Welcome to the Haunted Happenings Newsletter! In this first issue, I present all of the stories that audience members shared at my October 2017 lecture series. All stories are in the audience members' own words, and each new story is indicated by a horizontal line. There is a comment box at the very end of the page, so feel free to leave your thoughts or questions. Enjoy!
REED MEMORIAL LIBRARY -- CARMEL, NEW YORK
I work in a nursing home in the area. I’m a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) and I usually work the 3PM to 11PM shift, but this one night I was asked to stay over for the 11PM to 7AM shift. At around 2:30 in the morning I was changing one of the patients and I had the door open. There was only one other CNA and one nurse working with me. The other CNA was off the floor, and the nurse was sitting in the dayroom down the hall. I was changing the person when out of the corner of my eye I heard a sound like “Huhh” and somebody walked right past the door in the hallway. I thought it was the either the other nurse or the other CNA. I came out of the room when I was done and I walked down and checked the two rooms at the end of the hallway. No one was there. I didn’t think anything of it, but later on I told some other people I work with and they told me that they also experienced the same thing. Other things have happened in that facility. In the bathroom are call bells, the kind that have a little switch next to the toilet and you have to pull it down to ring for assistance. There have been times where there are two patients rooming together who can’t get out of bed, and their bathroom call-bell will be pulled down for no reason.
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I had something in my old home. There were times when I could be in the car or in the house and all of a sudden there would be the smell of cigar smoke. I’d be in the car and I’d get a full smell of cigar smoke. And the same way it came in, it would just disappear. One time my son Julian was in the car with me and I said, “Do you smell that?” and he smelled it too. I would tell my husband, but he doesn’t believe in anything.
One time I was preparing dinner and I was ready to set the table. My two sons and my husband and I were in the dining room and the whole entire room just smelled like cigar. And I said, “Well, we’re having dinner. If you want to join us you’re welcome to sit down, but we’re not stopping.” And the same way as before, it just came and then it was gone.
I had a great-grandmother who used to work in tobacco fields, and I also have a friend of mine that when I was going to college, he always smoked cigars. So it could be either of them, but I don’t know which one.
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Do you know “Cold Spring Depot Restaurant”? I was having dinner there with my daughter and was waiting on line to pay. They had a big roaring fire going, so I shouldn’t have felt cold. But I told my daughter, “I have to leave, it’s freezing.” And everyone looked at me and said, “We’re complaining that we’re hot”. The fellow behind the counter said, “You must have felt, and I forget her name, he said but it’s funny this is Sunday night and Wednesday night is the time that she always comes. I thought he was just joking, and I still think it’s a way of them luring people in on slow nights! Apparently, she was a young woman who was abused by her husband, and she was trying to escape and she was waiting at Cold Spring depot which used to be a train station, waiting to get on the train, but he caught up with her and he stabbed her to death.
And we get in the car and were driving home and I said to my daughter, “Ghosts don’t follow you home, right?”. And I didn’t know, and she said, “Oh, you’re ridiculous. You probably didn’t feel anything anyway.” So I get home, and my husband traveled for a living at the time. So it was just my daughter and me and she was going back to college that night. I was going to be home alone, and when she left I kept getting that creepy feeling and I turned around and I said, “You better not have followed me home. Because I’m alone in this house except for a dog, and the dog is not friendly.” I went to bed that night, and I have an over the door hanger that you kind of hang clothes on that need to be ironed. All of a sudden all the clothes fell off of the hangers, with the hangers on them fell on the floor, which is hard to do because you would have to lift them up. And I get up and I look. And I think I was more angry than anything. I said, “Now these are all full of dog hairs and I have to wash them again.” And I turned around and I said, “You don’t live here. You have to go back where you belong and not bother me.” And after that I didn’t feel anything.
NOTE: The following is posted on the Cold Spring Depot Restaurant website: “According to legend, on Wednesday nights, the main dining room has one extra guest, who did not make a reservation. In 1898, a local woman learned that her husband planned to kill her. The unfortunate lady rushed to the train depot to catch the 10:15 train to Poughkeepsie, but was apprehended by her husband, who stabbed her on a bench in the waiting room two minutes before the train's arrival. Today, the former waiting room serves as the restaurant's main dining room and locals claim that at 10:13 on Wednesday nights, a cold draft wafts through the section of the room where she was killed.
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My grandson Zander committed suicide a few years ago. It was such a terrible tragedy. A few years after he passed, his three younger brothers asked their mother, ‘Can we get a dog? ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘If you get a dog, what are you going to name it? The boys said, “Zander”. ‘No, says the mother. You cannot name the dog after your brother.’
A few years later my daughter met another couple who had lost a child and became friends with them. You know, I think that couples who lose children kind of find each other. This couple were going to Long Island to a psychic, and they invited my daughter and me. I didn’t really believe in it but we went. So the other couple had their reading. The psychic knew nothing other than they had lost a child. During the reading the psychic turned to my daughter and said, “Zander says. He’s very happy. That you should know that he has no stress. He’s met relatives and he’s having a good life. And you can name the dog Zander.” Can you believe it? How could anyone know something like this?
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I went to a psychic and she said to me, “I see that your son joined the Police force because I see him in his blue uniform marching.” And I said, “No, because he’s up in college.” She said, “Well, I’m seeing him marching in his blue uniform.”
I came home and my husband said, “John just called. He wants you to call him back.” So, I called my son and when he go on the phone he said, “I want to tell you that I just joined the Air Force”. The psychic saw my son marching in his blue uniform right before I found out that he had joined the Air Force. Isn’t that something?
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I was at Smalley’s Restaurant. It’s supposed to be haunted and the owner, Tony, often tells ghost stories to the customers but that night he said, “I’m not going to be telling ghost stories tonight.” So I went home, and the cats came over to me and wanted something to eat. I got out of my chair and proceeded to go over to the place where their food is. I’m not kidding you -- and I swear on my mother’s grave that this happened -- something hit me right here (on the side), and I mean HIT me. I mean BANG. I got hit here and then all of a sudden I felt two hands on my back push me down onto the floor. They pushed me down and held me there, and they wouldn’t let me get up. I was on the floor and I was thinking, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I was trying and trying to get up, and then finally I got up. All of a sudden I felt this burning sensation right here (indicates her stomach). And I’m thinking, ‘Now what the hell is this?’ I lifted up my shirt and there were three scratches, and I mean scratches. Deep, red scratches. Something followed me home from that restaurant. I had to show the restaurant owner, Tony. He thought I was joking at first. I said, “Tony, does this look like I’m joking?” and I showed him the scratches. And my other friend saw them and said, “Holy crap, what happened to you?”
A couple of nights later my friend called me and I told her what was going on. She said, “Alright we can take care of this right now.” We did the prayer of Archangel Michael together over the phone, and the scratches went right away. They just disappeared, and nothing else happened after that. You have to protect yourself when you go to places that are supposed to be haunted, or even to cemeteries because things can follow you home. I know, because it happened to me just the way I told you.
OXFORD LIBRARY -- OXFORD, CONNECTICUT
Does a spirit have to be in a shape of a human, or can it be like smoke? I saw white. And it just went straight across.
Barry: Was it human shape, or just a shape?
It was freeform and it just went across the back where I was sitting and I had somebody over that had just lost their wife. So, I was just wondering if I did see that.
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Have you ever had a case where there’s been like, a spirit mimicking a person’s voice? Here's is a two-part story about something mimicking us in our house.
Well, the first part was my husband was away on business and the kids were in the family room. Now, I did not hear this because I was doing the dishes, but the kids came running in to me and they said, “Oh my God mommy, did you hear that?” I’m like, “What, what did you hear.” They said, “We heard daddy’s chair pull away from the desk, and we heard his voice say, “Hey ... bed!” as if to come upstairs to go to bed. And, of course, Jim wasn’t home and they wouldn’t believe me that he wasn’t home. So I actually had to call him to assure them that he wasn’t in the house. Then, about three weeks later I came home and my daughter Samantha was upstairs sleeping, and I heard her in our family room say, “Hi Mommy! How are you? Did you have a good morning?”
Daughter: “I would never say anything like that!”
It was like a sing-songy way that she talks sometimes, and I called out, “Oh, I’m doing good honey.” You know, this that and the other thing. I went around the corner and all of a sudden my footsteps slowed down because I realized that she was not there. And I’m like, wait a minute, she’s not talking. She’s not in there. And then I even called out, “Samantha, you’re not in that room are you?” Dead silence. She was upstairs sleeping, because it was in the morning time and she was sleeping late. I told her all about it and she is still creeped out that something would mimic her speaking voice.
Daughter: I’m freaked out by it.
And my husband is actually freaked out that there was something that could mimic his speaking voice.
Barry: So you’re the last one to go, right?!
They haven’t heard from me yet!
Daughter: They haven’t mimicked my brother’s voice either.
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I used to rent an apartment up here in Christian Street, and we moved in when my son was about four months old. He had his own room, and we had a baby monitor in the room so we could hear him if he woke up. During the time we lived there we had experienced a number of strange things, like lights turned on and off, and sometimes you would feel like somebody was watching you, especially in the bathroom. Real creepy.
One night I put my son to bed. Around that time we had been trying the 'cry-it-out' method because he was still young, about six seven months. I was in the living room folding clothes watching TV and his dad was in the bedroom. All of a sudden my husband comes out of the bedroom yelling, “What is the matter with you? Why would you say that? Why would you talk to him like that?” I’m like, “What are you talking about? I’m here folding clothes?” He said, “You didn’t say anything?” I said, “No!” He goes, “I just heard over the monitor somebody saying ‘Shut the F_ _ _ up’ to Logan”
We actually called the people from TAPS and had them come investigate the place, and they said that it was more connected to me than to the place. But, there was something in my son’s room, especially above the crib that was not that pleasant.
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I wanted to ask you, are any of the pictures you show in your presentation actual pictures that you had taken? Or that you knew they were associated with a house in your research? Because you had the picture of a young boy with blonde hair, and you said that it was from Ridgefield, and I was at an estate sale in Ridgefield and as I was leaving, I had my daughter and my son in the car and we went by a wooded area and I saw a boy that looked just like that. A little blonde haired boy standing in the woods, and he was wearing older clothing. He had a white button-down on, and he either had knickers on, or riding pants on or something, and he was just standing in the woods facing out into the road. And there was nothing around. No reason why you would see a kid dressed like that. And when we left, when we passed him I said to my daughter, “Did you just see someone standing there?” And she said, “Yeah, I saw a little boy standing there.” And we turned around and went back and there was nobody there. But even my daughter said that he was wearing old fashioned clothing, and he looked just like that boy when you were saying the Ridgefield story, and that’s where the estate sale was. It freaked me out when I saw your photo. Like, “I’ve seen that boy!”
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I lived in the house that one of my relatives built, and right after my daughter was born I started getting these thoughts that were not my thoughts. Like, I saw a rope. I didn’t physically see it. I saw it in my mind. Does that make sense? And I'd have the thought “Oh, I want to kill myself. I want to kill myself.” And I was thinking, like I was saying that “I want to kill myself” Now, I just had a baby and I wanted this baby. I had exactly what I wanted, a little girl and a little boy. This wasn’t my thought at all.
I would get so upset that I couldn’t stay in the house and I’d have to go to my mom's or to the neighbors and take a nap and get out. And then I found out what this was all about. Growing up, my mom had told me that my great grandmother had committed suicide. But she always told me that she had drowned herself in the brook. Later, my sister showed me a newspaper article that said that my great grandmother had hung herself. And she had lived in that house. So I was wondering if she was trying to tell me that she had hung herself, somehow she wanted me to know by showing me the rope and putting those thoughts in my head about suicide.
I also had a dream when I was in that house about the borders that had lived there. I didn’t know anything about them, or that there even had been borders there but I dreamed about these people. A few weeks later I saw my sister and I told her I dreamed of the borders. My sister told me that there really had been borders in the house, and that our mother had been molested by some of them when she was little. My mother had never told me that, but I saw these people that had once lived there in my dream.
Unrelated to that house, when I was in Baltimore Maryland I once saw (the ghost of) a man walking up the stairs. It was a Civil War house that had been turned into a bed and breakfast. I had walked out in the hall to go to the bathroom, and I saw him walk right up the stairs just like you, just as solid as you are. And then he just disappeared. I was like, I must have seen a ghost! But he wasn’t scary.
Barry: Did he look Civil War-ish or was he modern.
No, he didn’t look Civil War-ish. He had like a flannel shirt on. I thought he was a guest. But he wasn’t.
Barry: How long did you see him?
Long enough to watch him walk up the stairs!
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My grandmother lives in a very historical home. It's one of the first homes built in the town of Pawling, New York. Very haunted. Every December 21st in the middle of the night there’s a gunshot in the basement. The butler was murdered in the basement for sleeping with one of the daughters. So, some things that happen are tied to the history of the house. But when we were kids, there was a man that would hang around the kids all the time. My grandmother swears he was harmless. We would talk to him, we would play with him. But only the kids.
Barry: Do you remember seeing him?
I don’t really remember. I was very young. But there’s an apartment on the 4th floor. I grew up there until second grade, and my grandmother said that I would always talk about this man. “I’m going to go play with the man. I’m going to play with the man,” I would say. And I’d be in my room playing.
My cousin’s family moved in when we moved out, and I was there one day when I was sick from school. My cousin was a baby and she was crying, and then she started laughing and I got up to look and I said to my grandmother, “It’s just the old man”.
All the kids. There are sixteen of us grandkids and my grandmother has stories about all of us seeing the old man, or playing with the old man, or talking to the old man. Like, we thought that he just lived there. There are many different ones there. My grandmother loves them though. And she swears that when she dies she’s joining them and staying in the house. She doesn’t want anything to happen to them because they’re her friends and she’s going to be with them forever.
Barry: She’s got her man picked out!
Woman: Yeah!
THE MARK TWAIN LIBRARY
Two years ago my husband and I went to visit the Curtis house in Woodbury Connecticut. It is supposed to be the oldest and very haunted inn. And we were looking forward to possibly seeing ghosts. We stayed overnight. I’m also an enthusiastic antique collector. That’s the road that has tons of antiques. So we stayed, and people kept telling us about all of the ghosts we would see. We didn't see squat, so I was kind of disappointed. The next day we went antiquing and we went to a bunch of places and didn’t see much. We came at the end of the road to a large mall antique stores with multiple antiques. I went through looking for miniatures, and I ended up on the top floor. There was one of those clothes racks that’s in a circle that you can spin around, and it had old communion, wedding and prom dresses on it. Mostly white. And I was looking through, kind of spinning it around when all of a sudden I got a sense that one of the dresses had something in it! And it was just like this visceral “Oh, I don’t like this at all!” I couldn't get out of there fast enough.
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Several years ago I moved from Millford, Connecticut to Windham. The house in Vermont was built in 1805. It’s an old farm house. It was owned by the Chapman family. It had dirt floors, a three story barn, and a carriage house. So about four years ago my neighbor across the street came over. She came over, and I was standing in the doorway, and the stairs were behind me. I opened the door and said, “Mary! How nice to see you!” And I noticed that when she greeted me she kind of stepped back. I said, “Oh, come on in. Come in!” And she goes, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s okay, that’s okay. I know you’re busy.” And she turned around and left. And I was thinking, ‘That’s really weird!’. A couple of weeks later I ran into her and I said, “Mary, you should have come in the other day. Don’t worry about me being busy. You could have come in.” And she said, “No, you had company.” And I said, “No I didn’t.” She said, “Yeah, there was a man standing on top of the stairwell. And he had on farmer jeans and a beard, like an old farmer.” And I said (laughing), “Well Jesus, is he single and around my age?!”
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I had this really weird dream where I kind of predicted my great-grandmother’s death. Before she died I dreamt that I was at her funeral. She died soon after, and when I went to the funeral everything in the dream happened the way that I dreamed about it. And then had a dream about my friend’s funeral before he died. After he died, I went to the funeral and the same things happened at the funeral that I saw in my dream. It kind of freaked me out!
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There was this house that I stayed in. I was on the second floor. It was built back in the 17 or 1800s. The history that I know of, the family did get killed. It was from one of the wars, whether it was WWI or Civil War when ships were coming in. The room that I stayed in, they had a dimmer light that you had to dim it yourself. It was on a high, high, high ceiling. The doors were very tall. Taller than the Mark Twain Library doors, and at least double thickness of those. And usually they would close on their own. Not slam, but close on their own. And I stayed there one night. And I was sleeping on my stomach and I felt something, a tap on my back. My legs were flat, but my head had come off the pillow. I reached for my glasses and I noticed there was a dim light. I wiped my eyes before I put on my glasses. I know I saw something, which was why I put on my glasses. And when I put on my glasses the door was wide open. But before that I saw the light and looked up at the ceiling because I something straight there. I saw a little girl. The door was wide open. I saw a little girl. She had to be between 8 and 11 years old. The only thing I saw was the back, and she had a gown on. She wasn’t facing me. She was turned the other way while the door was open. It was an off-grey-ish white. You didn’t see white or grey, but between those colors. She had long hair down to here, the arms were down to the side and the legs were spread like this. The door was wide open. And when I said, “Can I help you? Can I help you?” She started gliding very slowly as the door was slowly closing near her. By the time that she was at the door frame. Like I said, there was at least 4 to 6 inches left open, and then when I noticed she was gone the door started to totally close.
Barry: Before she got to the door, how far had she glided toward the door?
Where I was sleeping, she was right in the center of the room. I would say she glided at least a foot. And she was at least a foot and a half away from me, from the bed. Because she was in the center. The light was in the center. I mean, it was, the room that I was in was very tall ceilings. It was just unbelievable. The house was over 100 years old.
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Early one morning I was walking in the Waterbury area toward the Brass City Mall. I went inside and as I entered I was looking around and I started walking around the top. You know in malls where there’s a railing that goes around and you can walk around and look down? That part of the mall. When I got half-way around this railing I stopped to tie my sneakers, and when I stood up very slowly, that’s when I saw a ghost. At first it was only from the shoulders up and it was a man. The gentleman had a face, I could see it. He looked like a Native American man. The face was very thin, and he had long hair. I could see the ripple of the nose, the nose was small, and he was was a greyish-white color similar to the ghost girl I just told you about. When I started moving, I would keep my eye on him and he was moving. And as it started moving, the body started appearing. He had a shirt on, pants and shoes. He was dressed in modern clothing. So as the body started appearing, I just couldn’t believe it! It was so amazing.
I got all the way around to where I had started, and I began to walk toward the exit. I stopped again to look at him, and when I looked over at him this gentleman was moving around and around the railing, like speeding around and around. I couldn’t believe how fast he was going, and then he stopped. When he stopped, I looked at him and he looked at me. Then when I was heading toward the door I turned my head again, he was gone.
Barry: Did you get a sense that he saw you.
Yes. One hundred percent. He didn’t say anything, but I felt as if he was saying something to me. But I’m not going to say what I know he said to me, but it was just an experience and beautiful. It was just immaculate. I think what it was is that this gentleman told me something, I did what he told me to do, and here I am in Redding talking to you!
MT. KISCO LIBRARY -- MT. KISCO, NEW YORK
I lived in Mt. Kisco right at the top of Route 133, and across from the house they used in the movie “Ragtime”. Our house was right across the street and was 170 years old. It was actually my brother’s house. He bought the house. There are 27 rooms in the house and my parents lived on the third floor, I lived on the second floor, and my brother lived on the first floor. One day he was painting and all of a sudden he heard footstep. He looked over at the doorway where he heard the footsteps and he saw this white thing go past the door. He left his paintbrushes and everything out and he got out of there! He never told anybody for years.
We moved here in 1978, and it was my daughter who saw the ghost first. It was a woman with a flowing dress. I told her, “There’s no way Mary. You’re just seeing something,” and she said, “Mom, I know I saw it.” There were two bedrooms connected. You just go up two stairs and there was a door between them. Whenever the was a sighting, my daughter’s bedroom would be like walking into a freezer. It was so cold in there. Many people saw the ghost, and it was always like I said, when there was a sighting that room would be so cold. My daughter used to jump out of bed and turn the light on because she was always so nervous in that room.
Then my husband saw it and my daughter said, “Mom, remember I told you about that?” I told my brother what my daughter and my husband saw and my brother said, “That’s what happened to me when we moved in! I saw it too, but I was afraid to tell anybody. I thought they would think I was drunk!” He didn’t admit it until after he heard my daughter’s story.
After my daughter moved out of that room, my son inherited it when he was a teenager. We always knew when there was a sighting because we would find him sleeping on the couch and he wouldn’t go back in his room.
But it was always when there was a sighting that that room was like ice, ice, ice cold. The radiator would be burning hot but it would be really freezing cold in there. One day my son felt this icy touch on his face. Another time he felt her sitting on his bed. He thought the ghost liked him because he’d wake up and feel something sitting on his bed, and it would move down. When that happened he got right out of that room!
Now, my mother and father never believed it, but one day they saw it go past up the stairs. They just saw the shape. They knew it was the woman, but it was like a ghostly white dress. It really scared my mother.
All different things that happened in that house. One time I lost my earrings. I said, “I know I had them on the dresser”. I couldn’t find them for three weeks. Then one day I found them right on the floor right where my feet go when I stand up. I mean, there’s no way they could have been there for three weeks. I would have stood right on them. Different things like that happened. Little things would disappear, and then they appeared in a different place.
Other odd things happened all the time. Like, we would come home and find crackers or cookies open on the table, and no one had been home. Different things, I can’t even remember all of them. No one ever heard anything, voices or anything like that. We just saw the white shape go by. It was fun though. We didn’t feel threatened or anything, but it was crazy some of the things that happened in that house. I never believed in ghosts until we lived in that house!
We sold the house in 2001, and the people who bought it changed it to a two family house. Recently, when they were selling it, they had a tag sale. And I thought, ‘I have to go in and see what it looks like.’ I went to the tag sale and met the tenants who had been living on our floor and we started talking, and they had seen the ghost too! They had the same incidents with the ghost. They described it looking the same way.
My daughter used to babysit at the Ragtime house which was right across the street from us. It’s a big Victorian house with turrets. She used to get very nervous babysitting because there’s this little room up at the top of the turret where the kids liked to play. My daughter would turn off the light in that little room, and she’d go up later and the light would be on. The front door was really heavy and had heavy leaded glass in it. They would be sitting there and all of a sudden the front door would open even though it had been locked. The nanny in that house had stories about the ghost tickling her feet when she was laying in bed. And one day she was looking out the window from the second floor, looking down into the yard and she could see little kids in old fashioned period clothing. She could hear them giggling, and she watched them throwing the leaves that they had raked all day out of the bags and into piles on the lawn. She went out the next morning and the leaves were out of the bags and in piles on the grass.
SOMERS LIBRARY - SOMERS, NEW YORK
I was a nurses aid in Somers Manor nursing home before they built the beautiful new facility. It was just the nurse and I on the night shift, because that’s how they staffed it. Most of the patients were not really conscious; they were very senile and had dementia. When the other nurse went to dinner I was there by myself. A little while later I started hearing the patients getting restless, which was very unusual. The lights we turned down low because the patients were sleeping, and I looked down the hall and saw an orb -- a very white, light orb that I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. And it went right down the hall, I got chills, and it went into one of the rooms where there were about six patients. And I went in and just got to the doorway and I couldn’t go any further and then it disappeared. I know I saw it. I guess it could have been something from the outside possibly, but I don’t believe so!
Barry: How big was it?
It was like the size of a beach ball.
Barry: How long did you see it for?
About 45 seconds to a minute. It floated down the hall. I couldn’t wait for that nurse to come back from dinner!
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A lot of things happened in my house. It was built in 1973. No one died in the house, and the first weekend we got there, my son and his friend were sleeping in the family room. Big strong guys, both about 20 years old. In the morning I came in and they had blankets over their heads and I said, “What’s the matter?” And they go, “Oh, we saw a light in the hallway.” And I said, “It was probably a headlight” And he said, “No mom, it was a light and then it disappeared.” And then we started to hear sounds like a china closet with glasses falling. We couldn’t find anything. People would hear it and I’d say, “It’s just the ghost - don’t worry about it.” Then, my son’s girlfriend heard a party going on downstairs. She thought it was me and my friends, but then she realized that I was in bed. She was white as a ghost in the morning. She was so scared.
But the weirdest thing was, one Thanksgiving the whole family was in the dining room. My daughter’s nanny was there and I had just told her the story about how things would fly off the wall and all kind of things. And she goes to my other daughter and says, “Your mom just told me the story about things flying off the wall.” Near the corner of the dining room I have a picture of George Washington, and it goes FLYING off the wall as soon as she said that. It almost hit my grandson.
Barry: How far did it travel?
It had a drop leaf table underneath it, and it went past the drop-leaf table and onto the floor. I also found candlesticks, candles under the dining room table. There’s an area rug there, and my son-in-law who pooh-poohs everything. I said, “Let’s try it and see what happens if it falls down.” So I hit the candle as hard as I could and it fell right down and stayed right on the hardwood floor. But it wasn’t anything ominous. I liked it. And I felt that they were here before me, so we can share the space.
Barry: Did you buy the house used?
Yes, but my neighbor said that no one else ever said anything about it. Then I came to Somers and I asked the town historian and she said the only thing she could tell me is that there farmhouses there before. One day we saw a teacup moving. My daughter and I just watched it and it kept going and going and going. But it’s been quiet for a long time, so maybe they moved on by themselves.
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This is going back 25 years at least. We lived in Yonkers and we had a house that was 75 years old. And I always felt that the upstairs of the house was a little weird. I always would get weird feeling in this front room. Negative feelings. My husband took a photo of me once, just standing in that room and right in front of my body there was a spot that was out of focus. It was like greyish white smoke. The whole rest of the picture was crystal clear and there was just an out of focus spot right there. And one other time in that same room, my kids were very little and we were just sitting on the floor playing a game. Nothing was wrong in the room, we were just sitting there for a while playing a game and all of a sudden I jump up and right underneath me where I was seeing were a whole bunch of giant carpenter ants. All of a sudden they appeared right there where I was sitting. It very was weird!
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Actually I have two stories, but when we moved to our house here in Somers, my daughter and I sometimes see things that other people don’t. And, we’re moving into the house and I knew the people before us, the woman had died in the house. And we start both of us seeing this, like a flash going by us. And there was this smell like a woman’s perfume. And this went on for weeks. She saw it, I saw it. It was all around the bedroom, the master bedroom area. Finally I say to her, “Your husband doesn’t live here anymore.” We stopped seeing it.
And the other story is kind of a psychic experience. We had a dog for 12 years and the vet said to us, “She has a tumor and she’s not going to make it. We can’t take this out. Do you want to give her chemotherapy?” So I’m trying to decide whether we want to do this or not, to put her through that. I’m a realtor, so somebody called me to look at her house to put it on the market. Never met this woman before. She seemed like a very interesting person. She had stained glass that she was working on and other kinds of artwork. And she suddenly turns to me and says, “Oh, and I’m psychic. You have a dog that has passed.” And I said, “Well, I had a dog when I was a kid.” She said, “No, you HAVE a dog that has passed. It’s a white dog with little marking on it. And when you saw it you said, ‘This is the dog for me.’” I came home and said to my husband, “No chemotherapy. We just have to let her go.” That was the strangest experience I’ve ever had.
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I have an Ouija board story. Actually I have two. I worked at Bronx State Hospital, and we worked in the lab and down the hall was the morgue. So, we used to play with the Ouija board, we were like nineteen years old. We were playing with it, asking it questions and all of a sudden both of us picked our hands up at the same time and that little thing (planchette) kept going and going and going, right off the board. We both had felt a pressure on our hands. I folded it up and threw it in the garbage right then and there.
Another time my cousin had an Ouija board. It was a holiday and all the family was there, and the Ouija board asked for me. So I got on the Ouija board with my cousin and she asked the board, “Why wouldn’t you work with Donna?” and it spelled out, “Donna is a spy. She spied on John.” Now, my cousin John had gone on his first date the night before, and nobody knew it but my aunt and my cousin followed him to the movie theater and spied on him. And nobody knew it. So, what the Ouija board said was very weird, and very true.
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I have a medium story. I went to this one woman in Connecticut, and she told me some things that could have been. I wanted to believe, but I was very skeptical. And so she told me some things that were correct, and then she told me, “Somebody died, a young boy.” And I said, “Yes, my nephew.” And she said, “Yeah, it’s something (makes a gesture to the chest)” and I said, “Yeah, he drowned.” Then she said, “There’s something with his left arm.” I said, “No, no.” “I’m telling you there’s something with his left arm.” I said, “No”. So she goes on and on and she says this and that and she stops again and says, “There’s something with his left arm,” and I said, “I don't’ know.” And I guess I gave her a look and she said, “You don’t believe me. I’m not going to charge you, you can go, but remember the left arm, will you?” So I went home and first I asked his mom and she said, “No, there’s nothing with the left arm.” And I thought, ‘There you go’. Then I asked my nephew who had come up and he said, “Of course Aunt Monica, don’t you remember the left arm? Right before he drowned, for some reason he put his arm through this glass. And he got a cut. A really bad cut, which is the reason why he didn’t go someplace. Yeah, it was his left arm!” Before he told me this I thought, ‘If there’s anything about his left arm, this is the one time I’ll believe.’ So I went to my sister-in-law and I said, “You didn’t know about this left arm thing?” and she said, “Well, it was a cut on his wrist. I didn’t think of it as his arm.” Now, this medium had told me twice about the left arm, and she didn’t charge me …
Barry: Did you go back and pay her?
I tried, but she won’t answer my calls! (audience laughs) Seriously! I emailed her, I apologized to her -- not that I did anything, it was just the look I gave her I guess. She will not get back to me, so what can I say? I tried! But the left arm -- and I didn’t even know! Neither did his mother, or at least she didn’t think about it.
RIDGEFIELD LIBRARY -- RIDGEFIELD, CONNECTICUT
We had an English bulldog and she was eleven and had cancer, and three days before we put her to sleep, every morning she started waking up at 5:30 and started barking. Two days after we put her down, my husband and I woke up. She barked. She absolutely barked. We both sat up and said, “Did you hear Daisy bark?” And that was it and we never heard from her again.
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I did one of those touristy witch hunts in Salem Massachusetts. It was midnight, and we went with one of those tour groups into a firehouse that was still a working firehouse, but it also had an entrance to a slave underground railroad. We went down with the little light things, and we went around with those. Some people hears something in a corner, I never heard it. Then we turned the lights off and we put lasers out on the ground to see if we could see any movement, we didn’t but people kept hearing things in the corner, which I still never heard. But there was a spirit there named “Crawler” and we were asking him questions. At one point we did that knock (Shave and a haircut -- ) and we said, “Crawler, if you’re there can you finish that knock?” and we didn’t hear anything. Afterward we went upstairs and listened to the recording we had made and we heard a voice say, “Do it again.” He absolutely said it. He said, “Do it again.”
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I was traveling on business. I was by myself, in a fairly large hotel in San Francisco. And they gave me this big suite room, by myself, no reason to do it. They gave me this really big room. So, I was working late and I was in a room bigger than this room, it was like a living room. I was in the corner writing, working on something and I had a bad feeling. So I turned on the radio because I was getting creeped out. So, nothing happens. I shut everything and go to sleep.
As soon as I fall asleep I hear this metal smash, like BANG. And I pop up and I’m like, ‘What was that?!’ All the windows were shut, it was the corner of the building so it had a lot of windows. I look around the windows, I don't see anything. I look through the door down the long hallway and don’t see anything. I go back to sleep. Another 40 minutes or so, same thing again. BANG!! I get up, do the whole darn thing again. I look and think, ‘I can’t believe this.” It's getting later and later and I have to get up for a flight in the morning. And then it happened for a third time, BANG!, and I’m really aggravated. Do the whole darn thing. I get up, open the windows, I look down, there’s nothing around. I go to sleep, wake up, and I had an early flight. So I get up and take a shower. Now, none of the windows are open, and the bathroom is in the middle of the suite. There’s no breeze or anything. I go in the shower and the shower curtain blows on me like … annoying. I push it back. It blows on me again. I push it back, and it starts to blow again. I turn the shower on it and soak it so it will stay. It blows on me a third time. So, I’m really annoyed. I finish everything, get out, get to the airport.
I call my wife and she says, “How was everything? I said, “I’m exhausted. It was terrible. It was like something was messing with me. I couldn’t sleep all night, there was noise. I couldn’t explain it. The shower was terrible.” So I’m hearing myself telling her that it was like something was messing with me and I go home and go on the internet and put the hotel in, and it just came up. Pages and pages and pages of hauntings at this hotel in San Francisco. I wasn’t scared, it was more annoying and I couldn’t figure it out, and when I did I looked it up and it came right up. A whole bunch of stuff. It said that they like to mess with the guests. And they did. And they were good at it!
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From when I was little, in the old house that we used to live in, both my brother and my sister and I saw a woman figure. I always felt that it was kind of like a guardian angel type spirit. One night my sister woke up, we’re twins so we had our two bed in the room and she looks over and sees the woman standing next to my bed watching over me.
Sister: So, it was kind of like the bed was up against the wall and there was this woman standing as if she was on top of her, vertically standing over her head and kind of like looking straight out toward the door. And then I would look at her for a while and she would turn her face towards me, and the she would look back at the wall.
And my brother said that he saw the same figure. At first he thought it was my mom, but then he said that he saw her face and it was a completely different woman. We just never really figured that out. In addition to that I think that there’s this other type spirit. A child of some sort that I still kind of feel. It’s like a weird sense. But, one night when I was about 7 years old I woke up in the middle of the night, dead of night, and I felt this body next to me like sleeping next to me. Since we stayed in the same room I thought it was my sister. I tried to wake her up. I just assumed that she came into bed with me because she had a nightmare, and so I tried to wake her up. I just felt this body next to me. It wasn’t creepy, but I thought it was just as real as any person. And so, I wake up the next morning and I asked her, “Did you have a nightmare last night.” And she said “No!” And I was like, “Then what was that in my bed?!” It was kind of creepy.
Just recently in our new house I’ve had my door, like I went around and shut all the windows and my door kept opening. I’d close it and the way that the doorknobs were the type where you have to turn it and open it for the door to open. And so, I’d shut the door and it would come and I’d go sit on my bed and the door would come open. And I got up and shut the door again and I went back and sat on my bed, and then it came open again. And then out loud I could feel like there was something there kind of messing with me. It wasn’t evil or anything and I said out loud. And then the door like slowly shuts.
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I’ll tell you a story. It’s kind of a visitation kind of a thing. I had a dog I got when I was seven for my birthday, and she lived with us our whole lives. Best friends with my brother and myself. I grew up, went to college, went to New York. And one night she came to me in a dream and she said, “I’m going to have a baby first, but then I’m going to die.” So the next morning I woke up and called my mom and I said, “Mom, where’s Mary.” She said, “Well, I think she went off in the woods to die, honey.” So I took the train home the next day. We shuffled through the woods, but I knew that she told me that, so I knew that she was gone. She was gone. It was a good thing that she came to me. Thank you Mary.
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I wasn’t going to come tonight, but I’m really glad I came. I also do clearings. A couple years back there was a woman by the name of “Pavarti” who lives in Poland. She came back to this country and she did Civil War clearings. When I first heard about it I thought, ‘Civil War clearings, that’s kind of odd’. They as a group of people, kind of like you, went and investigated old Civil War sites and did releasings. And the spirits that came out were just amazing. This one woman (spirit) was a black woman, and she said, “My name is Bea”. As she went to the light she turned back to the group and said, “Be brave.” One of the things that I thought I heard her say is that she held on. Despite all the hardships that the African American people in her community were going through, she held on. There were a tremendous amount of orphanages, and she was like the mamma to these children. She (in spirit) was going to help keep all of the babies as healthy as possible. She hung on because she kept saying to God, “I know that he’s going to come back and release us.”
Related to this, we had been on a family event and some people we knew, a husband and wife came. They worked at the I-Hop (International House of Pancakes) in Westport, and they were telling us about the crazy paranormal stuff that was happening at that restaurant. They saw this spirit over and over, and it wasn’t a friendly spirit. They said that really strange things happen in this restaurant. And I said, “If that was my friend, I would pray for my friend. There’s this spirit that’s hurting so let me put a prayer out.” The next day I got some really crazy stuff, on my voicemail. I wish I recorded it. I know that it was the spirit reaching back saying, “How dare you. Don’t go praying for me. You don’t know what I went through.” I once heard that in doing clearings we are supposed to use white light if the spirit is receptive. But if we say “Bless you” it’s our ego saying this is the way to go to heal. So what I thought I heard that spirit say (on the voicemail) was, “Don’t tread on me. Stay away.” So I didn’t go there anymore.
But I just thought I’d share that about the group healing. When you talk about energy, consider that we’ve had so many parts of our country that have experienced slavery, hangings, other things. There’s energy that’s still hanging on there. I appreciate people like you and other people who are going out saying, ‘Hey, let’s report on it, and let’s heal it and bless it and let it move on if we can, if it’s open to it. So thank you for tonight. I’m glad I came.
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My husband and I moved into a house here in Ridgefield about three and a half years ago. When we saw the house it was covered in snow, so we didn’t see the yard or anything. It was just like a really big yard we were really excited because we came from Westchester from a little house with no yard. So we bought the house and moved in, and we found all of these religious artifacts around the house. Rosary beads around and broken crosses and things like that. There was a fake mantle in the house. When I pulled it down, rosary beads fell out from there. We found a picture of I think it’s the Virgin Mary coming up out of hell with like burning souls coming up. The former owners had written an epiphany blessing over each of our doorways. One over the front, one over the back that leads out to the yard. So we were like, alright, whatever. Maybe they were just religious people.
A number of things have happened, but I’m going to speed up and tell you about something that recently has been happening. Starting at the beginning of the school year, my doorbell started ringing at the same time each night. Two nights in a row it rang.
Barry: What time did it ring?
Between 7:55 and 8:00. Always either 7:56, 7:57 or 7:58. I’d look at my cellphone when it rang. So, I texted my neighbor a week later because it happened again. I said, “Are the boys outside?” because we have a path the we built between the two houses for our boys to go back and forth and play. She said, “No, they’re not outside.” Then it happened again. So it happened twice the first week, then it happened again, two nights in a row, but it didn’t happen consecutively. My husband I were going away on vacation in late September and I started to freak out. I called the police like, ‘What do I do I think I’m being ‘ding-dong-ditched’, but I don’t know where it’s coming from.’ We’re on a main road. The only way someone could ring our doorbell would be either to pull up to our driveway and I’d see them, or they’d have to come through the woods and ring our doorbell.
My husband and I were going away and my Aunt was coming to take care of the kids in late September. He doesn’t believe in any of this stuff, so he decided to get a security system. We put in a doorbell with a camera right before we leave. Nothing happened when my aunt was there. But when they installed the security system they disconnected the old doorbell. Well, a couple of weeks later our old doorbell starts ringing! The same time! It rang two nights the following week after we got back, and then it stopped. Then last weekend, Saturday, Sunday and Monday night it happened again! The old doorbell -- It’s totally disconnected! I had family over on Saturday night. We all heard it. It was not the new doorbell. It didn’t come through the new system. It was the old doorbell. We took the box off the wall and looked at the old doorbell. All the wires were totally disconnected. So finally we took it off the wall. We haven’t had anything happen since. I have a friend who says she’s sensitive, and she says I have something in my house.
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I have a cousin who lives in Westbury. First her son, and now her daughter have seen people in that house. They call him the ‘bad man’. Her son has a child, and he’s seen it since he was three. He’s now seven. My son has babysat there before. Lots of things happen. Doors open …
Woman's Son: Yeah. I was babysitting there once and Jody brought me up to his room. He has a sister. The door was partially open. Do you know where the door is connected by a hinge to the wall and there’s a space that you can see through out into the hallway? Well, I saw like … it was dark but you could see some light, but then it went completely dark in that space and I saw just an eye coming through the space in the door. It was just standing there, but then it went a way.
Barry: How high up was it?
Woman's Son: Just like someone standing there, like a 5 or 6 foot man had just walked in front of the door and looked through. I just went over and shut the door. It just looked at us. I’m getting chills telling you this. It was terrifying then. I babysat there again and I put the kids to bed. It was about 20 minutes later when they were both sleeping and all of a sudden I hear the boy say, “No, no. Don’t go in there. She’s sleeping. Leave her alone. Please stop. Don’t go in there. She’s trying to sleep!”
He does that a lot where he says, “Leave her alone, she’s sleeping.” My cousin told me this. They have “The Sailor” and they have “The Bad Man”.
Woman's Son: In the corner of the room, they have a dog and he would just run up to the corner of the room and bark at the corner.
The family would be interested in knowing who this spirit is if you’d like to come over. When the little boy was three, he talking about how he had a daughter! He would say that his daughter just sat down at the table, he would talk all about his daughter, and how she was in the house. He’s three. What is he talking about? It wasn’t a doll. He insisted he had a daughter.
Barry: Sounds like a past-life memory.
But she talks about her like she would come to the table. She would be there. Then it became when his sister came along, his own sister. The ‘bad man’ was always there, and the ‘sailor man’ was there too. The bad man was there more often, though.
I work in a nursing home in the area. I’m a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) and I usually work the 3PM to 11PM shift, but this one night I was asked to stay over for the 11PM to 7AM shift. At around 2:30 in the morning I was changing one of the patients and I had the door open. There was only one other CNA and one nurse working with me. The other CNA was off the floor, and the nurse was sitting in the dayroom down the hall. I was changing the person when out of the corner of my eye I heard a sound like “Huhh” and somebody walked right past the door in the hallway. I thought it was the either the other nurse or the other CNA. I came out of the room when I was done and I walked down and checked the two rooms at the end of the hallway. No one was there. I didn’t think anything of it, but later on I told some other people I work with and they told me that they also experienced the same thing. Other things have happened in that facility. In the bathroom are call bells, the kind that have a little switch next to the toilet and you have to pull it down to ring for assistance. There have been times where there are two patients rooming together who can’t get out of bed, and their bathroom call-bell will be pulled down for no reason.
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I had something in my old home. There were times when I could be in the car or in the house and all of a sudden there would be the smell of cigar smoke. I’d be in the car and I’d get a full smell of cigar smoke. And the same way it came in, it would just disappear. One time my son Julian was in the car with me and I said, “Do you smell that?” and he smelled it too. I would tell my husband, but he doesn’t believe in anything.
One time I was preparing dinner and I was ready to set the table. My two sons and my husband and I were in the dining room and the whole entire room just smelled like cigar. And I said, “Well, we’re having dinner. If you want to join us you’re welcome to sit down, but we’re not stopping.” And the same way as before, it just came and then it was gone.
I had a great-grandmother who used to work in tobacco fields, and I also have a friend of mine that when I was going to college, he always smoked cigars. So it could be either of them, but I don’t know which one.
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Do you know “Cold Spring Depot Restaurant”? I was having dinner there with my daughter and was waiting on line to pay. They had a big roaring fire going, so I shouldn’t have felt cold. But I told my daughter, “I have to leave, it’s freezing.” And everyone looked at me and said, “We’re complaining that we’re hot”. The fellow behind the counter said, “You must have felt, and I forget her name, he said but it’s funny this is Sunday night and Wednesday night is the time that she always comes. I thought he was just joking, and I still think it’s a way of them luring people in on slow nights! Apparently, she was a young woman who was abused by her husband, and she was trying to escape and she was waiting at Cold Spring depot which used to be a train station, waiting to get on the train, but he caught up with her and he stabbed her to death.
And we get in the car and were driving home and I said to my daughter, “Ghosts don’t follow you home, right?”. And I didn’t know, and she said, “Oh, you’re ridiculous. You probably didn’t feel anything anyway.” So I get home, and my husband traveled for a living at the time. So it was just my daughter and me and she was going back to college that night. I was going to be home alone, and when she left I kept getting that creepy feeling and I turned around and I said, “You better not have followed me home. Because I’m alone in this house except for a dog, and the dog is not friendly.” I went to bed that night, and I have an over the door hanger that you kind of hang clothes on that need to be ironed. All of a sudden all the clothes fell off of the hangers, with the hangers on them fell on the floor, which is hard to do because you would have to lift them up. And I get up and I look. And I think I was more angry than anything. I said, “Now these are all full of dog hairs and I have to wash them again.” And I turned around and I said, “You don’t live here. You have to go back where you belong and not bother me.” And after that I didn’t feel anything.
NOTE: The following is posted on the Cold Spring Depot Restaurant website: “According to legend, on Wednesday nights, the main dining room has one extra guest, who did not make a reservation. In 1898, a local woman learned that her husband planned to kill her. The unfortunate lady rushed to the train depot to catch the 10:15 train to Poughkeepsie, but was apprehended by her husband, who stabbed her on a bench in the waiting room two minutes before the train's arrival. Today, the former waiting room serves as the restaurant's main dining room and locals claim that at 10:13 on Wednesday nights, a cold draft wafts through the section of the room where she was killed.
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My grandson Zander committed suicide a few years ago. It was such a terrible tragedy. A few years after he passed, his three younger brothers asked their mother, ‘Can we get a dog? ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘If you get a dog, what are you going to name it? The boys said, “Zander”. ‘No, says the mother. You cannot name the dog after your brother.’
A few years later my daughter met another couple who had lost a child and became friends with them. You know, I think that couples who lose children kind of find each other. This couple were going to Long Island to a psychic, and they invited my daughter and me. I didn’t really believe in it but we went. So the other couple had their reading. The psychic knew nothing other than they had lost a child. During the reading the psychic turned to my daughter and said, “Zander says. He’s very happy. That you should know that he has no stress. He’s met relatives and he’s having a good life. And you can name the dog Zander.” Can you believe it? How could anyone know something like this?
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I went to a psychic and she said to me, “I see that your son joined the Police force because I see him in his blue uniform marching.” And I said, “No, because he’s up in college.” She said, “Well, I’m seeing him marching in his blue uniform.”
I came home and my husband said, “John just called. He wants you to call him back.” So, I called my son and when he go on the phone he said, “I want to tell you that I just joined the Air Force”. The psychic saw my son marching in his blue uniform right before I found out that he had joined the Air Force. Isn’t that something?
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I was at Smalley’s Restaurant. It’s supposed to be haunted and the owner, Tony, often tells ghost stories to the customers but that night he said, “I’m not going to be telling ghost stories tonight.” So I went home, and the cats came over to me and wanted something to eat. I got out of my chair and proceeded to go over to the place where their food is. I’m not kidding you -- and I swear on my mother’s grave that this happened -- something hit me right here (on the side), and I mean HIT me. I mean BANG. I got hit here and then all of a sudden I felt two hands on my back push me down onto the floor. They pushed me down and held me there, and they wouldn’t let me get up. I was on the floor and I was thinking, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I was trying and trying to get up, and then finally I got up. All of a sudden I felt this burning sensation right here (indicates her stomach). And I’m thinking, ‘Now what the hell is this?’ I lifted up my shirt and there were three scratches, and I mean scratches. Deep, red scratches. Something followed me home from that restaurant. I had to show the restaurant owner, Tony. He thought I was joking at first. I said, “Tony, does this look like I’m joking?” and I showed him the scratches. And my other friend saw them and said, “Holy crap, what happened to you?”
A couple of nights later my friend called me and I told her what was going on. She said, “Alright we can take care of this right now.” We did the prayer of Archangel Michael together over the phone, and the scratches went right away. They just disappeared, and nothing else happened after that. You have to protect yourself when you go to places that are supposed to be haunted, or even to cemeteries because things can follow you home. I know, because it happened to me just the way I told you.
OXFORD LIBRARY -- OXFORD, CONNECTICUT
Does a spirit have to be in a shape of a human, or can it be like smoke? I saw white. And it just went straight across.
Barry: Was it human shape, or just a shape?
It was freeform and it just went across the back where I was sitting and I had somebody over that had just lost their wife. So, I was just wondering if I did see that.
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Have you ever had a case where there’s been like, a spirit mimicking a person’s voice? Here's is a two-part story about something mimicking us in our house.
Well, the first part was my husband was away on business and the kids were in the family room. Now, I did not hear this because I was doing the dishes, but the kids came running in to me and they said, “Oh my God mommy, did you hear that?” I’m like, “What, what did you hear.” They said, “We heard daddy’s chair pull away from the desk, and we heard his voice say, “Hey ... bed!” as if to come upstairs to go to bed. And, of course, Jim wasn’t home and they wouldn’t believe me that he wasn’t home. So I actually had to call him to assure them that he wasn’t in the house. Then, about three weeks later I came home and my daughter Samantha was upstairs sleeping, and I heard her in our family room say, “Hi Mommy! How are you? Did you have a good morning?”
Daughter: “I would never say anything like that!”
It was like a sing-songy way that she talks sometimes, and I called out, “Oh, I’m doing good honey.” You know, this that and the other thing. I went around the corner and all of a sudden my footsteps slowed down because I realized that she was not there. And I’m like, wait a minute, she’s not talking. She’s not in there. And then I even called out, “Samantha, you’re not in that room are you?” Dead silence. She was upstairs sleeping, because it was in the morning time and she was sleeping late. I told her all about it and she is still creeped out that something would mimic her speaking voice.
Daughter: I’m freaked out by it.
And my husband is actually freaked out that there was something that could mimic his speaking voice.
Barry: So you’re the last one to go, right?!
They haven’t heard from me yet!
Daughter: They haven’t mimicked my brother’s voice either.
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I used to rent an apartment up here in Christian Street, and we moved in when my son was about four months old. He had his own room, and we had a baby monitor in the room so we could hear him if he woke up. During the time we lived there we had experienced a number of strange things, like lights turned on and off, and sometimes you would feel like somebody was watching you, especially in the bathroom. Real creepy.
One night I put my son to bed. Around that time we had been trying the 'cry-it-out' method because he was still young, about six seven months. I was in the living room folding clothes watching TV and his dad was in the bedroom. All of a sudden my husband comes out of the bedroom yelling, “What is the matter with you? Why would you say that? Why would you talk to him like that?” I’m like, “What are you talking about? I’m here folding clothes?” He said, “You didn’t say anything?” I said, “No!” He goes, “I just heard over the monitor somebody saying ‘Shut the F_ _ _ up’ to Logan”
We actually called the people from TAPS and had them come investigate the place, and they said that it was more connected to me than to the place. But, there was something in my son’s room, especially above the crib that was not that pleasant.
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I wanted to ask you, are any of the pictures you show in your presentation actual pictures that you had taken? Or that you knew they were associated with a house in your research? Because you had the picture of a young boy with blonde hair, and you said that it was from Ridgefield, and I was at an estate sale in Ridgefield and as I was leaving, I had my daughter and my son in the car and we went by a wooded area and I saw a boy that looked just like that. A little blonde haired boy standing in the woods, and he was wearing older clothing. He had a white button-down on, and he either had knickers on, or riding pants on or something, and he was just standing in the woods facing out into the road. And there was nothing around. No reason why you would see a kid dressed like that. And when we left, when we passed him I said to my daughter, “Did you just see someone standing there?” And she said, “Yeah, I saw a little boy standing there.” And we turned around and went back and there was nobody there. But even my daughter said that he was wearing old fashioned clothing, and he looked just like that boy when you were saying the Ridgefield story, and that’s where the estate sale was. It freaked me out when I saw your photo. Like, “I’ve seen that boy!”
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I lived in the house that one of my relatives built, and right after my daughter was born I started getting these thoughts that were not my thoughts. Like, I saw a rope. I didn’t physically see it. I saw it in my mind. Does that make sense? And I'd have the thought “Oh, I want to kill myself. I want to kill myself.” And I was thinking, like I was saying that “I want to kill myself” Now, I just had a baby and I wanted this baby. I had exactly what I wanted, a little girl and a little boy. This wasn’t my thought at all.
I would get so upset that I couldn’t stay in the house and I’d have to go to my mom's or to the neighbors and take a nap and get out. And then I found out what this was all about. Growing up, my mom had told me that my great grandmother had committed suicide. But she always told me that she had drowned herself in the brook. Later, my sister showed me a newspaper article that said that my great grandmother had hung herself. And she had lived in that house. So I was wondering if she was trying to tell me that she had hung herself, somehow she wanted me to know by showing me the rope and putting those thoughts in my head about suicide.
I also had a dream when I was in that house about the borders that had lived there. I didn’t know anything about them, or that there even had been borders there but I dreamed about these people. A few weeks later I saw my sister and I told her I dreamed of the borders. My sister told me that there really had been borders in the house, and that our mother had been molested by some of them when she was little. My mother had never told me that, but I saw these people that had once lived there in my dream.
Unrelated to that house, when I was in Baltimore Maryland I once saw (the ghost of) a man walking up the stairs. It was a Civil War house that had been turned into a bed and breakfast. I had walked out in the hall to go to the bathroom, and I saw him walk right up the stairs just like you, just as solid as you are. And then he just disappeared. I was like, I must have seen a ghost! But he wasn’t scary.
Barry: Did he look Civil War-ish or was he modern.
No, he didn’t look Civil War-ish. He had like a flannel shirt on. I thought he was a guest. But he wasn’t.
Barry: How long did you see him?
Long enough to watch him walk up the stairs!
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My grandmother lives in a very historical home. It's one of the first homes built in the town of Pawling, New York. Very haunted. Every December 21st in the middle of the night there’s a gunshot in the basement. The butler was murdered in the basement for sleeping with one of the daughters. So, some things that happen are tied to the history of the house. But when we were kids, there was a man that would hang around the kids all the time. My grandmother swears he was harmless. We would talk to him, we would play with him. But only the kids.
Barry: Do you remember seeing him?
I don’t really remember. I was very young. But there’s an apartment on the 4th floor. I grew up there until second grade, and my grandmother said that I would always talk about this man. “I’m going to go play with the man. I’m going to play with the man,” I would say. And I’d be in my room playing.
My cousin’s family moved in when we moved out, and I was there one day when I was sick from school. My cousin was a baby and she was crying, and then she started laughing and I got up to look and I said to my grandmother, “It’s just the old man”.
All the kids. There are sixteen of us grandkids and my grandmother has stories about all of us seeing the old man, or playing with the old man, or talking to the old man. Like, we thought that he just lived there. There are many different ones there. My grandmother loves them though. And she swears that when she dies she’s joining them and staying in the house. She doesn’t want anything to happen to them because they’re her friends and she’s going to be with them forever.
Barry: She’s got her man picked out!
Woman: Yeah!
THE MARK TWAIN LIBRARY
Two years ago my husband and I went to visit the Curtis house in Woodbury Connecticut. It is supposed to be the oldest and very haunted inn. And we were looking forward to possibly seeing ghosts. We stayed overnight. I’m also an enthusiastic antique collector. That’s the road that has tons of antiques. So we stayed, and people kept telling us about all of the ghosts we would see. We didn't see squat, so I was kind of disappointed. The next day we went antiquing and we went to a bunch of places and didn’t see much. We came at the end of the road to a large mall antique stores with multiple antiques. I went through looking for miniatures, and I ended up on the top floor. There was one of those clothes racks that’s in a circle that you can spin around, and it had old communion, wedding and prom dresses on it. Mostly white. And I was looking through, kind of spinning it around when all of a sudden I got a sense that one of the dresses had something in it! And it was just like this visceral “Oh, I don’t like this at all!” I couldn't get out of there fast enough.
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Several years ago I moved from Millford, Connecticut to Windham. The house in Vermont was built in 1805. It’s an old farm house. It was owned by the Chapman family. It had dirt floors, a three story barn, and a carriage house. So about four years ago my neighbor across the street came over. She came over, and I was standing in the doorway, and the stairs were behind me. I opened the door and said, “Mary! How nice to see you!” And I noticed that when she greeted me she kind of stepped back. I said, “Oh, come on in. Come in!” And she goes, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s okay, that’s okay. I know you’re busy.” And she turned around and left. And I was thinking, ‘That’s really weird!’. A couple of weeks later I ran into her and I said, “Mary, you should have come in the other day. Don’t worry about me being busy. You could have come in.” And she said, “No, you had company.” And I said, “No I didn’t.” She said, “Yeah, there was a man standing on top of the stairwell. And he had on farmer jeans and a beard, like an old farmer.” And I said (laughing), “Well Jesus, is he single and around my age?!”
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I had this really weird dream where I kind of predicted my great-grandmother’s death. Before she died I dreamt that I was at her funeral. She died soon after, and when I went to the funeral everything in the dream happened the way that I dreamed about it. And then had a dream about my friend’s funeral before he died. After he died, I went to the funeral and the same things happened at the funeral that I saw in my dream. It kind of freaked me out!
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There was this house that I stayed in. I was on the second floor. It was built back in the 17 or 1800s. The history that I know of, the family did get killed. It was from one of the wars, whether it was WWI or Civil War when ships were coming in. The room that I stayed in, they had a dimmer light that you had to dim it yourself. It was on a high, high, high ceiling. The doors were very tall. Taller than the Mark Twain Library doors, and at least double thickness of those. And usually they would close on their own. Not slam, but close on their own. And I stayed there one night. And I was sleeping on my stomach and I felt something, a tap on my back. My legs were flat, but my head had come off the pillow. I reached for my glasses and I noticed there was a dim light. I wiped my eyes before I put on my glasses. I know I saw something, which was why I put on my glasses. And when I put on my glasses the door was wide open. But before that I saw the light and looked up at the ceiling because I something straight there. I saw a little girl. The door was wide open. I saw a little girl. She had to be between 8 and 11 years old. The only thing I saw was the back, and she had a gown on. She wasn’t facing me. She was turned the other way while the door was open. It was an off-grey-ish white. You didn’t see white or grey, but between those colors. She had long hair down to here, the arms were down to the side and the legs were spread like this. The door was wide open. And when I said, “Can I help you? Can I help you?” She started gliding very slowly as the door was slowly closing near her. By the time that she was at the door frame. Like I said, there was at least 4 to 6 inches left open, and then when I noticed she was gone the door started to totally close.
Barry: Before she got to the door, how far had she glided toward the door?
Where I was sleeping, she was right in the center of the room. I would say she glided at least a foot. And she was at least a foot and a half away from me, from the bed. Because she was in the center. The light was in the center. I mean, it was, the room that I was in was very tall ceilings. It was just unbelievable. The house was over 100 years old.
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Early one morning I was walking in the Waterbury area toward the Brass City Mall. I went inside and as I entered I was looking around and I started walking around the top. You know in malls where there’s a railing that goes around and you can walk around and look down? That part of the mall. When I got half-way around this railing I stopped to tie my sneakers, and when I stood up very slowly, that’s when I saw a ghost. At first it was only from the shoulders up and it was a man. The gentleman had a face, I could see it. He looked like a Native American man. The face was very thin, and he had long hair. I could see the ripple of the nose, the nose was small, and he was was a greyish-white color similar to the ghost girl I just told you about. When I started moving, I would keep my eye on him and he was moving. And as it started moving, the body started appearing. He had a shirt on, pants and shoes. He was dressed in modern clothing. So as the body started appearing, I just couldn’t believe it! It was so amazing.
I got all the way around to where I had started, and I began to walk toward the exit. I stopped again to look at him, and when I looked over at him this gentleman was moving around and around the railing, like speeding around and around. I couldn’t believe how fast he was going, and then he stopped. When he stopped, I looked at him and he looked at me. Then when I was heading toward the door I turned my head again, he was gone.
Barry: Did you get a sense that he saw you.
Yes. One hundred percent. He didn’t say anything, but I felt as if he was saying something to me. But I’m not going to say what I know he said to me, but it was just an experience and beautiful. It was just immaculate. I think what it was is that this gentleman told me something, I did what he told me to do, and here I am in Redding talking to you!
MT. KISCO LIBRARY -- MT. KISCO, NEW YORK
I lived in Mt. Kisco right at the top of Route 133, and across from the house they used in the movie “Ragtime”. Our house was right across the street and was 170 years old. It was actually my brother’s house. He bought the house. There are 27 rooms in the house and my parents lived on the third floor, I lived on the second floor, and my brother lived on the first floor. One day he was painting and all of a sudden he heard footstep. He looked over at the doorway where he heard the footsteps and he saw this white thing go past the door. He left his paintbrushes and everything out and he got out of there! He never told anybody for years.
We moved here in 1978, and it was my daughter who saw the ghost first. It was a woman with a flowing dress. I told her, “There’s no way Mary. You’re just seeing something,” and she said, “Mom, I know I saw it.” There were two bedrooms connected. You just go up two stairs and there was a door between them. Whenever the was a sighting, my daughter’s bedroom would be like walking into a freezer. It was so cold in there. Many people saw the ghost, and it was always like I said, when there was a sighting that room would be so cold. My daughter used to jump out of bed and turn the light on because she was always so nervous in that room.
Then my husband saw it and my daughter said, “Mom, remember I told you about that?” I told my brother what my daughter and my husband saw and my brother said, “That’s what happened to me when we moved in! I saw it too, but I was afraid to tell anybody. I thought they would think I was drunk!” He didn’t admit it until after he heard my daughter’s story.
After my daughter moved out of that room, my son inherited it when he was a teenager. We always knew when there was a sighting because we would find him sleeping on the couch and he wouldn’t go back in his room.
But it was always when there was a sighting that that room was like ice, ice, ice cold. The radiator would be burning hot but it would be really freezing cold in there. One day my son felt this icy touch on his face. Another time he felt her sitting on his bed. He thought the ghost liked him because he’d wake up and feel something sitting on his bed, and it would move down. When that happened he got right out of that room!
Now, my mother and father never believed it, but one day they saw it go past up the stairs. They just saw the shape. They knew it was the woman, but it was like a ghostly white dress. It really scared my mother.
All different things that happened in that house. One time I lost my earrings. I said, “I know I had them on the dresser”. I couldn’t find them for three weeks. Then one day I found them right on the floor right where my feet go when I stand up. I mean, there’s no way they could have been there for three weeks. I would have stood right on them. Different things like that happened. Little things would disappear, and then they appeared in a different place.
Other odd things happened all the time. Like, we would come home and find crackers or cookies open on the table, and no one had been home. Different things, I can’t even remember all of them. No one ever heard anything, voices or anything like that. We just saw the white shape go by. It was fun though. We didn’t feel threatened or anything, but it was crazy some of the things that happened in that house. I never believed in ghosts until we lived in that house!
We sold the house in 2001, and the people who bought it changed it to a two family house. Recently, when they were selling it, they had a tag sale. And I thought, ‘I have to go in and see what it looks like.’ I went to the tag sale and met the tenants who had been living on our floor and we started talking, and they had seen the ghost too! They had the same incidents with the ghost. They described it looking the same way.
My daughter used to babysit at the Ragtime house which was right across the street from us. It’s a big Victorian house with turrets. She used to get very nervous babysitting because there’s this little room up at the top of the turret where the kids liked to play. My daughter would turn off the light in that little room, and she’d go up later and the light would be on. The front door was really heavy and had heavy leaded glass in it. They would be sitting there and all of a sudden the front door would open even though it had been locked. The nanny in that house had stories about the ghost tickling her feet when she was laying in bed. And one day she was looking out the window from the second floor, looking down into the yard and she could see little kids in old fashioned period clothing. She could hear them giggling, and she watched them throwing the leaves that they had raked all day out of the bags and into piles on the lawn. She went out the next morning and the leaves were out of the bags and in piles on the grass.
SOMERS LIBRARY - SOMERS, NEW YORK
I was a nurses aid in Somers Manor nursing home before they built the beautiful new facility. It was just the nurse and I on the night shift, because that’s how they staffed it. Most of the patients were not really conscious; they were very senile and had dementia. When the other nurse went to dinner I was there by myself. A little while later I started hearing the patients getting restless, which was very unusual. The lights we turned down low because the patients were sleeping, and I looked down the hall and saw an orb -- a very white, light orb that I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. And it went right down the hall, I got chills, and it went into one of the rooms where there were about six patients. And I went in and just got to the doorway and I couldn’t go any further and then it disappeared. I know I saw it. I guess it could have been something from the outside possibly, but I don’t believe so!
Barry: How big was it?
It was like the size of a beach ball.
Barry: How long did you see it for?
About 45 seconds to a minute. It floated down the hall. I couldn’t wait for that nurse to come back from dinner!
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A lot of things happened in my house. It was built in 1973. No one died in the house, and the first weekend we got there, my son and his friend were sleeping in the family room. Big strong guys, both about 20 years old. In the morning I came in and they had blankets over their heads and I said, “What’s the matter?” And they go, “Oh, we saw a light in the hallway.” And I said, “It was probably a headlight” And he said, “No mom, it was a light and then it disappeared.” And then we started to hear sounds like a china closet with glasses falling. We couldn’t find anything. People would hear it and I’d say, “It’s just the ghost - don’t worry about it.” Then, my son’s girlfriend heard a party going on downstairs. She thought it was me and my friends, but then she realized that I was in bed. She was white as a ghost in the morning. She was so scared.
But the weirdest thing was, one Thanksgiving the whole family was in the dining room. My daughter’s nanny was there and I had just told her the story about how things would fly off the wall and all kind of things. And she goes to my other daughter and says, “Your mom just told me the story about things flying off the wall.” Near the corner of the dining room I have a picture of George Washington, and it goes FLYING off the wall as soon as she said that. It almost hit my grandson.
Barry: How far did it travel?
It had a drop leaf table underneath it, and it went past the drop-leaf table and onto the floor. I also found candlesticks, candles under the dining room table. There’s an area rug there, and my son-in-law who pooh-poohs everything. I said, “Let’s try it and see what happens if it falls down.” So I hit the candle as hard as I could and it fell right down and stayed right on the hardwood floor. But it wasn’t anything ominous. I liked it. And I felt that they were here before me, so we can share the space.
Barry: Did you buy the house used?
Yes, but my neighbor said that no one else ever said anything about it. Then I came to Somers and I asked the town historian and she said the only thing she could tell me is that there farmhouses there before. One day we saw a teacup moving. My daughter and I just watched it and it kept going and going and going. But it’s been quiet for a long time, so maybe they moved on by themselves.
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This is going back 25 years at least. We lived in Yonkers and we had a house that was 75 years old. And I always felt that the upstairs of the house was a little weird. I always would get weird feeling in this front room. Negative feelings. My husband took a photo of me once, just standing in that room and right in front of my body there was a spot that was out of focus. It was like greyish white smoke. The whole rest of the picture was crystal clear and there was just an out of focus spot right there. And one other time in that same room, my kids were very little and we were just sitting on the floor playing a game. Nothing was wrong in the room, we were just sitting there for a while playing a game and all of a sudden I jump up and right underneath me where I was seeing were a whole bunch of giant carpenter ants. All of a sudden they appeared right there where I was sitting. It very was weird!
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Actually I have two stories, but when we moved to our house here in Somers, my daughter and I sometimes see things that other people don’t. And, we’re moving into the house and I knew the people before us, the woman had died in the house. And we start both of us seeing this, like a flash going by us. And there was this smell like a woman’s perfume. And this went on for weeks. She saw it, I saw it. It was all around the bedroom, the master bedroom area. Finally I say to her, “Your husband doesn’t live here anymore.” We stopped seeing it.
And the other story is kind of a psychic experience. We had a dog for 12 years and the vet said to us, “She has a tumor and she’s not going to make it. We can’t take this out. Do you want to give her chemotherapy?” So I’m trying to decide whether we want to do this or not, to put her through that. I’m a realtor, so somebody called me to look at her house to put it on the market. Never met this woman before. She seemed like a very interesting person. She had stained glass that she was working on and other kinds of artwork. And she suddenly turns to me and says, “Oh, and I’m psychic. You have a dog that has passed.” And I said, “Well, I had a dog when I was a kid.” She said, “No, you HAVE a dog that has passed. It’s a white dog with little marking on it. And when you saw it you said, ‘This is the dog for me.’” I came home and said to my husband, “No chemotherapy. We just have to let her go.” That was the strangest experience I’ve ever had.
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I have an Ouija board story. Actually I have two. I worked at Bronx State Hospital, and we worked in the lab and down the hall was the morgue. So, we used to play with the Ouija board, we were like nineteen years old. We were playing with it, asking it questions and all of a sudden both of us picked our hands up at the same time and that little thing (planchette) kept going and going and going, right off the board. We both had felt a pressure on our hands. I folded it up and threw it in the garbage right then and there.
Another time my cousin had an Ouija board. It was a holiday and all the family was there, and the Ouija board asked for me. So I got on the Ouija board with my cousin and she asked the board, “Why wouldn’t you work with Donna?” and it spelled out, “Donna is a spy. She spied on John.” Now, my cousin John had gone on his first date the night before, and nobody knew it but my aunt and my cousin followed him to the movie theater and spied on him. And nobody knew it. So, what the Ouija board said was very weird, and very true.
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I have a medium story. I went to this one woman in Connecticut, and she told me some things that could have been. I wanted to believe, but I was very skeptical. And so she told me some things that were correct, and then she told me, “Somebody died, a young boy.” And I said, “Yes, my nephew.” And she said, “Yeah, it’s something (makes a gesture to the chest)” and I said, “Yeah, he drowned.” Then she said, “There’s something with his left arm.” I said, “No, no.” “I’m telling you there’s something with his left arm.” I said, “No”. So she goes on and on and she says this and that and she stops again and says, “There’s something with his left arm,” and I said, “I don't’ know.” And I guess I gave her a look and she said, “You don’t believe me. I’m not going to charge you, you can go, but remember the left arm, will you?” So I went home and first I asked his mom and she said, “No, there’s nothing with the left arm.” And I thought, ‘There you go’. Then I asked my nephew who had come up and he said, “Of course Aunt Monica, don’t you remember the left arm? Right before he drowned, for some reason he put his arm through this glass. And he got a cut. A really bad cut, which is the reason why he didn’t go someplace. Yeah, it was his left arm!” Before he told me this I thought, ‘If there’s anything about his left arm, this is the one time I’ll believe.’ So I went to my sister-in-law and I said, “You didn’t know about this left arm thing?” and she said, “Well, it was a cut on his wrist. I didn’t think of it as his arm.” Now, this medium had told me twice about the left arm, and she didn’t charge me …
Barry: Did you go back and pay her?
I tried, but she won’t answer my calls! (audience laughs) Seriously! I emailed her, I apologized to her -- not that I did anything, it was just the look I gave her I guess. She will not get back to me, so what can I say? I tried! But the left arm -- and I didn’t even know! Neither did his mother, or at least she didn’t think about it.
RIDGEFIELD LIBRARY -- RIDGEFIELD, CONNECTICUT
We had an English bulldog and she was eleven and had cancer, and three days before we put her to sleep, every morning she started waking up at 5:30 and started barking. Two days after we put her down, my husband and I woke up. She barked. She absolutely barked. We both sat up and said, “Did you hear Daisy bark?” And that was it and we never heard from her again.
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I did one of those touristy witch hunts in Salem Massachusetts. It was midnight, and we went with one of those tour groups into a firehouse that was still a working firehouse, but it also had an entrance to a slave underground railroad. We went down with the little light things, and we went around with those. Some people hears something in a corner, I never heard it. Then we turned the lights off and we put lasers out on the ground to see if we could see any movement, we didn’t but people kept hearing things in the corner, which I still never heard. But there was a spirit there named “Crawler” and we were asking him questions. At one point we did that knock (Shave and a haircut -- ) and we said, “Crawler, if you’re there can you finish that knock?” and we didn’t hear anything. Afterward we went upstairs and listened to the recording we had made and we heard a voice say, “Do it again.” He absolutely said it. He said, “Do it again.”
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I was traveling on business. I was by myself, in a fairly large hotel in San Francisco. And they gave me this big suite room, by myself, no reason to do it. They gave me this really big room. So, I was working late and I was in a room bigger than this room, it was like a living room. I was in the corner writing, working on something and I had a bad feeling. So I turned on the radio because I was getting creeped out. So, nothing happens. I shut everything and go to sleep.
As soon as I fall asleep I hear this metal smash, like BANG. And I pop up and I’m like, ‘What was that?!’ All the windows were shut, it was the corner of the building so it had a lot of windows. I look around the windows, I don't see anything. I look through the door down the long hallway and don’t see anything. I go back to sleep. Another 40 minutes or so, same thing again. BANG!! I get up, do the whole darn thing again. I look and think, ‘I can’t believe this.” It's getting later and later and I have to get up for a flight in the morning. And then it happened for a third time, BANG!, and I’m really aggravated. Do the whole darn thing. I get up, open the windows, I look down, there’s nothing around. I go to sleep, wake up, and I had an early flight. So I get up and take a shower. Now, none of the windows are open, and the bathroom is in the middle of the suite. There’s no breeze or anything. I go in the shower and the shower curtain blows on me like … annoying. I push it back. It blows on me again. I push it back, and it starts to blow again. I turn the shower on it and soak it so it will stay. It blows on me a third time. So, I’m really annoyed. I finish everything, get out, get to the airport.
I call my wife and she says, “How was everything? I said, “I’m exhausted. It was terrible. It was like something was messing with me. I couldn’t sleep all night, there was noise. I couldn’t explain it. The shower was terrible.” So I’m hearing myself telling her that it was like something was messing with me and I go home and go on the internet and put the hotel in, and it just came up. Pages and pages and pages of hauntings at this hotel in San Francisco. I wasn’t scared, it was more annoying and I couldn’t figure it out, and when I did I looked it up and it came right up. A whole bunch of stuff. It said that they like to mess with the guests. And they did. And they were good at it!
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From when I was little, in the old house that we used to live in, both my brother and my sister and I saw a woman figure. I always felt that it was kind of like a guardian angel type spirit. One night my sister woke up, we’re twins so we had our two bed in the room and she looks over and sees the woman standing next to my bed watching over me.
Sister: So, it was kind of like the bed was up against the wall and there was this woman standing as if she was on top of her, vertically standing over her head and kind of like looking straight out toward the door. And then I would look at her for a while and she would turn her face towards me, and the she would look back at the wall.
And my brother said that he saw the same figure. At first he thought it was my mom, but then he said that he saw her face and it was a completely different woman. We just never really figured that out. In addition to that I think that there’s this other type spirit. A child of some sort that I still kind of feel. It’s like a weird sense. But, one night when I was about 7 years old I woke up in the middle of the night, dead of night, and I felt this body next to me like sleeping next to me. Since we stayed in the same room I thought it was my sister. I tried to wake her up. I just assumed that she came into bed with me because she had a nightmare, and so I tried to wake her up. I just felt this body next to me. It wasn’t creepy, but I thought it was just as real as any person. And so, I wake up the next morning and I asked her, “Did you have a nightmare last night.” And she said “No!” And I was like, “Then what was that in my bed?!” It was kind of creepy.
Just recently in our new house I’ve had my door, like I went around and shut all the windows and my door kept opening. I’d close it and the way that the doorknobs were the type where you have to turn it and open it for the door to open. And so, I’d shut the door and it would come and I’d go sit on my bed and the door would come open. And I got up and shut the door again and I went back and sat on my bed, and then it came open again. And then out loud I could feel like there was something there kind of messing with me. It wasn’t evil or anything and I said out loud. And then the door like slowly shuts.
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I’ll tell you a story. It’s kind of a visitation kind of a thing. I had a dog I got when I was seven for my birthday, and she lived with us our whole lives. Best friends with my brother and myself. I grew up, went to college, went to New York. And one night she came to me in a dream and she said, “I’m going to have a baby first, but then I’m going to die.” So the next morning I woke up and called my mom and I said, “Mom, where’s Mary.” She said, “Well, I think she went off in the woods to die, honey.” So I took the train home the next day. We shuffled through the woods, but I knew that she told me that, so I knew that she was gone. She was gone. It was a good thing that she came to me. Thank you Mary.
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I wasn’t going to come tonight, but I’m really glad I came. I also do clearings. A couple years back there was a woman by the name of “Pavarti” who lives in Poland. She came back to this country and she did Civil War clearings. When I first heard about it I thought, ‘Civil War clearings, that’s kind of odd’. They as a group of people, kind of like you, went and investigated old Civil War sites and did releasings. And the spirits that came out were just amazing. This one woman (spirit) was a black woman, and she said, “My name is Bea”. As she went to the light she turned back to the group and said, “Be brave.” One of the things that I thought I heard her say is that she held on. Despite all the hardships that the African American people in her community were going through, she held on. There were a tremendous amount of orphanages, and she was like the mamma to these children. She (in spirit) was going to help keep all of the babies as healthy as possible. She hung on because she kept saying to God, “I know that he’s going to come back and release us.”
Related to this, we had been on a family event and some people we knew, a husband and wife came. They worked at the I-Hop (International House of Pancakes) in Westport, and they were telling us about the crazy paranormal stuff that was happening at that restaurant. They saw this spirit over and over, and it wasn’t a friendly spirit. They said that really strange things happen in this restaurant. And I said, “If that was my friend, I would pray for my friend. There’s this spirit that’s hurting so let me put a prayer out.” The next day I got some really crazy stuff, on my voicemail. I wish I recorded it. I know that it was the spirit reaching back saying, “How dare you. Don’t go praying for me. You don’t know what I went through.” I once heard that in doing clearings we are supposed to use white light if the spirit is receptive. But if we say “Bless you” it’s our ego saying this is the way to go to heal. So what I thought I heard that spirit say (on the voicemail) was, “Don’t tread on me. Stay away.” So I didn’t go there anymore.
But I just thought I’d share that about the group healing. When you talk about energy, consider that we’ve had so many parts of our country that have experienced slavery, hangings, other things. There’s energy that’s still hanging on there. I appreciate people like you and other people who are going out saying, ‘Hey, let’s report on it, and let’s heal it and bless it and let it move on if we can, if it’s open to it. So thank you for tonight. I’m glad I came.
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My husband and I moved into a house here in Ridgefield about three and a half years ago. When we saw the house it was covered in snow, so we didn’t see the yard or anything. It was just like a really big yard we were really excited because we came from Westchester from a little house with no yard. So we bought the house and moved in, and we found all of these religious artifacts around the house. Rosary beads around and broken crosses and things like that. There was a fake mantle in the house. When I pulled it down, rosary beads fell out from there. We found a picture of I think it’s the Virgin Mary coming up out of hell with like burning souls coming up. The former owners had written an epiphany blessing over each of our doorways. One over the front, one over the back that leads out to the yard. So we were like, alright, whatever. Maybe they were just religious people.
A number of things have happened, but I’m going to speed up and tell you about something that recently has been happening. Starting at the beginning of the school year, my doorbell started ringing at the same time each night. Two nights in a row it rang.
Barry: What time did it ring?
Between 7:55 and 8:00. Always either 7:56, 7:57 or 7:58. I’d look at my cellphone when it rang. So, I texted my neighbor a week later because it happened again. I said, “Are the boys outside?” because we have a path the we built between the two houses for our boys to go back and forth and play. She said, “No, they’re not outside.” Then it happened again. So it happened twice the first week, then it happened again, two nights in a row, but it didn’t happen consecutively. My husband I were going away on vacation in late September and I started to freak out. I called the police like, ‘What do I do I think I’m being ‘ding-dong-ditched’, but I don’t know where it’s coming from.’ We’re on a main road. The only way someone could ring our doorbell would be either to pull up to our driveway and I’d see them, or they’d have to come through the woods and ring our doorbell.
My husband and I were going away and my Aunt was coming to take care of the kids in late September. He doesn’t believe in any of this stuff, so he decided to get a security system. We put in a doorbell with a camera right before we leave. Nothing happened when my aunt was there. But when they installed the security system they disconnected the old doorbell. Well, a couple of weeks later our old doorbell starts ringing! The same time! It rang two nights the following week after we got back, and then it stopped. Then last weekend, Saturday, Sunday and Monday night it happened again! The old doorbell -- It’s totally disconnected! I had family over on Saturday night. We all heard it. It was not the new doorbell. It didn’t come through the new system. It was the old doorbell. We took the box off the wall and looked at the old doorbell. All the wires were totally disconnected. So finally we took it off the wall. We haven’t had anything happen since. I have a friend who says she’s sensitive, and she says I have something in my house.
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I have a cousin who lives in Westbury. First her son, and now her daughter have seen people in that house. They call him the ‘bad man’. Her son has a child, and he’s seen it since he was three. He’s now seven. My son has babysat there before. Lots of things happen. Doors open …
Woman's Son: Yeah. I was babysitting there once and Jody brought me up to his room. He has a sister. The door was partially open. Do you know where the door is connected by a hinge to the wall and there’s a space that you can see through out into the hallway? Well, I saw like … it was dark but you could see some light, but then it went completely dark in that space and I saw just an eye coming through the space in the door. It was just standing there, but then it went a way.
Barry: How high up was it?
Woman's Son: Just like someone standing there, like a 5 or 6 foot man had just walked in front of the door and looked through. I just went over and shut the door. It just looked at us. I’m getting chills telling you this. It was terrifying then. I babysat there again and I put the kids to bed. It was about 20 minutes later when they were both sleeping and all of a sudden I hear the boy say, “No, no. Don’t go in there. She’s sleeping. Leave her alone. Please stop. Don’t go in there. She’s trying to sleep!”
He does that a lot where he says, “Leave her alone, she’s sleeping.” My cousin told me this. They have “The Sailor” and they have “The Bad Man”.
Woman's Son: In the corner of the room, they have a dog and he would just run up to the corner of the room and bark at the corner.
The family would be interested in knowing who this spirit is if you’d like to come over. When the little boy was three, he talking about how he had a daughter! He would say that his daughter just sat down at the table, he would talk all about his daughter, and how she was in the house. He’s three. What is he talking about? It wasn’t a doll. He insisted he had a daughter.
Barry: Sounds like a past-life memory.
But she talks about her like she would come to the table. She would be there. Then it became when his sister came along, his own sister. The ‘bad man’ was always there, and the ‘sailor man’ was there too. The bad man was there more often, though.
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