Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf

by Christopher Balzano

  But even now—more than 30 years after he moved away from the buried haunted clock—Richard can still see its green face and brass hands in his sleep, and hear its crazed second hand ticking away in the night.

  The Haunted Butter Dish

  One morning Heather was making toast for her two children. She put the butter dish, which had been given to her by her grandmother, on the island countertop in her kitchen, and turned her back for a moment to put the bread in the toaster. When she turned around to get the butter dish, it had disappeared.

  “I asked the kids if they took it, even though I knew they hadn’t because they had been in the living room watching television,” Heather said. “I remember yelling out loud, ‘This is stupid. Who loses a butter dish?’ ”

  Without the butter, Heather decided she’d have to make something else for breakfast instead. As she went to throw the toast in the trash, she looked back at the kitchen island and the butter dish had reappeared—right where she had left it.

  Heather didn’t think much of the disappearing butter dish until it happened to her husband as well. One morning he made toast as Heather played with the children in the living room. When he reached for the butter dish, he saw it had disappeared from the kitchen island. He called out to Heather to see if she had moved it.

  “I told him to just give it a minute and it would come back,” Heather said. “At first he said, ‘Yeah, right,’ but when he looked down again, it was there again. I told him it was just haunted and he had to deal with it.”

  That was four years ago, and the butter dish still has a tendency to disappear and reappear. Although there has been ghostly activity in her home, the butter dish seems to be the focus of the haunting.

  The disappearing and reappearing butter dish.

  Don’t Sit There!

  On display at the Thirsk Museum in North Yorkshire, England, is the famous Busby Stoop Chair, said to be about 300 years old. Nobody has sat in the chair since 1978, and with good reason—the chair is allegedly cursed and responsible for at least three deaths.

  The story goes something like this: There was a man named Thomas Busby, who owned the Busby Stoop Inn just outside of North Yorkshire. He was married to the daughter of Daniel Awety, with whom Busby was involved in some illicit, illegal activities. One of their crimes, known as “coin clipping,” involved shaving off parts of coins in order to create enough metal to forge their own counterfeit coins.

  In 1702, Awety and Busby got into an argument, supposedly over their criminal enterprise, and Busby stormed off. The next time he saw his father-in-law was in the pub, sitting in Busby’s favorite chair, supposedly to taunt Busby. Enraged, Busby threw him out of his pub. A short time later and likely full of ale—Busby was a notorious drunkard—he snuck into Awety’s home, bludgeoned him to death with a hammer, and stashed his body in the woods.

  The body was found and Busby was, of course, the main suspect. He was arrested at the pub and dragged down the main street to the gallows. Along the way, he shouted out a curse that anybody else who dared to sit in his favorite chair would die just as cruelly as Awety had, and as Busby soon would.

  He may have just made good on that curse.

  The chair has been loosely linked to a handful of deaths in the past few centuries. A chimney sweep who sat in it in the late 1800s was found dead the next morning, hanging from a gatepost near where Busby himself was hanged.

  During World War II, visiting airmen would sit in the chair, and their entire squadron would perish. Two particular pilots were killed before they even got the chance to fly again, when their car crashed into a tree on their way back to the airbase. Heart attacks, car wrecks, and other terrible afflictions often befell whoever sat in the chair, and the legend of its curse began to spread throughout England.

  Soon, the chair became sort of a “Bloody Mary” to pub-goers, a challenge to show that you were not afraid of it. People would dare one another to sit in it, often resulting in fatal consequences. The last straw came in the 1970s, when a young man who sat in it on a dare fell to his death while working on a roof. After that, the chair was placed in the basement, presumably to prevent anyone from sitting in it again. That is, until a delivery man decided to take a break in it one morning—and afterward, just a few miles down the road, his truck crashed

  and he was killed.

  At that point, the owner of the pub donated the chair to the Thirsk Museum. No one has been allowed to sit in it since.

  Don’t Sit There, Either!

  Among the ornate architecture and mesmerizing landscapes of the famed mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, is the rather unique Belcourt Castle. It was built between 1891 and 1894 as a 60-room “summer cottage” for Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who built the Louis XIII-style mansion for $3 million.

  Belcourt Castle remained in the Belmont family until 1940. It went through a series of owners and saw continued neglect until the Tinney family purchased it in 1956. The Tinneys spent many years restoring the castle to its former glory, filling it with antique furnishings from around the world—and with them, a whole slew of ghosts.

  There were no real reports of Belcourt Castle being haunted before the arrival of all those antiques, but these days there are so many ghosts, current owner Harle Hope Hanson Tinney actually conducts ghost tours of her home.

  Although more than a few objects in Belcourt Castle are known for their associated spirit attachments, none are more famous than the two chairs in the French Gothic Ballroom.

  Most visitors to the castle describe a severe drop in room temperature surrounding the two chairs; no matter what season it is, the air surrounding them is always ice cold. While the spirits surrounding the chairs are both adamant about not wanting anyone to sit in them, they do so through two different methods. One chair simply cannot be sat in; there is a force of resistance so great it’s like a force field around it. The other chair can be sat in, but if you sit in it you will soon be tossed out.

  What could be the nature of the ghosts that haunt these chairs? Why do they remain, for lack of a better term, glued to their seats? Perhaps these chairs hold special significance to the spirits, and they have no desire to share them with tour-goers and visitors to Belcourt Castle. Or maybe there are so many ghosts roaming the hallowed halls that these spirits had to claim at least one spot for themselves.

  The Healing Medal

  Everett and his wife were worried when their seven-year-old son, Logun, began acting strange for brief periods of time. When they took him to a doctor, he was diagnosed with localized focal seizures. Logun was scheduled to have an MRI in order to rule out lesions, tumors, or cancer as the culprit of these seizures.

  As the test loomed closer, Everett found himself in a panic over what the doctors might find. On one hand, he wanted to know what was wrong with his young son, but on the other, he was afraid of what they would find. Why was this happening? What kind of bad news were they going to get next?

  Two days before Logun’s test, Everett was fumbling with the change in his pocket. He reached down deep and felt something strange mixed in among the coins. He pulled it out, realizing it was a pendant of some kind. When he looked closer, he saw it was a St. Christopher’s medal.

  Everett had never owned such a medal, nor had he ever seen one before.

  St. Christopher is believed to offer safety from sudden death, and travelers often wear his medal. Some medals are accompanied by variations of the phrases, “Look upon St. Christopher and go on reassured” or “If you trust in St. Christopher, no harm will befall you.” It is also thought that St. Christopher will protect believers from pestilence, which we now recognize as infectious disease.

  The day of Logun’s test was difficult to endure. The MRI took twice as long as it should have because the doctors needed extra imaging to try to locate the root of the boy’s affliction. Everett kept reaching into his pocket and holding the medal between his fingers, figuring its mysterious appearance was some sort of sign.

&nb
sp; The St. Christopher medal.

  The next day, Logun’s test results brought wonderful news. He was in the rare but lucky three percent of people who have focal seizures but no abnormal growths or cancer as the cause. Anti-seizure medication would correct everything.

  Everett began to think that the St. Christopher medal was lucky or perhaps even blessed, and decided he would put it on a necklace for his son. But when he reached into his pocket, the medal was gone. He searched for three days but couldn’t locate it. He started to think that perhaps it had gone on to help another family that needed it, appearing out of nowhere just as it had for him.

  About a month and a half later, Everett was scheduled to have knee surgery. The day before his surgery, he found the St. Christopher medal lying in the driveway of his home, right by the driver’s side door of his car. Even if he had dropped it following Logun’s test, he surely would have spotted it in the six weeks since that time.

  Everett felt the medal reappeared to help him through his surgery and it did just that, until the day he got his stitches removed—when it vanished again.

  An Assurance From the Unknown

  Sometimes the paranormal aspects of a haunted item stem from how the item is obtained, rather than from how it behaves after it is acquired. Objects can appear out of nowhere, finding their way into the hands of a person who needs them.

  For centuries, people have reported odd items appearing out of thin air. When the item is something you need at that time, it’s hard to deny that there is a special kind of force at work, and when the delivery man can’t be used to explain as to why an item suddenly appears, it becomes an even deeper mystery.

  Jenna isn’t sure whether the people she saw that night in 1991—and the man who seemed to lead them—were ghosts or angels. She and a friend, who also saw them, tend to base their ghostly appearance on religious beliefs or what they think about the paranormal.

  “I have no idea who those people were,” Jenna said, thinking back on it 20 years later. “And honestly, I sometimes question if they were even people and not guardian angels, not that I even really believe in that. But it was so odd.”

  Both Jenna and her friend have had other paranormal experiences, and one thing they agree on is that at no time did the leader seem entirely human, even if what he gave them was real—a simple marble.

  It all started when their small group of friends went through an AIDS scare.

  “I was 16, and the AIDS crisis was in full swing. PSAs (public service announcements) were everywhere, telling us all to get tested right away,” Jenna said. “I had just started having sex a few months before this, and being a good girl, I decided to do as I was told. I was terrified to get the test. Even though I had only had one partner and we used protection, I was convinced that I was probably going to be punished by some higher power for having sex before marriage.”

  While no one in Jenna’s crowd was promiscuous, they were scared. Several people in their community had been exposed to the disease. Jenna, already a bit of a hypochondriac, was the first to be tested. Something in her heart told her she would not like the results.

  “I went and did it anyway. My friend, Amy, came with me, and after it was over we decided to go out to eat at Applebee’s. It was not a place I really ever went, and I have no idea why we decided to go that evening. But I needed to vent my fears and it was a place for us to go, away from our parents, and talk about it all.”

  It was late, and most of the people in the restaurant were teens. The ghosts appeared out of nowhere under one of the streetlights that glowed in the parking lot. One second the lot was empty, and the next there were four teens making their way across the pavement, too far away from anything to have walked up unseen.

  “I definitely remember there was a guy walking out in front, with longish brown hair, probably in his 20s. I had never seen any of them before,” Jenna said.

  The leader was handsome and well dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt, and sports jacket too thick for the hot Dallas weather. His whole appearance was clean and attractive. Jenna remembers being as arrested by his natty looks as by his sudden materialization.

  There was also a light around him Jenna can’t, even to this day, fully describe. He was illuminated by the streetlight above him, but there was also light that seemed to come from behind him. Jenna, who had studied auras, is reluctant to say he was glowing.

  “It’s more he was bathed in light,” she said.

  The vision looked at her as if nothing else existed in the world, his face serene. He wasn’t smiling so much as simply looking peaceful.

  Although Jenna’s friend, Amy, was facing the window, she hadn’t spotted the mysterious people yet. Jenna stopped their conversation so that Amy might notice them out the window, but by that time they had entered the restaurant. They seemed to disappear from the parking lot and reappear by the door in the blink of an eye. It was obvious they hadn’t run the distance because they remained calm and graceful. The leader of the group was unrumpled, his hair and clothes still in perfect order. More importantly, as he opened the door and walked in, no one noticed he was there.

  “They came right into the restaurant. They walked directly up to Amy and me,” Jenna said. They didn’t stop to talk to anyone, and Jenna doesn’t remember anyone looking at them. “The guy in the front looked right at me and said, ‘Hold out your hand.’ I looked at him, but did not speak, and I put my hand out. He placed his hand over mine and put something in it, but did not take his hand away, right away. He looked at me and said, ‘Everything is going to be all right.’ Then he closed my hand up so that I could not see what he put inside, and he and the others turned around and left. They did not eat, they did not get drinks, nothing.”

  For a moment, Jenna and Amy were too stunned to move. “I opened my hand and inside was a beautiful cat’s eye marble,” Jenna said. “I knew, looking at it, that this was a sign that I was going to be all right, that I did not have AIDS.”

  The marble was unremarkable, but holding it, Jenna was overcome with a sense of peace and the feeling that, as the mysterious stranger had predicted, everything was going to be okay.

  Jenna and Amy got up to follow the ghostly people, but they had vanished again. They questioned the hostess, but she had never even seen them come in.

  Jenna’s test was negative, and she passed the marble to the next person who went in for the test.

  “Amy and I made a pact to pass the marble on to anyone we knew who was getting the test. So I gave it to her when it was her turn, and I suppose she passed it on.”

  The marble made its way through their group, one by one, bringing tranquility to whoever possessed it at the moment. It was like a security blanket, giving peace of mind. But before long it disappeared, and no one could quite remember who had it last. No ghostly young man appeared to take the marble away, and no exploding spectral entity destroyed it. It was just not needed anymore and vanished.

  What happened that night is not easy to explain. The marble itself didn’t cause Jenna and Amy to see visions. Many parts of the story, from the mysterious group of people to the calm each person felt, make a sort of sense when looked at individually. What happens, though, when all these elements combine into one paranormal experience?

  “It was probably one of the strangest, most wonderful things that has ever happened to me. I will never forget it,” Jenna said.

  But don’t tell them that what they witnessed was not a ghost. They know there are times when you just have to believe your eyes.

  I Dream of Djinn

  The ring’s significance in societies around the world is undeniable, and its symbolism reflects the culture of the person wearing it. In most Western countries, the ring is a token of one’s commitment to another person. Wedding rings are thought to connect directly to the heart, claddagh rings show if you are single or involved with someone special, and mood rings tell others how you’re feeling.

  The ring’s special meanings can range from ete
rnity, due to its physical design of the endless circle, to magic, as in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It may also send a cultural message or show prosperity or status.

  There are countless stories of haunted rings. Because of their close personal relationships with the wearers, they are often the focus of spirits that are looking to communicate with the people left behind. That means the young woman who finds the ring her deceased grandmother was buried wearing can find peace with the dead.

  The Edwards brothers didn’t have such good luck. Some might say they were doomed from the beginning. Haunted rings are supposed to be inherited, not bought through an online auction.

  Brian and Ray Jay had been investigating the paranormal for a bit when they decided to get more personally involved in a haunting. They’d been interested in looking for ghosts for years, and those first few investigations fueled their desire.

  “After a few paranormal investigations,” said Ray Jay, “Brian decided he wanted to learn more about ‘haunted items.’ He found some rings on eBay purported to be haunted. The one he decided to purchase said it had a djinn attached to it. If I remember correctly, it was supposed to be a guardian djinn or something. It was advertised as a positive entity.”

  Some of the most common haunted items for sale online are rings that have a djinn, or jinn, attached to them. What we know about djinns is based mainly on old literature, although every week newspapers from the Middle East or from parts of Africa post stories of people cursed by them, falling victim to horrible tragedies or being blamed for crimes.