as an observer. What they did, they started moving this board and all of a sudden. I’m looking at the people, I’m looking at their faces, and the table started rising. It rose up about five inches from the floor, maybe more. I said, “What’s going guys? You’re playing with me. Don’t do this.” But their knees were on the floor, their hands were on the table on the board, and the table began moving around and it began spinning. And I just said, “I’m out of here!” It scared the hell out of me. It really did. I never forgot that, and I’ve just stayed away from this sort of stuff ever since. 
_____ 

     About seven years ago my mom passed away in her house, and for a long period of time I could smell her perfume. She lived not within the main part of her house, but in a separate part of the house. Every once in a while, I could smell her perfume. There was no perfume in there. I had cleaned it out. I Cloroxed everything after she passed, but to this day I still smell her perfume. I’m wondering if it’s real, if it’s just my imagination, or if mom’s popping up to say, “I’m still here!” 
     One caveat to that was I had her cremated and I didn’t know what to do with the ashes for almost three years. I decided, let me throw it into the bathroom into the cabinet that was emptied and cleaned, and the perfume smell was most prevalent during those three years. I finally took her ashes out to the cemetery where my dad is, and it’s not quite as prevalent, but every once in a while, there’s that scent again.  
______

     I have a little story. I was watching a movie called “The Red Violin”. I had hung my grandfather’s mandolin in my house. As I was watching the movie, during the scene when they were burying the violin with this young protege, the mandolin fell. It just leapt off the wall and crashed onto the floor. It was fine. It wasn’t harmed. I watched the rest of the movie and just held it. 
     My sister-in-law had given me a ceramic mother swan and three baby swans because I have three sons. These little statues were sitting on a table underneath where the mandolin had been hanging. When the crash happened the three baby swans got pushed away from the mother swan, but nothing was broken. The mandolin was hanging over all sorts of little statues and breakable things, but nothing was damaged. 
     My youngest son had just moved out of the house, and the movie is about the life of the violin after the mother and child die, and then this violin goes on to have it’s own life. To me it was like my grandfather was saying to me, “Your boys are on their own now, but you still have more life ahead of you.”
_____
Picture

     About 10 years ago, my husband and I went down to Key West, Florida and someone had told us about a museum down there, and there was a doll. Robert the doll. It’s a creepy looking doll. It’s dressed in a sailor suit, and there’s hardly any face. At the time, the doll was out in the open. It wasn’t covered or anything. 
     They say that things will happen to you if you make fun of it or if you touch it. My husband was like, ‘I don’t believe in that. I think this is silly.’ I started taking pictures of the doll using a camera that still used film. When we got home, the roll of film that the pictures of the doll was on was gone. Just gone, and we never found it after that. All of the other rolls of film we took on the trip were there, but that one roll with the pictures of the doll just disappeared. We always thought it was strange because of the way my husband was saying that the stories about Robert the doll weren’t true. I guess they were! [Note: "Robert has been said to exact his vengeance in many ways, but especially on electronic devices. Cellphones and cameras have been known to break. Photos in cameras have disappeared or been destroyed. Letters tacked around his plexiglass home attest to that and much more." (1)
_____

     I go to a school called SUNY Purchase, and Purchase is very notoriously haunted. My freshman year I lived in a suite with eight girls, and all of them were home for the weekend except for me. We would hear knocks in the corner where no one could reach, usually in threes which always freaked me out. A couple of times I would wake up in a sleep paralysis. I would feel like somebody was holding my chest down and I couldn’t get up. It just freaked me out. There have been other instances where I would see things out of the corner of my eyes and shadows. There is a cemetery on campus and people have apparently passed away there, so that always freaked me out. 
     My roommates who lived across from me would hear knocks all night. They would hear shadow figures. We would go through cycles where some of us would have sleep paralysis. We never really thought too much of it, but the more I’ve done research the more I’ve been freaked out. I was talking to someone whose mom went to the school in the 80’s and she said that one of her friends passed away in the same building, and the body wasn’t found for a couple of days until people realized that they weren’t showing up for classes. 
_____

     At night, my mom and I share a room and my grandma and brother have two separate rooms down the hall. I wasn’t sleeping, I was just laying in bed facing the wall and my cat was up next to me. Everyone else was asleep, and it felt like someone tapped my right thigh. No one else was awake. I looked behind me, but no one was there. I was so scared, like what the heck just happened. It only tapped me once, but it was like someone was trying to get my attention as if I was asleep.
     Also, we have this standup clock next to the mantle, and there were these random prints like someone had put their hand there. It was all covered in dust, and nobody had touched it since we moved. The only time we touch it is if we put coins in this little bowl. That was just on its own shelf, and no one ever touched anything else.
_____

1 Comment

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

8/12/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
     Looking like something out of a Steven King novel, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia is widely considered to be one of the most haunted places in America. Visitors have reported apparition sightings, unexplained voices, odd sounds, and other paranormal activity. The current owner of the facility runs historic tours and ghost tours to raise money for ongoing restoration of the buildings and grounds; and many paranormal TV shows have conducted investigations at the 162-year-old asylum.
     As scary as some of the asylum ghost stories may be, the history of the Trans-Allegheny is far more horrifying; and it is this horrific background that is the cause of so much paranormal activity.
     When it was conceived, the Trans-Allegheny asylum was a big step forward in the treatment of mentally ill patients. The asylum was the brainchild of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, a crusader for the mentally ill. He conceived of a facility that would provide patients with an abundance of light and fresh air which he thought were essential in the treatment of those with mental illness. He envisioned long hallways with 12-foot-high ceilings, and an abundance of windows to allow cross-breezes throughout the hospital.  Dr. Kirkbride imagined spaces where patients would gather to socialize and eat. He also felt that patients should be allowed to roam freely around the hospital and grounds to help stimulate their minds and their senses, and to give them more control of their own lives.
    Once plans for the hospital were underway, he ordered for the grounds to be landscaped in such a way that patients looking out windows would see only rolling hills and openness so that nothing would suggest that their hospital was also surrounded by gates to keep them locked inside.
    The asylum was designed by Baltimore architect Richard Snowden Andres in a combination of Gothic Revival and Tutor Revival styles, and construction began in 1858. When it was completed, the hospital’s main building was nearly a quarter mile long and had the distinction of being one of the largest hand-cut stone masonry buildings in the United States. It was the second largest hand-cut sandstone building in the world, second only to the Kremlin in Moscow. 

     Prior to its opening, the name of the facility was changed from the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum to ‘The West Virginia Hospital for the Insane’, and patients were first admitted in 1864. The hospital was designed to be totally self-sufficient, so it had its own farm, dairy, waterworks and, of course, its own cemetery. Naturally, the amount of land needed to make this possible was massive. By the time of its completion, it encompassed 666 acres in area and included 13 buildings. Interesting numbers!
     As early as 1881 the asylum began to become overcrowded, housing 500 more patients than it was designed for. The hospital’s resources couldn’t keep up with the increased patient load, and conditions began to rapidly decline. Rooms intended for one person now held up to five. The farm and dairy compound designed for just 300 patients couldn’t meet the increased demand and patients began to become malnourished. As a result, their mental health issues worsened.
     By 1938, the asylum was running at six times over capacity. Patients were running wild inside of the building because there weren’t enough staff members to contain them. By the 1950s, the hospital housed 2,600 patients--nearly ten times the number it was intended to care for. 
     A local newspaper, The Charleston Gazette, sent reporters to the hospital to expose its horrific conditions. Inside the walls of the facility they were shocked to find patients sleeping on the floor, and in freezing rooms because of lack of heat and furniture. The windows were covered with dirt and grime to the point where they allowed little light into the once bright hallways. Wallpaper was peeling and decayed, and some had been ripped off the walls by frantic patients. 
     Patients who were deemed “uncontrollable” were found locked in cages and in large wooden cribs in hallways, and bedrooms were only available for the more cooperative patients. Other cruel methods to help control the patients included ice water baths, bloodletting, and electroshock therapy. 
     Often, the treatments for mental illness were worse than the condition itself. One was insulin coma therapy in which patients would be repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin to produce daily comas. This wasn’t a method to control an unruly patient, it was thought to be an effective treatment for some mental illnesses. The theory was that drastically changing insulin levels lead to an altering of the electrical impulses in the brain. Although some doctors swore that patients who underwent the treatment had positive results, insulin coma therapy faded from use and stopped in the 1960s.
     In the 1930s, the Trans-Allegheny asylum began giving lobotomies to many of its residents under the direction of surgeon Walter Freeman. His “ice-pick” method involved slipping a thin, pointed rod into a patient's eye sockets, and using a hammer to drive it into their brain to sever the connective tissue in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The damage done to these poor people was unimaginable. President Kennedy’s sister Rosemary was a victim of Dr. Freeman’s ice pick operation when she was just 23 years old. It failed, and she ended up spending the rest of her life in an institution.
     Dr. Freeman performed over 4,000 lobotomies at the Trans-Allegheny, and hundreds of perfectly healthy patients were left with life-long physical and cognitive damage. This barbaric procedure also resulted in a number of deaths.
     The Trans-Allegheny also had its share of gruesome murders. One night, two patients pulled another from his bed and tied him up with bed sheets, then hung him from the ceiling. The sheets didn’t hold, so they put his head under a metal bed frame, then killed him by jumping up and down on the mattress until his skull was crushed.
     One would think that the hospital would have been closed down once such horrific conditions and medical practices were discovered. Not so. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the patient population began to decline due to changes in the treatment of mental illness, and the asylum finally closed its doors in 1994 after a new facility was opened in Weston. 
     The hospital and grounds remained vacant until they were auctioned off by the state in 2007. The winning bidder, Joe Jordan, an asbestos demolition contractor, got the 242,000 square foot building and the surrounding property for $1.5 million.
     Places where tragedies occurred are often ripe with ghosts, so the Trans-Allegheny asylum is the perfect breeding-ground for paranormal activity. It is a storehouse of all of the negative emotions, abuse, and the confusion of madness, and anyone entering that space can pick up on those past impressions.
     But what about ghosts? Spirits often stay rooted in places where they died a tragic or untimely death. Many don’t realize they have died, and so they live on in a sort of twilight dreamstate seeing images from their past, and images from the present which they don’t always understand.      
     When dealing with the Trans-Allegheny asylum, it’s important to remember what it is built out of--sandstone. There is something called ‘the stone tape theory’ which speculates that ghosts and other hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions during emotional or traumatic events can be projected in the form of energy, "recorded" onto rocks and other items and "replayed" under certain conditions. Quartz is the mineral that holds the most energy, and sandstone is made up primarily of quartz. This might explain why the asylum is so haunted--the building itself is one, huge, 242,000 square-foot sandstone memory cell; and the memories it holds are misery, sorrow, and madness. 
    When the TV show Ghost Adventures visited the asylum, Sue Parker, a former hospital employee was interviewed for the episode. She said that she had an experience once while giving a tour of the asylum. She said, “I had a group of people on a tour, and we were walking down one of the hallways. When we got to one of the doors a woman who was on the tour said, ‘Oh my God, did you see that?’ I asked the woman, ‘What did you see?’ She just kept saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’. I said, ‘Tell me what you saw’ and the woman said, ‘There was a lady dressed in a Victorian style dress with a high-neck collar. The dress fit her tight around the waist, then was wide at the bottom.’ The woman told the guide that this mysterious figure walked right up to her, almost face to face, and she just looked at her. Then, all of a sudden, she was gone.’

     The Ghost Adventures team collected a lot of evidence during the investigation, the most compelling of which were the strange voices and noises that were picked up as they were filming. These included screaming, moaning, banging sounds, doors slamming, loud breathing, and grunting sounds. They also picked up a number of disembodied voices. One was a little girl talking, another was an adult male voice. At one point, their film equipment picked up a muffled conversation between two people coming from somewhere deep in the empty asylum. 
     In addition, their digital recorders picked up several clear EVP. These included the phrases, “Who are you?”, “You wanna fight me?”, “I don’t want it”, “Be quiet”, “I’m okay”, and “Zack and Nick, get out”.
    Brenda Reed told a story about an experience she had while using the facility to hold a town festival. She said, “We were having a festival one day. It was after the place had closed for the day, and we were concerned that people might still be in the building. A couple of employees went to take a look around to make sure that it was clear. They came down and said that they had run into a gentleman on the second floor. They asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’. The man just looked down and said, ‘I’m looking for a way to get out of here.’ The man walked away, and when they went to find him, he had disappeared.”
    Many spirits roam the halls of the Trans-Allegheny asylum. Some are angry, and many are confused. One spirit who seems to be very active is a little girl known as Lily. Many believe she still wanders the halls of the asylum where she lived and died.

     Shelley Bailey, a local researcher, shared an experience she had with the little girl’s spirit when she and three other women tried to contact Lily by using a child’s rubber ball. “We asked Lily if she wanted to play,” she said, “and one of the ladies set a ball down on the floor. She set it directly in the middle of the floor. A few minutes later, the ball rolled all the way over to the wall. It went straight to the wall. No one else in the group touched it. The ball then bounced from that wall and rolled over to another wall. One of the women in the group picked up the ball and bounced it back to the wall, and it bounced back to her. We did this over and over again, we just kept bouncing back and forth.” 
     Psychic Tammy Wilson met with the Ghost Adventures team while they were filming at the Trans-Allegheny, and after doing a walkthrough of the facility she said that she connected with Lily’s spirit and had an idea why she haunts the building. She said, “She’s here because she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know how to cross over, and I think she’s waiting for someone.” Who is Lily? No one knows for sure, but one theory is that she was a former child patient, or she was born to a female patient and died at the age of 9 at the hospital.
     As for the other spirits who still roam the halls of the asylum, Tammy said, “I think that not knowing what to do, and wanting to be home but can’t be, is what holds them here.” 
     People often report a feeling of being watched throughout the asylum. One day a security guard was making his rounds, and when he got to the kitchen a feeling of anxiety suddenly overtook him. He said that he felt as if someone was staring at him. He saw movement near a doorway out of the corner of his eye, and as he turned to look at it he was shocked to see a human figure beginning to form. He described it as a grey, smokey shape roughly in the form of a woman wearing a dress. As he looked at it, he said that it felt as if a woman was watching him from the doorway. 
     Rebecca Jordan, operations manager of the Trans-Allegheny, insists that there are at least 7 spirits who haunt the asylum. Some make themselves known to visitors and paranormal investigators; others have interacted with her directly. Once while giving a tour of the facility, something reached out to her and made physical contact. “He laid his hand on my shoulder and squeezed,” said Jordan. “I was scared to death. The group in front of me was asking what happened to you? That was the last year I worked in the haunted house.”
     The Trans-Allegheny asylum is open to the public, and there are several tour packages available. The ‘Heritage and History’ tours of the facility delve into the history of the treatment of the insane, medical procedures used at the asylum, and facts and features unique to the hospital. 
     Ghost hunters have a number of tour options, including daytime paranormal tours, flashlight tours, and even an opportunity to spend a night in the asylum. Ticket prices for the evening ghost tours and overnight investigations are pricey, but well worth it. After all, it’s not every day that you get to hunt for ghosts in the most haunted asylum in the United States.
     The ways in which modern medicine understands and treats mental illness have come a long way from the days when the Trans-Allegheny asylum was up and running. If there is a silver lining in Trans-Allegheny's shameful history, it is that we can learn from the mistakes of the past in order to forge a better future for the mentally ill.
     As for the ghosts, for now they’ll remain to roam the halls and occupy the rooms of the asylum; a place they knew as home, and where their suffering seems to continue to this very day. One day, perhaps, someone will visit the asylum not just to ‘hunt ghosts’, but to free these spirits and to reunite them with their loved ones. Until then, all we can do is pray for these poor lost souls, and for the souls of those who were, in many cases, unwittingly responsible for the horrors inflicted on so many innocent people at the Trans-Allegheny Asylum.

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

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

​
0 Comments

Bigfoot Sightings in Connecticut and New York

6/4/2020

0 Comments

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

     Another sighting in Warren County took place on the shores of Lake George, New York in the Spring of 1990. After reading the witness's description of the creature and seeing the drawing he submitted, I’d say that it wasn’t exactly a Bigfoot, but rather some other mysterious creature. Maybe a Littlefoot!
    The witness said, “My brother and I were canoeing on Lake George, in NY state at around sunset. We headed south for 10 minutes to an area known as Deer Leap. At the lakeside is a boulder strewn area with cliffs rising 600 feet above the shoreline. As we were beginning to come on to this area we saw something standing on shore. It was brownish in color and standing straight up with it's arms at its side. It was about the size of a small man and extremely skinny, like a teenage boy. It appeared to be covered with reddish brown hair, and had a pale face, and expressive eyes and mouth. But the weird thing was that it had a deranged smile or smirk on its face. This thing wasn’t a baby bear or anything like that. Unlike a bear, its arms were long and it didn’t have a snout. 

    When we saw it, its body was facing south, and it was looking down the shoreline. Suddenly, it turned its head directly towards us and stared at us very intently. We whispered to each other and watched it while it watched us. Here we were, two grown men paddling parallel to the shore about 200 feet out from this thing, but we couldn’t get up the courage to go in closer. 
     Like I said, this thing had a strange look on its face, almost a crazed grin. It looked almost like a giant Lemur. The sun was setting now as we continued to watch it in the shadows of the mountain. It was standing next to an old, dead pine tree, and it turned and climbed, sloth-like up the tree about 20 feet to the first large limb, and then onto the crook of a branch. We paddled back around and as we approached it again it cocked its head directly at us, after a minute or so it turned its face downward into its body and it looked like it became part of the tree. It blended in so perfectly it looked just like a lump in the crook of the branch. You would never have known that it was there unless you saw it move. I have been in this area all my life and have never seen anything like this and have not seen it since.” The witness submitted this eerie sketch with his report ... 
Picture
    In January of 1989 a man named Robert Townshend submitted a Bigfoot sighting to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization after staying over at a friend’s house in Whitehall, New York. In the morning, Mr. Townsend and his friend were walking in the woods when they noticed strange tracks in the snow. Townsend said, “My friend and I saw footprints while walking in the woods that must have been 20 inches long, and we also found some tree branches broken down that were from about 15 feet off of the ground. We decided to head back to his house right away because we both felt as if we were being watched and it was close to dark.
    The entire way home we felt as if we were being followed. I slept on a fold out couch in the living room and the entire front of the house has windows. The next morning I awoke at around 6:30AM and I saw a large creature about 20 feet from the house. It must have been at least 10 feet tall, because the windows are 15 feet off the ground and it was no more than 5 feet below me.
    I watched it wandering around for a while, but I didn’t dare move. It was brown and looked very human except for its size and forehead, and obviously the hair it was covered with. After about five minutes it walked toward the house and up a bank. As it passed the house it banged so hard on the wall that I thought it's arm would come right through. My friend was awakened by this and came in and I told him what I had seen. We saw that this thing left tracks in the snow, but we decided to stay in rather than follow them. Can you blame us?” 
     In 2010, a retired policeman and army veterine was camping at Cascade Lake in the Adirondacks. He spent the day hiking and fishing, then had a quiet night at his campsite where he slept soundly. At 7AM he woke up and started to make breakfast. It was a beautiful, clear sunny morning, and mist was rising off the surface of the lake. He thought that it would make a great photo, so he grabbed his iPhone and walked about 50 yards to the edge of the lake to take the picture. As he approached the breakwall, he noticed a dark brown object on the opposite side of the lake on the shore. At first he couldn’t make out what it was, but it seemed to be some sort of an animal, and it looked like it was sitting at the water’s edge. The animal looked like it was doing something in the water with its paws, as a faint splashing sound could be heard. 
     The man thought it would be a good idea to get a picture, so he brought the phone up to eye level and tried zooming in on the animal. As he was focusing in, the animal suddenly stood up on two legs. The man was startled and pulled the phone down to get a better look at this creature with his own eyes. The creature stood about 8 feet tall, and was covered head to toe with long, dark, shaggy hair or fur. It was too far away to see any facial features, but its upper body was massive and stocky like a football player’s build. It had very long arms that hung well below its waist, and it had hands, not paws. It took a step towards the tree line, then stopped and turned its whole upper body to the left and stared at the man for about 10 seconds. As it turned back towards the woods, sunlight shone off of its back. It took two gigantic steps, and disappeared into the forest. Although he was a retired policeman and military man, he had never seen anything like this in his life. He quickly returned to his campsite, packed up, and drove away as fast as he could.
     In a 2012 New York Daily News video, an elderly man named Frank Siecienski from Whitehall, New York was interviewed about a photo his wildlife camera captured one night. He said, “In my yard I have an apple tree that was loaded with so many apples that one year it was unbelievable. One day I was going through my yard and I happened to look at the apple tree, and all the apples in one section, like a 5-foot-high section, all the apples were devoured. They were completely gone. So I set up a game camera and left it there for seven days and seven nights. Both my wife and I when we first saw it on the computer said, ‘What in the world is that?’ We got this picture of some creature, and it was estimated to be over 400 pounds. So right now I have a picture of a creature that everyone is telling me—and I believe it is—a female Sasquatch with a youngun.” The photo shows a huge animal with its back to the camera. It is covered with fur, has a cone-shaped head, and seems to be hunched over a very young fur covered animal. The hand of this ‘baby Bigfoot’ can be seen holding onto the arm of the larger creature. It is an incredible photo, and one of the most convincing I’ve seen to date. 
Picture
     Although the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot is primarily anecdotal, it’s hard to ignore the similarities in the description of the creatures reported by so many people--a huge, hulking creature that stands and walks upright. It has a cone-shaped head, broad shoulders, arms that hang well below the knees, shaggy hair or fur, and a face that is often described as fleshy. In some reports, a smaller creature is described as being very thin, but also completely covered with hair or fur. It seems to be related to Bigfoot, but maybe a different species; or, it’s a young Bigfoot.
     Of course, skeptics argue that by now there should be an abundance of physical evidence to prove that Bigfoot really exists. In addition, now that nearly everyone on the planet has a smartphone, there should be no shortage of photo and video evidence. And with all of the Bigfoot hunters out there, both on TV and in the private sector, someone would have caught one by now. 
     If Bigfoot is real, then what is it? Surely, by now we’ve discovered every type of animal there is on the planet, right? In 2019 alone, scientists discovered seventy-one new species of animals, fish, and plants. Shannon Bennet is the head of the California Academy of Sciences and Dean of research. In a recent interview she said, “Despite decades of tirelessly scouring some of the most familiar and remote places on Earth, biodiversity scientists estimate that more than 90% of nature’s species remain unknown.” 
     So, it’s very possible that Bigfoot falls into the undiscovered 90% category. But there are others who think that Bigfoot is more than just an elusive animal. They feel that Bigfoot is a highly evolved, and highly misunderstood, race of people. 
     In 2016 I received a curious email which read: 
I see that you investigate paranormal activities around Connecticut and New York, and I was wondering if you have ever come across recent Sasquatch or Dogman sightings in the Litchfield hills area?  
     I wrote back that I had heard rumors of Bigfoot sightings in Connecticut, but I have never been contacted by anyone who had actually seen one. I asked if he had ever seen a Bigfoot, and his answer really piqued my interest. He wrote:
I have had contact and sightings with The Sasquatch people, but I am not at liberty to disclose where I've had them, for the simple reason I respect their forest home, and do not want "Bigfoot Hunters" or so called "researchers" trying to track them down. This is by no means directed at you, just in general to the folks who have a specific agenda of disrupting things.
     After the writer discovered that I had not heard from any other Bigfoot eyewitnesses, he emailed me one last time. At the very end of his message he said something that stuck with me, and I think there may be some truth to it. He wrote:
I was just wondering if you ever came across other individuals who have had encounters in the past. I am always interested in hearing other people’s stories when it comes to The Sasquatch. I will say this much, they are a highly evolved race of ‘people’ who put us humans to shame with their ability to shape shift, teleport and communicate using telepathy. The reason no one has ever captured them is because they know way in advance a person's intention through energy vibrations and auric fields. 
     Is Bigfoot an advanced, shape-shifting, interdimensional being or just an undiscovered species of animal? Is he seemingly impossible to catch because he’s an extremely introverted and elusive animal, or because he ducks back-and-forth between dimensions? Does Bigfoot blend in with the scenery because he’s developed the ability to camouflage himself like a chameleon, or because he can shape-shift and look like anything he wants to whenever anyone is near? The jury is still out, and maybe that’s a good thing. What fun would life be without a good mystery, and Bigfoot is one of the biggest mysteries of all. I think Albert Einstein summed it up best when he said, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
     So if you’re out hiking in the woods and you spot an 8-foot-tall creature covered with long brown hair and red eyes, don’t be afraid. It’s probably just Bigfoot, and he’s probably just waiting for an opportunity to quietly slip away into the woods and melt away into the shadows. 

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

The Banshee

5/11/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
     Every culture has their own unique tales of ghosts and supernatural beings. The Japanese have the Onryō [Un-yo], vengeful ghosts who come back from purgatory for a wrong done to them in life. They also have the ghosts of those who died at sea called the Funayūrei [FOO-nah YOO-ray]. In India we find the Bhūta [bu-HOO-ta], restless ghosts dressed entirely in white. They cast no shadow, and their feet are turned backward. And from the Middle East comes the Jinn, shape-shifting spirits made of fire and air who can either help us or hurt us with their magical powers.   
     While most ghosts and other paranormal beings are relatively unknown outside of their place of origin, one is world-famous. She hails from Ireland, and her name is known the world over--the Banshee. 
     Pretty much everyone has heard the expression “screaming like a Banshee”, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t know exactly what a Banshee is. The word comes from the Old Irish ‘Bean-Sidhe’ which translates as “woman of the fairy mound”. The Banshee is a female spirit, and her unearthly screaming and wailing is nothing less than death’s singing telegram. When you hear the Banshee cry, wail, or scream--someone is going to die, and it’s usually a family member. 
     The first traditional stories of the Banshee appeared in the 8th century about women known as 'keeners' who sang mournful songs to lament someone’s death. Some keeners were said to be sinners because they accepted alcohol as payment--remember, this was the 8th century--and they were punished by being doomed to become Banshees. 
     It is often said that the Banshee laments or warns only the descendants of pure Milesians of Ireland--those whose surnames begin with O’ or Mac. Though the Banshee usually appears alone, several have been known to appear at once to announce the death of someone great or holy. 
     Although we associate the Banshee with death, not all of them are bad creatures. Some are the spirits of women who have strong ties to their families, and who watch over them in death. These Banshees appear as beautiful, enchanting women, and their sorrowful songs and the sound of their weeping are heard in the days leading up to the death of a family member. In most cases the Banshee can only be heard by the person she chooses to hear it.
     Of course, if there are good Banshees, you can be sure that there are also bad ones. These evil Banshees are the spirits of women who had reasons to hate their families. They appear as hag-like apparitions, and they are filled with hatred. The shrieks and screams of these nefarious Banshees are not a warning; they howl in celebration of the death of someone they once hated.
    Other legends say that the Banshee is the ghost of a young girl who suffered a violent death, and her spirit is said to warn of an impending violent death in the family. Although this type of Banshee is the spirit of a young girl, for some reason she appears as an old woman dressed in rags. She has blood red eyes that are filled with hatred, and to look into her eyes leads to instant death. Perhaps the most frightening thing about this particular type of Banshee is that her mouth is always open, and she is constantly screaming.

     Most Banshees are said to warn of an impending death, but others are so evil that they take great pleasure in killing people by driving their victims insane with their horrifying screams, and leading them to commit suicide. 
     Although her shrieks and cries are enough to make anyone think twice about trying to catch a glimpse of the Banshee, there are many reported sightings of this terrifying creature. What does she look like? Descriptions vary. She’s sometimes seen as a filthy old hag dressed in rags with long, dirty grey hair, long fingernails, and sharp, pointed rotting teeth. Others have described her simply as an old woman with a veil over her face dressed all in black with long, grey hair. But the Banshee doesn’t always show herself as an old woman. Sometimes she is seen as a beautiful young maiden with long, silver-white or red hair who wears either a green dress or a shroud.       
     It’s said that if a Banshee is seen, she will turn into a cloud of mist and vanish. At the same time, a noise similar to a bird flapping its wings will be heard. But there are many stories where the Banshee simply walks away after delivering her message.
     Whatever she looks like, and whatever she is wearing, the Banshee’s eyes are always red from crying. In fact the only human-looking version of the Banshee that doesn’t seem to have red eyes is the one where she is described as a headless woman, naked from the waist up. She carries a bowl of blood, and her screams come from the depths of her bloody, gaping throat. 
     While the Banshee is definitely a female, some sightings describe her as a monstrous creature with the body of a woman, and the head of a bird or a hare. And the size of the Banshee can range anywhere from as small as 3 feet tall to as large as 8 or 9 feet tall. Her arrival is sometimes heralded by flocks of crows, howling dogs, or screeching cats. Whatever form she chooses to take, one thing is for certain; when the Banshee shows up, it’s never a good sign. She is nothing less than a caterwauling harbinger of imminent, unavoidable death. 
     But for all her faults, the Banshee does have a good side. Some say that her creepy appearance and her high-pitched wailing warns families of an impending death so they can be better prepared for the inevitable. Others say that the Banshee is an escort who’s job is to make sure that a loved one gets safely to the other side.     
     A very different version of the Banshee is the Scottish spirit known as the Washer of the Ford. She haunts desolate streams where she can be seen scrubbing the blood from the linen and grave-clothes of those who are about to die. Here’s where it gets a little bizarre. The Washer of the Ford has a very distinctive feature. She is said to have unusually long, pendulous breasts that interfere with her washing, so she does what any woman with a similar problem would do--she throws them over her shoulders and lets them hang down her back. Those who see her must not turn away. Instead, he must quietly approach her from behind and take hold of one of her breasts--decisions, decisions--put it in his mouth, pretend to be nursing from it, and claim to be her foster-child. Only then will she tell him whose clothing it is that she is washing. If she says the clothing belongs to an enemy, he can allow the washing to continue. But if the clothing belongs to him, he can stop her from completing her task and avoid his fate. (i)  
     Although stories of the Banshee might seem like nothing more than mere fairytales, reports of actual Banshee encounters are abundant. In her online article, The Wailing Irish Banshee, author Serena Ó Longáin shared a Banshee story that was told by her grandmother. The story goes that one cold, blustery night her grandmother’s brother was walking home from an evening out with friends. When he arrived home, he was shocked to see a mysterious woman standing outside his front door. She was dressed entirely in black, and her face was hidden by a dark veil. The woman was crying so much that the man was concerned, so he walked over to her to find out what was the matter. But as he approached her to try to comfort her, she moved away, and as she did she kept pointing at the man’s house. Each time he walked over to her, she moved away, but she continued to cry and point at his house. Finally, this mysterious weeping woman walked away; her cries fading away into the night until all was silent. When he went inside, he shared the story with his sister, and she knew just what it meant. The man had seen and heard the Banshee, which meant that someone in the family would soon die. Sure enough, three days later, one of her brothers died in his sleep. (1) 
     In his online article, Bizarre Encounters with Real Banshees, author Brent Swancer shares some truly chilling stories. One, which he quotes from the book True Irish Ghost Stories, tells of a family from Ireland who had a number of encounters with the Banshee. The story is told as follows: “My mother, when a young girl, was standing looking out of the window in their house at Blackrock, near Cork. Suddenly, she saw a white female figure standing on a bridge which was easily visible from the house. The figure waved her arms towards the house, and my mother heard the bitter wailing of the Banshee. The vision lasted a number of seconds before the figure finally disappeared. The next morning my grandfather was walking as usual in the city of Cork. He accidentally fell, hit his head against the curbstone, and never recovered consciousness.”         
     Sometimes the Banshee is heard, but not seen. In the following tale from the book True Irish Ghost Stories, a woman shared her stories of the sound of the Banshee. She said, “In March of the year 1900, my mother was very ill. One evening the nurse and I were with her arranging her bed. Suddenly, we heard the most extraordinary wailing, which seemed to come in waves around and under her bed. Naturally, we looked everywhere to try and find the source, but it was in vain. The nurse and I looked at one another, but we made no remark to my mother, as she didn’t seem to hear the mournful cries. At the time, my sister was downstairs sitting with my father. She heard the wailing and thought that some terrible thing had happened to her little boy who was in bed upstairs. She rushed up to his room, but she found that he was sleeping quietly. Oddly, my father did not hear the sound. However, the neighbors in the house next door heard it, and they ran downstairs thinking that something had happened to their servant. The servant was fine, but she said to them, ‘Did you hear the Banshee? Our neighbor must be dying.’” (2) A few days later, the sick woman passed away. 
     In another story, the Banshee was heard by a student in 1894 in an Irish boarding school. The boy had taken ill, so he was put in a room by himself where he could rest. The next day, he was visited by the school doctor. As the doctor was examining the boy he suddenly sat straight up in his seat and cocked his head to one side. “What’s wrong?” asked the doctor. “It’s that crying,” said the boy. “Can’t you hear it?” The doctor strained his ears, but he couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. The doctor supposed that the boy must have been hearing things due to his fever. But the boy persisted. “You can’t hear that sound? That terribly crying sound? I know what it is. It is the cry of the Banshee. I know, because I’ve heard it before, and I’m afraid because I know what it means. When you hear the cry of the Banshee, someone is going to die.” The doctor tried to comfort the boy who, after a while, settled down and went to sleep. The following morning, the head-master received some very sad news. A telegram arrived saying that the boy’s brother had been accidentally shot, and that he had died. 
     In a story from the 1940s, the Banshee actually knocked on the front door. It’s told that an elderly man was bedridden by a debilitating disease. One day, scores of squawking crows began congregating around the house for no reason at all. That night his friends and neighbors paid him a last visit. His condition was getting worse, and he was only expected to live a few hours longer. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. When one of the visitors opened the door, an ugly old woman with long white hair and wearing a long white dress was standing a few feet from the front door. She was wringing her hands and sobbing. Without warning, the old woman suddenly let out an ear-splitting scream and rushed at the house before vanishing into thin air. According to the story, the old man died just a few hours later. (2)
     Although she is known as an Irish ghost, the Banshee has been known to appear in other parts of the world. In a story from the 1950s, a young man had an encounter with a Banshee in an apartment in New York city where he lived with his mother. It was dusk, and the young man was standing near his bedroom window when he heard what sounded like a newborn baby or a cat crying. The apartment was on the 5th floor, and the window faced an alleyway, so his first thought was that it was a cat. But soon, the cries changed to those of a young child who seemed to be sobbing. The man described it as “the saddest cry I have ever heard.” He thought that it was, perhaps, the boy next door crying. He yelled out, “Tommy, is that you? Are you OK? Do you need help?” But there was no answer, just more crying. Soon, the cries changed to those of a woman sobbing--heartbreaking sobs coming from an unknown source. 
     The man’s mother came into the room and he said, “Mom, do you hear that crying? It sounds like someone is really hurt.” She shook her head and said that she hadn’t heard anything. The apartment was small, and the cries were so loud that she should have heard them when she was in the living room, but she insisted that she hadn’t heard a thing. As soon as she left the room, the crying started up again. The man said that it wasn’t the cries of someone who was being physically hurt; they were the cries that someone would make if they were just told the worst news possible. It was the sound of a woman crying with a broken heart. After a while, the crying faded away and eventually stopped altogether. Three days later, at 5:30 in the morning the phone rang. The young man’s aunt called with bad news. His aunt Kathleen who had been suffering with leukemia had died. (3)
     Not all Banshee stories come from long ago. Modern tales of the Banshee are more common than you might think. After a recent lecture at Kent Library in Kent Falls, New York, a woman told me about a first-hand Banshee experience she had in early 2020. She said, “My father and mother are both from Ireland. My mother's sister Ann lived in the Bronx for most of my life, but she has since moved back to Ireland. When we were young, Aunt Ann would often tell us stories about how she would hear the Banshee when someone died. She was known in her family for this. She would tell us about specific people who passed in Ireland, and how the Banshee visited her prior to their passing. My mother told me that even as a little girl, her sister Ann would tell the family when she heard the Banshee, and sure enough they would hear of someone's passing shortly after.  
     Fast-forward to a few weeks ago. My husband and I were asleep in bed, and a loud wailing sound right outside our bedroom window woke me up. It was so loud and clear that it was almost like the window was open, but it wasn't. It was a very long, drawn-out moaning sound, as if someone was in deep distress--a very sad moaning kind of a sound, like an old woman was crying. I'm not sure how long I lay there listening to it, but it felt like it kept going on and on and wouldn't stop. I remember thinking I just wanted it to stop. I tried to wake my husband up, but he was fast asleep and he wouldn’t budge. After a while, the sound faded away and finally stopped.      
     As strange as the experience was, the next day I didn’t give it much thought. It wasn't until I climbed into bed that night that it all came flooding back to me. I suddenly began rambling to my husband about what had happened. I asked him if he remembered the wailing sound outside our window the night before, or if he remembered me kicking him and saying, ‘Do you hear that?’ He said he had no idea what I was talking about. I said to him, ‘I can't believe you didn't hear it.’ 
     He asked if I thought it might have been a coyote that I heard and I said, ‘No way!’ Sometimes we’ll hear coyotes way off in the distance. We always hear several of them howling together, and the sound is always very faint. The sound that I heard that night was completely different. It was one singular being making the sound, and it was directly under our second story bedroom window. 
     I said, ‘I know this sounds crazy, but I think it was a Banshee. I’ve never heard a Banshee before in my life, but the crying, wailing sound I heard last night was exactly as my Auntie Ann described it.’ My husband asked, ‘What does that mean?’  I said, ‘It means someone is going to die, or has already died.’
     I am not joking, literally about three minutes later my phone beeped because I had an incoming text. I picked up the phone and saw that it was from my brother, and it was a message about a family friend. I read the message and said to my husband, ‘Aww, that’s so sad. Mrs. McMahon just died.’ I didn't even put it together until my husband said, ‘Wow, that's crazy. I guess that's it.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘The Banshee sound that you heard last night. Mrs. McMahon--she’s the person who died after you heard it.’ I freaked out! I couldn't believe what had just happened. We were both pretty amazed. I think IR didn't make the connection right away because Mrs. McMahon was not a family member, just a close friend of the family. 
     Afterward, as I tried to make sense of what had happened, it occurred to me that my Auntie Ann had recently been put in a hospital for exhaustion in Ireland when this happened. Maybe she couldn’t hear it because she was sick at the time. I’ve heard that the Banshee chooses a specific person to hear her. I guess she chose me that night. Thankfully, I haven’t heard her since.
     Some think that the Banshee is just a myth, but first-hand encounters with this enigmatic screaming woman are at odds with this theory. If the old adage ‘Believe becomes reality’ is true, then if you believe in something long and strong enough, it actually becomes real. If this is true, then centuries of Banshee lore believed by so many have surely made her a very real creature. So, even if you don’t have a drop of Irish blood in your veins, if you a woman sobbing and moaning outside your window at night, don’t ignore her. She might be the Banshee, and she might be trying to give you a message--like it, or not. 
​

Resources
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/06/bizarre-encounters-with-real-banshees/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banshee
https://www.celtic-weddingrings.com/celtic-mythology/legend-of-the-banshee
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tigs/tigs09.htm
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/offbeat/ireland-s-banshee-a-delusion-of-peasants-or-a-spirit-with-a-mournful-wail-1.3881517
https://www.yourirish.com/folklore/banshees-in-ireland
http://www.theparanormalguide.com/blog/banshee
https://www.wired.com/2014/06/fantastically-wrong-wailing-banshee/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean-nighe


0 Comments

Premature Burial

4/4/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
“There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.” ― Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial

     On May 6, 2007, Lewis Johnson brought his sixty-one-year-old wife Judith to the emergency room at Delaware’s Beebe Medical Center. She thought that she was having a bad case of indigestion, but it turned out that she was having a heart attack. Less than 45 minutes after she arrived she went into cardiac arrest. After being given multiple medicines and shock treatments to help restart her heart, Mrs. Johnson never regained a pulse and at 8:34PM she was declared dead. The staff brought Mr. Johnson into a private room and the on-call doctor delivered the bad news. His wife was dead. 
     Meanwhile, Judith’s body was moved aside and her gurney pushed against a wall ready to be sent to the morgue. At around 9:50PM, a nurse noticed something strange. Judith appeared to be breathing. The nurse rushed to her side and discovered that she was very much alive.     
     Modern cases of spontaneous return of circulation,--otherwise known as ‘Lazarus syndrome’--is rare, but not unheard of. Consider the case of Janine Kolkiewicz. When doctors examined the ninety-one-year-old woman, her heart had stopped beating, and she was no longer breathing. She was declared dead. But eleven hours later she awoke in the hospital mortuary with a craving for tea and pancakes.
     In 2007, a 33-year-old Venezuelan man woke up during his own autopsy. Carlos Camejo woke up during the post-mortem when the medical-examiner began cutting into his face with a scalpel. Later, Mr. Camejo told reporters, "The pain was unbearable." The medical examiner knew something was wrong when the incision began bleeding. When his grieving wife arrived at the morgue to identify his body, she was shocked to find him waiting in the corridor, alive. 

     In 2014, 79-year-old Walter Williams from Mississippi was declared dead by a hospice nurse who found him with no pulse. The next day, he woke up at the funeral home.  An ambulance was called, and he was taken to a hospital. He was alert, and had conversations with his family and friends. When asked about the experience, he said that he thought that he had just fallen into a deep sleep. 
     Since 1982, there have been at least 38 reported cases of survival after failed resuscitation. But you have to wonder--what about those cases that weren’t discovered in time? Has anyone ever been accidentally buried alive? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. 
     Taphephobia--the fear of being buried alive--is listed as a top phobia. “Thankfully, modern medical practices have made the fear mostly a thing of the past. But throughout history, lack of modern medical science meant that accidental burials were definitely something to be afraid of.” (1)
     One of the earliest and most well documented cases of premature burial is that of Alice Bluden of Basingstoke, England. Alice was married to a malt dealer, and she was described as a kind, ‘full-figured’ woman. One day in 1674, Alice decided that she wanted a drink of poppy water--a type of tea made from poppy seed pods that contains morphine and codeine. Taken in small quantities, the tea acts as a sedative; when a larger amount is ingested, the beverage has a narcotic effect. Taken in very large amounts, the drink can be lethal. Alice must have ingested a pretty substantial amount of tea that day because soon after drinking it she sank into a coma so deep that she appeared to be dead. She was examined by a doctor who held a mirror beneath her nose, but he failed to detect any breath, and there was no evidence of a pulse so she was pronounced dead. 
     Alice’s husband was away on business at the time, and when he received word that his wife had died he asked for the funeral to be postponed until his return; but in those days, freezers weren’t available for body storage. In addition, obese bodies decay at a faster rate than lean ones, so Alice’s family, at the behest of the doctor, thought it best to bury her without delay before putrefaction set in. 
     Because the family was so anxious to get Alice underground, there was no time for a custom-built coffin. Instead, Alice’s large frame was put into a casket that was so small that poles had to be used to force her arms and legs down so that the lid could be securely nailed shut. But Alice’s coffin wouldn’t remain closed for very long. 
     Two days after her burial, children playing in the graveyard heard mysterious moans and cries coming from underground. They reported this to the headmaster of their school, but he didn’t believe them. Instead of investigating the boys’ story, he punished them for telling lies. The following day the headmaster decided that it might be a good idea to check out the children’s story himself. He visited Alice’s gravesite and he too heard the mysterious cries coming from underground and he had the body exhumed.
    When the coffin was opened, there lay Alice--alive, but bruised and bloody from trying to escape her coffin. But she was so weak from the ordeal that she collapsed and died--again. Unfortunately, no one thought to call a doctor to check if she was actually dead, so for a second time, Alice’s body was forced into her tiny coffin and she was reburied. This time, the family hired a guard to make sure that Alice was actually dead. His job was to watch over the grave and listen for any suspicious noises coming from underground that might suggest that Alice was alive. Great idea--but sometime during the night it began to rain and the guard decided to head over to the local pub to stay warm.
    The next morning the family discovered that the guard had left his post, so they had the grave dug up a second time just to be sure that Alice was indeed dead. To their horror, when the coffin was opened they discovered that Alice had revived sometime during the night. In her frenzied state, she had forced her hands from her sides and clawed at the inside of the coffin. Witnesses said that her face and hands were bloody and torn to shreds from attempting to escape. But this time, Alice was truly dead. She most likely suffered a heart attack brought on by the terror of being buried alive not once, but twice.
Picture
Just before he died, Frederic Chopin wrote a note saying: “The earth is suffocating. Swear to make them cut me open, so I won’t be buried alive.” In Victorian times, the fear of being buried alive was so strong that a society was formed to prevent such a thing from happening. It was aptly called The Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive. 
     Over time, people devised a number of methods that were used to make sure the person thought to be dead was actually dead. Some of these methods were … well, let’s say they were a little odd to say the least. In 1752, for example, Antoine Louis had the idea of blowing tobacco smoke up the rears of the dead to awaken them if they weren’t quite dead yet. Why tobacco? And why up the ass? I’m not quite sure. But it does give the expression “blowing smoke up your ass” an entirely new meaning, doesn’t it?
Picture
A French clergyman thought that tobacco smoke blown into the asses of the newly dead wasn’t enough to ensure that they were actually dead. He proposed thrusting a red-hot poker up there instead. Ouch! Even for the dead. Ouch! 
     And leave it to the French to take things one-step further. In 1854, another Frenchman invented the pince-mamelon--aka “The Nipple Pincher”. It was a particularly strong pair of giant tweezers designed to shock the supposedly dead back to life. I wonder if the person applying them counted to three first ... you know, just to give a warning. 
     But forget about smokey asses and pinched nipples. There was a much simpler way to make sure that someone wasn’t buried alive--don’t bury them; at least, not right away. The easiest way was to hold a wake. The term “wake” comes from the practice of waiting three days before burying a body to make sure that it doesn’t wake up. In Victorian times, wakes were held in the parlors of people’s homes. By the 20th century, funeral services were moved to funeral homes and the home parlor took on a new name--the living room--because it was no longer used to display the dead.
​     Let the body sit around for three days, then bury it. 
Problem solved, right? Not exactly. For some people, three days just wasn’t enough time to guarantee that a person was actually dead.
     In her online article, The Horror of Premature Burial, author Bess Lovejoy writes, “The Germans had their own solution. These were
Leichenhaüsers, or waiting houses, chambers designed to hold the apparently dead until their putrefaction confirmed their plight. 

     A physician-turned-philanthropist named Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland built the first Leichenhäuser, in Weimar, Germany in 1791. The “corpse chamber,” which could hold eight bodies at a time, was kept constantly warm with pipes that fed the room with steam, to hasten the decomposition of the bodies. Leichenhaüsers were built all over Germany and elsewhere between 1795 and 1828, and some even later, with ever-increasing frills: there were heaps of scented flowers, bells, and wires attached to the corpses in case they woke up, and a long-suffering porter who had to keep watch. In some cases, people paid admission for the privilege of wandering amongst the bodies.” (3)
     In Paris, viewing the dead was becoming such a popular tourist attraction that 
a special Morgue was built as a public exhibition space. It was open daily, and was free to the public. Behind glass on slanted marble tables were the naked bodies of unidentified victims of crimes, drownings, and suicides. 
The naked corpses were on display for several days before they were removed. Although the intent was to have the public view the bodies in the hope that some might be identified, the Paris Morgue instead became a wildly popular tourist attraction with thousands visiting each day. For reasons of hygiene, the Morgue closed its doors to the public in March 1907.
Picture
     In a cemetery in The Hague, Netherlands sits an attractive, modern looking building. It was actually built in 1828, and appropriately named ‘The Apparent Dead House’. Its sole purpose was to house the bodies of the recently dead so they could be observed over a period of weeks to make sure that there was absolutely no sign of life. Professional ‘death-watchers’ were hired to place mirrors and feathers in front of the corpses' faces to check for any hint of breath, and they were periodically stuck with pins to check for a physical reaction. In addition, the bodies were attached to a system of strings and bells so that any movement of the body would be immediately detected.(3) Once it was obvious that a person was actually dead, arrangements would be made to give the body a proper burial.
Picture
The Apparent Dead House - The Hague, Netherlands
 In the 19th century, fear of premature burial led to the invention of a number of clever devices known as ‘coffin alarms’. These were designed to aid a person who was buried alive by allowing them to breathe, to signal for help, or to escape on their own. These weren’t just zany devices that people thought up and talked about with their friends; they were actual inventions, and some even had US patents.
     In Ashawnta Johnson’s article, History’s Best Strategies for Avoiding Being Buried Alive, she tells of one man’s idea. She writes, "Timothy Clark Smith, a Vermont taphephobia sufferer, decided to rely on others to make sure his death wasn’t announced too early. Smith asked to have a window installed on his grave, “six feet above him and centered squarely on his face,” when he died. Today the glass has clouded with age and it’s impossible to get a look at Smith, but imagine a breathy fog covering the glass, and Smith waiting for someone to notice. Of course, by all accounts Smith never had to have the assistance of a helpful passerby, and he died without incident in 1893. (2)
Picture
     The grave window was a simple idea, but premature-burial-prevention-devices of the era were far more complex. In 1868, Franz Vester invented something he called “An Improved Burial Case”. The description of the device reads: “The tomb is equipped with a number of features including an air inlet, a ladder, and a bell so that the person, upon waking, could save himself. If too weak to ascend by the ladder, he can ring the bell, giving the desired alarm for help, and thus save himself from premature death by being buried alive.
     
In 1882, John Krichbaum patented the “Device for Indicating Life in a Buried Person”. The patent stated that “It will be seen that if the person buried should come to life, a motion of his hands will turn the branches of a T-shaped pipe upon or near which his hands are placed.” On the surface of the grave is a scale that alerts the living that the pipe has been moved. The coffin is equipped with a battery-powered alarm. When a wire comes in contact with the body, the alarm is activated and a spring-loaded rod raises a flag on the surface. Lastly, a tube is positioned over the face of the buried body so that a lamp can be lowered down and the buried person’s face can be seen.
Picture
     In 1897, a device was patented that seemed to cover all the bases. It involved a spring-loaded ball that was placed on the chest of the newly deceased. If the chest moved, the ball’s spring would trigger the release of light and air into the coffin through a tube that ran up to the grave’s surface. At the same time, a system of bells and flags would spring into action to summon help. 
Picture
     You would think that the practice of embalming must certainly have put the fear of being buried alive to rest, right? Not really. Remember, not everyone is embalmed before they’re buried; and as we’ve seen, modern cases of people being mistaken for dead still crop up now and then.
     
So the next time you’re at a cemetery, listen carefully. That muffled sound you hear might not be a flag blowing in the wind, or the distant cries of a child playing in a nearby neighborhood. It might be a voice, and it might be coming from six-feet underground.
Picture

Resources

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/apparent-dead-house-in-the-hague
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/31-days-of-halloween-premature-burial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_burial
"A MAN BURIED ALIVE. - WHAT HIS FRIENDS DISCOVERED WHEN THE COFFIN WAS OPENED. - View Article – NYTimes.com"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/woman-found-alive-in-hospital-morgue-1322541.html
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/just-dying-to-get-out/
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1994-11-18-9411180003-story.html
https://www.grunge.com/57710/times-dead-people-actually-alive/
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/21/teenager-wakes-up-headed-to-his-own-funeral-after-being-presumed/21718716/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dead-teen-screaming-in-tomb_n_55dcc238e4b04ae49704c32b
https://www.foxnews.com/story/woman-declared-dead-still-breathing-in-morgue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_syndrome
https://www.frazerconsultants.com/2017/06/final-isnt-final-look-premature-burials-history/
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/08/alice-blunden/
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/06/sin-eaters/?utm_source=penultimate
https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/morgue-visite-favorite-paris-au-19e-siecle
0 Comments

The Connecticut Witch Trials

2/28/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
     If I had lived in Salem Massachusetts a little over three hundred years ago, I would most certainly have been accused of witchcraft, and as a result, I probably would have been executed. Why? Well, if you didn’t know -- I’m a ghost hunter. But that’s not all. I read Tarot cards and, in my youth, I used the Ouija board. So let’s face it, the 1600’s, I would have been toast -- Literally. I would have either been burned at the stake or hung. 
     But what if I didn’t live in Salem back then? What if I lived in my home state of Connecticut. I would have been safe, right? Nope. Capital crimes in 1642 Connecticut included murder, adultery, blasphemy -- and witchcraft. Witchcraft was a criminal offense, and the accused faced criminal prosecution and a trial by jury. 
     Everyone knows about the Salem witch trials of 1692, but the first person executed for witchcraft in the United States wasn’t from Salem. A young woman named Alse Youngs from Windsor, Connecticut was accused of witchcraft and put on trial. It is not known what Alse did to cause her neighbors to make such wicked accusations. But what we do know is that she was found guilty of witchcraft, and that she was executed by hanging in Hartford, Connecticut on May 26, 1647 and buried in an unmarked grave. 
     The Connecticut witch trials, also known as the Hartford witch trials, occurred from 1647 until 1663, and they were the first large-scale trials of their kind in the American colonies. During that time period at least 34 people were accused of witchcraft in Connecticut, of which eleven were put to death -- just nine fewer than the number of people executed for witchcraft in Salem. 
     The Connecticut witch panic and trials are almost unknown to most people, but they are an extremely important and dark part of American history. Whereas the Salem witch panic lasted just seven months, Connecticut’s spanned several decades. And the witch trials in Connecticut were proportionally far more deadly than Salem’s. In Salem, they executed 20 of the 180 women and men brought up on formal witchcraft charges, while in Connecticut 11 out of 34 were executed. In other words, eleven percent of those accused of witchcraft were put to death in Salem, and 32 percent of those accused in Connecticut were executed. So, you had a much better chance of being put to death for witchcraft in Connecticut than in Salem.
     But why were people so afraid of witches, and why did they believe in them in the first place? Let’s face it, the thought of women riding around on broomsticks, putting hexes on people, and having animals at their beck and call who did their dirty work seems like nothing more than a bunch of dark fairy tales. But keep in mind, the first settlers in America came from England, and in Europe approximately 40,000 people were put to death for witchcraft over a 200 year period. 
     Belief in witchcraft was common in England. In fact, ‘white witches’ and ‘white wizards’ known as ‘cunning folk’ or ‘blessing witches’ were well respected in many English communities. In an age where medicine was largely unknown or unavailable, practitioners of white witchcraft were often successful in healing the sick by using folk-remedies and herbs. White witches were also called upon to help identify enemies in the community through various methods of divination. 
     While white witches were credited with curing sick children and animals, ‘black’ witches were thought to inflict sickness and death. One function of a white witch was to protect the community from the evil doings of black witches. They did this through the use of dolls stuck with pins. The dolls were called ‘poppets’ and the pins weren’t meant to actually harm the black witch; they were used to neutralize her spells and to protect the community from further harm. 
     The Puritans were fiercely religious, conservative, and intensely intolerant of other beliefs or religions. They also suffered many hardships in the New World including epidemics, starvation, death of livestock, hard winters, and Indian attacks. Witchcraft was often the scapegoat for these hardships because belief in witchcraft was as common as the belief in God. If you believed in God, then you had to believe in the devil; and people firmly believed that witchcraft was just one way that Satan wielded his power. 
     Today, a lot of evidence must be shown before someone is put on trial for a crime. But in colonial times it took just a single accusation of witchcraft to get the ball rolling. Very little was known about medicine in the seventeenth-century, so witchcraft was often blamed for people getting sick or dying. Women were midwives, so if a mother or child died in childbirth, the midwife was often to blame--and sometimes she was accused of being a witch. 
     In colonial times, livestock was the most important possession a person could have. If livestock behaved oddly or died, there had to be a reason. Sometimes the reason was thought to be witchcraft. In one case, a woman came into the yard of her neighbor. When asked what she wanted, she said that she just wanted to see their new calf. At the time, the calf was reported to have been secured to a heavy post that was driven into the ground, but after the woman left it somehow pulled the post from the ground and ruined a crop of corn. Because of this, the woman was accused of being a witch. Of course, any logical person would suppose that it wasn’t the woman’s fault; most likely, the post just wasn’t secured deep enough in the ground. 
     God help those with mental illness in colonial Connecticut. One of the accused had a habit of talking to herself, and based on the testimonies of her neighbors, the old woman was obviously mentally unstable. She was a feisty old woman, and probably not very nice. One of her neighbors testified that she once heard the old woman muttering to herself. When she asked her who she was talking to the old woman snapped back, “I was talking to you”. Now, obviously this was a snarky reply meant to imply, “Mind your own business”, but it was taken as a sign that the ‘witch’ was attempting to put a curse on the woman.   
     Alse Young was the first person in Connecticut to be put to death for witchcraft. The second person to be convicted, and the first to confess, was Mary Johnson of Wethersfield. Mary was working as a house servant in Hartford, Connecticut in 1646, where she was accused of theft. She moved to Wethersfield, where she also worked as a servant, and in 1647 she was once again accused of theft and was whipped for her crime by the local minister. During her punishment, Mary Johnson confessed that “a devil was wont to do her many services”. She also confessed to “uncleanness with men and Devils” and that she had murdered a child. Mary was convicted on December 7, 1648 for “familiarity with the Devil” and imprisoned in Hartford, Connecticut. While in prison awaiting her execution, it was discovered that she was pregnant. Her execution was delayed, and after the birth of her son she was hanged in June of 1650. 
     Why did Mary Johnson confess if she wasn’t actually a witch? Religion was so ingrained in people’s lives that any moral weakness was viewed as a sin. Women often confessed that they were tempted by Satan to do things that were considered morally wrong. Men, on the other hand, rarely aired their inner conflicts and guilty feelings. Women were sexually repressed, so a woman having sexual desires was considered sinful. Having sex outside of marriage was deemed a mortal sin, so adultery was often blamed on the devil’s influence. As for Mary’s confession of murdering a child, it is likely that she felt responsible for the death of a child who was in her care, and that she considered it murder. Or, it’s possible that she had had a miscarriage and that she blamed herself for the child’s death. 
     Less than three years after Mary Johnson was put to death, the first husband-and-wife couple were accused of witchcraft--Wethersfield residents John Carrington and his wife Joan. Details of the accusations against the couple are scarce, but the indictment read: “Thou art indicted by the name of John Carrington of Wethersfield, carpenter, that not having the fear of God before thine eyes thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan, the great enemy of God and Mankind; and by his help has done works above the course of nature, according to the laws of God and the established laws of this commonwealth thou deservest to die.” The same indictment was handed down to his wife. On March 6, 1651 the couple was found guilty of witchcraft, and soon after they were hanged in Hartford.
     In 1664, Lydia Gilbert of Windsor, Connecticut was charged with witchcraft. The accusations against her were bizarre to say the least. In 1651, Lydia and her husband Thomas took in a boarder named Henry Stiles. Henry was probably Thomas Gilbert’s employer, and Lydia kept house for him during the time he boarded with them. 
     On November 3, 1651, Henry and a neighbor named Thomas Allyn were participating in training exercises with a group of militiamen. During the exercises, Allyn’s gun went off accidentally. The bullet hit Henry and killed him. A trial was held, and Allyn was found guilty of “homicide by misadventure”. He was fined 20 pounds and ordered not to bear arms for one year. 
     Although this seemed to be the end of the story, it wasn’t. After the trial, the people of the community continued to try to understand how such an accident could have occurred. Soon, rumors began to spread and Lydia Gilbert was soon accused of playing a part in Henry’s death. On March 25, 1654--a full three years after Henry’s accidental death--Lydia was accused by her neighbors of practicing witchcraft. Not only that, they also said that she had used her evil powers to cause the musket of Thomas Allyn to discharge.
A trial was held, and a panel of jurors were assembled. Six of those on the panel were residents of Windsor who were well aware that Thomas Allyn had been convicted of accidentally killing Stiles, but Lydia was still found guilty. Though there are no written records that tell Lydia’s ultimate fate, most historians believe that she was hanged at Hartford. This is due to the fact that records show that Thomas Gilbert moved to present day Glastonbury, Connecticut shortly after her trial and quickly remarried. 
     We often hear of the witchcraft panic that swept across seventeenth-century New England, but what exactly is a panic? A panic is defined as a “number of linked cases forming a chain reaction” (*). By 1662, witchcraft accusations in Hartford had spread at an alarming rate and that year the witch hunting hysteria culminated in seven trials and four executions. 
     It all started on March 23, 1662 when 8-year-old Elizabeth Kelly died. She had been in good health until after spending a day with a neighbor, Goodwife Ayers also known as “Goody” Ayers. The next day, Ayers came to the house and shared a bowl of broth with the girl. That night the girl became sick, most likely with bronchial pneumonia, and her high fever made her delusional. She reportedly exclaimed, “Help me! Goodwife Ayres is upon me. She chokes me. She kneels on my belly. She will break my bowels. She pinches me. She will make me black and blue.” The little girl’s parents, John and Bethia Kelly, suspected that the devil was at work, and they became convinced that their daughter had been struck down by witchcraft at the hands of Goody Ayers. 
     The Kelly’s brought their concerns about Ayers to the town officials and she was summoned to the side of the dead girl who was laid out in her parents’ home. The corpse was examined, and it was found that there were bruises on her shoulders and upper arms. These bruises seemed to correspond to the child’s ravings when she said that Goody Ayers “will me me black and blue”. According to reports, during the examination of the body, a red spot appeared on the dead child’s cheek nearest to where Ayers was standing. Of course, this was taken as a sign of Ayers being a witch. 
     The local magistrates summoned physician Bray Rossiter to examine the body. Because of the distance he had to travel, it took several days for the autopsy to take place. Onhand was an assistant and six witnesses. The doctor concluded that Elizabeth had not died of natural causes. He stated that the body was pliable without any of the stiffness that should have been present. He reported that the girl’s throat contained a large amount of blood, and it was stiff and hard. In his medical report, he swore that Elizabeth Kelly had suffered “unnatural harm”. Hartford residents interpreted this to mean that Goody Ayers was a witch.
     For whatever reason, Goody was not immediately imprisoned, so she and her husband William wasted no time in skipping town to avoid a certain death sentence. They abandoned their eight-year-old son and left behind all of their possessions. The couple most likely fled to New York or Rhode Island since neither state had an extradition treaty with Connecticut. 
     Around this same time a woman named Ann Cole began to behave strangely. Although she had always been a pious woman, she began convulsing and spewing curses and blasphemy. According to one account Ann “had taken with strange fits wherein she--or rather the devil, as ‘tis judged made use of her lips--held a discourse for a considerable time.” But Ann wasn’t accused of being a witch; she claimed that she was under the spell of her neighbor, Rebecca Greensmith.
     The Greensmiths were not well liked by the townspeople. Rebecca was described by her minister, Reverend John Whiting, as being “lewd, ignorant and considerably aged”. Nathaniel was not viewed favorably either. He had had several run-ins with the law. He was accused of stealing a hoe, of stealing one-and-a-half bushels of wheat, of lying in court, and of battery. 
     Based solely on Ann Cole’s accusations, Rebecca Greensmith was charged with witchcraft and thrown into prison. Ann also gave the names of other people in town who she said were bewitching her. Soon, the accused women began to accuse other women of the town of being the real witches. 
     In January, 1663, Rebecca Greensmith confessed in court to having “familiarity with the devil”. From her testimony and behavior in court, the woman was clearly mentally unstable. Among other things, she said that at Christmas she and the devil had “a merry meeting” to form a covenant. Greensmith said that she met in the woods with seven other witches who would often come in the form of cats, crows, or other animals. These included Goody Ayers, Mary Sanford, and Elizabeth Seager. She also said that the devil came out of the woods in the form of a deer that skipped around her. 
     Rebecca also confessed that her husband Nathaniel was involved in witchcraft, and that strange animals or familiars would follow him about in the woods. She claimed that Nathaniel possessed impossible strength; that he could easily place large logs on his wagon, a job that would normally require help from several men. At the trial, neighbors testified that they saw Elizabeth Seager--one of the women Rebecca accused of also being a witch--dancing with other women in the woods at night, and that they were cooking something mysterious in a large black kettle. 
     Although Rebecca Greensmith confessed to being a witch in court, her husband continued to protest his innocence. But it was no use. Because Rebecca had openly confessed to being a witch, everything she said at the trial was considered to be true.  On January 25, 1663, Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith were both executed by hanging. Joining them at the Hartford gallows that day was Mary Barnes of Farmington who had also been found guilty of witchcraft. A few days later, Mary Sanford was sent to the gallows. After the executions, Ann Cole was reportedly “restored to health” which only fueled the belief in the community that witchcraft had been the root cause of her malady. 
     Elizabeth Seager--the woman Rebecca Greensmith accused of being a witch--was also put on trial that same year. She was indicted for witchcraft, blasphemy, and adultery. She pleaded not-guilty to all of the accusations. During the inquiry a neighbor testified:
“I saw this woman, Elizabeth Seager, in the woods with three more women, and with them I saw two black creatures like two Indians but taller. I saw likewise a kettle there over a fire. I saw the women dance round these black creatures. I looked up at the women and smiled at them. One of the women saw me and said, “Look who is yonder!” and then they ran away up the hill. I stood still and the black things came towards me and then I turned to come away.” The witness admitted that he never actually saw the women’s faces, but testified that “I knew the persons by their habits or clothes, having observed such clothes on them not long before.” 
     Seager was convicted of witchcraft and adultery in 1665 and she was sent to prison to await execution. Luckily, she was eventually set free “on the grounds that the jury’s decision to convict was legally indefensible. The jurymen were furious, and those who believed that Elizabeth Seager was a witch, of whom there were many, made it clear that they felt betrayed.” (*) After her release, the couple and their three children moved to Rhode Island.
     The four executions of suspected witches in Hartford were to be Connecticut’s last. (2) Although another witch panic broke out in Fairfield in 1692, only two of the six accused went to trial, and neither were put to death. Connecticut held its final witch trial in 1697, fifty years after Alse Young’s execution. The trial occurred in Wallingford where Winifred Benham and her teenaged daughter--also named Winifred--were accused of witchcraft to cause physical harm to three children of prominent Wallingford families. They were also accused of killing another child by causing her to have ‘spots’ on her body. We now know that the child most likely died of measles. The jury returned a verdict of “not proven” and the case was dismissed.  
     People continued to accuse their neighbors and relatives of being witches, but these accusations usually ended up with the accused suing for slander, and winning. In 1750 witchcraft was finally taken off of the list of capital offenses in Connecticut. 
     The executions for witchcraft don’t seem real, do they? Reading about the trials and executions may be disturbing, but because it happened so long ago it almost feels like we’re reading a work of fiction. These poor, innocent men and women don’t seem like real people when we read about them -- but they were. It was reported that as one woman was led to the gallows, she broke free and wrapped her arms around a large boulder, pleading for her life. As she was forcibly dragged away, the skin on her fingers were ripped off leaving bloody trails on the stone. The poor woman continued to cry and plead for her life right up until she dropped through the gallows floor to her death. Just imagine how devastating it must have been to the spouses and children of those executed for witchcraft. I’m sure that husbands fought tooth and nail for their accused wives, trying to talk some sense to the court, but ultimately failing and being forced to watch them hanged for no reason. 
     In October 2012, descendants of those executed for witchcraft petitioned the Connecticut government to posthumously pardon the victims, but the motion was not passed. On February 6, 2017, the town of Windsor unanimously passed a resolution to symbolically clear the names of the town's two victims, Alse Youngs and Lydia Gilbert. Memorial services were held for the victims of the witch trials in Windsor in June of 2017. The service marked the 370th anniversary of Alse Youngs' execution. 
     Please remember in your prayers the eleven Connecticut residents who were unjustly executed as witches so long ago: Alyse Youngs (1647), Mary Johnson (1648), Joan Carrington (1651), John Carrington (1651), Goody Basset (1651), Goody Knapp (1653), Lydia Gilbert (1654), Mary Sanford (1662), Rebecca Greensmith (1662), Nathaniel Greensmith (1662), and Mary Barnes (1662)

Resources
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/16/nyregion/entertaining-the-devil-in-connecticut.html
https://ctstatelibrary.org/witchcraft-in-connecticut/
https://libguides.ctstatelibrary.org/hg/colonialresearch/witchcraft
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2006/rpt/2006-R-0718.htm
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/witch-hunts-connecticut/
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/alse-young-witch/
http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/17docs.html
The European Witch Hunt (book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Corey
https://www.history.com/news/before-salem-the-first-american-witch-hunt
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/08/artsandhumanities.highereducation
https://www.courant.com/community/windsor/hc-wn-windsor-witch-trials-0608-20170606-story.html
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/mary-johnson-witch/
https://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-taking-note-buchanan-windsor-witches-0324-20190324-mw6ygw65bjc23pkg6uyqr3bfbi-story.html
https://www.facebook.com/ctwitchmemorial/posts/why-did-rebecca-greensmith-confess-to-being-a-witch-in-an-open-court-particular-/2313572985596922/
https://www.sylviaprincebooks.com/blog/2017/penis-snatching-witches
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/lydia-gilbert-witch/
https://www.onsegermountain.org/witchcraft.html
1 Comment

The Use of Dolls in Ritualistic Magic

1/28/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
     What do Barnes and Noble, Walmart, and Target have in common? They all sell Voodoo Dolls! And they’re not the only ones. You can buy Voodoo dolls and kits from literally hundreds of online vendors, and browsing through the plethora of different types of online Voodoo dolls is actually very entertaining. There’s the “Mini Office Voodoo Kit” to put a curse on your boss or co-workers; the “Sports Fan Voodoo Kit” for those who think they need a little extra help in making sure their team wins; the “Valentine Voodoo Doll Kit” and the “Happy Couple Voodoo Doll Kit” to cast love spells; the “Passion Masters Sex Voodoo Doll” and the “Wolfman Stamina Voodoo Doll” to ‘attain massive, animal-like sex stamina’; and my favorite--the “Photo Revenge Voodoo Doll” where you send a photo of your ex, wait for the doll to arrive, then go to town sticking pins in the doll that has your ex’s face on it.

Sympathetic Magic
     In order to understand the use of dolls in ritual magic, it’s important to understand the concept of sympathetic magic whereby a magician believes that he can produce any desired physical effect merely by imitating it. In addition, there is the belief that whatever is done to a material object will also be done to the person that it was once in contact with. This is why dolls used in magic rituals are often constructed or decorated with hair, nail-clippings, or pieces of cloth once owned by a person. A perfect example of this is a dolls now housed in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. The doll was made in 1953 as a curse against a woman who had connections to the Nazi party. It is made out of cloth, and the gown it wears is made out of material stolen from the woman’s wardrobe. The doll has a dagger through its face and eye. (1) 
     The use of dolls in sympathetic magic goes back thousands of years. The melting and burning of ritualistic dolls was written about in great detail in some ancient Greek texts. In ancient Egypt, enemies of Ramses III used wax images of the Pharaoh in rituals to help bring about his death. Greek poppets, known as Kolossoi, were used for various ritual purposes, such as to restrain a ghost, to ward off an evil entity, or as a way to bind lovers together. 
      Voodoo dolls are the most familiar type of doll used in casting spells and curses, but there are actually a number of different types of dolls used in ritualistic magic and witchcraft. 

Poppets      
     The oldest examples of dolls stuck with pins and used in ritual magic don’t come from Africa or the Carribean, they originated in Britain where during the middle ages, practitioners of magic called ‘cunning folk’--also known as wizards, wise men or women, or conjurers-- would make cloth dolls made to resemble a person in the community who was thought to be a witch. The doll would be stuck with pins to do the witch harm, and to help break any magic spells she may have put on anyone.  
     If you ever get a chance to visit England, be sure to visit the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall. The museum was founded in 1951 by folk magician Cecil Williamson to display his personal collection of occult artifacts. Today, the museum houses the largest collection of objects related to witchcraft and the occult. Among the museums many interesting artifacts is a curious figure--a small, crudely formed female clay doll stuck with four pins. This type of ritualistic doll is known as a poppet, and this particular one appears to be blackened in places as if it had been charred by fire. Two of the pins are stuck in the dolls eyes, one in the throat, and one through the right breast. The poppet once belonged to the museum’s founder, and was made by him as a curse. Who he was cursing, and for what reason is unknown. But what we do know is that poppets such as this are often used in ritual magic and witchcraft.
    Poppets are made to represent a person and they’re used to cast spells on that person for good or for evil, or to put a curse on the person. They can be made out of a number of different materials such as carved roots, corn husks, a piece of dried fruit, wax, clay, branches, or cloth. Dolls made out of cloth are often stuffed with herbs or other materials thought to have magical properties. While most dolls are kept close by the person who is casting a spell or curse, others are sometimes lodged in chimneys or other hidden places in a home. Obviously, those poppets who are designed for protection are placed there with full knowledge of the homeowner. Poppets that have a curse on them would be hidden in a home to make sure it is close by its intended victim. 


Voodoo Dolls
     Now let’s get one thing straight, Voodoo has very little to do with so called Voodoo dolls. In fact, the name Voodoo isn’t even the actual name of the religion. Vodou (the proper spelling and pronounced VOO-dow or VOE-do) originated in the 17th century French colonial empire among enslaved West Africans. An 1685 law required all slaveholders to Christianize slaves within eight days of their arrival, and this was often Catholicism. Over time, the slaves combined elements of their religious beliefs with Roman Catholicism. Because they were forced to adopt Catholic rituals, slaves gave them double meanings and in the process, many of their African spirits became associated with Christian saints. 
     Vodou is a fascinating and complex religion, and although dolls are used in Vodou, they are usually used for good, or for protection against evil, similar to the use of religious statues in churches and homes. Dolls are used for a variety of purposes such as love, healing, guidance, fertility, and empowerment. The color of the doll is associated with its intended purpose. 

White -- Healing, purification, positive intentions
Red -- Love, Attraction, Power, Blood
Green -- Money, Growth, Fertility
Yellow -- Success, Confidence
Purple -- Wisdom, Spirit Realm, Intuition
Blue -- Love, Peace, Serenity
Black -- To summon negative intentions and energy or to dispel negative energy 

The same colors can also be found on pins which are stuck into a doll to emphasize the intention associated with a particular color. 

Fetish Dolls
     When West African slaves were brought to the United States, they retained their religious practices of using dolls. One type of doll that they made was called a “fetish” and it was thought to be possessed by spirits connected to the doll’s owner. The fetish would be worn for good luck, or to access magical powers. Fetish dolls are also used to create a bond between the physical and spiritual worlds. They are also known by the names ‘juju’ and ‘grisgris’. The term ‘grisgris’ also refers to charm bags filled with magical powders, roots, herbs, bones, spices, stones, feathers, and so on. So, grisgris bags are actually a type of magic potion--a combination of ingredients designed to produce an intended outcome. The bags are usually worn by a person, but they are sometimes tied to fetish dolls as part of a spell.  

Ndebele dolls
     The Ndebele people of Southern Africa have a rich tradition of using different types of dolls for protection, fertility, and good luck. The Ndebele are known for their brightly colored painted homes and clothing, and their dolls reflect this colorful tradition. 
     During courtship, a man will place a doll outside a young woman’s hut which indicates his intention to propose marriage to her. When a woman is preparing to marry, she is given a doll that she names and cares for. When she has her first child, it is given the same name as the doll. 

Xhosa Dolls
     Another South African tribe known as the Xhosa are known for their beaded fertility and love dolls. These small dolls which are covered with colorful beadwork. The dolls are believed to have magical powers, and they are worn on a necklace to attract an eligible husband and to increase fertility. A girl is given the doll by her parents during adolescence and she is instructed to take good care of it. If a doll is lost or damaged, there is a risk that her firstborn child will die. After the birth of her first child, the young mother returns the doll to her parents and it is passed on to her younger sister.
     Not all Xhosa dolls are meant to be displayed openly. Love dolls necklaces that are used to attract a husband are made up of a male and a female doll and are only worn at night. 
     Other dolls are meant to be seen, and are worn openly. Fertility doll necklaces are openly displayed  by married women. They have just one doll attached to them, and they are worn to show both the community and their ancestors their desire to have children. 

Native American Kachina Dolls
     Kachinas are both spirits and the personification of things found in the natural world. A kachina can represent anything in the natural world or cosmos. Although kachinas are not worshipped, each is considered to be a powerful being who can use his particular power to help humans. But this can only be done by giving the kachina veneration and respect. 
     Kachina dolls are carved in the likeness of the spirit being they represent, and after a ceremony that involves dance and music, the dolls are given to young girls of the village. The dolls are then hung on the walls of the pueblo and are meant to be studied in order to learn the characteristics of each Kachina. In addition to their educational purposes, the dolls are a constant reminder of the kachinas and the powers they have to help those who respect them.
  
Hoku Dolls
     In Japan, hoku dolls are given to pregnant mothers to protect both the mother and the unborn child. Traditionally, these dolls are made of silk and human hair. Similar dolls are made for boys, but their purpose is different. Hoku dolls for boys would be consecrated and offered at a shrine when the boy ‘comes of age’ at 15 years old. Hoku dolls are also give to young girls who keep them until they married, at which time they give them up at a shrine to assure a happy marriage. Like poppets, hoku dolls grew from a tradition of a doll representing a person. Paper dolls called ‘hina’ were used as ‘stand ins’ for a person in order to take on the brunt of a person’s sins, or misfortunes. (2)

Worry Dolls
     Worry dolls originated in Guatemala, and like Japanese paper hina dolls, it is believed they take away children’s worries so they can sleep at night. Worry dolls are made out of whatever material is available such as sticks, wire, thread, and scraps of fabric. They are often small enough to fit in children’s hands. Parents believe that keeping a worry doll under a child’s pillow or bed will help direct the child’s worries, fears, and bad dreams into the doll. Some people whisper their worries to the doll in private and allow the doll to take on those worries. Psychologically, this makes sense if the ritual is done with reverence and strong belief in the process.

Do Dolls Used in Rituals Really Work?

     Those who use dolls in sympathetic magic and in other similar rituals and practices swear by them, but of course the only evidence we have is anecdotal. Many paranormal books tell tales of people who have been harmed by a curse involving a doll. Others tell stories where people were cured of a variety of illnesses by the use of dolls stuck with pins or adorned with herbs. 
     One paranormal website (5) claims that three deaths were the result of a Voodoo-type doll found in a Connecticut home, though there are some serious holes in that story. The first person who died was a woman who was well in her 90s. She was described as being in “failing health” for a number of years before her death. The second person who died was the man who made the dolls. He was also in poor health at the time; and besides, I’m sure he didn’t intentionally curse himself, though his bad intentions may have backfired and caused his death. The third person died of a ruptured spleen. Interestingly, one of the dolls had pins stuck into the spleen area. Then again, the doll with the pin in its spleen was in the shape of a fish, not a person. So, it’s not clear who the intended victim was.
  
     If you’re interested in experimenting with ritualistic dolls, it’s probably best to keep the Wiccan “Rule of Three” in mind. The rule of three states that whatever energy a person puts out into the world, be it for good or bad, will be returned to that person three-fold. So, using a doll to help heal or to bring joy and happiness to someone should bring you a handsome reward. But be warned--before you go sticking black pins in a doll made to resemble your worst enemy, keep in mind that, in the end, the person you’ll be hurting the most is yourself.

Resources
https://www.learnreligions.com/are-voodoo-dolls-real-95807
https://www.learnreligions.com/what-are-magical-poppets-4072783
https://www.learnreligions.com/sympathetic-magic-2561922
https://voodoodolls.typepad.com/voodoo_dolls/2007/04/a_brief_history.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_doll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Vodou
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunning_folk_in_Britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Witchcraft_and_Magic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Williamson
https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk
https://www.livescience.com/40803-voodoo-facts.html
https://www.occultopedia.com/f/fetish.htm
https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/the-strange-magic-of-dr-wrens-fetish-dolls/Content?oid=9691040
https://fun107.com/the-true-story-of-three-deaths-caused-by-a-voodoo-curse-in-westport/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_dolls
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_Kachina_figure

0 Comments

Krampus and Other Terrifying Christmas Legends

12/5/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
     Everyone loves the holidays because they’re filled with family traditions; and those traditions fill us with good feelings, which is why we keep them year after year, right? Not exactly. According to psychologists, we are far more likely to keep a tradition going if it comes with the possibility of a threat of punishment. For example, consider the tradition of Santa at Christmas. Sure, the thought of receiving gifts makes us feel good, but there’s always that possibility that he could put coal in your stocking if you’re naughty, or that you might not get the gifts you want. Or, God forbid, there’s the possibility that Santa might overlook you altogether. So, we don’t follow traditions just because we enjoy them--subconsciously, we may be following them because we’re afraid.
    The Christmas season is upon us, and with it comes lots of traditions including the December 25th visit by none other than the big guy himself--Santa Claus. Now, there’s probably no need for me to tell you who Santa is, but it’s important to know a little bit about the ‘jolly old elf’ before we move onto other more unsavory Christmas legends. 

St. Nicholas vs Santa Claus
    Santa Claus evolved from St. Nicholas who was an actual person; a 4th-Century Greek Christian bishop from Lycia on the southern coast of Turkey. It’s said that Nicholas gave away all of his inherited wealth and traveled the countryside helping the poor.
    The name Santa Claus comes from St. Nicholas’ Dutch nickname, Sinterklaas. Like the game of telephone, pass a name on long enough and it will end up sounding like something else. In this case, over time, Sinterklaas became known as Santa Claus.
    During the middle ages, a tradition sprang up whereby children were bestowed with gifts from St. Nicholas, not on Christmas but on the evening before the date of St. Nicholas’ death, December 6. The practice of giving children gifts at Christmas was started by Martin Luther (1483-1546), the monk who was a seminal figure in the Protestant reformation. By the sixteenth-century, the custom of giving gifts to children on the feast of St. Nicholas was very popular, but Luther was interested in placing the focus on Christ instead of the veneration of saints, so the date was moved to December 25 to coincide with Christmas.
    Now, a brief word on why Christmas is celebrated on December 25. During the first three centuries of Christianity, Christ’s birth wasn’t celebrated at all. The first official mention of Christmas as a holiday celebrating Jesus’ birth appears in a Roman calendar from 336 AD. The church chose the date for Christmas to coincide with existing pagan festivals honoring the Roman god of agriculture and the Persian god of light. Declaring December 25 as a Christian holiday was a way to force Rome’s pagan subjects to accept Christianity as the empire’s official religion.
    The familiar image of Santa filling childrens’ stockings with toys originated from a series of woodcuts distributed by a member of the New York Historical Society in 1810. But of course, the image of the portly ‘jolly old elf’ in the red suit became fixed in our minds from the 1822 poem, “A Visit From St. Nicholas” also known as “Twas the Night Before Christmas”.


Krampus
​     Long before the modern, jolly old man we know today as Santa, there was the German Christmas Devil known as Krampus. The tradition of Krampus dates back to the 12th century. In the days leading up to the Feast of St. Nicholas, children would begin to hear rumors and whispers of the coming of an evil, black-fur covered creature. He had a mangled, maniacal face with bloodshot eyes and a long, red, snake-like tongue dangling from his open mouth. Giant horns curled up from his head, and his body was a mixture of man, goat, and demon. His job was to weed out the good children from the bad. As you can imagine, young children would have been absolutely terrified as Krampusnacht--Krampus Night--quickly approached.
     While Santa is known for leaving a lump of coal in the Christmas stockings of naughty children, the Krampus used much more sinister means to keep children in line. He carried a bundle of sticks which he would brutally swat naughty children with. But the punishment didn’t end there. The legend goes that Krampus would enter the town swinging long chains around to capture the bad children. Once caught, a child would be put in a large basket or sack that Krampus carried on his back, and he would bring all of the bad children either to the woods, or down to his home in the underworld.
     Traditionally, young men would dress up as the Krampus during the first week of December, particularly on the evening of December 5, and roam the village frightening children with rusty chains and bells. Sometimes accompanying St. Nicholas and sometimes on his own (1), Krampus would visit homes and businesses throughout the town. Whereas the person playing the part of St. Nicholas would give out candy and toys to the children, the young man playing the part of Krampus would attempt to whip and capture children. Although it was probably understood to be all in good fun, the not-so-subtle warning to behave was surely ingrained in young childrens’ minds all year long.   
    The Krampus seems to have originated from the pagan ‘Horned God’ worshiped by witches and other pagan religions, and the lashing of bad children with birch switches may be tied to the initiation rites performed by some witches covens.       

      Today, Krampus has his own celebration on the day before the Feast of St. Nicholas. In Germany’s Alpine region, every evening on December 5 elegantly dressed St. Nicks pair up with monstrously outfitted Krampuses and make the rounds of homes and businesses, offering gifts and playful threats. (3) As the Krampus walks along, the rattling of his chains and the jangling of cowbells warn of his coming. He dashes through the streets chasing children and adults alike, poking them with sticks as if to say, ‘You’ve been naughty this year.’
   
Belsnickel   
     Although the Krampus is the most famous Christmas demon, in southwestern Germany, children know of a Christmas character called Belsnickel--a cantankerous, fur-clad bringer of gifts. Unlike the purely evil Krampus, Belsnickel’s character is a combination of sinister and generous.
    Like most malevolent Yuletide characters, Belsnickel has his own particular style of dress and recognizable features. He is usually portrayed as a ragged, disheveled man dress in furs, and is sometimes seen wearing a mask with a long tongue. In other areas of Germany he can be found wearing a long, black or brown coat or robe held together at the waist with a rope. On his head is either a fur cap or bear skin hat decorated with bells. He carries a switch in his hand that he uses to beat naughty children; but his pockets are filled with cakes, candies, and nuts for good children.  

     As people migrated from Germany to the US, In the early 1800’s Belsnickel’s fame spread to the Pennsylvania Dutch. There he was known as a character who visited homes a few weeks before Christmas to check up on the behavior of the children. His coming was usually frightening for children because he always seemed to know exactly which of them misbehaved. “He would rap on the door or window with his stick and the children would have to answer a question for him, or sing some type of song. In exchange he would toss candies onto the floor. If the children jumped too quick for the treats, they may end up getting struck with Belsnickel's switch.” (4)
     Belsnickling is the traditional running of groups of young men dressed in masks and fantastic costumes on the eve of the Feast of St. Nicholas. It’s a good-natured, boisterousness event where the young men, dressed in skins and furs, run through the village streets rattling chains and bells.

 Le Père Fouettard
     Another evil Christmas character, Le Père Fouettard, hails from France; and of all the holiday boogiemen, his backstory is perhaps the most gruesome. 
     The most popular story of Le Pere Fouettard--more ‘affectionately’ known as Father Whipper--was first told in 1150. In it, three boys on their way to enroll in a religious boarding school are kidnapped by Le Pere Fouettard who is a butcher. He and his wife drug the boys and slit their throats, then cut them into pieces and stew them in a barrel. In a Sweeney-Todd-like twist, St. Nicholas happens to stop by and is offered the best cuts of meat--the boys. He discovers the crime and resurrects the children and sends them back to their parents. Seeing an opportunity for the butcher to repent his sins, the butcher either willingly or by force became St. Nicholas’ servant. As the two walk about the town in the days leading up to the Feast of St. Nicholas, St. Nick rewards the good children with candy and toys, while Father Whipper punishes the bad ones with his whip. 

Knecht Ruprecht
     Another one of St. Nick’s ‘bad cop’ helpers is Knecht Ruprecht, the name Ruprecht being a common name for the devil in Germany. He is first mentioned in written sources in the 17th century. His appearance is similar to that of Father Whipper in that he is depicted as a man with a long beard dressed in furs with little bells on his clothes. He sometimes carries a long staff, and a bag of ashes. Ruprecht sometimes walks with a limp, and his black clothes and dirty face are attributed to the soot he collects as he goes down chimneys. 
     Ironically, even though his name is associated with the devil, his job seems to be to find out if children know their prayers. If they do, they receive gifts from St. Nicholas. If they don’t, Ruprecht beats the children with his bag of ashes. This is an interesting contrast to the Catholic tradition of receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday. To wear ashes on one’s head during Ash Wednesday signifies purification and sorrow for sins. But if you are seen covered with ashes from Knecht Ruprect, it is a sign that you are in need of further religious study. 
     Although he seems tame enough, there is a darker side to some of the Ruprecht traditions. Sometimes children would be summoned by Ruprecht to dance or singing a song. The good performers were rewarded by St. Nicholas; the bad performers would be severely beaten by Ruprecht. However, those who performed REALLY badly were put into Ruprecht's sack and taken away to his home in the Black Forest to be eaten, or to be tossed into a river. Think of it sort of like a diabolical, 17th century version of American Idol.

Frau Perchta 
     The only female on our list of Christmas horrors is Frau Perchta--also known as The Belly Slitter. She is best known as a figure from Germanic and Austrian folklore, but versions of her gruesome holiday antics can be found all over Europe. Frau Perchta is generally depicted as a crone dressed in rags with a long, beaked, iron nose. Sometimes she carries a cane, but almost always she carries a long, sharp knife that she keeps hidden beneath her skirts. (4a) Her character most likely evolved from Berchta, the Germanic goddess of abundance who was demonized by the Catholic church and referred to as a witch.
    Frau Perchta is said to fly through the night sky accompanied by demonic Krampus-looking creatures, elves, and unbaptized babies. If you hear the sound of thunder and the roaring of wind on the last three Thursdays before Christmas, it just might be Frau Perchta flying through the night with her creepy entourage.
        This ugly, witch-like hag is known to reward the good and generous, and to punish the greedy and dishonest. The majority of her victims are those who work on feast days, particularly Epiphany Sunday which is celebrated by the church on the first Sunday after January 1. For some reason, she takes a special interest in spinners--those who make thread or yarn by spinning. Those who don’t rest during holy days, and especially those who spin when they shouldn’t, are punished by having their bellies slit open with a knife, their intestines pulled out, and the empty cavity filled with rocks or straw.

     Ironically, Frau Perchta also punishes the lazy. So, you shouldn’t work on feast days, but God forbid you slack off any other time of the year. And Frau Perchta reserves special punishment for dishonest children--she scrapes their tongues with broken glass. But have no fear! If you are a good, hard-working soul she might reward you with a silver coin. So, just to clarify, if you failed to meet your spinning quota for the year or you worked on her feast day, you got disemboweled and stuffed full of rocks. If you worked hard and did what you were supposed to do you got … like a dime.(5)  Sounds fair to me!

Hans Trapp
This last Christmas evil-doer is based on an actual person named Hans Van Tratha, a 15th century French knight. He was said to stand about six-and-a-half feet tall, and he lived in a lavish castle called ‘Berwartstein’ which was given to him by the Elector (ruler) of an area bordering Germany and France.
    Hans’ bad reputation grew from a feud he had with his neighbor Henry, the Abbot of Benedictine Monks at Weissenburg Abbey. Hans said that as owner of the castle the Abbey, which was on his property, belong to him, and he demanded that it and all its belonging be turned over to him.
    The feud became so bad that Henry turned to the Pope for help. The Pope summoned Hans to Rome to be questioned about his loyalty to the church, but he refused and was subsequently excommunicated from the church. After this, the king and the emperor pronounced an imperial ban on Van Trotha. But in spite of this banishment, he went on to become a respected knight in France, and he died of natural causes at castle Berwartstein. Two years after his death, for some reason the Emperor and the Pope had a change of heart and all of the sanctions were lifted.      

     Of course, Hans Van Tratha’s bad-boy reputation lead to many legends which somehow morphed into the Christmas character Hans Trapp. Although he is known to children as the “Black Knight”, Hans Trapp is often depicted simply as a man with a white beard who wears a pointed hat. Of course, like many of our ne’er-do-well Christmas characters, he carries a rod with him to hit children with if they don’t sing and pray.   
     But Hans Trapp wouldn’t be on this list if he was just another child punisher. Indeed, the legends that grew up around him and his evil doings at Christmas time are truly gruesome. The most popular legend is that he became very wealthy through acts of magic and through making a pact with demons, and that he worshiped Satan. When the Vatican heard of his cruelty and his involvement with the occult, he was arrested and brought before the Pope. He was excommunicated for Satanism and upon returning to his home in France discovered that everything he owned had been taken from him. Now totally destitute, the villagers of his hometown shunned and banished him to the woods in neighboring Germany.
     Totally enraged at those who took everything away from him, he devoted his life to practicing sorcery and other dark arts. After years of living alone in the forest, he went insane and began to crave the taste of human flesh, so he came up with a plan. He would disguise himself as a scarecrow by stuffing his clothes with straw and sticks and wait in the fields for his unsuspecting prey to come by. Day after day he waited in the fields for the perfect victim. Then one day, a young boy on his way home took a short-cut through the fields and was violently attacked by Hans Trapp. He stabbed the boy with a sharpened stick and dragged his body back to his shack in the woods. There he cut the child’s body into pieces and roasted them over his fire. But just as he was about to take his first bite of the child’s flesh, God struck him down with lightning and he died.
     To this day, parents of the North-Eastern region of France warn their children that every Christmas Hans Trapp’s spirit would come back dressed as a hooded scarecrow to enact his revenge by abducting naughty children into the forest where they would never be seen again. (6)
​

     I hope you’ve enjoyed these harrowing Christmas legends. If tradition goes hand-in-hand with the threat of punishment, then it’s no wonder these creepy holiday traditions have lived on for centuries. So watch out. Santa is right around the corner, which means that Krampus, Belsnickel, Le Père Fouettard, Knecht Ruprecht, Frau Perchta, and Hans Trapp aren’t far behind. And if you haven’t been good this year, each one is just waiting to dole out their own special brand of punishment. 

Resources
https://www.bustle.com/articles/131377-why-we-love-traditions-according-to-science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
https://www.6sqft.com/how-santa-claus-was-born-in-new-york-city-in-the-1800s/
http://www.unmuseum.org/santa.htm
https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/le-pere-fouettard-the-french-christmas-cannibal-who-serves-santa-claus/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/krampus-krampusnacht_n_5a278422e4b02d3bfc367bf4
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Krampus
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belsnickel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_Ruprecht
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A8re_Fouettard
https://historycollection.co/ten-terrifying-christmas-customs-legends-around-world-will-give-chills/7/
https://www.npr.org/2011/12/10/143485735/naughty-or-nice-krampus-horror-for-the-holidays
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/krampus-could-come-you-holiday-season-180957438/
http://germaniasociety.com/christkindlmarkt/st-nick-krampus
https://boroughsofthedead.com/frau-perchta/
https://thestoriedimaginarium.com/2018/12/24/the-myth-of-frau-perchta/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Trotha
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/matauryn/2018/12/11/hans-trapp/








0 Comments

Stories Shared by Audience Members at my 2019 Library Lecture Series

10/22/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Kent Library -- Carmel, New York
My sister Carol has a house in Burrillville, Rhode Island right over the border from Putnam Connecticut. It had been her boyfriend Tim's house where he grew up with his family. A few years ago she was staying over in the house and she brought a nightgown upstairs to the bedroom. She lay it on the bed and went downstairs for a minute, and when she came back the nightgown was gone. It just disappeared. She looked all over for the nightgown, but she couldn't find it, so she wound up wearing one of her boyfriends' shirts to bed that night. It didn't seem like much, but a couple weeks later she found the nightgown in an old chest that was in the room.
     What was interesting about the story is that when my sister first met her boyfriend, he took her up to Burrillville to meet his mother, and the mother never liked her. They weren't married, they were good Catholics, they were living in sin and so-on and so-forth. After fourteen years they're still not married! The mother just didn't like her. Shortly after that the mother died. She fell down the stairs in the house.
     This story about the nightgown happened about three years ago. As I said, they live in the house where Carol's boyfriend's mother died, and they do stay in the mother's room. When the nightgown disappeared no one was in the house but Carol and Tim. She did find it several weeks later hidden in this trunk; but Carol is convinced that the mother is still there and that she took the nightgown off the bed and put it in the trunk so they wouldn't sleep together. Different things have happened, being walking into a room and suddenly feeling freezing cold is one of them. Hearing footsteps is another, but the most significant thing was the missing nightgown, and she thinks that her boyfriend's mother still doesn't like her. 
_____
This happened about three years ago. A little history on it, I've spoken to people who believe in spirits and stuff like that, like my crazy sister-in-law. They say they know the colors they like, and they know their names and all of this stuff. But I'm the kind of person that needs proof. I gotta know for sure. I need some kind of proof.
     So, one night I go to bed and the bedroom is small. It's about 8x10 and the bed is in the corner, so nothing gets to me unless I can see it. So I go to bed one night. I'm laying on my right side. The wall is behind me and the headboard is against the wall. I'm laying there and I'm going to ask if there's anything in the room, if there's such things as spirits, I gotta know. I said, "I gotta know right now. I don't want to know a week or a month down the road or whatever. It's gotta be right now, I've gotta know yes or no. And if they're not, well, I'm not going to ask again. This is it." I said, "Just one thing. Don't scare the ____ out of me. I don't want you dropping in through the ceiling, appearing in this room or anything like that."
     Now, my dog is listening to this. The dog is three feet away, she's giving me the side-eye like, 'Who's he talking to?'. But I'm watching the dog because the dog is going to know anything that happens. So I'm laying there, when all of a sudden I feel two big steps in the bed behind me. BOOM! BOOM! Not light, but the way that I would have stepped on the mattress. I bounced up and down and I put my arm behind me--and thank God, I don't feel a leg back there. And I say, 'Thank you. That's enough!' Because if something would have touched me, I would have had a heart attack. So it kind of knew. I'll do this and this guy won't panic and jump out the window. So it was interesting.
     I have friends who tell me, 'Do that again. you have to prove that that was real.' No I don't! You don't want to be calling stuff. You don't know who's there. Once is enough.  
_____

Danbury Library -- Danbury, Connecticut
About 30 years ago my wife and I and my son and his wife went camping up to New Hampshire on the Saco Rover. We decided to go canoeing the next day down the river. So we get everything all together, got in the canoe and started going down. It got pretty swift. We were coming to a corner and here's a tree laying half on the ground and half in the water. So my son's wife, Kathy, was with me and my wife was in another canoe with our son. Now, if you damaged the canoe you had to pay for it when you got back. So we're going along at a pretty fast clip and here's this tree. So I said, "Kathy, put your foot out and try to push the boat away because we're going to hit that tree."  Sure enough we hit it, and the boat turns over and fills up with water. She's caught underneath the boat between the boat and tree, and I'm not strong enough to push the canoe back so she could get up. She was under water. So my son jumps out of his canoe and tries to come over to try and help. In the meantime here's this 60's thin guy, white hair sitting on a sandy part of the shore. Nothing else around because we're going through the woods. I'm pushing for all I'm worth. Jeffrey is calling to Kathy. All of a sudden I look and I see this hand on the top corner point of the canoe. He says to me, "Relax". That's all he said. Then with one hand, he pulled that canoe up and Kathy came up out of the water. I turned around to thank him, and this guy is gone. So from that day on I believe in angels.
_____
We were having a family reunion in New Jersey. We have a rather large family, and everybody was together. One of the things we did is that everybody who passed away was given a balloon and you write the person who passed away's name on the balloon. So we all went out in the yard, and I had put my mother's name on a balloon. Everybody let the balloons go on the count of three. Every single balloon went up except my mother's. It stayed at an average height, about 5 feet off the ground. It floated the whole afternoon. It floated around the yard, in the house, all over. So we all said, 'Mom never wanted to leave the party!' 
_____
I don't share this story with anyone, but since I feel like I'm amongst friends. I'm 43 now, and this happened when I was 16 years old I grew up in a pretty haunted house. I want to say that my family was kind of religious, so we had a belief system to call for help if something were to happen; especially with a house being kind of busy (with ghosts). This is a scary story, but one night I was in bed. The lights were off and I was awakened, and it was a really thick, blacker-than-black mist that came into my room, and it smelled like sulfur. And it came and it started to choke me--three times it started to choke me. The first time I called out, and my believe system was to call out to God so I called out to Jesus and it froze and it disappeared. And then the second time it came back and it's choking me. I can't breathe, I'm choking and there's pressure on my neck. There's the disgusting smell of sulphur, and there was just fear and death. I called out Jesus and it stopped. The last time it came back it's choking me and I'm like, 'God, I'm going to die'. And then I see out of the corner, it was like a movie. A light comes out of the corner, a bright light and it stops. The hands are still around my neck. And I hear a voice say, "What are you doing here. Don't you know she's mine? You have no right to be here." Then the voice said, "You are to leave and you're never to come back, and I'm placing angels in the corners of her room." I don't know if it's coincidence, but I ended up getting cancer years later in my throat. 
_____
I was on 'death watch' for a friend's dad who had pancreatic cancer. It was in the middle of the night and he was sent home from hospice. I was sitting in the chair and I'm kind of getting tired, and I see a shadow in the doorway. A black shadow. I remember shaking my head like 'I'm seeing this, but I can't be seeing this'. I wouldn't have thought anything about it had he not started to freak out in his bed. He had already been given medication to pass, to help him to relax and to go into his state, but he started freaking out in his bed when the shadow came into the room. I was struck with fear, and I just shut my eyes and then it was gone. I had to go home, and when I came back I heard that he had passed away. And the only thing that I can remember is, do you know the mummy they discovered where he looks shocked and scared? That was the state of this man. His face. Once he passed away, he just was struck with fear at whatever was coming in the doorway for him, even when he passed away. I got to see him. He was gone, his mouth was open, his eyes were wide open. He was horrified. Horrified. 
_____
I'm 30 now, but this happened when I was a teenager. I grew up in a very old building in Yonkers. I always knew that there was something that was not right with this building. My family all lived in the same building, so all the neighborhood kids would hang out in our house since we lived on the first floor.
     One day we invited one of our friends to come over. She was always into witchcraft and all these different things from a young age. So one day she came with a book bag and she pulls out this Ouija board. I didn't know what it was, and she was like, "I hear that you guys can talk to spirits with this." She was telling us about it and I was like, "Cool! Let's play it!" So, somehow everyone ends up coming into our apartment and there's maybe like thirteen of us in one little living room, and we're all like, 'Can this thing really work.'
     So, four or five of us gathered around and we started asking it questions. Four of us had our fingers on the planchette and it starts to move. I'm like, 'Come on guys. Stop messing around.' And they're like, 'I'm not moving it!' So we all start freaking out and we ask for a name. And it goes to J-A-V and none of us knew what it meant. My first name starts with a J and my last name starts with a V but I didn't put anything together. And so maybe about five minutes after, something in my brain just clicked. My parents lost a son at a very young age, and his initials are JAV, and I immediately became flooded with emotions and was just bawling. I asked if this was my brother and the planchette went to YES. When that happened I just walked away and I could not control my emotions. I had to stop.
     After that happened I came back. We used to have a reclinable chair and my dog was sitting at the top, she was laying at the top of the chair. It was one of those big old fashioned ind of chairs. Somebody asked, 'Was this real? If that was real can you please make a sign?' We lived on the first floor, but there was about 10 feet between the base of the building to our window. And it just sounded like a rock hit the window. My dog freaked out and started barking at the window. We were like, we're done!
     About a week later I was feeling really uneasy the remainder of the week and I ended up falling asleep in the same livingroom where we had played with the Ouija board. I was watching TV, I fell asleep and I wake up in the middle of the night. This was an old building, and there was an indented part where our sofa was, and there was a stained glass chandelier. I look up and this chandelier was spinning in circles. I just freaked out. I couldn't move, I couldn't scream, I couldn't get up. And then I just remember closing my eyes really tight and holding onto the pillows around me and I'm like, 'God if you're here please help me leave this room' and I just bolted out and ran to my room.
​     I didn't tell anybody until about seven years later. My mom was really pissed at me, even seven years later! That was the one experience I have that have manifested and I physically experienced something moving around me.
_____
I live in a house from 1775 with my parents, so it's really old. We hear creaky stuff, and doors, and my dad's a huge skeptic so he just writes it off. Nothing major has ever happened, but recently I was taking a nap in my parents' bed one day and I woke up to someone clapping right next to my face. Like LOUD. It jolted me awake. And I could feel the presence, almost the breeze from the clapping being right next to my ear. I was terrified. And I immediately called and told my parents, and my mom actually confessed a week later that she had the exact same thing happen to her with the clapping, and that she just wrote it off and never told anybody.  Nothing has happened since, but I saged the shit out of my house after that so that could be why! I did a lot of investigation into it because I was terrified. That was several months ago and nothing has happened since. That was the one thing that I ever personally experience that made me think, maybe this is really. So, I'm not so skeptical after that.  

Oxford Library -- Oxford, Connecticut 
​     I have a Ouija board story. The one and only time that I ever would participate in it. I went to Salve Regina College in Newport. This was back in the winter of 1986/87 when the college had just recently turned co-ed, so all the boys were in one dormitory—Carey Mansion where they filmed Dark Shadows. The mansion was about 150 years old at the time, and Salve Regina had a lease on it. They no longer do, and it’s no longer a dormitory. But at the time it was the boys dorm, and it was very creepy. Picture gargoyles and things like that. I always hated going there. I always had just a really creepy feeling when I went there, and everybody would say to me, ‘Oh, it’s just because it’s creepy looking. There’s really nothing going on there.’    
Picture
     So one night a group of girls decided to do the Ouija board at Carey Mansion, and they shamed me into coming with them. You know, like ’Come on, don’t be chicken’, So, I went. When we got there we found out that all the boys were out somewhere, but we decided to stay anyway and we went into what they called the study room. This was a big room that had three ten foot tall iron grate windows; you know, those real thick glass windows—and they never opened. They were always shut because it was impossible to open them.
     So, we went to the study room and there were ten girls; eight of us around the table, and two girls who sat on the table criss-cross with the Ouija board on their lap. Contrary to what you were saying before about how the Ouija board planchette in your story was going fast, these girls were going really slow with the Ouija board. So they started asking questions. They took forever. Literally like an hour to answer these questions: Is there a spirit here? — Yes. Are you a good spirit or a bad spirit? — Bad. What is your name? — And it spelled out ‘Sebastian’.
     So now we’re all starting to get a little antsy and tired and a little creeped out, so they were like “Sebastian, if you’re here show us a sign.” And nothing happens. They ask a second time, nothing happens. The third time they ask and I said, “Yeah, the window’s going to fly open next,” and as soon as the words left my mouth the window flew open and wind and little snowflakes came in, because it was flurrying outside. Well, it was pandemonium. I was at the edge of the table. I remember trying to get out the door, which was right there, and this girl who was about six feet tall and two hundred pounds landed on top of me and knocked the wind out of me.
     Everybody ran out and I’m laying in the hallway and I’m stunned, and all of a sudden there’s a man looking over me and it’s the priest who lives upstairs. He was from Ireland, Father Meade. And Father Meade was looking at me like, ‘What the hell is this girl doing on the floor?’ And I just pointed into the room and he looked and he just went white. He said, “How did you open that window?” and I said, “It flew open.” “Don’t like to me,” he said. “We’re not lying, Father. The window flew open.” And then I started to cry because now I’m totally freaked out. And he sees the Ouija board and I said, “I know it’s a sin!” — because here I am this Catholic girl. “It’s only a sin if you believe,” he said. And I’m like “I’m crying because I believe because the window just flew open!”
     Everybody left me there with Father Meade, and he just did not believe me. He had to call people to come and put the window back in place because it weighted so much. No one could ever open these windows, and he just could not believe that one just flew open by itself. I said to him, “Father, when we were doing the Ouija board I said it and the window flew open,” and he was looking at me like I lost my marbles.
     I never stepped foot in there again, and I use that story to tell young people never to touch the Ouija board. I probably didn’t sleep for two weeks after that. I’ve heard stories that Kerry mansion is haunted, you know, Urban legends. But I really experienced this. It happened to me many, many years ago and I’ll never forget it.
_____
     I’m a graphic designer and I was doing an ad for ‘Global Health’. I was looking at stock photography, and I was on the computer just looking at pictures of globes and stethoscopes—pages and pages trying to find the right image. There were 25 images I was looking at, and right in the center is a black image with white letters, and it said “Hi my love”. And I looked at it and I thought, ‘That’s so strange! Why would that be in here?’ So I just kept looking for pictures, then I did my ad and afterward I thought, “Whoa! That’s so weird” Because when I used to talk to my mom all the time, when we’d say goodbye she would say, “Goodbye my love”. My mom has been gone for about five years. So, I said, that was so strange so I searched it ‘Hi my love’ and I never found it again. So I think that definitely was a message from her, and I wasn’t even thinking of her at the time. But I guess she was thinking of me.
_____
     I’m a nurse, and this happened when I was just a graduate nurse and it was right after I lost my very first patient. I was driving home and I was upset, I was shaken and crying a bit about it. And as I was driving home I felt a pressure on my right shoulder, and all of a sudden I just started feeling a calming sensation coming over me after that. And then I knew that she was OK. She was telling me, “I’m OK”.
_____
     This happened in August of 2007 in Bristol, Connecticut. We live across the street from a funeral parlor. It has three stories, and they used to rent out the third floor, but the fire department stopped them from renting it out because it didn’t have the extra staircase, so nobody was living up there at the time.
     It was a hot night, and I was sleeping on our sun porch which is in the front of the house. It was a humid night and there was heat lightning, and this happened about 2 AM. I looked up at the funeral parlor and coming out of the top left hand window was a solid black shadow. It oozed out of the corner of one of the windows and just zipped around the front of the house, then around the corner of the house real fast. It was human shaped, and elongated (see illustration drawn by the person who told the story) because it came out of the corner of the window. It started out as a small shape, then grew into a long, full shape that zipped right around the corner of the house.
Picture
_____
​I’m in a dance group and we do a performance at a camp in Woodstock, Connecticut every fall. This year, when we were doing out performance our audio kept messing up. We were recording the whole thing and when the person who had the camera went to go back and check the recordings, half of it didn’t record. The camera was fine. It had batteries and everything, but half of it was gone.
     That morning, most of the girls were in my cabin. I was the den mom of the cabin, and I woke them all up that morning and they were all saying, “I have bruises on my arms” and I was like, “Oh girls, don’t worry about it. You’re probably just bruised up from something you did yesterday.” The girls aged from 14 to 16 years old. The bruises were just on their arms. And then I got up, and there was a scratch on my arm. It looked like a cat scratch. I said to the girls, “That’s weird because I work for a cat shelter, and I KNOW when I get a cat scratch.” They were like, “How do you know?” I told them, “I feel it when it happens. It really stings and burns. So, it’s weird because my cat didn’t scratch me before. And besides, I hadn’t been at the cat shelter for three days.” Again, it was just on my arm, and all of the girls had bruises just on their arms.
_____
I have two stories to share. They’re actually not mine, they’re my dad’s, but I corroborated them with his brother who is also in the story. So, the first one happened when my father was four-years-old and his older brother was six. They had recently moved to Southbury, Connecticut. My dad’s brother was annoyed at my father, so he took him for a walk and he ended up throwing him in a pond. The pond was iced over, and my dad fell in and went under the ice. He couldn’t find his way out because it was icy, so he kept banging on the ice and banging on the ice until he heard a voice. He doesn’t know how he got out of the pond, and there was nobody around when he got out of the pond. His brother got scared and took off and came back with grandma, and no clue who that was who lead him out of the water. He didn’t remember what the voice said, but he got the idea it was like, ‘Follow me’. He just knew that he had to follow the voice. My grandmother corroborated the story too, that my uncle came and got her to come get my father. And she thought that he would have been dead by the time they got there because it was a good 10 or 15 minutes from where they were. And when they got there, he was out and on top of the bank somehow.
     The second story took place when my dad was much older, when they were teenagers. My uncle was about sixteen-years-old, and my father was about thirteen or fourteen. They had a friend named Charlie, and they lived at the top of the hill where I grew up in Southbury in the Berkshire Estates area. There’s a community where they have a lot of summer homes that they then modified and turned into larger homes, but there were still a lot of one room summer shacks that were kind of abandoned in the back woods area. So, my dad and his friends used to play in them a lot. As teenagers, they’d go in there and roughhouse and put their comic books in there and that kind of stuff.    
​     So, there was one of these one room shacks that they used to go to all the time. So one day, my father, his brother and their friend Charlie met at this house, and they were playing for a good hour and a half in this room talking, doing their same-old same-old. They finally went to leave. My uncle was in the front, my father was in the middle, and Charlie was in the back talking to my father. At one point as they were walking, my father goes to turn around to answer Charlie and Charlie’s not behind him. Then seconds later, up ahead at the top of the hill is Charlie coming down the hill. So who had my father and my uncle been talking to for the past hour and a half? He wasn’t even there. After they saw him, they made him go to his house where his parents were. His parents had just let him go from whatever chores he was doing that morning. That’s when he became a believer in demons and things like that. Because he was like, “What was my brother and I talking to for an hour and a half?”

Mark Twain Library -- Redding, Connecticut
     My in-laws bought a place down in Toccoa, Georgia. They had told us that there was something in the house that always turned off the refrigerator, the lights would go on and off, the microwave would go on by itself. One time the Jacuzzi went on by itself and wouldn't turn off again. So, my mother-in-law would talk to me about it, and I said, 'You know, if you ask them to stop -- see what happens". So one night she said, "OK, it's nine o'clock at night. Stop it with the lights, I want to go to sleep." Sure enough, he turned off the lights, and they didn't come on again until the next day. 
     My in-laws later learned that one of the contractors' employee's fell while they were building the porch off of the master bedroom. He fell right outside of our bedroom window. They didn't know this when they bought the house. The neighbors told them after, so it was something they learned later. They also discovered that some of the neighbors had paranormal experiences in there homes too. 
     This past April we were there, and we were packing to come home the next morning and my little one was in the shower. When he got out he looked in the bathroom mirror and said, "Mommy, who is this man who's in the window?" What happened was, he got out of the shower, and he looked in the mirror and saw this guy. He said it was a younger guy. He didn't seem bothered by it, but I was very upset. 
     I just knew that it was the guy who had died while building this house. So, I got very upset. I was like, 'How dare you! It's one thing to do things to adults, but not to a little boy.' So I did a clearing and said to this spirt, "You've got to go. You're not alive any more. You've passed." My intention was for him to find peace, that's all I wanted him to do.
     After that, we went downstair to our bedroom and there was a really strong feeling of a presence in the room. It was a really heavy feeling. I could tell that he was there and that he just didn't want to leave. So I finally said, "You've got to go. But if you're not going to go, and you're not going to go to the light, that's up to you, but you can NOT be in this house. There's the light, just go. Go find happiness, go find your peace." And just like that, he left. The minute he left, everything just calmed. You could totally feel it. Since then they haven't had anything happening in the house. So I'm sure he's gone! 
_____
     I moved into a new house, and before I took the place I asked the landlord, "Has anyone died here?" and he said, "Well, yeah. We were going to tell you that. He died of natural causes, and he was a musician." So, a perfect fit. Musician. All the right things, and the family believes that he lead me to this house.
     So I move in, and I set up my stereo. I have these heavy, heavy little speakers and I put them on either side of the mantle piece. Everything's set up. Ten days later, a friend of mine came to visit. It's Memorial Day weekend, I've been there about ten days and all of a sudden there's a crash downstairs. I look around and think, what was that? The cat is on the bed. This is weird. The next morning I go to my friend, "Hey, did you hear that crash last night?" and he said, "Yeah, I heard that. That was weird." It turns out the speaker got knocked off of the mantle piece and crashed. It still works, but it's dented up. It somehow got pushed off of the mantle. Now, a cat this big couldn't push something that heavy off even if he was up there. The speaker was right up against the wall. A cat could not have swiped it away from the wall and knocked it to the ground. These are heavy, heavy speakers. They could prop one of those metal doors open they're so heavy. 
     A few weeks ago, I feel a cat on my bed, but it wasn't my cat. He was downstairs. This past Sunday, I'm in the bathroom and I see the back end of a cat go from the bedroom to the guest room. And I'm thinking, 'That's weird. How did Nigel get up here and me not see him?' So I go into the guest room and look around, but there's nobody in there. I go downstairs, and Nigel is exactly where I left him. Ghost cat! Probably my late 'Finnie' found me.
     But there's been some really interesting stuff happening. And the cool thing is that people walk into this house and they go, 'Wow! There's a lot of great, beautiful energy here.' So, whomever is lingering. Maybe he didn't like the speaker choices. I don't know. He was a musician. Maybe he's saying, "These aren't good enough! Get off! I didn't have this crap here when I lived here!" But like I said, everybody who comes in says there's great energy, and I'm very happy there. I think that whomever is hanging around is good and friendly. 
     My family has a lot of good stories about their time doing seances. One time in this old, old building that still exists in New York city where my parents lived, they were all doing a seance one night in the 60's. There were all these struggling actors in the room. Everybody was trying to make it in New York, and they all did a seance. And the table lifted up and went all the way up to the ceiling. And then they were like, 'OK, we're done!". 
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Archives

    January 2021
    November 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed